Wouldn't a fund like this need to skim some money off the top (as it were) to cover their own overhead, salaries, admin, etc.?
No, there isn't any direct overhead. Every penny that I contribute can be granted to a charity.
I believe they pay for the operation of the fund through the investment pools. Donations that haven't yet been granted are invested in one or more of about a half-dozen investment pools. The return appears to be a bit lower than the underlying mutual funds that comprise the pool.
If so, they essentially fund the operation by taking a bit of the return on funds that are left in the fund for any amount of time before being granted.
I read the Wired article, and it was basically an author baiting Jobs to try to one-up Gates and his highly-publicized public giving. The author at least admitted that Jobs might be giving money anonymously, which is probably more in Jobs' character
I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs is donating money to charity anonymously, and if so he would be wise to not take the bait.
It's easy to do it, and you don't have to be a millionare. I opened an account with Fidelity's Charitable Gift Fund a few years back, and since then have made every charitable gift through it, anonymously.
The Fund is a public charity. The donor makes a non-revocable contribution and receives a charitable deduction at that time (subject to the usual limitations). Subsequently, the donor makes grant recommendations to the fund. The recommendation is reviewed for compliance (i.e. the recipient is a US charitable organization), and the grant is made. The donor's name can be included, or the donor can request anonymity.
The donor cannot receive any benefit in return or recommend a grant to satisfy a pledge. The grant cannot be used for political purposes. There are other restrictions, described here.
In the past fiscal year, the Fund made grants totaling nearly $700 million, and has exceeded $5 billion in grants since inception in 1991.
A company who shall rename nameless installed two WAPs to cover each side of their offices.
One of them uses the company name for the SSID. The other (installed later) is still set to "linksys". So, when you carry a laptop from one part of the office to the other, you have to switch networks.
Apparently, they haven't figured out the concept of using the same SSID and different channels so the switch is made automatically.
How exactly did they go out of business? A 10% retail sales tax on boats shouldn't be that negative.
They bought the boat somewhere else, or simply didn't buy one at all.
The US had a diverse custom boat building industry. Most were small, family-run operations that built custom boats to order for people that had the money and inclination. It was a high-margin (and high-profit) business, separate from the mass market boat industry that churn out fishing and ski boats using production lines.
The luxury tax decimated the custom-boat industry in the US. I'm not sure if it ever recovered.
Create a luxury sales tax. Have the sales tax only affect purchases the rich can afford. Electronics over $5k for example. Vehicles over $50k. Anything classified as a yacht. Property purchases (i.e. land) exceeding $1 million.
The US Congress thought that a 10% luxury tax on boats over $100,000 was a good idea back in 1991. It was (relatively) quickly repealed three years later -- but not before putting a large number of US-based custom boat builders out of business.
It just seems to me as if the executives are getting paid billions of dollars and Google's bottom line should reflect that with the new expensing procedures- whether it it direct compensation or stock options.
Not all grants are options. Some are outright grants of stock. If these shares were grants, the shares were already outstanding. Google doesn't have to buy stock at the current price to cover the exercise of options.
The proceeds from the sale of granted stock do not come out of the bottom line -- it comes from the people who buy the shares.. However, there are now more liquid shares floating in the market, which increases the "supply" of shares and potentially depresses the market price.
The Aurora (which is the VS Deliverer variant) developed a bug in a new release in which the gunner could fire the entire 12-shot clip of ammo in one concentrated blast. It was apparently triggered by clicking the left mouse button in a certain manner or sequence.
The VS quickly learned how to use it on the Emerald server. Suddenly, Aurora's were everywhere and they were devastating to all kinds of enemy armor. One blast could nearly destroy a medium battle tank (the Vanguard or Prowler), and all it took were a few more shots from someone else to finish it off.
I don't remember all the details, but the problem was reportedly identified during the beta test of that release, but that didn't stop it from being deployed. And it took it a long time to be fixed.
Not sure who would actually play on such a limited account though. Maybe with the basic shotgun you could do some damage, but without a vehicle you will pretty much be "fodder."
I've been looking around and I'm haven't found anything that says "no vehicles" for the "fodder". They currently restrict availability of a few vehicles to people with the "core combat" expansion, but that was a one-time $10 fee (or $30, depending on when you paid it) for early players of the game. I think it's bundled with new purchases of the game now.
