I think that'd be fascism, actually. Socialism would be when the government takes the profits from investing the taxpayer's money and spends it on the people who are too poor to pay any taxes.
You might want to know how many gallons you'll use on a 200 mile trip, but it's unlikely you want to know how far a trip you can go on with the 8 gallons left in your tank.
When you're low on gas, or planning a drive through an area where gas stations are very spread out, you absolutely want to know how far you can get using the gas in your tank. That's why any modern car with a decent onboard computer display will show you that figure. They usually don't show gallons/mile, because that's not the conventional way to compare consumption rates, even though it would make more sense. Checking your consumption rate is usually a less critical bit of information then checking whether you'll reach the next gas station or not, too.
How big a garden do you need to grow 50% of your own food?
Not much, if you have to quit your job in order to tend to it, in which case you're going to starve to death sooner or later because you can't afford to buy the other 50% of your food.
Fresh veggies to supplement your diet during the growing season doesn't take up much time or space at all, though. A good product (which is not difficult to build on your own if you're so inclined) is EarthBox, a container with built-in watering and fertilizer. A couple of those and a sunny spot (or an indoor growlight) can give you quite a bit of fresh produce.
Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx
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USPS Server Meltdown
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To be fair, what sort of "backup" calculation would you have done here, short of reverse-engineering the USPS algorithm for calculating shipping rates?
They could have returned to the pre-computer shipping practices to figure out the shipping rate: rolling dice, consulting the Oracle, checking tea leaves, or sacrificing a goat.
Oh no, wait, they didn't do that. They either used a fixed rate or a rate based on the product price range, looked up in a five-row table.
As a couple of ACs have already said, if you want to learn JS then don't start by learning a framework. Learn a framework/library once you've learned the language fully, and you've identified some functionality that the framework will provide and save you some time.
I have to disagree with this advice, though only partially. When you're developing in javascript, you're dealing with two things:
The Javascript language
The DOM
Browser support for the language is pretty consistent, so unless you want to use the very latest version (which many users won't have in their older browsers) you don't have to worry much about cross-browser issues. Crockford's "Good Parts" book is an excellent resource for teaching you which parts of the language shouldn't be used, and how to use the rest properly.
When dealing with the DOM (the object tree that represents the browser window and everything within it) you've got a really poorly designed API that's inconsistently implemented across browser vendors and browser versions. Interacting with the DOM is what you want to use a framework for. It's a complete waste of your time as a javascript developer to learn the ins and outs of every browser-specific inconsistency and quirk, when the framework developers have devoted their time and expertise to figuring that stuff out for you. If you're interested in working at that level with them, great, learn the details, but if you want to develop applications, build on the consistent and solid foundation the framework developers have provided.
My absolute favorite framework is jQuery, partly because it's easy to use, and partly because it's highly modular, and partly because the base library is almost entirely just a DOM interface. It doesn't force you to develop your application in any particular way, it just gives you the tools to make working with the DOM easier.
If the growth rate were a constant percentage, you'd be right. However, the growth rate is changing (declining, specifically) so it's incorrect to say that the population is growing exponentially. That's like saying that a moving car with the brakes applied will eventually reach infinite velocity, when in fact it's going to stop moving.
Your comment led me to read about Exponential Growth, and the third example is "Human population, if the number of births and deaths per person per year were to remain at current levels (but also see logistic growth)." Again, you need a constant rate in order to get exponential growth. The Logistic Growth article is illuminating; this is the commonly-seen S-curve that starts growing slowly, goes through a rapid exponential growth period, switches to an exponential deceleration, and then stops growing completely at the top of the curve. This is a classic population growth model (among many other things.)
I think it's accurate to say that the world population had been growing exponentially over the past few centuries, but only because it's been in that portion of a logistic growth curve. We're probably now near the top of the curve, and we'll be hitting the top and reaching zero growth in another half century or so.
The good news is that it's not resource shortages that are causing the growth rate to slow down; most of the population growth is currently occurring in the most resource-starved regions of the world. The slowest growing regions are the ones with the most resources; we're probably slowing down for social reasons rather than lack of resources.
Probabilities don't predict when something might happen, or when something is 'due'. That's a gambler's mis-perception.
