If there's already one done somewhere, why should I duplicate the effort rather than download it? You really don't understand the Internet, do you, Anonymous jerk Coward.
My credibility comes from the facts. If you choose to ignore them because of some Bush-era talking points you insist on clinging to, that's your problem. I'm not interested in convincing people like you who insisted we go into Iraq and stay there. You will just have to get dragged along with everyone else as we claw our way out of the hole you forced us to dig there.
It's an oil war. What made Iraq unusual among all the targets for invasion was its oil. The UN controlled Iraq's oil when it was under Saddam Hussein's control; that hasn't been in the way for over 5 years now. The possibility that the US might never get preferential access to it doesn't matter: the oil was the bait that already got us to spend the $TRILLION (that you people said would be negligible). The Oil War isn't necessarily for oil, but it's certainly about oil. Otherwise there's plenty of other countries where victory and democracy were actually achievable. But they wouldn't have been perfect places for Halliburton and its other oil ilk, topped by Bush/Cheney, to get US corporate welfare for a decade or more.
You're the one with no credibility. If you want to quibble with the facts because of your bias, try quibbling with the actual facts of the actual subject. Instead of the bait and switch that makes up both your comment here, and your whole "!!!9/11!!! - no, Iraq!" scam that you're still defending with everyone's life but your own.
Nuclear fuel is an extracted mineral. That's a rock. Greek for rock is "petro", which is why petroleum is called that: "rock oil". Nuclear fuel is a petrofuel. It's exhaustible, not renewable.
Onsite renewables like wind and solar (especially solar thermal for water heating) don't need any transmission/distribution infrastructure changes to work.
Where's your evidence that scaling up renewables like wind, solar, geothermal makes them no cleaner than coal or oil? Or creates anything like the dirty products of nuke plants?
Yes, the future will probably have more nuclear and slightly less dirty exhaustible fuels like oil, coal and gas. But that's because those dirty old industries are still favored by subsidies and momentum. Not by physics or economics. The renewables are easier to scale, and the factors keeping their legacy competitors propped up are being steadily removed or overmatched by the new industries. We don't have to like the old stuff, and we don't have to keep it, either.
What is "significant impact"? Renewables already constituted 7.4% of US energy consumption by 2008, which was a year before Obama started dramatically increasing investment in renewables. Before the US entered the Great Recession, after a decade of Oil War in which energy prices were finally high enough to make reducing energy consumption a national consensus. Before BP killed the Gulf with the consequences of offshore oil/gas drilling. That fraction had already jumped by the beginning of 2009 (still before those propelling events), just as it had been swiftly rising - though for only a few years.
California (1/7th of all Americans) already generates 31% of its electricity from renewables, 12% from non-hydropower. Again, this is all before the recent catastrophes and stimuli produce a new wave of generation plants, which are under construction.
It doesn't have to take decades before renewables have significant impact. In fact, close to 10% is already significant impact. Renewable plants are faster to build than exhaustible power systems, and are much easier/cheaper to build distributed around the country than centralized exhaustible power plants. Contrary to your statement, onsite generation by solar and wind is an advantage over centralized petrofuels in terms of our existing distribution, which onsite can largely ignore but petrofuels cannot. If we spent a $TRILLION on renewables for a decade, the way we will have spent a $TRILLION+ in Iraq on Oil War for a decade, we'd probably have at least 25% of our power coming from renewables. The resulting boom in the US domestic economy, both stimulated by investment in new technology/labor and unshackled from shipping money and jobs to foreign oil suppliers, would even further accelerate renewable fuel switchover, making subsidies unnecessary. If we canceled all the subsidies to petrofuels like oil, coal, gas and nukes, we'd see even faster conversion as a freer market finally played on a leveled playing field.
We don't have fifty years to leave exhaustible fuels for renewables. Fortunately, we don't need more than 10-20 to do it.
If the problem with spraypainting the inside of the car body panels with a lithium/nanotube battery layer is that water would get into the layer, then it seems to me the layer can be sealed. I don't think these are lithium/air batteries that need to be porous. A watertight coating layer, or perhaps a hydrophobic layer that doesn't interfere with the electronic chemistry - or both - seems possible.
4-5 miles range per day does translate into useful power, like for accessories as you say. It might be useful as a last resort charger when there's no other vehicle to jumpstart you in an emergency. If the solar charger weighs less than an extra jumpstart battery, maybe it's worth it. If a lightweight car gets 75+ miles per gallon-equivalent of electricity, and the charging layer is really cheap (like a paint), it might be economical to power the vehicle. Especially a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle that drives only a few miles a day anyway.