So true. I left because leveling up CR was such a nightmare. Assemble a team, get team to location, try vainly to get teams weapons pointed in the right direction, fail to inject any strategy, give up and try to kill as many as possible in the hopes for CR points.
Getting CEP (to level up CR) is a lot easier with a organized outfit. CEP calculations are no longer based on kills, so it requires some amount of discipline and strategy. Working with a group of people who already know what to do (and can help the new guys) isn't as stressful.
When you can come back instantly, or nearly so, your team basically has an infinite supply of people, so the most efficient attack is always going to be the overwhelming mob. If you have a much larger death penalty (5 minute rez, or something like that) you have to develop some strategy. Maybe add some limits to the spawn points...Like only so many spawns per minute or something. Of course, that punishes the good players more than the bad players.
There is a spawn timer now, which gets longer if you spawn more often in a certain amount of time. But it isn't much of a penalty.
But this actually does result in a strategy: an anti-spawn strategy. Effective squads and outfits think ahead on how to limit the enemy's ability to spawn players nearby.
Re:As a former planetside player....
on
Planetside For Free
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I thought new players were going to be able to level up to BR 8, which should get you at least 4 cert points, right?
You now get 7 cert points at Battle Rank 1. You get an additional cert point for each BR up through BR23, except for BR6, BR12, and BR18. Normally, you get an implant at those three BR's, but with the "fodder" program, I guess you don't get anything at BR6.
Most decent FPS players should be able to get up to BR8 within a couple of weeks of playing a few hours a night. You can get all the way to BR4 just by trying out every vehicle and weapon in the simulator and visiting a few places in "sanctuary" -- and that's without going through the new training programs. I've built a new player up to BR4 in 35 minutes that way.
Does anyone have any stats on maximum connections to PS servers at one time?
There are three servers: European, US West Coast, US East Coast. At primetime in the evening, I would estimate about 600 players on-line on the East Coast server. A continent can have a maximum of 133 players from an empire, and there are three empires. Lately, I've observed my empire to population-lock a continent and have 20-30 people left over to stir up trouble elsewhere. The other empires have about the same population. The past month or so, overall population has risen quite a bit, as they have invited people with expired subscriptions to come back and play for 30 days for free.
Weapon balance seemed, well... spotty. I played back in the Beta days with a room mate of mine, and even with us both in the same room yelling things at each other, we didn't have all that much success--and we're both at least decent FPS players.
Balance is a bit better, but that's a source of endless discussion and argument among the empire. The key is teamwork: even two people working together can't do much against the more powerful weapons. I play with an organized outfit that usually has a platoon of 10-30 people in the evenings, and we have a reputation for getting things done in situations where twice the number of less-organized people will fail.
Vehicles were fun, but the weapons felt very underpowered--we'd both shoot that Lancer anti-vehicle gun at even a Lightning, and it felt like forever before the thing blew up.
Personal weapons are underpowered against vehicles in this game, but I think that's necessary to get people into the vehicles. If only one or two shots could destroy a vehicle, people wouldn't bother with them. As it is now, it's hard enough to get people to use the armored vehicles instead of zerging from the nearest spawn point.
Maybe it was lag. I remember trying to get back into the game for a while, but even after doubling my RAM (to 512) I still had problems.
This has been a continuing problem. I can't play with less than 1G RAM. 512M is not adequate unless you want to be struggling with lag all the time. One of my teammates is always falling behind us because it takes him several minutes to change zones (i.e. move to a new continent). If he is in a vehicle with the rest of us, we can easily reach and disembark at a target in a new zone before he even gets it loaded.
'm also not keen on Clans--small tactical teams I can do, but Clans seem to always end up full of annoying elitists. It seems like it'd be pretty hard to find a good squad without joining a clan.
Some of the outfits are full of annoying people like that. Others are so disorganized that you would do better playing solo. I switched outfits several times before I found one that fit my style.
Lastly, I've heard that there're still pretty serious bugs. Like vehicles randomly becoming invincible, and major weapons randomly doing no damage (like, all the shotguns--and one whole faction's infantry weapons more or less revolve around shotguns).
The invincible vehicle is effectively gone: I've only seen it once in over a year of play. But, the shotgun bug is still there, wh
According to the article, in 2004, nearly half of the accidents were caused by on-site workers not checking with the proper support numbers for underground cables and/or pipelines.