If an event has a one-in-one-thousand probability of occurring in a given year, that doesn't mean it'll happen every thousand years. It means that if you look at a million year period, divide it up into 1000 thousand year blocks, you'll find that the event usually occurs once in each of those blocks. However, sometimes it won't occur at all, and sometimes it'll occur multiple times. It's just that 'once per 1000 years' is the most common frequency.
There's no way to tell, during one of those thousand year blocks, whether you're in an above-average block or a below-average block (unless the event has already occurred a few times, in which case you're clearly above average.) Therefore, you can't say that the event is 'due', even if it's been a while since the last event.
I'm just curious - but why do you care about our survival as a species in an event that may not happen in the foreseeable future?
Because when you're talking about these kinds of events, they may happen in the foreseeable future... perhaps this afternoon. For example, it's frightening to see how many near-earth asteroids we discover just after they nearly hit us, compared to how many we find just before they nearly hit us. Both of these far outweigh the number we discover that are no where near us right now, but might one day pose a risk.
On the other hand, you have to live your day-to-day life considering the probabilities of getting killed by different things. World-wide civilization-ending disasters are pretty low on the probability scale, compared to things like "fatal car accident" and "heart attack". If you're not afraid of dying on a US highway, you shouldn't be afraid of dying from anything else either. If you're on the highway a lot in the US, that's probably where you're going to die.
No, it's not. It's not even growing linearly. (Do you know what those terms mean?)
See Wikipedia's World Population page for an article about the subject. According to the article, the world population growth rate peaked at 2.2%/year in 1963, and has been dropping since then. In real terms, the peak was 86 million new people in 1987. In 2007, there were 77 million new people.
The article shows that the growth rate is decreasing, and it is predicted to hit zero then become negative, causing the population to crest, probably around 9-10 billion people sometime around 2050. Various unpredictable events could alter this, both in a positive way (enhanced methods of food production, including my favorite idea, large-scale hydroponic farms) and in a negative way (plague, war, climate change.) However, under the current conditions, population growth is slowing down and approaching a peak, not growing at an exponential rate.
In Sales, this is called 'filling the pipeline'. As an entrepreneur, you're the company salesperson, so you have to do sales-related work. (See The Development Abstraction Layer.)
Your jobs as an entrepreneur fall into four categories:
Jobs you've completed
Jobs you're working on now
Jobs you've gotten but haven't started yet
Jobs you haven't gotten yet
You don't want to wait until categories #2 and #3 are empty before you start working on category #4, because it can take a long time for a job to move up from #4 to #3. You've got to work constantly on #4 to keep #3 full, so that when you're done with #2 you'll always have something billable waiting for you in #3.
This goes for every self-employment field. For example, my wife is a Real Estate Agent, and she works almost exclusively by referrals from past clients (category #1.) She's got homes that are currently listed, and buyers that are currently looking for a new home (category #2). Every month she sends out mailings, makes phone calls, and does in-person visits with past clients in order to keep in touch with them, to generate referrals and turn #4 into #3 and #2. This works really well; at least once a year she'll have an active buyer who's looking for something specific, and one of the potential sellers in #3 has a perfect match. She'll be able to go to that seller and say "If you're still thinking about selling your home, I have a buyer who I think would be very interested in making an offer." This often converts a potential seller into an active listing, and the offer goes through right away, eliminating most of the marketing cost of listing the home for sale. (Saves the seller money, and they don't have to live for weeks/months trying to keep the house spotless and having strangers visiting and walking through all of the time.)
It'd be a lot cheaper and safer to drop it into a subduction zone along the edge of one of the Earth's continental plates. At most that's a mile down, rather than trying to boost it 93 million miles up. (Out of the Earth's gravitational field, at least.) Lots of people would object to the idea of taking care of nuclear waste by strapping a big explosive fuel container to it, too.
however, i also humbly submit that if you want to tinker in your shed, try genetics. genetics is still very much a frontier where the fundamentals are still being worked out, and although much equipment required for genetics research (centrifuges, gel electrophoresis, etc.) are still expensive, none of it is outside the realm of the committed hobbyist
Oh, yeah, trying to set up a chem lab will get you into trouble, but setting up a biological weapons lab? No problem!
Pretty good, probably. In bulk they've got to be really cheap, probably less than a penny each. Put a couple into twenty cents worth of packaging and sell the package for a dollar. Even with the cost of moving the packages to the stores, that's got to be a good markup.
