I totally agree. People have trouble enough maneuvering in 2 dimensions, then they want to add a 3rd dimension of movement? I shudder to think of the accidents caused people flying to work, while they drink their coffee, read their papers, and use their cell phones...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) already tracks "space weather". Check out this Primer for a good introdcution about what we already know.
Why is this important? Whenever the Earth's magnetosphere is hit by a solar storm, the change in magnetic field induces a DC ground current in the metal in the earth. For most applications, this has no effect. For the bulk power grid, this is significant -- this DC current seeps into the grid through ground taps, and can damage AC systems. Because the (very) high voltage equipment depends on (very) low currents, these fluctuations can be enough to damage transformers and cause problems on a state-wide scale.
Why is my alma mater always at the wrong end of the news?
It's not like it's anything new... My CS neighbor in Warren Hall back in '95 built a rather comprehensive web-based search engine... but back then, it wasn't taboo to share.
Without the filesharing on the internal net, I never would have found the Crystal Method, Filter, Moby or Delerium... all of which are staples of my current CD collection. But that's preaching to the choir here...
This disease kills 1 in 25, in industrialized asian nations. Worldwide, that's 200+ million people, should it spread.
The government of Singapore is trying to minimize the spread of the virus, and if those infected are not willing to cooperate by remaining in their homes waiting out the sickness, what else are they supposed to do? If they quarantine them in the hospitals, the doctors become infected (don't forget the disease killed its discoverer) and it will just spread. Quarantine is supposed to bottle up the infected, until their bodies defeat the virus.
Instead, those infected keep breaking quarantine, and keep going out into public where they can infect more people. I don't feel sorry for those that can't be trusted... after all, knowing that they are sick, can this be equated to attempted murder via infection?
Funny you should mention...
on
Clothes That Kill
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Apparently a laboratory was wondering why so many of their lab rat offspring were being born deformed. The only different with this batch of mice is that their cages seemed to show more wear than the other mice.
Apparently the "harsh" cleaning agents used to sterilize the cages were breaking down (softening) the polymers in the plastics of the cage. The mice would then gnaw the softer plastic. On further examination, once in the body, the chemically-altered plastic had a negative effect on chromosome ordering during cellular division, leading to an equivalent of "down syndrome" for mice.
What makes it worse is that this same type of plastic "bisphenol A" is common in many human products, including many baby toys & bottles. Combine that with the disease-paranoid parents who scrub their homes with ever-increasing-strength cleaning agents, then look at the increase in childhood asthma and autism in recent years, and you have to wonder...
The pictures combine a photo of an army soldier with gun raised warning the crowd about something happening off camera (with everone looking away from the soldier), with a photo of the same solder talking to the crowd gun lowered (and everyone looking at him).
The combined photo has the soldier with the gun raised and everyone looking at him, which makes it appear that the soldier is threatening the crowd with his weapon. The entire context of the image has changed, from the US helping to the US threatening.
Jesus, the USA is not a democracy, it s a REPUBLIC
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. It is majority rules all the time, and you're screwed with the minority vote. In a republic, you divide the country into smaller voting blocks, each of which has the power to create rules for the locality. That way, if I look out at the insane decisions made over there in California, I can thank my lucky stars that I live on the east coast, where my ruleset is different.
And all of you that go bonkers that a private company is being used to collect information on the citizens of this country... I assume you've heard of a credit report? Oh yeah, that history of your credit worthiness, that is passed from bank to bank to determine if you can be trusted. It is created by, maintained by, and proofed by the public, which is 100x better than anything the government could throw together. There's 100s of companies that'll help you review your credit reports (judging by the spam) to keep your data square. I would RATHER that the private sector correlates the data, because that way I know I have a say in it's collection, and that it's being done right.
That's the point of the article: what if a bank does locate something fishy, for instance someone opens an account with a visa and suddenly has tons of money rolling through... the private sector has no enforcement responsibilities, that's the government's job. I don't see anything in the article saying that either sector is going to be collecting MORE data, it's just tying the two together so we can all do a better job at tracking down the true criminals.
Q: Do companies ever go "we dont care what the investors want. We will do what pleases us, not them."
All the time.
"Going Public" basically means that you, the owner, are offering a percentage ownership to the public in exchange for the public's money. On the plus side, you get a fresh infusion of money to do research, increase inventories, hire more employees, etc. On the flip side, you are now responsible to the investors to keep the company profitable, and every now and then kick back a slice of your earnings to your investors as dividends.