And a large part of the other half, like this particular incident, is probably because the digger got an erroneous answer from the support number.
A contractor for Verizon buried fiber optic cable (for FIOS) in my neighborhood late last year. Prior to their arrival, the cable, electrical, and natural gas utilities marked the locations of their respective cables/pipelines. But when they started boring two doors down from my house, they suddenly quit and packed up for the day.
I went out to watch a couple of days later, and asked what happened. They had nearly punched a hole in the natural gas line, because it wasn't properly marked -- and had to wait for the gas company to investigate. Apparently, natural gas lines have a wire next to the pipeline that pulses at a certain frequency, and can be picked up with a sensor. For some reason, the wire had been separated from the pipeline and was about 3 feet away.
A number of years ago, a friend of mine worked for a large computer company with a support center in Colorado Springs. A contractor digging post-holes for a fence did what they were supposed to do: called the telephone company for the location of a buried cable. The phone company marked the location of an adjacent cable that was no longer in use and instead directed them to the right-of-way for the new cable. So, when the digger pulled up bits of copper wire from every hole, the contractor didn't even blink -- it was supposed have been the old cable that had been decommissioned.
Beatles-Beatles is not in that top 9, he/she had fewer than 2 stories a month accepted for 2005.
In 2005, a total of 19 submissions by Beatles-Beatles were accepted, which is indeed less than 2 per month. But, you apparently spread his submissions over the full year. According to http://slashdot.org/~*%20*%20Beatles-Beatles, his first accepted submission was published on 2005-10-10.
If you spread the 19 accepted submissions over a two month period, that is over 9 stories per month. Furthermore, on 10/31 and 11/13, two of his submissions were accepted. On 11/28 and 12/11, three of his submissions were accepted.
I don't think you were intentionally trying to lie with statistics, but your apparent methodology doesn't account for the year-end skew and ignores multiple instances of daily clusters.
Actually, the Yahoo article has it right, at least mostly. You just mis-read it.
The Yahoo article says:
According to the Federation of Tax Administrators, the following states impose no income tax on state residents: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming.
Texas has no income tax. But, it does have a sales tax. And like many other states, it varies across the state -- not according to county, but according to municipality.
"It appears that publishing Free Software giving access to culture is about to become a counterfeiting criminal offence."
What is "access to culture"? The article specifically uses two P2P file-sharing programs as examples. Is this about pirating media (music, movies), or about publishing source code?
It seems you have your own misphrases when it comes to statistics.
Translation: you can't back up what you wrote or refute what I wrote, so you resorted to a personal attack.
I do statistical data analyis every day. If I claimed there was a correlation based on a 1% difference in measurements, my clients would (rightfully) question my competence. If I claimed there was a cause-effect relationship, I would be asked to leave.
What is your point? Each of these is worsened by driving at a less efficient speed.
My point is that your claim:
You can see this by looking at graphs of consumption before and after the speed limit in the US was raised from 55 to 65.
... cannot be substantiated. There are many factors that cause gasoline consumption to rise. Aside from a few pauses, consumption has risen without regard to the speed limit:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/perspectives.p df.
Look at figure 19 on page xxiv. There's no discernible change in the trend in 1995.
As I posted in my last message, the US DOT estimates that -- at most -- the 55mph speed limit reduced consumption by 1%, which is statistically insignificant. But, that was at the expense of billions of man hours, which translated directly into reduced productivity and billions of wasted dollars.
Repealing the speed limit didn't increase accident fatalities or injuries, either. After accounting for the increase in miles driven, accident injuries and fatalities actually declined from 1995 to 1997: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa346.pdf
You can see this by looking at graphs of consumption before and after the speed limit in the US was raised from 55 to 65.
Correlation != Causation.
The national 55mph speed limit was repealed in 1995, leaving it to the states to set the speed limits. It might be 65 in your state, but in mine it varies from 55 to 70, depending on a number of factors.
After the 55mph speed limit was repealed, the number of miles driven increased substantially. Larger (and less efficient) vehicles also became more popular, as gasoline dropped to historically low prices in 1998 (after adjusting for inflation).
