Yes, they will learn what shape to fabricate a helicopter stealth rotor in in order to build their own stealth aircraft or to test their high-power radar. Unless, of course, they already have the plans, which is entirely possible because China seems to routinely steal US Stealth plans (I've heard this from nonclassified sources and don't know if it's true but suspect there's at least some truth to it). AFAIK, we have much better sigint but they have much better cyber offensive units. I'm not sure how human intelligence assets play out, but I'd expect them to have an advantage. (But maybe not.)
Did US and Pakistan have some kind of deal where they are not allowed to improve their technology with their friends if US happens to dump their trash all over the country? US would do exactly the same with UK or their other girlfriends.
Well, Pakistan does have an "accept several hundred billion dollars a year from the US" deal. If China's making them a better offer, then Pakistan's actions make sense.
You are assuming short-term monetary gain is the most important factor in the deal.
At the time, it was an expected reaction.
The rational thing to do for monetary gain would have been to offer the stealth tail to the highest bidder, with a higher premium required if someone wants no photographs.
But Pakistan was really pissed at the US. Think how we would feel if the Mexican or Canadian army send a special forces team into West Point or Fort Worth to arrest a drug kingpin without our consent. Now multiply it by at least ten (due to more anti-American sentiment in Pakistan to begin with).
The environmental impact statement that supported the Canadian switch to plastic currency estimated a lifecycle of approximately 3x the time paper currency lasted and used landfill carbon impact for end-of-life data for both types of currency.
Currency is a disposable product in that bills are retired when they are too worn to be used. Each year, the banks take a great deal of cash out of circulation and replace it with new cash.
Not all trained professionals are good. Some of them are a lot worse than what you find on the internet with an intelligent search. I'll grant that facebook isn't a terribly *reliable* source of data, but you'll find *a lot* of upper-middle class people on there who have experienced whatever you're going through or have had relatives who had, and who are intelligent enough to know quite a bit about the problem. You can't trust them to be medically right, but you can still get a lot of data, and to have experience living through the problem (which docs often don't have).
Most doctors only report negative side effects if (1) they are reported by a large number of people, and (2) they accord with the doctor's preconceived notions. Most docs make up their own mind whether to believe a patient's report of side-effects. (Crazy, but true.) To be fair, this is mostly a problem during the studies that get the drug approved in the first place, but that's mostly because that's when the side-effects tend to get reported at all.
> Not that a drug company would be in a position to disclose that sort of information anyways. They simply don't have the persons information. That's as it should be.
Drug companies pay pharmacies to get the history of drugs they sell and who prescribes them. That information includes ID #s unique to particular patients, without formally identifying any of the patients. In the opinion of the pharmacies, etc..., this is enough to comply with medical privacy laws. But don't you think if you got a little bit of information on a patient--where they lived, when they died, a little bit of info on their history (enough to know what other drugs they might have tried), and a doctor or two of theirs, that you could guess a fair number of patient identities from the numbers?
Yes and No--that's an interesting point, and I'll concede it can be conceptualized that way. The break-up value is not necessarily profit, because the sunk cost may be greater than zero. (Although I suppose it is short-term profit). Similarly, it may be profit for the firm owner but not the firm itself, depending on how the break-up is structured and how the tax law functions in the jurisdiction, for example.
I would rather own a firm that has a net worth of $10 billion and zero profit than a firm with a net worth of $0 and, say, fifty million in annual profit.
From the perspective of the owner, the firm's profit is not the only thing that matters. It is one metric among many--albeit it an important one.
A ten-minute delay for an employee working 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week, is 2500 minutes or 41 2/3 hours of work, a 2% increase in time when the employee can be working. If the computer has a 4-year lifecycle, that's 4 weeks of work at an 8 hour day.
That time may be utilized with up to 100% efficiency depending on the habits of the worker, e.g. if the employee checks work mail or does some other routine action on the computer before working, and does not pipeline another task during the time his computer spends booting up. This is *only* factoring in boot-up delays, and if the employee has any hard-disk-limited transactions during the day.