But your point about rolling up the battery (like a traditional capacitor, which has the same thinness requirements) is insightful. I bet the reporter didn't bother asking the scientists about that, or asking an engineer about alternatives to thicker layers. Your solution would work today. Mine might never be worth doing:).
the MIT team achieved its best results with very thin electrodes. The performance dropped off considerably as the electrodes were made thicker. Because thicker electrodes can store more charges, they allow a battery to hold more energy. So for now, hybrid batteries will be best suited to applications with low overall power demands, such as powering electronic circuitry in smart cards, credit cards with electronic chips that hold more information than magnetic strips do. For the batteries to be useful in hybrid cars or other power-hungry applications, researchers will need to find a way to make thicker electrodes that can still move charges quickly, a project Shao-Horn says she is working on now.
Or they could coat all the insides of the body panels and chassis with a thin layer of battery that would still give a very large total volume, evenly distributed. If they divided it into independent cells evenly drawn down, even a collision trashing that part of the car would put only a a little of its power storage out of commission.
If they could manufacture and assemble the battery layer as a sprayed paint, that could lower costs and speed repairs. And if the upper outside surface of the car could be covered in solar PV panels (or paint), the whole battery could recharge at whatever fraction of 1KW:m^2 the sun (or artificial lighting) is pouring down on it.
Those are other, extra innovations not yet within our grasp in addition to these nanotube batteries just achieved. But they are good complements to the batteries and its properties. The arrival of the battery material might just pull us closer to the complete package.
No, I am not implying that. You are inferring that.
What I am explicitly saying is that Republicans have abused the filibuster, and that the filibuster rules must be changed to prevent its abuse. I have said it over and over again. I have also rejected your inference that the legitimacy of its use is determined by which party.
In fact what I have said over and over is that Republicans abuse the filibuster, so the rules must be changed.
You are the one who keeps trying to turn that into a purely partisan argument, that only X Party can/cannot use the filibuster. Because you are a Republican, Republicans like you always want special rules beneficial to your party and prohibitive to the other, and you want Democrats prohibited from using the filibuster just like your Republican Party wanted to eliminate it when Democrats had it available.
That's enough. You're just part of the pool of Republicans who want special privileges, and then blame Democrats when you don't get them.
No. You are now creating several straw man arguments. I did not say that Democrats can use it but Republicans cannot - you did, and I pointed out already that straw man. I also didn't say it was OK to use it to block judicial nominees but not healthcare reform. Indeed I said nothing about the uses to which it's put.
I also didn't make the argument that Democratic use of the filibuster is OK because Democrats represent more people. You did, when you offered that article which consists entirely of that argument. I only agreed that argument has some validity, and that it certainly doesn't make the point you keep trying to make - it makes the opposite point.
There are plenty of arguments to be made in favor of those straw men you offer, like how the republic part of our governmental system is designed precisely to give representatives power to lead even when an action is not popular. I could back it up with polls showing that now that HCR is law, and opponents have stopped pumping time and money into fighting it (while proponents have stopped doing so to boost it), people actually learning about the actual law and its actual effects have reversed those earlier polls. HCR is now now popular than unpopular, growing in popularity faster than it became unpopular, and following the exact same trend as every other healthcare or other social protection programme, from Medicare to Social Security to universal education to universal electric or telephone service. Right down to Republicans filibustering it on the argument that it's "armageddon", while Democrats manage to eventually pass it.
All votes are "yes-no" votes. Republicans filibustered many more Clinton or Obama judicial appointees than Democrats filibustered Bush's or Reagan/Bush's, while only Republicans tried to "ram them down our throats" by trying to eliminate the filibuster itself.
But again, those are straw men. I debunk them only to show the weakness of even the fallacies you offer. If the best you can do is fallacies, evidence that argues against you but you offer because it's the second Google result (failing at even cherrypicking results), and chanting Republican buzzwords, you're not going to convince anyone of anything. Only your fellow Republicans will agree, and they'll obviously stick together on anything - that's how filibusters work.
That article demonstrates that when Democrats have used the filibuster, their Senate minority represented a majority of Americans. But Republican filibusters represent a minority of Americans.
So what you've done is underscored how the Senate's disproportionate representation is anti-democratic, especially when considering the filibuster. Except when Democrats have filibustered, where the filibuster has let a minority of representatives protect the majority of people, who they represent.