There are lots of reasons that gasoline consumption increased. The higher speed limit may have been a contributing factor, but the US Dept. of Transportion estimated that the 55mph limit reduced US gasoline by 1 percent, at most. That's statistically insignificant, given the variables. Keeping tires inflated to the proper pressure would probably have saved more gasoline.
It's up to 492Kbps, send and receive, for variable bit rate. For guaranteed bit rate, it's up to 256Kbps. I don't know if that means X Kbps each direction, or combined. Maybe someone else can fill in the gaps.
24mbit/sec? Sounds like "across the street from the provider" has suddenly become prime nerd real estate [....]
A Verizon subcontractor has been laying fiber in front of my house this week. When it goes live, an install crew will bring fiber up to the side of my house and install an Optical Network Terminal (ONT). From that, I'll get a Cat5/100Mbit cable to a router inside.
I have a choice of packages:
5 Mbps/2 Mbps for $40/month
15 Mbps/2 Mbps for $50/month
30 Mbps/5 Mbps for $200/month
Tell me again what Martha Stewart was doing in jail?
Martha Stewart was in jail because she lied to investigators.
After all was said and done, the government dropped the rest of the charges against her, because they couldn't prove she had done anything wrong. It's not even clear that she did anything illegal (other than lying about it).
But since she didn't tell the truth when first confronted about it, she went to jail. If she had told the truth or not said anything at all, it's unlikely that she would have convicted of anything.
I'm not sure she was ever treated with either drug. Fortunately, the resistant strain of the virus apparently doesn't reproduce well.
An article in Nature is supposed to be published next week. Hopefully, there will be more detail.
Unless you are a poultry worker or otherwise handle wild fowl you are not at risk. This disease is spread bird to man but not man to man.
Don't be so sure. There's has been a case in Asia where a girl appears to have contracted it from her brother. They haven't been able to connect her illness with any poultry.
(I read the article last night, but haven't been able to find it this morning)
Missouri expects to spend less than $3 million a year on the service, Rahn said, although the exact price won't be known until the contract is finalized. Maryland is spending $1.9 million, although the entire Baltimore project costs nearly $5.6 million, said Mike Zezeski, director of real-time traffic operations for the Maryland Department of Transportation.
By contrast, the San Francisco Bay area spent about $35 million over several years to install roadside scanners and develop computer programs, websites and call centers for a real-time traffic service based on electronic toll passes, said Randy Rentschler, a spokesman for the region's Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
The same service is offered in Houston: Houston TranStar. It can be downloaded onto a web-enabled phone.
The data is also provided to XM Radio, who offers it for car navigation systems that can display it on the screen in real-time: http://www.xmradio.com/xmnavtraffic/.
My Acura RL has this feature, and I wish that they would implement some form of this in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.
Slashdot Mirror
No, there isn't any direct overhead. Every penny that I contribute can be granted to a charity.
I believe they pay for the operation of the fund through the investment pools. Donations that haven't yet been granted are invested in one or more of about a half-dozen investment pools. The return appears to be a bit lower than the underlying mutual funds that comprise the pool.
If so, they essentially fund the operation by taking a bit of the return on funds that are left in the fund for any amount of time before being granted.
I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs is donating money to charity anonymously, and if so he would be wise to not take the bait.
It's easy to do it, and you don't have to be a millionare. I opened an account with Fidelity's Charitable Gift Fund a few years back, and since then have made every charitable gift through it, anonymously.
The Fund is a public charity. The donor makes a non-revocable contribution and receives a charitable deduction at that time (subject to the usual limitations). Subsequently, the donor makes grant recommendations to the fund. The recommendation is reviewed for compliance (i.e. the recipient is a US charitable organization), and the grant is made. The donor's name can be included, or the donor can request anonymity.
The donor cannot receive any benefit in return or recommend a grant to satisfy a pledge. The grant cannot be used for political purposes. There are other restrictions, described here.
In the past fiscal year, the Fund made grants totaling nearly $700 million, and has exceeded $5 billion in grants since inception in 1991.
One of them uses the company name for the SSID. The other (installed later) is still set to "linksys". So, when you carry a laptop from one part of the office to the other, you have to switch networks.
Apparently, they haven't figured out the concept of using the same SSID and different channels so the switch is made automatically.
They bought the boat somewhere else, or simply didn't buy one at all.