An employee making $100K/year earns $8k during that time. An employee making $50K/year earns $4k during that time.
Assuming worse factors--a 3-year lifecycle, a 50% time use or 5 minute per day savings, and a $50K/yr employee--the extra employee time would still cost you $1.5K over the machine life cycle.
It is *easily* worth spending an extra $1K on a computer* if it will give an employee an extra five minutes a day. If the employee is paid well or by-the-hour, it is worth significantly more to do so.
But then the study of the carbon footprint needed to do the carbon footprint study of the carbon footprint of bicycling would need to be included. But then the carbon footprint of the study done of the carbon footprint of the study done of the carbon footprint ob bicycling would also have to be done, and so on, and so on, and so on. . ..
If only we had come up with some concept that would let us estimate these residuals...
The carbon footprint thing is overrated, but not useless. The problem is that it is often used without context. Canada is replacing their paper currency with plastic, for example, and it has a much better carbon footprint, in part because the plastic does not break down and thus does not release carbon into the atmosphere.
But that also means that what goes into the landfill does not biodegrade, and that we are using a non-renewable resource rather than a renewable resource for the money. (Even though it is only a tiny amount of that nonrenewable resource). Those considerations should be included in the environmental impact analysis of using the new money, but IRRC, they were not--the whole emphasis was on carbon footprint.
I am not remembering wrong. I am looking at the bill on hydroone. The prices you quoted are what they formally say prices are, which generally means generation bill up to a certain amount. Divide your total bill by your kilowatt-hours. Even then, distribution costs vary depending on where in Ontario you are. Debt retirement charges, the result of massive mismanagement for years, also go into it.
On the bill I am thinking of, power has gone up from 15c/KWh to 20 c/KWh recently. I am not sure offhand if that is before or after they multiply KWh by 1.1.
That is as expensive as it is in Hawaii, the most expensive state in the US. Only this bill is in Ontario, where power generation is a LOT cheaper than in Hawaii.
If it does go to the Supreme Court in Canada, oral arguments will be watchable. In the US, the Supreme Court does not allow cameras in the Courtroom (although you can still hear the audio).
Re:Better yet: Open Source Boilerplate ....
on
Open Source For Lawyers?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Much of the legal profession is simply copying and pasting from books and CDs of boilerplate contracts / wills / leases / etc. They then charge $200/hr as if they typed it up themselves. Quite frankly, prior to software, a good place where Open Source would fit is with boilerplate agreements such as this.
No, they don't. That is not the legal profession; that is most likely malpractice and fraud. They charge a rate for their time, but their time is spent taking that form and customizing it to your situation, correcting the boilerplate (most boilerplates are not done incredibly well), analyzing your situation, and maybe researching a little of the relevant law if they don't know something arcane. A mother's will may need to be protected from a future divorce--the boilerplate needs changing. The law may have changed on the enforcability of covenants not to compete--the boilerplate needs changing. The lease you are writing might have an unusual term in it--the boilerplate needs changing. Anyone who uses a boilerplate for an agreement without at least re-reading it and making careful, studious changes where appropriate is not doing their job, except in some unilateral contracts where you have zero bargaining power. Anyone who charges $200/hr for the time it would have taken them to write an agreement from scratch when they did not do that is not being a professional and in all probability is breaking the law of the jurisdiction he is in in a way that can have serious consequences if he is found out.
Just what lawyers need, free software because they don't bill enough to pay for software and the jobs it supplies.
Typical lawyers, want to charge you $$$ (250+ an hour) and yet spend NOTHING on the backend. They do not know the value of other people's time while over-valuing their own.
The market values their time. They can't sell it at $250/hr unless someone is willing to pay that. The only way to fix the problem would be up-front costs, which would help both the lawyers and the clients, but even those would need caveats in them, as work can take more time and money than expected.