Shareholder rights are managed like a pure democracy -- majority rules. This is why you usually see that "Pres So-and-so" owns 51% of the stock in the company... so their vote can always override whatever the public decides, providing that they disagree with the public. This is where stock options have an effect; directors giving themselves gobs of company stock in place of salary.
Now, it's not a good idea to piss off your investors, because they'll just turn and sell your stock, and you have to pay that capital back. That's why there are quarterly reports (you know, those big books you throw away every 3 months) that tell the public the state of the company, and whether your staff is doing a good job making money (price to earnings ratio). And, like most of the IPOs of the late 90s, your up the creek if that investment capital is your operations budget, and people want their money back, because then *poof* you're bankrupt.
Having done some control theory work, I have mixed opinions on this.
We know that the shuttle wing suffered a catastrophic failure (as in it broke apart), and flight stability was lost. With a tail wing and one side wing, the shuttle should have gone into a corkscrew. Immediately, sensors onboard would have kicked in, saying "the current flight path is not desireable, adjust the flaps to stabilize". Well, the computer has no clue that half the flaps are gone, and nothing in the scenarios could have fixed the rolling. It is a case where the problem is beyond the scope of the software that controls the system. At that point, you can only hope that the ingenuity of the human mind would find the right solution -- in this case, it was beyond hope.
I recall reading that when the shuttle was originally designed, it assumed 100% computer control flight & had no cockpit, and adding the viewing glass added a multitude of structural weaknesses to the design. But the pilots wouldn't ride if they didn't have the option to drive... designs were changed, politics reigned, and we got what we have today.
On the flipside, you could argue that the complexity of the situation is beyond human reflexes, and instead we should allow the computers to fly all the time. This is the current setup, and it worked for every situation ever encountered to date. If NASA would just give up on the option for human-controlled flight, they would be able to scrap the cockpit, and design a shielded "passenger" bay instead. This would remove a lot of the material weaknesses, and it would allow more "common" scientists to travel in space, since it would remove that aspect of required training.
Would a shielded compartment have saved the crew? The forces involved are (pardon the pun) astronomical, and even had they survived, I doubt it. But, our country designs some amazing things, and it's only a matter of time before we discover the materials to make it happen.
This librarian has never seen a book of any meaning or interest
You know, that's exactly how I feel when I throw a query at google... 20 million results, but 19.9 million of those are random hits on content, but not context. Like your bonus question, the index of a nearly infinite set of data is itself nearly infinite, which makes the searching in the index as tedious as searching the data directly.
In a way, our modern Internet is the "Tower of Babel"... have you ever tried to look up Historical Quotes on the web? What you end up with are quote of what people think they heard, and not always the actual text. You have typo's, grammar mistakes, context mistakes... And as the number of sources increase, so does the frequency of error, and bang, your results are garbage. Like your scenario, in order to return an exact match from a search, your definition of the search becomes the document you are searching for.
What if you were to define this infinite library as a probabilistic problem... Hmm. If you were to define an information source that was the set of all combinations of all text of all lengths (Tower of Babel), then any instantaneous glance at the data would return uniform noise. You would then define "books" as a set of gramatically ordered data, but you still havent assigned any intelligence to the order. Like browsing Slashdot at Level -1, the odds of finding anything intelligible are quite remote.
This reminds me of when I was back in college, doing work on image recognition with neural networks... we built a project similar to the (new at the time) Post Office Zip Code recognition software, you fed it an array of pixel intensities, and it generated the ASCII symbol that matched the image. When everything is said and done, there is no intelligence inherent *within* the system... All you have created is a probabilistic filter, an expert system drawing numerical conclusions. The programmer crafts the rules, and you pray that he/she had envisioned all of the possible outcomes, lest the creation will fail.
You could argue the difference between organic and machine is the error handling code... but it's way too late for this much philosophy:) need to sleep
OIL PRICES PLUNGE... with US crude at $26.30. This puts it at about the same price back during the heating oil crunch of 2000. Business Week figures that even the recent spike in oil prices will not lead to a recession, because of usage cutbacks & OPEC surplus.
GOLD DROPS BELOW $330... where it was back in december. And even at the recent peak, it's lower than it was in 1995, the start of the boom.