The US had a diverse custom boat building industry. Most were small, family-run operations that built custom boats to order for people that had the money and inclination. It was a high-margin (and high-profit) business, separate from the mass market boat industry that churn out fishing and ski boats using production lines.
The luxury tax decimated the custom-boat industry in the US. I'm not sure if it ever recovered.
The US Congress thought that a 10% luxury tax on boats over $100,000 was a good idea back in 1991. It was (relatively) quickly repealed three years later -- but not before putting a large number of US-based custom boat builders out of business.
Not all grants are options. Some are outright grants of stock. If these shares were grants, the shares were already outstanding. Google doesn't have to buy stock at the current price to cover the exercise of options.
The proceeds from the sale of granted stock do not come out of the bottom line -- it comes from the people who buy the shares.. However, there are now more liquid shares floating in the market, which increases the "supply" of shares and potentially depresses the market price.
The Aurora (which is the VS Deliverer variant) developed a bug in a new release in which the gunner could fire the entire 12-shot clip of ammo in one concentrated blast. It was apparently triggered by clicking the left mouse button in a certain manner or sequence.
The VS quickly learned how to use it on the Emerald server. Suddenly, Aurora's were everywhere and they were devastating to all kinds of enemy armor. One blast could nearly destroy a medium battle tank (the Vanguard or Prowler), and all it took were a few more shots from someone else to finish it off.
I don't remember all the details, but the problem was reportedly identified during the beta test of that release, but that didn't stop it from being deployed. And it took it a long time to be fixed.
You can find one reference to it in this thread: Devs, whats the official story (again?) on the Aurora 12-shot "Bug" (Feature?). You might be able to find more on it by searching the forums.
I've been looking around and I'm haven't found anything that says "no vehicles" for the "fodder". They currently restrict availability of a few vehicles to people with the "core combat" expansion, but that was a one-time $10 fee (or $30, depending on when you paid it) for early players of the game. I think it's bundled with new purchases of the game now.
Getting CEP (to level up CR) is a lot easier with a organized outfit. CEP calculations are no longer based on kills, so it requires some amount of discipline and strategy. Working with a group of people who already know what to do (and can help the new guys) isn't as stressful.
When you can come back instantly, or nearly so, your team basically has an infinite supply of people, so the most efficient attack is always going to be the overwhelming mob. If you have a much larger death penalty (5 minute rez, or something like that) you have to develop some strategy. Maybe add some limits to the spawn points...Like only so many spawns per minute or something. Of course, that punishes the good players more than the bad players.
There is a spawn timer now, which gets longer if you spawn more often in a certain amount of time. But it isn't much of a penalty.
But this actually does result in a strategy: an anti-spawn strategy. Effective squads and outfits think ahead on how to limit the enemy's ability to spawn players nearby.
You now get 7 cert points at Battle Rank 1. You get an additional cert point for each BR up through BR23, except for BR6, BR12, and BR18. Normally, you get an implant at those three BR's, but with the "fodder" program, I guess you don't get anything at BR6.
Most decent FPS players should be able to get up to BR8 within a couple of weeks of playing a few hours a night. You can get all the way to BR4 just by trying out every vehicle and weapon in the simulator and visiting a few places in "sanctuary" -- and that's without going through the new training programs. I've built a new player up to BR4 in 35 minutes that way.
Does anyone have any stats on maximum connections to PS servers at one time?
There are three servers: European, US West Coast, US East Coast. At primetime in the evening, I would estimate about 600 players on-line on the East Coast server. A continent can have a maximum of 133 players from an empire, and there are three empires. Lately, I've observed my empire to population-lock a continent and have 20-30 people left over to stir up trouble elsewhere. The other empires have about the same population. The past month or so, overall population has risen quite a bit, as they have invited people with expired subscriptions to come back and play for 30 days for free.
Weapon balance seemed, well... spotty. I played back in the Beta days with a room mate of mine, and even with us both in the same room yelling things at each other, we didn't have all that much success--and we're both at least decent FPS players.
Balance is a bit better, but that's a source of endless discussion and argument among the empire. The key is teamwork: even two people working together can't do much against the more powerful weapons. I play with an organized outfit that usually has a platoon of 10-30 people in the evenings, and we have a reputation for getting things done in situations where twice the number of less-organized people will fail.