I haven't said that filibusters are OK for Democrats but not Republicans, even though you just offered evidence of that. What I've said is that filibusters are abused more by Republicans than by Democrats. And that the disproportionate Senate is an abuse of democracy. And that both are serving the country very badly.
I've watched it. But if you think it's "fighting corruption" now, you should look into what the minority Republicans do to filibuster. They just notify Reid (the Senate Majority Leader) that they will filibuster, and Reid accepts that they will. Or they use any of the many points in the legislative path to refuse "unanimous consent" to some rule erected to create that option, and derail the process.
Nobody ever stands up and speaks for days on end. The corruption at work is the filibusterer. And indeed, there's nothing stopping a filibusterer from being the corrupt one.
Mr Smith is a movie character. The Senate is real. Really corrupt. Abusable rules like the filibuster help keep it that way.
There's no reason to assume the swinging bucket won't achieve the correct force.
Your calculations of the light hitting the sensor don't even take into account how wide the sensor is. Consider an extreme case where the sensor is 180 degrees, a hemicylinder. For the half cycle it's pointing away from the sky, it misses light for that half; 50% of the light. A sensor that's 2 degrees wide would catch only 0.555555556%: 2.5 orders of magnitude lost. But that could be enough, compensated by the excellence of this mirror, compared to other 'scopes.
Democrats did occasionally use filibusters, as every minority has. But Republicans have used filibusters 3x as much as Democrats did when Republicans had a slimmer minority before them, and far more than usual. Republicans even threatened to eliminate the privilege they now abuse specifically to prevent Democrats from stopping long-term judicial appointments, though Republicans prevented more judicial appointments before that, under Clinton.
As usual, though Democrats might not be so good, Republicans are far worse. Saying "they both do it" is a false equivalency that hides Republicans being so bad that they paralyze governement. Right when Democrats are working to fix things Republicans broke with their majority.
Because democracy is when the majority of the people rules. A majority is 50%+1. When the +1 is not enough, that is not as democratic. In the extreme case, a 100% requirement means a minority of 1 interferes with the majority rule. The closer the majority requirement to 100%, the further from 50%+1, the further the rule from the majority. Ergo further from democracy.
Yes. Though I didn't suggest mounting the 'scope in space, which is a good idea. But I think that if the spins were sufficiently fast the 'scope could be mounted at the Earth's surface, overcoming gravity just as this original article says they do.
On the ground, the sensor sweep would have to omit the arcs where the sensor is looking at only the ground or blocked by parts of the apparatus.
As Churchill noted, democracy sucks, but it's the only thing that's ever worked.
The Constitution didn't give elements of both elected and nonelected officials to installing congressmembers. The Senate isn't nonelected in the original Constitution. It was elected by each state's legislature. So all of your points, which aren't the only factors in elected officials' priorities, were true about senators' constituencies in their state's legislature. Which meant that electing them was a purely partisan affair, measured by the partisan majority in the legislature. That method was so abused that we amended the Constitution to put the power in the people's hands.
The Constitution split the Congress into one chamber representing the people, the other chamber representing the states (the states' governments). The founders were transitioning us from government in which the state had all the power, the people had practically none (if the state excluded them). The original formulation balanced the people against the state. And indeed at that time, with few in the new country experienced with matters of government, it might have been prudent to give states equal power to the people. Though the Senate has more power than the House in some ways, like ratifying treaties and confirmations to Executive Branch and Judicial Branch nominations among others, even if the House has nominal origination of spending laws and the rarely exercised power of impeachment (after which the Senate tries and convicts/acquits). But again, Americans outgrew that dilution of democracy and took the power through the legit means of amending the Constitution, nearly a century ago, after just over a century of the original way.
The president is still not elected directly, either. The Electoral College is the same kind of structure as the original Senate election system, though the College has no other function while legislatures legislate. And indeed that dilution of democracy is notoriously treacherous. And in exactly the same ways as the legislature electing its senators: an ultimately purely partisan basis for election, an interference with the transparency that is paramount to any honesty and accountability, and a way for votes to be bought and sold defying the people's statement of our desired representatives.
Once elected by the people, the influence from other, more local representatives you desire is still at work in our current system. Presidents and senators must get agreement from the House representatives to pass and execute laws, and refrain from the most egregious behavior to avoid impeachment.