In about a month, the war will be over. Not only will we have thrown out a bloody dictator (freeing his citizens from harm), but we open up their nation for economic progress. Not only will we rebuild what we've destroyed (which if you've noticed, a strong effort is being made to keep this minimal), but we will upgrade them to modern technology. Power plants, water systems, industry, hospitals, roads... all of this means american jobs & products. With embargos removed, Iraq can produce at it's true output, flooding the oil market (destroying whatever little power OPEC & the saudi's have left) and the free markets win. Everyone benefits, the economies boom, and life goes on!
(On a personal note as an Electrical Engineer, my company's 2002 average was a 3.5% pay raise plus a 4% bonus)
I just got finished reading on MSNewsweek that the US economy is as large as the next 3 added together (Japan, Germany and Britain). Our military budget (4% of our GDP, lowest in any wartime in history) is as large as every UN member country's added together (191 countries). What I see is a majority of the world ruled by nationalist gov's trying to protect THEIR interests who don't let their people express views like we are allowed to here --- with state-owned medias, who don't show us what their citizens really think, only what CSPAN with its anti-american biases filters for the local audiences.
I see Iraqis who fled their homelands actively protesting Saddam, and supporting american liberation of their country.
I see Turkey opressing their Kurdish populations, with a government against the US because they don't want the Iraqi Kurds to have their own nation-state.
I see Arabian & OPEC countries protesting the US because they are about to lose their dominance of the oil market -- Iraqi freedom fighters have already said they will not honor Geman & France's existing contracts for oil exports when Iraq is democratized. Iraq has the worlds's second largest oil reserves, most of which are still untapped. Middle eastern nations live in fear of this reserve coming under US control.
I see Germany's socialist government on shaky ground about to collapse with an almost 11% unemployment rate. Don't forget that in Germany's January elections, the existing anti-american socialist party lost LOTS of electorates. Not to mention that Iraq is a good customer for German weaponry... Germany doesn't want the world to discover that they are arming these tirants.
I see France living in fear of the "National Front" party, consisting of Islams who are persecuted by the French government, like African-Americans were in the US in the 40's and 50's. They will not do anything to anger this sector of population, or Chirac and his socialist party are sure to be kicked out (which if you recall he almost was, two years ago by Le Pen during a run-off)
Then you have Britain... All these stories about Blair being in danger of being removed for supporting Bush. Don't forget that they have a parlimentary system -- the people don't vote for Blair, they vote for the party, and the party appoints Blair. And the labor party hates Blair now, even though 75% of likely voters would support the war if the UN says go.
The united states is experiencing a surge in support rallys, but the television won't show them. The rally in Atlanta yesterday (of several thousand people) was reportedly larger than the one in Washington DC, but the anti-war ralley got the 12 hours of TV time in CSPAN. Today's ralley in Valley Forge PA is expected to be even larger.
Ask yourself, who is really against the united states? the governments (who only wish to protect their personal interests), or the populations themselves who don't have a voice? As long as the anti-conservative media controls what we see, we'll never have the real picture presented to us. Only those that bother to keep themselves know that the citizens of the world NEEDS the US to act, and that these misguided governements need to fall.
Meanwhile, for all the complaining, Feb 2003 values for the USA are 5.8%
Let's hear it for global economies!
Eh, whatever. All this reminds me of my sister and her friends, who this year are graduating seniors from Pitt. Those that are willing to move are having no problems finding jobs (my sister has a job offer in the oil industry, with a 6-month assignment in Norway). Those that are not willing to move are currently unemployed. The opportunities are out there, if they would shut up about how unfair the world is, and look for it.
How does a US$13 plus an extra 16% tax on computers sound?
That sounds like a certain european country's economy is going down the tubes, and they are looking to tax their way into recovery. Any economist could tell you it's a foolish approach, and will only encourage the current decline in tech.
I really feel bad for the citizens though, but you know, if you vote these people into power, you get what you vote for. If they really cared, they'd vote the socialists out, but with a 10.5% unemployment rate, that only encourages the class envy that makes them want to tax the "richer" (anyone with $700 who wants a computer). Maybe they should re-evaluate why they support a party so willing to suck money out of their wallets.
We see case after case of Dot-Com companies folding because they can't afford to locate their offices in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, etc. Property taxes throughout the state are through the roof, environmental "taxes" are stiff, all for who's benefit? The politicians? It sure isn't the stockholders...