Lawyers have to keep track of their time in six-minute intervals. The billable hour is not fun for them either.
Try and figure out how to make healthcare affordable enough that you don't need the government or some other insurance company to pay for it for you?
You don't need to have insurance done the way it's done. As it is, doctors are incentivized to do lousy work by insurance companies. A negotiated flat rate for a certain procedure regardless of whether it is a careful one by a good surgeon that takes three times as long or a sloppy one by a quick surgeon, for example. If you want your patents to get the right care, you have to lie to insurance companies about the patient's medical condition. I'm not doing scan X as a follow-up because it's what you should do after the patient has condition Y, I'm doing it to be sure patient doesn't have (expensive-to-treat) condition Z.
Universal Health Insurance is good at preventive care, but bad at dealing when people get sick. (Try getting a specialist in Canada. See if you even get referred to a specialist when you should be.)
Private Health Insurance has an inherent conflict-of-interest problem that it addresses in a way where the transaction costs are incredibly wasteful. (I know someone who spent more than 24 hours on the phone getting an address changed).
Ideally, we need a little of each, with improvements to both.
There are significant differences between Democrats and Republicans at a policy level and at demographic and socioeconomic levels. However, these differences are in only a few areas, like abortion, gay rights, health care, and the estate tax.
They are very important areas, but there are *many* policy decisions where the two parties are essentially in alignment, thus effectively disenfranchising voters who want to vote for other policies. Drug policies, campaign finance reform, free trade, underfunding criminal justice, lack of consumer protection, Copyright Reform, Patent Reform, the patriot act, etc...
This patent involves honestly estimating when the package will arrive, you see, not just when the guy will show up with the slip saying he tried to deliver it, at the same moment when your doorbell miraculously fails to work, but only for him.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking too offensively.
That's every American's God Given Right!
Yes, they will learn what shape to fabricate a helicopter stealth rotor in in order to build their own stealth aircraft or to test their high-power radar. Unless, of course, they already have the plans, which is entirely possible because China seems to routinely steal US Stealth plans (I've heard this from nonclassified sources and don't know if it's true but suspect there's at least some truth to it). AFAIK, we have much better sigint but they have much better cyber offensive units. I'm not sure how human intelligence assets play out, but I'd expect them to have an advantage. (But maybe not.)
Did US and Pakistan have some kind of deal where they are not allowed to improve their technology with their friends if US happens to dump their trash all over the country? US would do exactly the same with UK or their other girlfriends.
Well, Pakistan does have an "accept several hundred billion dollars a year from the US" deal. If China's making them a better offer, then Pakistan's actions make sense.
You are assuming short-term monetary gain is the most important factor in the deal.
At the time, it was an expected reaction.
The rational thing to do for monetary gain would have been to offer the stealth tail to the highest bidder, with a higher premium required if someone wants no photographs.
But Pakistan was really pissed at the US. Think how we would feel if the Mexican or Canadian army send a special forces team into West Point or Fort Worth to arrest a drug kingpin without our consent. Now multiply it by at least ten (due to more anti-American sentiment in Pakistan to begin with).
The environmental impact statement that supported the Canadian switch to plastic currency estimated a lifecycle of approximately 3x the time paper currency lasted and used landfill carbon impact for end-of-life data for both types of currency.
Currency is a disposable product in that bills are retired when they are too worn to be used. Each year, the banks take a great deal of cash out of circulation and replace it with new cash.
Not all trained professionals are good. Some of them are a lot worse than what you find on the internet with an intelligent search. I'll grant that facebook isn't a terribly *reliable* source of data, but you'll find *a lot* of upper-middle class people on there who have experienced whatever you're going through or have had relatives who had, and who are intelligent enough to know quite a bit about the problem. You can't trust them to be medically right, but you can still get a lot of data, and to have experience living through the problem (which docs often don't have).