My guess is that the profit per item was good, but the volume was too low, so the overall ROI for the effort wasn't worthwhile. Selling the same packages over the internet, or just selling the items with minimal and cheaper packaging like a plastic bag, eliminates most of the costs and gives you a better ROI.
In fact, I just checked RadioShack's website, and it looks like they're selling bulk packages of components at very reasonable prices. A hobbyist could buy the single component that they need, and build up a large home inventory of parts, fairly cheaply. It's not as convenient as the store in some ways, and more convenient in others.
The relationship between half-life and radioactivity makes sense generally, but in the aggregate I don't think it applies in the particular case of the reactor design I'm talking about. From Integral Fast Reactor:
Another important benefit of removing the long half-life transuranics from the waste cycle is that the remaining waste becomes a much shorter-term hazard. After the actinides (reprocessed uranium, plutonium, and minor actinides) are removed and recycled, the remaining radioactive waste isotopes are fission products, which have half lives of either 90 years (Sm-151) and less, or 211,100 years (Tc-99) and more; plus any neutron activation products from the non-fuel reactor components. (Tc-99 and I-129 are also candidates for nuclear transmutation to stable isotopes by neutron capture.)
The result is that within 200 years, such wastes are no more radioactive than the ores of natural radioactive elements.
As I understand this, the highly radioactive components of the waste have very short half-lives and will decay very quickly to the point where they're no longer an issue. Yeah, so I guess we're both right. It just doesn't seem valid to call the remainder 'waste' once it's equivalent to natural rocks. That's like calling the stuff that comes out of a compost bin 'garbage' instead of 'earth'.
No, the best solution for dealing with highly radioactive nuclear waste is to burn it in a modern reactor design until we've extracted nearly all of the energy from it. The remainder is much lower volume, much less radioactive, and has a much shorter halflife. After a few hundred years, it'd be no more radioactive than the ground, so it'd be ok if it got out of storage and was sprinkled around at that point.
The reactors we currently use in the US are kind of like filling your car's tank with gas, driving a few miles, and then looking for a safe place to dump the 'dirty' gas that remains in your tank so you can refill it.
Enter microsoft.public.virtualpc in the Search for a group box, then click on the group name in the results.
Enter vista explorer crash in the search box in the upper right, and click on Search this Group.
Enjoy your three targeted search results.
I'm not sure if these results will actually address your problem, but maybe your problem hasn't been addressed in that group. In any case, it's certainly possible to search within a particular group, within the context of the group display, which is the way most web forums work too. So you've got a workaround which isn't awful, unless you want to search many groups at once.
The number of reports from the rest of the world simply don't match up to those from the US, statistically it just doesn't make sense unless someone can suggest a valid reason why visitors from another world would be interest mainly in Americans?
We're talking about post World War II, when the UFO craze really ramped up, right? At the time, most of the technologically advanced parts of the world were pretty trashed, except for the US. We were also the only ones setting off nukes for a while. To an outside observer, it would be pretty clear that the US was well on the path to running the joint, so whether the aliens planned to make contact or invade, focusing their study on the US would make sense.
Since then, the rest of the world has recovered, but even today the US uses most of the energy, which can be seen as a sign of technological prominence. (Maybe, when you've got interstellar drives, power output is more impressive than efficiency.) So even today, a focus on the US doesn't seem unlikely. We should start to see more UFO activity ramping up in China, though, if this theory is correct.
There's also plenty of room for plausible explanations in many cases too, how can people be so sure Russians don't have aircraft as high tech as proposed by the aurora project, it's not like the Russians are somehow less capable of keeping secrets, with their oppresive regime quite the contrary.
The Russians are certainly capable of keeping secrets, even better than we realized. What they lack is, and always has been, the resources to do advanced R&D. We're learning now that a lot of the advanced weaponry and massive capacity we thought the Soviet Union had during the cold war was mostly smoke and mirrors: single test aircraft that we thought were both more capable than they actually were, and deployed in large numbers that were never actually built. It's unlikely that they would have designed and built something like the Aurora without (a) getting the design from someone else, and (b) waiting to see if it's even practical. The Russians are much better at building and operating proven and robust technology than at pushing the envelope, while the US is better at wasting massive resources pushing the envelope and blowing stuff up, while stubbornly claiming to be the most advanced.