How about all of these tech companies consider kissing the "Silicon Valley" goodbye by moving out of California? I don't understand why on earth these corporations, much less the citizens, put up with the excessive taxes in CA. These companies have lost their shirt, and now have a chance to start over. Why not start over in a location where your company has the opportunity to cut their costs?
It isn't economical to concentrate the panels for power generation, because of the transmission issues involved. That's why it hasn't been done yet, nor will it, for any grand-scale projects. The materials currently do not exist to transfer that quantity of electric power over the long distances involved.
Its like suburbs... jobs are in the city, but people want to live in the country, so we connect the two with roads. The analogy is: why not remove all the jobs from the entire country, and concentrate them in one city, because we have the know-how to build one HUGE office building... well, how are you going to transfer the workers (current) along the roads (transmission lines) without traffic congestion (line overheating) to the points that the roads (lines) collapse under the pressure?
The longest transmission line in the world is the "Inga-Shaba", a 1700kM 500kV single-phase transmission line in western Africa. That's 1056 miles, roughly the distance from New York City to Chicago. However, its max capacity is 560 MW because of reactive line losses, equivalent to the output of one medium sized fossil fuel plant. This past summer, the mid-Atlantic states alone hit just over 60,000 MW for an instananeous peak. In 1999, the United States consumed 3.45 x 10^9 MW-hours of energy.
That is the problem with solar power, any type of generation really, you cannot concentrate it. Energy is lost as heat, proportional to the resistance of the wire, which is proportional to the distance of the line. So #1, even if you can generate it, you can't transport it that distance. #2, the more you concentrate, one cloudy day would wipe out the majority of your generation... remember, this is not a 365-day guaranteed capacity source. Not to mention #3 that a common sand storm in the desert would crack and scratch your glass, driving up repair costs.
What you would need is a 100% distributed system, maybe one station per square mile across every population center in the US, minimizing the path between generation and consumption. Now, try to get local approval from the municipalities to install it (and junk up their landscapes). Then, calculate the maintainence costs to visit each one of these locations... astronomical.
Finally, your whole "war on terror" argument is, for lack of a better word, crap. Every statement you've made is an approximation, and your solutions assume the ideal. It's a thinly masked anti-war rhetoric pretending to pass as fact. If the war were really about oil, we'd drill it ourself on our homeland, and be done with those dictators in the middle east. Then you finish it off with a snide remark against the President's home state... a quick Google search could have answered your construction question (numbers for off-shore Alabama):
Q. How long does it take to drill these wells? A. Miocene: 1 to 2 weeks; Norphlet: 6 to 12 months Q. How much does it cost to drill these wells? A. Miocene: $750,000 to $2 million; Norphlet: $15 million to $40 million Q. What is the average daily drilling rig cost? A. $100,000 to $120,000 Q. How much and long does each well produce? A. Miocene: 2 million to 15 million cubic feet per day for 1 to 10 years, Norphlet: 10 million to 126 million cubic feet per day for 10 to 20 years
From StudyWorks Online: "For example, the consumption of oil in the United States reached a peak in 1978, then decreased by almost 20 percent by 1983 as more fuel-efficient cars were introduced and less oil was used for electricity. However, gasoline consumption increased again in the '90s as gas-guzzling SUV's and small trucks became more popular. Nonetheless, oil consumption is currently increasing by only 1 percent per year, and consumption in 1999 was only 3.5 percent higher than it was in 1978." Get those SUVs on a normal fuel usage plan. Improve gas-electric hybrids. Encourage more efficient fossil fuel generators. What we really need is efficiency, not alternative generation.
This ruling is extra notable because Powell, the FCC Chairman, publicly disagrees with their decision: "An FCC chairman has not dissented from a high-profile FCC ruling for roughly 15 years." Powell was a very strong proponent for deregulation, and it seems this time around, state regulators and Bell want the status quo.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you... On such a nice day when I'm stuck indoors doing taxes, reading that brightened my day :)
I totally agree. People have trouble enough maneuvering in 2 dimensions, then they want to add a 3rd dimension of movement? I shudder to think of the accidents caused people flying to work, while they drink their coffee, read their papers, and use their cell phones...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) already tracks "space weather". Check out this Primer for a good introdcution about what we already know.