Most doctors only report negative side effects if (1) they are reported by a large number of people, and (2) they accord with the doctor's preconceived notions. Most docs make up their own mind whether to believe a patient's report of side-effects. (Crazy, but true.) To be fair, this is mostly a problem during the studies that get the drug approved in the first place, but that's mostly because that's when the side-effects tend to get reported at all.
> Not that a drug company would be in a position to disclose that sort of information anyways. They simply don't have the persons information. That's as it should be.
Drug companies pay pharmacies to get the history of drugs they sell and who prescribes them. That information includes ID #s unique to particular patients, without formally identifying any of the patients. In the opinion of the pharmacies, etc..., this is enough to comply with medical privacy laws. But don't you think if you got a little bit of information on a patient--where they lived, when they died, a little bit of info on their history (enough to know what other drugs they might have tried), and a doctor or two of theirs, that you could guess a fair number of patient identities from the numbers?
Yes and No--that's an interesting point, and I'll concede it can be conceptualized that way. The break-up value is not necessarily profit, because the sunk cost may be greater than zero. (Although I suppose it is short-term profit). Similarly, it may be profit for the firm owner but not the firm itself, depending on how the break-up is structured and how the tax law functions in the jurisdiction, for example.
I would rather own a firm that has a net worth of $10 billion and zero profit than a firm with a net worth of $0 and, say, fifty million in annual profit.
From the perspective of the owner, the firm's profit is not the only thing that matters. It is one metric among many--albeit it an important one.
A ten-minute delay for an employee working 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week, is 2500 minutes or 41 2/3 hours of work, a 2% increase in time when the employee can be working. If the computer has a 4-year lifecycle, that's 4 weeks of work at an 8 hour day.
That time may be utilized with up to 100% efficiency depending on the habits of the worker, e.g. if the employee checks work mail or does some other routine action on the computer before working, and does not pipeline another task during the time his computer spends booting up. This is *only* factoring in boot-up delays, and if the employee has any hard-disk-limited transactions during the day.
An employee making $100K/year earns $8k during that time. An employee making $50K/year earns $4k during that time.
Assuming worse factors--a 3-year lifecycle, a 50% time use or 5 minute per day savings, and a $50K/yr employee--the extra employee time would still cost you $1.5K over the machine life cycle.
It is *easily* worth spending an extra $1K on a computer* if it will give an employee an extra five minutes a day. If the employee is paid well or by-the-hour, it is worth significantly more to do so.
But then the study of the carbon footprint needed to do the carbon footprint study of the carbon footprint of bicycling would need to be included. But then the carbon footprint of the study done of the carbon footprint of the study done of the carbon footprint ob bicycling would also have to be done, and so on, and so on, and so on. . . .
If only we had come up with some concept that would let us estimate these residuals...
We could call it... multiplication.
The carbon footprint thing is overrated, but not useless. The problem is that it is often used without context. Canada is replacing their paper currency with plastic, for example, and it has a much better carbon footprint, in part because the plastic does not break down and thus does not release carbon into the atmosphere.
But that also means that what goes into the landfill does not biodegrade, and that we are using a non-renewable resource rather than a renewable resource for the money. (Even though it is only a tiny amount of that nonrenewable resource). Those considerations should be included in the environmental impact analysis of using the new money, but IRRC, they were not--the whole emphasis was on carbon footprint.
I am not remembering wrong. I am looking at the bill on hydroone. The prices you quoted are what they formally say prices are, which generally means generation bill up to a certain amount. Divide your total bill by your kilowatt-hours. Even then, distribution costs vary depending on where in Ontario you are. Debt retirement charges, the result of massive mismanagement for years, also go into it.
Note: those are actual costs, i.e. take the price, divide by KwH. Not Generation costs.
On the bill I am thinking of, power has gone up from 15c/KWh to 20 c/KWh recently. I am not sure offhand if that is before or after they multiply KWh by 1.1.