While I don't necessarily accept the Hill's story as, let's say "accurate", the rolled-up map isn't so far fetched for a technologically advanced race. We're on the verge of having widely-available flexible displays and electronic paper, and it won't be long before you'll have a cell phone whose back folds out into an 8.5" x 11" display on which you can read the morning news, with full-motion video. It may be that the aliens who abducted Ms. Hill used something similar, and her description is just the best she could come up with using her 50's-era understanding of technology.
When looking at stories like this, especially historical ones, you can't just take the descriptions at face-value; you have to consider the observer's context as well, and try to extrapolate from what they're able to describe to what they might have actually been looking at. This is true for all areas of science where eye witness testimony is used for evidence; for example, we know that people all over the world have been digging up dinosaur fossils for a long time, based on the worldwide prevalence of 'dragon' stories.
- A well defined way to say "The page is loaded, all your variables and objects are loaded, Time to execute!" rather then "You can only see the variables and objects that are defined 'above' you and not 'below' you in unloaded portions of the page".
jQuery's$().ready( function() {...} ); method has been a fantastic help in my Javascript development. It executes after the DOM has been initialized, but before all of the images have been loaded. window.onload() waits for the images to load, which delays your javascript from running until after the page has been rendered. jQuery doesn't do that; your code will often run before the page is rendered, so you can use javascript to enhance/replace elements that work without javascript too. For example, I often have UI controls which will refresh the entire page to perform their function when javascript is not enabled, but they'll use AJAX and refresh only the necessary elements if javascript is enabled. Using jQuery, I can attach events and alter CSS classes before the user sees the page, so javascript and non-javascript users get somewhat different looking, somewhat different behaving, but always fully functional views of my application.
My guess is that companies make the gauges vague on purpose, so that people DON'T try to get too much (false/misleading) information out of them.
That's a guiding principal for conveying quantitative information. There's accuracy, and there's precision. The accuracy of a measurement tells you how correct the measurement is relative to the actual value you're trying to measure. The precision tells you how specific the measurement is, or to put it another way, now narrow the range of actual values the measurement covers (since there is always a bit of uncertainty in a measurement.)
For example, I could tell you that the temperature is 95F outside. There is an implied precision of 1F (+/- 0.5F) in that measurement. I could also say that the temperature is in the 90s, which has an implied precision of 10F. (+/- 5F). That's precision. If the actual temperature is 65F, then despite the precision of my measurements, they're very inaccurate.
The guiding principle is that the precision with which you convey information should match the accuracy. If you have a digital thermometer that shows the temperature in tenths of a degree, it had better be accurate to within a tenth of a degree, otherwise it is misleading. On the other hand, if your thermometer is a color changing material that is blue when it's cold, green when it's moderate, and red when it's hot, you'd better label it 'cold moderate hot' rather than put a temperature scale with 1 degree precision on it.
Many developers (and other people) get this completely wrong, and report numbers with far too much precision.
As long as you didn't stuff your life savings in a matress for 50 years and take it out and expect it to be worth the same, there was no real effecy by the change of the value of one to the other. In fact, small inflation has the effect of encouraging investment, and as such, inflation can actually cause an economy to grow in real terms when a gold standard would hold it back.
I disagree. Without inflation, investment would be even more desirable, because you wouldn't be losing a percentage of your investment gains to inflation. That reduces the risk of investment, and more modest investments become attractive which would not be worthwhile in an inflationary environment. You're also suggesting that money ought to depreciate over time if it sits unused, like a physical asset that ages and deteriorates. That's nonsense, and that's why gold has been used as a currency rather than something like iron: you can collect it without worrying that it will slowly dissolve away to nothing just by sitting in your vault.
What allows an economy to grow, in a fiat economy, isn't inflation: it's the ability to go into unending debt through the fractional reserve system. With a gold-backed economy, banks are limited in how much they can lend to borrowers for investment because of the effort of moving gold around and the limited availability of gold. Get rid of the gold, and it's just bookkeeping; the federal reserve can increase the money supply at will, which allows more lending for more investment. Inflation, the devaluing of the currency, is the side-effect of increasing the money supply. The trick is to keep the debt spread out and build it slowly so that most people don't notice; the extra investment keeps ahead of the inflation and debt, potentially for a long time.