Why is this important? Whenever the Earth's magnetosphere is hit by a solar storm, the change in magnetic field induces a DC ground current in the metal in the earth. For most applications, this has no effect. For the bulk power grid, this is significant -- this DC current seeps into the grid through ground taps, and can damage AC systems. Because the (very) high voltage equipment depends on (very) low currents, these fluctuations can be enough to damage transformers and cause problems on a state-wide scale.
Why is my alma mater always at the wrong end of the news?
... all of which are staples of my current CD collection. But that's preaching to the choir here...
It's not like it's anything new... My CS neighbor in Warren Hall back in '95 built a rather comprehensive web-based search engine... but back then, it wasn't taboo to share.
Without the filesharing on the internal net, I never would have found the Crystal Method, Filter, Moby or Delerium
This disease kills 1 in 25, in industrialized asian nations. Worldwide, that's 200+ million people, should it spread.
The government of Singapore is trying to minimize the spread of the virus, and if those infected are not willing to cooperate by remaining in their homes waiting out the sickness, what else are they supposed to do? If they quarantine them in the hospitals, the doctors become infected (don't forget the disease killed its discoverer) and it will just spread. Quarantine is supposed to bottle up the infected, until their bodies defeat the virus.
Instead, those infected keep breaking quarantine, and keep going out into public where they can infect more people. I don't feel sorry for those that can't be trusted... after all, knowing that they are sick, can this be equated to attempted murder via infection?
I read an article recently on Yahoo Science News.
Apparently a laboratory was wondering why so many of their lab rat offspring were being born deformed. The only different with this batch of mice is that their cages seemed to show more wear than the other mice.
Apparently the "harsh" cleaning agents used to sterilize the cages were breaking down (softening) the polymers in the plastics of the cage. The mice would then gnaw the softer plastic. On further examination, once in the body, the chemically-altered plastic had a negative effect on chromosome ordering during cellular division, leading to an equivalent of "down syndrome" for mice.
What makes it worse is that this same type of plastic "bisphenol A" is common in many human products, including many baby toys & bottles. Combine that with the disease-paranoid parents who scrub their homes with ever-increasing-strength cleaning agents, then look at the increase in childhood asthma and autism in recent years, and you have to wonder...
I think in this case it's more like changing:
... your friends."
"Politicians are weasels, always raising taxes and wasting the money. If I were you, I'd send a warning to your friends."
to:
"Politicians are
and not telling anyone about it.
Here are the 3 photos Side by Side.
The pictures combine a photo of an army soldier with gun raised warning the crowd about something happening off camera (with everone looking away from the soldier), with a photo of the same solder talking to the crowd gun lowered (and everyone looking at him).
The combined photo has the soldier with the gun raised and everyone looking at him, which makes it appear that the soldier is threatening the crowd with his weapon. The entire context of the image has changed, from the US helping to the US threatening.
Jesus, the USA is not a democracy, it s a REPUBLIC
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. It is majority rules all the time, and you're screwed with the minority vote. In a republic, you divide the country into smaller voting blocks, each of which has the power to create rules for the locality. That way, if I look out at the insane decisions made over there in California, I can thank my lucky stars that I live on the east coast, where my ruleset is different.
And all of you that go bonkers that a private company is being used to collect information on the citizens of this country... I assume you've heard of a credit report? Oh yeah, that history of your credit worthiness, that is passed from bank to bank to determine if you can be trusted. It is created by, maintained by, and proofed by the public, which is 100x better than anything the government could throw together. There's 100s of companies that'll help you review your credit reports (judging by the spam) to keep your data square. I would RATHER that the private sector correlates the data, because that way I know I have a say in it's collection, and that it's being done right.
That's the point of the article: what if a bank does locate something fishy, for instance someone opens an account with a visa and suddenly has tons of money rolling through... the private sector has no enforcement responsibilities, that's the government's job. I don't see anything in the article saying that either sector is going to be collecting MORE data, it's just tying the two together so we can all do a better job at tracking down the true criminals.
Q: Do companies ever go "we dont care what the investors want. We will do what pleases us, not them."
All the time.
"Going Public" basically means that you, the owner, are offering a percentage ownership to the public in exchange for the public's money. On the plus side, you get a fresh infusion of money to do research, increase inventories, hire more employees, etc. On the flip side, you are now responsible to the investors to keep the company profitable, and every now and then kick back a slice of your earnings to your investors as dividends.