The biggest problems with the Senate are its departures from democracy. The majority rule has been replaced by minority tyranny through abusing rules that protect minority rights to influence (but not control) decisionmaking. That's the automatic and universal filibuster at work, along with "holds" placed by single senators interfering with a system retooled to rely on unanimous consent for too many decisions. And the simple inequity of a few people in a small state like Wyoming each having something like 70x the power over Senate decisions than each of the many people in a large state like California. An inequity repeated in the Electoral College by the same allocation.
If you prefer officials to be chosen by secret deals inside private political clubs, the minority privileged to more power than the majority, obscure rules giving minority political clubs power over much larger majorities, you want to move further from direct election of senators. You want to protect the way the Senate gives minorities the power to stop the majority from governing at all.
But most Americans, when we know how the system works, prefer to vote for (or against) the people who make decisions on our behalf. The Constitution's evolution reflects that gradually increasing knowledge, and indeed should continue in the same direction. Progress, not regression.
The Intel device puts a Zigbee dongle on every powered device, like a clothes dryer, to sense power consumption for reporting back to a PC for display and management.
Those dongles are expensive. The Zigbee part is $10-15 each (wholesale in 1000+ qty), the current sensor is $2-4, the Pic or Arduino microcontroller is $2-5, the relay (dryers are typically 240V@30A=7.2KW) or other power actuator is $5-10; integrating them is at least $5 = $24-39. Even for a $400 dryer that's something like 10% more, breakeven at 80 runs skipped, so probably over 10 years.
For appliances around $100 or less, where savings are less than 7KW per hour skipped, the payback is a lot longer.
If the dongles could cost $5 or less, the payback in a year or so could justify the expense.
The pork, especially on giant new power plants (or nuke waste dumps) gets spent on giant corporations in that state. The replacement of direct election of senators by the old way, election by the state's legislature, would just hide the bribery and patronage under that less direct election.
If you're against democracy, you're against direct election of senators.
If you want more democracy, you want the Senate to make the filibuster extremely rare, instead of the current Republican practice of filibustering every single Democratic bill, which changes the Constitution's majority (50%+1) requirement into a forced supermajority of 60+.
And if you want real democracy, instead of people in small states like Wyoming having something like 70 times the voting power in the Senate (and therefore in the Electoral College for president) of big states like California.
There's a lot we can change to make Congress more democratic, more of a legitimate republic. Giving up our power to vote for our senators is a giant change backwards into the 1800s.
How about spinning the bowl of mercury facing up, then swinging the bowl around a horizontal axis? Like a bucket of water swung at arm's length over one's head then back down, then back up, in a cycle, the way kids show each other "centripetal force"? The momentum would keep the concave surface intact as the whole contraption spun and swung around. Then the contraption could be rotated on the other horizontal axis, pointing the concave mirror at whichever direction was desired.
The mirror would point in that direction only intermittently, as the mirror swung past that point in its arc. But the image sensor could be sampled only at that moment, as the position synced with the desired direction.
All of that swinging would have to be calibrated to compensate for the interaction of the various axes of spin. But that all sounds like a set of DSPs could do it, with a laser interferometer keeping the cycles synced and sampling at the right timeslot.
Zillow.com has a detailed listing for the White House saying it's worth $270,050,000. Interestingly, its purchase value peaked at $331M on April 1, 2008.
I've got to add some embedded client components for syncing a MySQL DB data mart to a remote customer's web services XML interface to an existing app that runs in JBoss against MySQL, with a PHP interface (and a Flex/Flash client), code in an SVN repo.
Is there a good website telling me how to get started with Eclipse and the best plugins and configs, installed and configured on an Ubuntu server?
The whole point of open source is sharing the assets. Which doesn't mean "free" (except when it's FOSS).
Red Hat isn't the only Linux corp, the way that Apple is the only Mac corp and Microsoft is the only Windows corp. Add together all the Linux OS corps, including the biggest, Red Hat, and you've got something that's bigger than, say, Sun (was), or any of the Unix corps before it.
Linux's open source means that the corporate model is different, fundamentally. The model doesn't capture every penny in a single corp the way it did with Microsoft. A lot of the monetary value is held by the customers, and by people all along a very shaded gradient all the way to kids downloading OS'es they don't even install, trading them like baseball cards.
All of which means that the market gets the most efficient use out of all the value. Which you'd think would be good for business, better than the monopolistic model that does create $5-$50 billion corps like Microsoft, except for the business of stock market speculation (that does practically nothing good for business except speculators and brokers). Meanwhile, OSS is also capable of growing corps as big and valuable to stock traders as Red Hat, which is also valuable to business and even its competitors.