As long as the real wealth in the economy continues to grow (ie: natural resources being developed, manufacturing infrastructure being built, new industries being created) this can go on for a long time. But eventually the debt becomes overwhelming, the wealth creation in the economy slows down (industry moving elsewhere, resources running out or going untouched), and now all you've got is cascading inflation and debt. Sound familiar?
If you took all the refined gold in the world, all of it, and used it to back the US dollar only, then the price of gold would have to skyrocket to something like $2,000/oz.
Actually, you've just figured out a ballpark figure of how much the dollar has been devalued since we left the gold standard, when the value of the dollar was set at 1/20th of an oz of gold, eg: 1oz Gold = $20.
Another example I once read was that 1oz of gold, at $20, used to be enough to buy a very nice suit. Today, with 1oz of gold costing ~$900, it's still enough to buy a very nice suit. The value of the gold and the suit haven't changed much, it's the dollars that are worth less.
If we wanted to go back onto the gold standard, then yeah, we'd have to divide the number of dollars in circulation by the ounces of gold the government has left, and that'd be the exchange rate. It's probably not too far from $900/oz, which the gold-trading market has already set as a fair exchange rate between gold and US dollars. You got the order of magnitude right; you were only off by a factor of two.
Gold isn't particularly rare in the earth's crust, but it is costly to extract. If someone were to develop new technology that extracted gold at significantly cheaper prices, your currency would collapse. This isn't unprecedented.
Another example is what happened to Spain after they discovered Central and South America. Extracting gold from the natives was significantly cheaper than mining it themselves, and their economy went nuts for a while due to all of the surplus gold they imported.
Perhaps you didn't get your money's worth. When I sold my condo (before my wife became an agent) I had pretty much the same experience; I paid $17k in commissions for two visits, a couple days on the market (including an open house) and a quick and easy transaction. I'd be surprised if either agent put in more than 10 hours on the deal (though I don't know how much time the buyer's agent had to work with the buyer; it might've been much more.)
To be honest, for lower-price listings, my wife will recommend that the seller do or pay for some of the repairs rather than paying for them herself. She's got a network of related-industry professionals that she knows well, trusts, and who will often either give her breaks on the service or preferential treatment on the scheduling because of the amount of work she refers to them; this is a benefit that is passed on directly to my wife's clients, and they're always made aware of the relationship and told that they're free to use anyone they like. Usually they go with my wife's recommendations, because of the level of trust and because it's a better deal.
In our area, starter homes go for $400k and up, so most clients get at least some services thrown in, but it's the $800k+ listings that get the gold treatment. Otherwise, I start getting on her case about spending too much out-of-pocket for the commission she's going to get. So, for example, while a higher-end listing will get staging professionals hired and paid for to come in and stage the house, the lower-end listing will get my wife's services as a stager (she's working on getting a certification) and they'll get to use the fairly large collection of lightweight extra furniture we've built up just for this purpose. One time, we actually put our living room couch and dining room set into a client's home for a month because the home was vacant, and looked too empty without the furnishings. (I wasn't too pleased, but it would've cost a lot of money to rent the furniture, and it did make the house look a lot nicer.)
That's discussed a lot within the industry, and there are certainly agents and brokerage companies who operate that way. They did ok during the boom, but I think they've all gone out of business since the downturn started. The problem is that being a Real Estate agent doesn't provide a steady paycheck; you're a self-employed contractor, and the longer a deal takes or the longer a house is on the market, the less your hourly-rate becomes for the time you spend on that client. A flat-rate service might work if it's an open-ended hourly rate, rather than a fixed fee per-transaction, but then you add a bunch of time-tracking overhead and billing to the cost of running your business, which will have to drive the rates up higher than buyers and sellers are already paying. By basing the fee on a percentage of the selling price, everyone involved has a pretty good idea of what the agents will get right from the start.
You can relate this to being a software development contractor. There are some jobs which are simple, which you've done a hundred times before, and you know pretty much exactly how much time and effort they'll take. For those, you can set a fixed fee. In a Real Estate transaction, the buyers and sellers attorneys, the mortgage broker, the property inspector, the staging and cleaning professionals, and the bank's assessor all operate this way. On the other hand, there are jobs where you just don't know how long it's going to take, or how much work you're going to have to do, so you negotiate either an hourly rate or royalties. This is what the buyers and sellers agents face, and they essentially get a royalty on the transaction, which is simpler to deal with than an hourly rate.