Shareholder rights are managed like a pure democracy -- majority rules. This is why you usually see that "Pres So-and-so" owns 51% of the stock in the company... so their vote can always override whatever the public decides, providing that they disagree with the public. This is where stock options have an effect; directors giving themselves gobs of company stock in place of salary.
Now, it's not a good idea to piss off your investors, because they'll just turn and sell your stock, and you have to pay that capital back. That's why there are quarterly reports (you know, those big books you throw away every 3 months) that tell the public the state of the company, and whether your staff is doing a good job making money (price to earnings ratio). And, like most of the IPOs of the late 90s, your up the creek if that investment capital is your operations budget, and people want their money back, because then *poof* you're bankrupt.
Having done some control theory work, I have mixed opinions on this.
We know that the shuttle wing suffered a catastrophic failure (as in it broke apart), and flight stability was lost. With a tail wing and one side wing, the shuttle should have gone into a corkscrew. Immediately, sensors onboard would have kicked in, saying "the current flight path is not desireable, adjust the flaps to stabilize". Well, the computer has no clue that half the flaps are gone, and nothing in the scenarios could have fixed the rolling. It is a case where the problem is beyond the scope of the software that controls the system. At that point, you can only hope that the ingenuity of the human mind would find the right solution -- in this case, it was beyond hope.
I recall reading that when the shuttle was originally designed, it assumed 100% computer control flight & had no cockpit, and adding the viewing glass added a multitude of structural weaknesses to the design. But the pilots wouldn't ride if they didn't have the option to drive... designs were changed, politics reigned, and we got what we have today.
On the flipside, you could argue that the complexity of the situation is beyond human reflexes, and instead we should allow the computers to fly all the time. This is the current setup, and it worked for every situation ever encountered to date. If NASA would just give up on the option for human-controlled flight, they would be able to scrap the cockpit, and design a shielded "passenger" bay instead. This would remove a lot of the material weaknesses, and it would allow more "common" scientists to travel in space, since it would remove that aspect of required training.
Would a shielded compartment have saved the crew? The forces involved are (pardon the pun) astronomical, and even had they survived, I doubt it. But, our country designs some amazing things, and it's only a matter of time before we discover the materials to make it happen.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
Liberty is two wolves attempting to have a sheep for dinner and finding a well-informed, well-armed sheep.
This librarian has never seen a book of any meaning or interest
... have you ever tried to look up Historical Quotes on the web? What you end up with are quote of what people think they heard, and not always the actual text. You have typo's, grammar mistakes, context mistakes... And as the number of sources increase, so does the frequency of error, and bang, your results are garbage. Like your scenario, in order to return an exact match from a search, your definition of the search becomes the document you are searching for.
... Hmm. If you were to define an information source that was the set of all combinations of all text of all lengths (Tower of Babel), then any instantaneous glance at the data would return uniform noise. You would then define "books" as a set of gramatically ordered data, but you still havent assigned any intelligence to the order. Like browsing Slashdot at Level -1, the odds of finding anything intelligible are quite remote.
:) need to sleep
You know, that's exactly how I feel when I throw a query at google... 20 million results, but 19.9 million of those are random hits on content, but not context. Like your bonus question, the index of a nearly infinite set of data is itself nearly infinite, which makes the searching in the index as tedious as searching the data directly.
In a way, our modern Internet is the "Tower of Babel"
What if you were to define this infinite library as a probabilistic problem
This reminds me of when I was back in college, doing work on image recognition with neural networks... we built a project similar to the (new at the time) Post Office Zip Code recognition software, you fed it an array of pixel intensities, and it generated the ASCII symbol that matched the image. When everything is said and done, there is no intelligence inherent *within* the system... All you have created is a probabilistic filter, an expert system drawing numerical conclusions. The programmer crafts the rules, and you pray that he/she had envisioned all of the possible outcomes, lest the creation will fail.
You could argue the difference between organic and machine is the error handling code... but it's way too late for this much philosophy
Well, if this is true, then I'm afraid that the only solution to global warming is to put out the sun.
To quote Drudge today & some analysis:
DOW HAS BEST WEEK SINCE 1982...
DOLLAR HITS MULTI-MONTH HIGHS..."
OIL PRICES PLUNGE... with US crude at $26.30. This puts it at about the same price back during the heating oil crunch of 2000. Business Week figures that even the recent spike in oil prices will not lead to a recession, because of usage cutbacks & OPEC surplus.
GOLD DROPS BELOW $330... where it was back in december. And even at the recent peak, it's lower than it was in 1995, the start of the boom.