Vehicles were fun, but the weapons felt very underpowered--we'd both shoot that Lancer anti-vehicle gun at even a Lightning, and it felt like forever before the thing blew up.
Personal weapons are underpowered against vehicles in this game, but I think that's necessary to get people into the vehicles. If only one or two shots could destroy a vehicle, people wouldn't bother with them. As it is now, it's hard enough to get people to use the armored vehicles instead of zerging from the nearest spawn point.
Maybe it was lag. I remember trying to get back into the game for a while, but even after doubling my RAM (to 512) I still had problems.
This has been a continuing problem. I can't play with less than 1G RAM. 512M is not adequate unless you want to be struggling with lag all the time. One of my teammates is always falling behind us because it takes him several minutes to change zones (i.e. move to a new continent). If he is in a vehicle with the rest of us, we can easily reach and disembark at a target in a new zone before he even gets it loaded.
'm also not keen on Clans--small tactical teams I can do, but Clans seem to always end up full of annoying elitists. It seems like it'd be pretty hard to find a good squad without joining a clan.
Some of the outfits are full of annoying people like that. Others are so disorganized that you would do better playing solo. I switched outfits several times before I found one that fit my style.
Lastly, I've heard that there're still pretty serious bugs. Like vehicles randomly becoming invincible, and major weapons randomly doing no damage (like, all the shotguns--and one whole faction's infantry weapons more or less revolve around shotguns).
The invincible vehicle is effectively gone: I've only seen it once in over a year of play. But, the shotgun bug is still there, wh
And a large part of the other half, like this particular incident, is probably because the digger got an erroneous answer from the support number. A contractor for Verizon buried fiber optic cable (for FIOS) in my neighborhood late last year. Prior to their arrival, the cable, electrical, and natural gas utilities marked the locations of their respective cables/pipelines. But when they started boring two doors down from my house, they suddenly quit and packed up for the day.
I went out to watch a couple of days later, and asked what happened. They had nearly punched a hole in the natural gas line, because it wasn't properly marked -- and had to wait for the gas company to investigate. Apparently, natural gas lines have a wire next to the pipeline that pulses at a certain frequency, and can be picked up with a sensor. For some reason, the wire had been separated from the pipeline and was about 3 feet away.
A number of years ago, a friend of mine worked for a large computer company with a support center in Colorado Springs. A contractor digging post-holes for a fence did what they were supposed to do: called the telephone company for the location of a buried cable. The phone company marked the location of an adjacent cable that was no longer in use and instead directed them to the right-of-way for the new cable. So, when the digger pulled up bits of copper wire from every hole, the contractor didn't even blink -- it was supposed have been the old cable that had been decommissioned.
In 2005, a total of 19 submissions by Beatles-Beatles were accepted, which is indeed less than 2 per month. But, you apparently spread his submissions over the full year. According to http://slashdot.org/~*%20*%20Beatles-Beatles, his first accepted submission was published on 2005-10-10.
If you spread the 19 accepted submissions over a two month period, that is over 9 stories per month. Furthermore, on 10/31 and 11/13, two of his submissions were accepted. On 11/28 and 12/11, three of his submissions were accepted.
I don't think you were intentionally trying to lie with statistics, but your apparent methodology doesn't account for the year-end skew and ignores multiple instances of daily clusters.
The Yahoo article says:
According to the Federation of Tax Administrators, the following states impose no income tax on state residents: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming.
Texas has no income tax. But, it does have a sales tax. And like many other states, it varies across the state -- not according to county, but according to municipality.
What is "access to culture"? The article specifically uses two P2P file-sharing programs as examples. Is this about pirating media (music, movies), or about publishing source code?
However, instead of omitting the vocal track, the "karaoke" machine would omit the lead (or rhythm?) guitar track.
It might encourage the tone-deaf "singers" to try something else. If nothing else, the air-guitar antics would be more entertaining.
Translation: you can't back up what you wrote or refute what I wrote, so you resorted to a personal attack.
I do statistical data analyis every day. If I claimed there was a correlation based on a 1% difference in measurements, my clients would (rightfully) question my competence. If I claimed there was a cause-effect relationship, I would be asked to leave.
My point is that your claim:
You can see this by looking at graphs of consumption before and after the speed limit in the US was raised from 55 to 65.