Open source is a new model for business. Measuring it by the old model isn't going to make sense to a lot of people. Even though it can make a lot of dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
If there's already one done somewhere, why should I duplicate the effort rather than download it? You really don't understand the Internet, do you, Anonymous jerk Coward.
That's a really nice image. Where can I find a 1920x1200 pixel image file of it to use as desktop wallpaper?
My credibility comes from the facts. If you choose to ignore them because of some Bush-era talking points you insist on clinging to, that's your problem. I'm not interested in convincing people like you who insisted we go into Iraq and stay there. You will just have to get dragged along with everyone else as we claw our way out of the hole you forced us to dig there.
It's an oil war. What made Iraq unusual among all the targets for invasion was its oil. The UN controlled Iraq's oil when it was under Saddam Hussein's control; that hasn't been in the way for over 5 years now. The possibility that the US might never get preferential access to it doesn't matter: the oil was the bait that already got us to spend the $TRILLION (that you people said would be negligible). The Oil War isn't necessarily for oil, but it's certainly about oil. Otherwise there's plenty of other countries where victory and democracy were actually achievable. But they wouldn't have been perfect places for Halliburton and its other oil ilk, topped by Bush/Cheney, to get US corporate welfare for a decade or more.
You're the one with no credibility. If you want to quibble with the facts because of your bias, try quibbling with the actual facts of the actual subject. Instead of the bait and switch that makes up both your comment here, and your whole "!!!9/11!!! - no, Iraq!" scam that you're still defending with everyone's life but your own.
Not "petroleum", petrofuel.
Nuclear fuel is an extracted mineral. That's a rock. Greek for rock is "petro", which is why petroleum is called that: "rock oil". Nuclear fuel is a petrofuel. It's exhaustible, not renewable.
Onsite renewables like wind and solar (especially solar thermal for water heating) don't need any transmission/distribution infrastructure changes to work.
Where's your evidence that scaling up renewables like wind, solar, geothermal makes them no cleaner than coal or oil? Or creates anything like the dirty products of nuke plants?
Yes, the future will probably have more nuclear and slightly less dirty exhaustible fuels like oil, coal and gas. But that's because those dirty old industries are still favored by subsidies and momentum. Not by physics or economics. The renewables are easier to scale, and the factors keeping their legacy competitors propped up are being steadily removed or overmatched by the new industries. We don't have to like the old stuff, and we don't have to keep it, either.
What is "significant impact"? Renewables already constituted 7.4% of US energy consumption by 2008, which was a year before Obama started dramatically increasing investment in renewables. Before the US entered the Great Recession, after a decade of Oil War in which energy prices were finally high enough to make reducing energy consumption a national consensus. Before BP killed the Gulf with the consequences of offshore oil/gas drilling. That fraction had already jumped by the beginning of 2009 (still before those propelling events), just as it had been swiftly rising - though for only a few years.
California (1/7th of all Americans) already generates 31% of its electricity from renewables, 12% from non-hydropower. Again, this is all before the recent catastrophes and stimuli produce a new wave of generation plants, which are under construction.
It doesn't have to take decades before renewables have significant impact. In fact, close to 10% is already significant impact. Renewable plants are faster to build than exhaustible power systems, and are much easier/cheaper to build distributed around the country than centralized exhaustible power plants. Contrary to your statement, onsite generation by solar and wind is an advantage over centralized petrofuels in terms of our existing distribution, which onsite can largely ignore but petrofuels cannot. If we spent a $TRILLION on renewables for a decade, the way we will have spent a $TRILLION+ in Iraq on Oil War for a decade, we'd probably have at least 25% of our power coming from renewables. The resulting boom in the US domestic economy, both stimulated by investment in new technology/labor and unshackled from shipping money and jobs to foreign oil suppliers, would even further accelerate renewable fuel switchover, making subsidies unnecessary. If we canceled all the subsidies to petrofuels like oil, coal, gas and nukes, we'd see even faster conversion as a freer market finally played on a leveled playing field.
We don't have fifty years to leave exhaustible fuels for renewables. Fortunately, we don't need more than 10-20 to do it.
If the problem with spraypainting the inside of the car body panels with a lithium/nanotube battery layer is that water would get into the layer, then it seems to me the layer can be sealed. I don't think these are lithium/air batteries that need to be porous. A watertight coating layer, or perhaps a hydrophobic layer that doesn't interfere with the electronic chemistry - or both - seems possible.