In about a month, the war will be over. Not only will we have thrown out a bloody dictator (freeing his citizens from harm), but we open up their nation for economic progress. Not only will we rebuild what we've destroyed (which if you've noticed, a strong effort is being made to keep this minimal), but we will upgrade them to modern technology. Power plants, water systems, industry, hospitals, roads... all of this means american jobs & products. With embargos removed, Iraq can produce at it's true output, flooding the oil market (destroying whatever little power OPEC & the saudi's have left) and the free markets win. Everyone benefits, the economies boom, and life goes on!
(On a personal note as an Electrical Engineer, my company's 2002 average was a 3.5% pay raise plus a 4% bonus)
And they matter how?
I just got finished reading on MSNewsweek that the US economy is as large as the next 3 added together (Japan, Germany and Britain). Our military budget (4% of our GDP, lowest in any wartime in history) is as large as every UN member country's added together (191 countries). What I see is a majority of the world ruled by nationalist gov's trying to protect THEIR interests who don't let their people express views like we are allowed to here --- with state-owned medias, who don't show us what their citizens really think, only what CSPAN with its anti-american biases filters for the local audiences.
I see Iraqis who fled their homelands actively protesting Saddam, and supporting american liberation of their country.
I see Turkey opressing their Kurdish populations, with a government against the US because they don't want the Iraqi Kurds to have their own nation-state.
I see Arabian & OPEC countries protesting the US because they are about to lose their dominance of the oil market -- Iraqi freedom fighters have already said they will not honor Geman & France's existing contracts for oil exports when Iraq is democratized. Iraq has the worlds's second largest oil reserves, most of which are still untapped. Middle eastern nations live in fear of this reserve coming under US control.
I see Germany's socialist government on shaky ground about to collapse with an almost 11% unemployment rate. Don't forget that in Germany's January elections, the existing anti-american socialist party lost LOTS of electorates. Not to mention that Iraq is a good customer for German weaponry... Germany doesn't want the world to discover that they are arming these tirants.
I see France living in fear of the "National Front" party, consisting of Islams who are persecuted by the French government, like African-Americans were in the US in the 40's and 50's. They will not do anything to anger this sector of population, or Chirac and his socialist party are sure to be kicked out (which if you recall he almost was, two years ago by Le Pen during a run-off)
Then you have Britain... All these stories about Blair being in danger of being removed for supporting Bush. Don't forget that they have a parlimentary system -- the people don't vote for Blair, they vote for the party, and the party appoints Blair. And the labor party hates Blair now, even though 75% of likely voters would support the war if the UN says go.
The united states is experiencing a surge in support rallys, but the television won't show them. The rally in Atlanta yesterday (of several thousand people) was reportedly larger than the one in Washington DC, but the anti-war ralley got the 12 hours of TV time in CSPAN. Today's ralley in Valley Forge PA is expected to be even larger.
Ask yourself, who is really against the united states? the governments (who only wish to protect their personal interests), or the populations themselves who don't have a voice? As long as the anti-conservative media controls what we see, we'll never have the real picture presented to us. Only those that bother to keep themselves know that the citizens of the world NEEDS the US to act, and that these misguided governements need to fall.
And where is unemployment at 10%?
:) France is close at 8.8%.
Germany, at 10.5%
Meanwhile, for all the complaining, Feb 2003 values for the USA are 5.8%
Let's hear it for global economies!
Eh, whatever. All this reminds me of my sister and her friends, who this year are graduating seniors from Pitt. Those that are willing to move are having no problems finding jobs (my sister has a job offer in the oil industry, with a 6-month assignment in Norway). Those that are not willing to move are currently unemployed. The opportunities are out there, if they would shut up about how unfair the world is, and look for it.
How does a US$13 plus an extra 16% tax on computers sound?
That sounds like a certain european country's economy is going down the tubes, and they are looking to tax their way into recovery. Any economist could tell you it's a foolish approach, and will only encourage the current decline in tech.
I really feel bad for the citizens though, but you know, if you vote these people into power, you get what you vote for. If they really cared, they'd vote the socialists out, but with a 10.5% unemployment rate, that only encourages the class envy that makes them want to tax the "richer" (anyone with $700 who wants a computer). Maybe they should re-evaluate why they support a party so willing to suck money out of their wallets.