Repealing the speed limit didn't increase accident fatalities or injuries, either. After accounting for the increase in miles driven, accident injuries and fatalities actually declined from 1995 to 1997: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa346.pdf
Correlation != Causation.
The national 55mph speed limit was repealed in 1995, leaving it to the states to set the speed limits. It might be 65 in your state, but in mine it varies from 55 to 70, depending on a number of factors.
After the 55mph speed limit was repealed, the number of miles driven increased substantially. Larger (and less efficient) vehicles also became more popular, as gasoline dropped to historically low prices in 1998 (after adjusting for inflation).
There are lots of reasons that gasoline consumption increased. The higher speed limit may have been a contributing factor, but the US Dept. of Transportion estimated that the 55mph limit reduced US gasoline by 1 percent, at most. That's statistically insignificant, given the variables. Keeping tires inflated to the proper pressure would probably have saved more gasoline.
Yes, the article is lacking. But, you can get the answer by googling for "BGan Inmarsat" (I got the terms from TFA). Or you can go directly to Inmarsat's webpage: http://countdown.inmarsat.com/bgan/default.aspx?to p_level_id=31&language=EN&textonly=False.
It's up to 492Kbps, send and receive, for variable bit rate. For guaranteed bit rate, it's up to 256Kbps. I don't know if that means X Kbps each direction, or combined. Maybe someone else can fill in the gaps.
A Verizon subcontractor has been laying fiber in front of my house this week. When it goes live, an install crew will bring fiber up to the side of my house and install an Optical Network Terminal (ONT). From that, I'll get a Cat5/100Mbit cable to a router inside.
I have a choice of packages:
5 Mbps/2 Mbps for $40/month
15 Mbps/2 Mbps for $50/month
30 Mbps/5 Mbps for $200/month
http://www22.verizon.com/FiOSforhome/channels/FiOS /root/package.aspx
However, I'll probably go for a business package that includes static IPs and 15 Mbps/2 Mbps for $100/month.
http://business.verizon.net/pands/fios/features.as p
The ONT also provides standard POTS service, and eventually cable TV:
http://www22.verizon.com/FiosForHome/Channels/fios /FiosTV_comingsoon.aspx
Martha Stewart was in jail because she lied to investigators.
After all was said and done, the government dropped the rest of the charges against her, because they couldn't prove she had done anything wrong. It's not even clear that she did anything illegal (other than lying about it).
But since she didn't tell the truth when first confronted about it, she went to jail. If she had told the truth or not said anything at all, it's unlikely that she would have convicted of anything.
Possibly. But, that's the problem: they weren't able to identify the vector.
I saw in another article that she hadn't started Tamiflu until after she was already ill, when it's not expected to work as well.
The original article that I quoted wasn't clear about it, but this one is:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&si d=adU.gGtVZZ2g
A sample from the patient was resistant to Tamiflu in a laboratory test. However, it wasn't resistant to Relenza:
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapac ific/view/173522/1/.html
I'm not sure she was ever treated with either drug. Fortunately, the resistant strain of the virus apparently doesn't reproduce well. An article in Nature is supposed to be published next week. Hopefully, there will be more detail.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051014/hl_afp/health fluvirusdrugtamiflu_051014160640
More unsettling is that the virus in this particular patient developed a resistance to Tamiflu -- the drug being stockpiled to fight a flu epidemic.
Don't be so sure. There's has been a case in Asia where a girl appears to have contracted it from her brother. They haven't been able to connect her illness with any poultry.
(I read the article last night, but haven't been able to find it this morning)
An article in Wired says:
Missouri expects to spend less than $3 million a year on the service, Rahn said, although the exact price won't be known until the contract is finalized. Maryland is spending $1.9 million, although the entire Baltimore project costs nearly $5.6 million, said Mike Zezeski, director of real-time traffic operations for the Maryland Department of Transportation.
By contrast, the San Francisco Bay area spent about $35 million over several years to install roadside scanners and develop computer programs, websites and call centers for a real-time traffic service based on electronic toll passes, said Randy Rentschler, a spokesman for the region's Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
The same service is offered in Houston: Houston TranStar. It can be downloaded onto a web-enabled phone.
The data is also provided to XM Radio, who offers it for car navigation systems that can display it on the screen in real-time: http://www.xmradio.com/xmnavtraffic/.
My Acura RL has this feature, and I wish that they would implement some form of this in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.