4-5 miles range per day does translate into useful power, like for accessories as you say. It might be useful as a last resort charger when there's no other vehicle to jumpstart you in an emergency. If the solar charger weighs less than an extra jumpstart battery, maybe it's worth it. If a lightweight car gets 75+ miles per gallon-equivalent of electricity, and the charging layer is really cheap (like a paint), it might be economical to power the vehicle. Especially a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle that drives only a few miles a day anyway.
But your point about rolling up the battery (like a traditional capacitor, which has the same thinness requirements) is insightful. I bet the reporter didn't bother asking the scientists about that, or asking an engineer about alternatives to thicker layers. Your solution would work today. Mine might never be worth doing :).
Or they could coat all the insides of the body panels and chassis with a thin layer of battery that would still give a very large total volume, evenly distributed. If they divided it into independent cells evenly drawn down, even a collision trashing that part of the car would put only a a little of its power storage out of commission.
If they could manufacture and assemble the battery layer as a sprayed paint, that could lower costs and speed repairs. And if the upper outside surface of the car could be covered in solar PV panels (or paint), the whole battery could recharge at whatever fraction of 1KW:m^2 the sun (or artificial lighting) is pouring down on it.
Those are other, extra innovations not yet within our grasp in addition to these nanotube batteries just achieved. But they are good complements to the batteries and its properties. The arrival of the battery material might just pull us closer to the complete package.
No, I am not implying that. You are inferring that.
What I am explicitly saying is that Republicans have abused the filibuster, and that the filibuster rules must be changed to prevent its abuse. I have said it over and over again. I have also rejected your inference that the legitimacy of its use is determined by which party.
In fact what I have said over and over is that Republicans abuse the filibuster, so the rules must be changed.
You are the one who keeps trying to turn that into a purely partisan argument, that only X Party can/cannot use the filibuster. Because you are a Republican, Republicans like you always want special rules beneficial to your party and prohibitive to the other, and you want Democrats prohibited from using the filibuster just like your Republican Party wanted to eliminate it when Democrats had it available.
That's enough. You're just part of the pool of Republicans who want special privileges, and then blame Democrats when you don't get them.
Goodbye.
No. You are now creating several straw man arguments. I did not say that Democrats can use it but Republicans cannot - you did, and I pointed out already that straw man. I also didn't say it was OK to use it to block judicial nominees but not healthcare reform. Indeed I said nothing about the uses to which it's put.
I also didn't make the argument that Democratic use of the filibuster is OK because Democrats represent more people. You did, when you offered that article which consists entirely of that argument. I only agreed that argument has some validity, and that it certainly doesn't make the point you keep trying to make - it makes the opposite point.
There are plenty of arguments to be made in favor of those straw men you offer, like how the republic part of our governmental system is designed precisely to give representatives power to lead even when an action is not popular. I could back it up with polls showing that now that HCR is law, and opponents have stopped pumping time and money into fighting it (while proponents have stopped doing so to boost it), people actually learning about the actual law and its actual effects have reversed those earlier polls. HCR is now now popular than unpopular, growing in popularity faster than it became unpopular, and following the exact same trend as every other healthcare or other social protection programme, from Medicare to Social Security to universal education to universal electric or telephone service. Right down to Republicans filibustering it on the argument that it's "armageddon", while Democrats manage to eventually pass it.
All votes are "yes-no" votes. Republicans filibustered many more Clinton or Obama judicial appointees than Democrats filibustered Bush's or Reagan/Bush's, while only Republicans tried to "ram them down our throats" by trying to eliminate the filibuster itself.
But again, those are straw men. I debunk them only to show the weakness of even the fallacies you offer. If the best you can do is fallacies, evidence that argues against you but you offer because it's the second Google result (failing at even cherrypicking results), and chanting Republican buzzwords, you're not going to convince anyone of anything. Only your fellow Republicans will agree, and they'll obviously stick together on anything - that's how filibusters work.
We're talking about abuse.
That article demonstrates that when Democrats have used the filibuster, their Senate minority represented a majority of Americans. But Republican filibusters represent a minority of Americans.
So what you've done is underscored how the Senate's disproportionate representation is anti-democratic, especially when considering the filibuster. Except when Democrats have filibustered, where the filibuster has let a minority of representatives protect the majority of people, who they represent.
I haven't said that filibusters are OK for Democrats but not Republicans, even though you just offered evidence of that. What I've said is that filibusters are abused more by Republicans than by Democrats. And that the disproportionate Senate is an abuse of democracy. And that both are serving the country very badly.
You have just agreed with me with your citation.