We see case after case of Dot-Com companies folding because they can't afford to locate their offices in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, etc. Property taxes throughout the state are through the roof, environmental "taxes" are stiff, all for who's benefit? The politicians? It sure isn't the stockholders...
How about all of these tech companies consider kissing the "Silicon Valley" goodbye by moving out of California? I don't understand why on earth these corporations, much less the citizens, put up with the excessive taxes in CA. These companies have lost their shirt, and now have a chance to start over. Why not start over in a location where your company has the opportunity to cut their costs?
Maybe the ACLU could give them some pointers about what to do...
It isn't economical to concentrate the panels for power generation, because of the transmission issues involved. That's why it hasn't been done yet, nor will it, for any grand-scale projects. The materials currently do not exist to transfer that quantity of electric power over the long distances involved.
Its like suburbs... jobs are in the city, but people want to live in the country, so we connect the two with roads. The analogy is: why not remove all the jobs from the entire country, and concentrate them in one city, because we have the know-how to build one HUGE office building... well, how are you going to transfer the workers (current) along the roads (transmission lines) without traffic congestion (line overheating) to the points that the roads (lines) collapse under the pressure?
The longest transmission line in the world is the "Inga-Shaba", a 1700kM 500kV single-phase transmission line in western Africa. That's 1056 miles, roughly the distance from New York City to Chicago. However, its max capacity is 560 MW because of reactive line losses, equivalent to the output of one medium sized fossil fuel plant. This past summer, the mid-Atlantic states alone hit just over 60,000 MW for an instananeous peak. In 1999, the United States consumed 3.45 x 10^9 MW-hours of energy.
... a quick Google search could have answered your construction question (numbers for off-shore Alabama):
That is the problem with solar power, any type of generation really, you cannot concentrate it. Energy is lost as heat, proportional to the resistance of the wire, which is proportional to the distance of the line. So #1, even if you can generate it, you can't transport it that distance. #2, the more you concentrate, one cloudy day would wipe out the majority of your generation... remember, this is not a 365-day guaranteed capacity source. Not to mention #3 that a common sand storm in the desert would crack and scratch your glass, driving up repair costs.
What you would need is a 100% distributed system, maybe one station per square mile across every population center in the US, minimizing the path between generation and consumption. Now, try to get local approval from the municipalities to install it (and junk up their landscapes). Then, calculate the maintainence costs to visit each one of these locations... astronomical.
Finally, your whole "war on terror" argument is, for lack of a better word, crap. Every statement you've made is an approximation, and your solutions assume the ideal. It's a thinly masked anti-war rhetoric pretending to pass as fact. If the war were really about oil, we'd drill it ourself on our homeland, and be done with those dictators in the middle east. Then you finish it off with a snide remark against the President's home state
Q. How long does it take to drill these wells? A. Miocene: 1 to 2 weeks; Norphlet: 6 to 12 months
Q. How much does it cost to drill these wells? A. Miocene: $750,000 to $2 million; Norphlet: $15 million to $40 million
Q. What is the average daily drilling rig cost? A. $100,000 to $120,000
Q. How much and long does each well produce? A. Miocene: 2 million to 15 million cubic feet per day for 1 to 10 years, Norphlet: 10 million to 126 million cubic feet per day for 10 to 20 years
From StudyWorks Online: "For example, the consumption of oil in the United States reached a peak in 1978, then decreased by almost 20 percent by 1983 as more fuel-efficient cars were introduced and less oil was used for electricity. However, gasoline consumption increased again in the '90s as gas-guzzling SUV's and small trucks became more popular. Nonetheless, oil consumption is currently increasing by only 1 percent per year, and consumption in 1999 was only 3.5 percent higher than it was in 1978." Get those SUVs on a normal fuel usage plan. Improve gas-electric hybrids. Encourage more efficient fossil fuel generators. What we really need is efficiency, not alternative generation.
Why, as a conservative libertarian, should I support the socialist authoritarian drivel that comes out of this site?
Let it die.
This ruling is extra notable because Powell, the FCC Chairman, publicly disagrees with their decision: "An FCC chairman has not dissented from a high-profile FCC ruling for roughly 15 years." Powell was a very strong proponent for deregulation, and it seems this time around, state regulators and Bell want the status quo.
> If you can get them to vote you a dictatorship, I say you deserve to win
Hey, if Saddam Hussein can do it... oh wait, you can't kill the other players in this game...