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I think that'd be fascism, actually. Socialism would be when the government takes the profits from investing the taxpayer's money and spends it on the people who are too poor to pay any taxes.
When you're low on gas, or planning a drive through an area where gas stations are very spread out, you absolutely want to know how far you can get using the gas in your tank. That's why any modern car with a decent onboard computer display will show you that figure. They usually don't show gallons/mile, because that's not the conventional way to compare consumption rates, even though it would make more sense. Checking your consumption rate is usually a less critical bit of information then checking whether you'll reach the next gas station or not, too.
Not much, if you have to quit your job in order to tend to it, in which case you're going to starve to death sooner or later because you can't afford to buy the other 50% of your food.
Fresh veggies to supplement your diet during the growing season doesn't take up much time or space at all, though. A good product (which is not difficult to build on your own if you're so inclined) is EarthBox, a container with built-in watering and fertilizer. A couple of those and a sunny spot (or an indoor growlight) can give you quite a bit of fresh produce.
They could have returned to the pre-computer shipping practices to figure out the shipping rate: rolling dice, consulting the Oracle, checking tea leaves, or sacrificing a goat.
Oh no, wait, they didn't do that. They either used a fixed rate or a rate based on the product price range, looked up in a five-row table.
I have to disagree with this advice, though only partially. When you're developing in javascript, you're dealing with two things:
Browser support for the language is pretty consistent, so unless you want to use the very latest version (which many users won't have in their older browsers) you don't have to worry much about cross-browser issues. Crockford's "Good Parts" book is an excellent resource for teaching you which parts of the language shouldn't be used, and how to use the rest properly.
When dealing with the DOM (the object tree that represents the browser window and everything within it) you've got a really poorly designed API that's inconsistently implemented across browser vendors and browser versions. Interacting with the DOM is what you want to use a framework for. It's a complete waste of your time as a javascript developer to learn the ins and outs of every browser-specific inconsistency and quirk, when the framework developers have devoted their time and expertise to figuring that stuff out for you. If you're interested in working at that level with them, great, learn the details, but if you want to develop applications, build on the consistent and solid foundation the framework developers have provided.
My absolute favorite framework is jQuery, partly because it's easy to use, and partly because it's highly modular, and partly because the base library is almost entirely just a DOM interface. It doesn't force you to develop your application in any particular way, it just gives you the tools to make working with the DOM easier.
If the growth rate were a constant percentage, you'd be right. However, the growth rate is changing (declining, specifically) so it's incorrect to say that the population is growing exponentially. That's like saying that a moving car with the brakes applied will eventually reach infinite velocity, when in fact it's going to stop moving.
Your comment led me to read about Exponential Growth, and the third example is "Human population, if the number of births and deaths per person per year were to remain at current levels (but also see logistic growth)." Again, you need a constant rate in order to get exponential growth. The Logistic Growth article is illuminating; this is the commonly-seen S-curve that starts growing slowly, goes through a rapid exponential growth period, switches to an exponential deceleration, and then stops growing completely at the top of the curve. This is a classic population growth model (among many other things.)
I think it's accurate to say that the world population had been growing exponentially over the past few centuries, but only because it's been in that portion of a logistic growth curve. We're probably now near the top of the curve, and we'll be hitting the top and reaching zero growth in another half century or so.
The good news is that it's not resource shortages that are causing the growth rate to slow down; most of the population growth is currently occurring in the most resource-starved regions of the world. The slowest growing regions are the ones with the most resources; we're probably slowing down for social reasons rather than lack of resources.
Probabilities don't predict when something might happen, or when something is 'due'. That's a gambler's mis-perception.
If an event has a one-in-one-thousand probability of occurring in a given year, that doesn't mean it'll happen every thousand years. It means that if you look at a million year period, divide it up into 1000 thousand year blocks, you'll find that the event usually occurs once in each of those blocks. However, sometimes it won't occur at all, and sometimes it'll occur multiple times. It's just that 'once per 1000 years' is the most common frequency.
There's no way to tell, during one of those thousand year blocks, whether you're in an above-average block or a below-average block (unless the event has already occurred a few times, in which case you're clearly above average.) Therefore, you can't say that the event is 'due', even if it's been a while since the last event.