I've watched it. But if you think it's "fighting corruption" now, you should look into what the minority Republicans do to filibuster. They just notify Reid (the Senate Majority Leader) that they will filibuster, and Reid accepts that they will. Or they use any of the many points in the legislative path to refuse "unanimous consent" to some rule erected to create that option, and derail the process.
Nobody ever stands up and speaks for days on end. The corruption at work is the filibusterer. And indeed, there's nothing stopping a filibusterer from being the corrupt one.
Mr Smith is a movie character. The Senate is real. Really corrupt. Abusable rules like the filibuster help keep it that way.
There's no reason to assume the swinging bucket won't achieve the correct force.
Your calculations of the light hitting the sensor don't even take into account how wide the sensor is. Consider an extreme case where the sensor is 180 degrees, a hemicylinder. For the half cycle it's pointing away from the sky, it misses light for that half; 50% of the light. A sensor that's 2 degrees wide would catch only 0.555555556%: 2.5 orders of magnitude lost. But that could be enough, compensated by the excellence of this mirror, compared to other 'scopes.
Democrats did occasionally use filibusters, as every minority has. But Republicans have used filibusters 3x as much as Democrats did when Republicans had a slimmer minority before them, and far more than usual. Republicans even threatened to eliminate the privilege they now abuse specifically to prevent Democrats from stopping long-term judicial appointments, though Republicans prevented more judicial appointments before that, under Clinton.
As usual, though Democrats might not be so good, Republicans are far worse. Saying "they both do it" is a false equivalency that hides Republicans being so bad that they paralyze governement. Right when Democrats are working to fix things Republicans broke with their majority.
Because democracy is when the majority of the people rules. A majority is 50%+1. When the +1 is not enough, that is not as democratic. In the extreme case, a 100% requirement means a minority of 1 interferes with the majority rule. The closer the majority requirement to 100%, the further from 50%+1, the further the rule from the majority. Ergo further from democracy.
Yes. Though I didn't suggest mounting the 'scope in space, which is a good idea. But I think that if the spins were sufficiently fast the 'scope could be mounted at the Earth's surface, overcoming gravity just as this original article says they do.
On the ground, the sensor sweep would have to omit the arcs where the sensor is looking at only the ground or blocked by parts of the apparatus.
As Churchill noted, democracy sucks, but it's the only thing that's ever worked.
The Constitution didn't give elements of both elected and nonelected officials to installing congressmembers. The Senate isn't nonelected in the original Constitution. It was elected by each state's legislature. So all of your points, which aren't the only factors in elected officials' priorities, were true about senators' constituencies in their state's legislature. Which meant that electing them was a purely partisan affair, measured by the partisan majority in the legislature. That method was so abused that we amended the Constitution to put the power in the people's hands.
The Constitution split the Congress into one chamber representing the people, the other chamber representing the states (the states' governments). The founders were transitioning us from government in which the state had all the power, the people had practically none (if the state excluded them). The original formulation balanced the people against the state. And indeed at that time, with few in the new country experienced with matters of government, it might have been prudent to give states equal power to the people. Though the Senate has more power than the House in some ways, like ratifying treaties and confirmations to Executive Branch and Judicial Branch nominations among others, even if the House has nominal origination of spending laws and the rarely exercised power of impeachment (after which the Senate tries and convicts/acquits). But again, Americans outgrew that dilution of democracy and took the power through the legit means of amending the Constitution, nearly a century ago, after just over a century of the original way.
The president is still not elected directly, either. The Electoral College is the same kind of structure as the original Senate election system, though the College has no other function while legislatures legislate. And indeed that dilution of democracy is notoriously treacherous. And in exactly the same ways as the legislature electing its senators: an ultimately purely partisan basis for election, an interference with the transparency that is paramount to any honesty and accountability, and a way for votes to be bought and sold defying the people's statement of our desired representatives.
Once elected by the people, the influence from other, more local representatives you desire is still at work in our current system. Presidents and senators must get agreement from the House representatives to pass and execute laws, and refrain from the most egregious behavior to avoid impeachment.
The biggest problems with the Senate are its departures from democracy. The majority rule has been replaced by minority tyranny through abusing rules that protect minority rights to influence (but not control) decisionmaking. That's the automatic and universal filibuster at work, along with "holds" placed by single senators interfering with a system retooled to rely on unanimous consent for too many decisions. And the simple inequity of a few people in a small state like Wyoming each having something like 70x the power over Senate decisions than each of the many people in a large state like California. An inequity repeated in the Electoral College by the same allocation.