That is as expensive as it is in Hawaii, the most expensive state in the US. Only this bill is in Ontario, where power generation is a LOT cheaper than in Hawaii.
Yes. They have the internets. Power, on the other hand... they have it, but it costs an arm and a leg. Literally.
If it does go to the Supreme Court in Canada, oral arguments will be watchable. In the US, the Supreme Court does not allow cameras in the Courtroom (although you can still hear the audio).
Much of the legal profession is simply copying and pasting from books and CDs of boilerplate contracts / wills / leases / etc. They then charge $200/hr as if they typed it up themselves. Quite frankly, prior to software, a good place where Open Source would fit is with boilerplate agreements such as this.
No, they don't. That is not the legal profession; that is most likely malpractice and fraud. They charge a rate for their time, but their time is spent taking that form and customizing it to your situation, correcting the boilerplate (most boilerplates are not done incredibly well), analyzing your situation, and maybe researching a little of the relevant law if they don't know something arcane. A mother's will may need to be protected from a future divorce--the boilerplate needs changing. The law may have changed on the enforcability of covenants not to compete--the boilerplate needs changing. The lease you are writing might have an unusual term in it--the boilerplate needs changing. Anyone who uses a boilerplate for an agreement without at least re-reading it and making careful, studious changes where appropriate is not doing their job, except in some unilateral contracts where you have zero bargaining power. Anyone who charges $200/hr for the time it would have taken them to write an agreement from scratch when they did not do that is not being a professional and in all probability is breaking the law of the jurisdiction he is in in a way that can have serious consequences if he is found out.
Just what lawyers need, free software because they don't bill enough to pay for software and the jobs it supplies.
Typical lawyers, want to charge you $$$ (250+ an hour) and yet spend NOTHING on the backend. They do not know the value of other people's time while over-valuing their own.
The market values their time. They can't sell it at $250/hr unless someone is willing to pay that. The only way to fix the problem would be up-front costs, which would help both the lawyers and the clients, but even those would need caveats in them, as work can take more time and money than expected.
Lawyers have to keep track of their time in six-minute intervals. The billable hour is not fun for them either.
Try and figure out how to make healthcare affordable enough that you don't need the government or some other insurance company to pay for it for you?
You don't need to have insurance done the way it's done. As it is, doctors are incentivized to do lousy work by insurance companies. A negotiated flat rate for a certain procedure regardless of whether it is a careful one by a good surgeon that takes three times as long or a sloppy one by a quick surgeon, for example. If you want your patents to get the right care, you have to lie to insurance companies about the patient's medical condition. I'm not doing scan X as a follow-up because it's what you should do after the patient has condition Y, I'm doing it to be sure patient doesn't have (expensive-to-treat) condition Z.
Universal Health Insurance is good at preventive care, but bad at dealing when people get sick. (Try getting a specialist in Canada. See if you even get referred to a specialist when you should be.)
Private Health Insurance has an inherent conflict-of-interest problem that it addresses in a way where the transaction costs are incredibly wasteful. (I know someone who spent more than 24 hours on the phone getting an address changed).
Ideally, we need a little of each, with improvements to both.
With market value as they are, there are many houses it would be profitable even if you had them sit empty.
It would be *more* profitable to have someone in them, almost always, but it would be profitable to have them empty.
They stopped ordering new F-22s.
There are significant differences between Democrats and Republicans at a policy level and at demographic and socioeconomic levels. However, these differences are in only a few areas, like abortion, gay rights, health care, and the estate tax.
They are very important areas, but there are *many* policy decisions where the two parties are essentially in alignment, thus effectively disenfranchising voters who want to vote for other policies. Drug policies, campaign finance reform, free trade, underfunding criminal justice, lack of consumer protection, Copyright Reform, Patent Reform, the patriot act, etc...
This patent involves honestly estimating when the package will arrive, you see, not just when the guy will show up with the slip saying he tried to deliver it, at the same moment when your doorbell miraculously fails to work, but only for him.