If you prefer officials to be chosen by secret deals inside private political clubs, the minority privileged to more power than the majority, obscure rules giving minority political clubs power over much larger majorities, you want to move further from direct election of senators. You want to protect the way the Senate gives minorities the power to stop the majority from governing at all.
But most Americans, when we know how the system works, prefer to vote for (or against) the people who make decisions on our behalf. The Constitution's evolution reflects that gradually increasing knowledge, and indeed should continue in the same direction. Progress, not regression.
The Intel device puts a Zigbee dongle on every powered device, like a clothes dryer, to sense power consumption for reporting back to a PC for display and management.
Those dongles are expensive. The Zigbee part is $10-15 each (wholesale in 1000+ qty), the current sensor is $2-4, the Pic or Arduino microcontroller is $2-5, the relay (dryers are typically 240V@30A=7.2KW) or other power actuator is $5-10; integrating them is at least $5 = $24-39. Even for a $400 dryer that's something like 10% more, breakeven at 80 runs skipped, so probably over 10 years.
For appliances around $100 or less, where savings are less than 7KW per hour skipped, the payback is a lot longer.
If the dongles could cost $5 or less, the payback in a year or so could justify the expense.
Though I don't think Intel is complaining.
The pork, especially on giant new power plants (or nuke waste dumps) gets spent on giant corporations in that state. The replacement of direct election of senators by the old way, election by the state's legislature, would just hide the bribery and patronage under that less direct election.
If you're against democracy, you're against direct election of senators.
If you want more democracy, you want the Senate to make the filibuster extremely rare, instead of the current Republican practice of filibustering every single Democratic bill, which changes the Constitution's majority (50%+1) requirement into a forced supermajority of 60+.
And if you want real democracy, instead of people in small states like Wyoming having something like 70 times the voting power in the Senate (and therefore in the Electoral College for president) of big states like California.
There's a lot we can change to make Congress more democratic, more of a legitimate republic. Giving up our power to vote for our senators is a giant change backwards into the 1800s.
How about spinning the bowl of mercury facing up, then swinging the bowl around a horizontal axis? Like a bucket of water swung at arm's length over one's head then back down, then back up, in a cycle, the way kids show each other "centripetal force"? The momentum would keep the concave surface intact as the whole contraption spun and swung around. Then the contraption could be rotated on the other horizontal axis, pointing the concave mirror at whichever direction was desired.
The mirror would point in that direction only intermittently, as the mirror swung past that point in its arc. But the image sensor could be sampled only at that moment, as the position synced with the desired direction.
All of that swinging would have to be calibrated to compensate for the interaction of the various axes of spin. But that all sounds like a set of DSPs could do it, with a laser interferometer keeping the cycles synced and sampling at the right timeslot.
If you say something in public, how do you have any privacy to protect it?
Zillow.com has a detailed listing for the White House saying it's worth $270,050,000. Interestingly, its purchase value peaked at $331M on April 1, 2008.
I've got to add some embedded client components for syncing a MySQL DB data mart to a remote customer's web services XML interface to an existing app that runs in JBoss against MySQL, with a PHP interface (and a Flex/Flash client), code in an SVN repo.
Is there a good website telling me how to get started with Eclipse and the best plugins and configs, installed and configured on an Ubuntu server?
The whole point of open source is sharing the assets. Which doesn't mean "free" (except when it's FOSS).
Red Hat isn't the only Linux corp, the way that Apple is the only Mac corp and Microsoft is the only Windows corp. Add together all the Linux OS corps, including the biggest, Red Hat, and you've got something that's bigger than, say, Sun (was), or any of the Unix corps before it.
Linux's open source means that the corporate model is different, fundamentally. The model doesn't capture every penny in a single corp the way it did with Microsoft. A lot of the monetary value is held by the customers, and by people all along a very shaded gradient all the way to kids downloading OS'es they don't even install, trading them like baseball cards.
All of which means that the market gets the most efficient use out of all the value. Which you'd think would be good for business, better than the monopolistic model that does create $5-$50 billion corps like Microsoft, except for the business of stock market speculation (that does practically nothing good for business except speculators and brokers). Meanwhile, OSS is also capable of growing corps as big and valuable to stock traders as Red Hat, which is also valuable to business and even its competitors.
Open source is a new model for business. Measuring it by the old model isn't going to make sense to a lot of people. Even though it can make a lot of dollars.
You are a fool. Just because you can't understand a post doesn't mean you should open your mouth.