Because when you're talking about these kinds of events, they may happen in the foreseeable future... perhaps this afternoon. For example, it's frightening to see how many near-earth asteroids we discover just after they nearly hit us, compared to how many we find just before they nearly hit us. Both of these far outweigh the number we discover that are no where near us right now, but might one day pose a risk.
On the other hand, you have to live your day-to-day life considering the probabilities of getting killed by different things. World-wide civilization-ending disasters are pretty low on the probability scale, compared to things like "fatal car accident" and "heart attack". If you're not afraid of dying on a US highway, you shouldn't be afraid of dying from anything else either. If you're on the highway a lot in the US, that's probably where you're going to die.
No, it's not. It's not even growing linearly. (Do you know what those terms mean?)
See Wikipedia's World Population page for an article about the subject. According to the article, the world population growth rate peaked at 2.2%/year in 1963, and has been dropping since then. In real terms, the peak was 86 million new people in 1987. In 2007, there were 77 million new people.
The article shows that the growth rate is decreasing, and it is predicted to hit zero then become negative, causing the population to crest, probably around 9-10 billion people sometime around 2050. Various unpredictable events could alter this, both in a positive way (enhanced methods of food production, including my favorite idea, large-scale hydroponic farms) and in a negative way (plague, war, climate change.) However, under the current conditions, population growth is slowing down and approaching a peak, not growing at an exponential rate.
In Sales, this is called 'filling the pipeline'. As an entrepreneur, you're the company salesperson, so you have to do sales-related work. (See The Development Abstraction Layer.)
Your jobs as an entrepreneur fall into four categories:
You don't want to wait until categories #2 and #3 are empty before you start working on category #4, because it can take a long time for a job to move up from #4 to #3. You've got to work constantly on #4 to keep #3 full, so that when you're done with #2 you'll always have something billable waiting for you in #3.
This goes for every self-employment field. For example, my wife is a Real Estate Agent, and she works almost exclusively by referrals from past clients (category #1.) She's got homes that are currently listed, and buyers that are currently looking for a new home (category #2). Every month she sends out mailings, makes phone calls, and does in-person visits with past clients in order to keep in touch with them, to generate referrals and turn #4 into #3 and #2. This works really well; at least once a year she'll have an active buyer who's looking for something specific, and one of the potential sellers in #3 has a perfect match. She'll be able to go to that seller and say "If you're still thinking about selling your home, I have a buyer who I think would be very interested in making an offer." This often converts a potential seller into an active listing, and the offer goes through right away, eliminating most of the marketing cost of listing the home for sale. (Saves the seller money, and they don't have to live for weeks/months trying to keep the house spotless and having strangers visiting and walking through all of the time.)
Inefficient first-generation tech. Unfortunately, engineering development in the US got halted before the tech was improved.
It'd be a lot cheaper and safer to drop it into a subduction zone along the edge of one of the Earth's continental plates. At most that's a mile down, rather than trying to boost it 93 million miles up. (Out of the Earth's gravitational field, at least.) Lots of people would object to the idea of taking care of nuclear waste by strapping a big explosive fuel container to it, too.
Oh, yeah, trying to set up a chem lab will get you into trouble, but setting up a biological weapons lab? No problem!
Pretty good, probably. In bulk they've got to be really cheap, probably less than a penny each. Put a couple into twenty cents worth of packaging and sell the package for a dollar. Even with the cost of moving the packages to the stores, that's got to be a good markup.
My guess is that the profit per item was good, but the volume was too low, so the overall ROI for the effort wasn't worthwhile. Selling the same packages over the internet, or just selling the items with minimal and cheaper packaging like a plastic bag, eliminates most of the costs and gives you a better ROI.
In fact, I just checked RadioShack's website, and it looks like they're selling bulk packages of components at very reasonable prices. A hobbyist could buy the single component that they need, and build up a large home inventory of parts, fairly cheaply. It's not as convenient as the store in some ways, and more convenient in others.
The relationship between half-life and radioactivity makes sense generally, but in the aggregate I don't think it applies in the particular case of the reactor design I'm talking about. From Integral Fast Reactor:
As I understand this, the highly radioactive components of the waste have very short half-lives and will decay very quickly to the point where they're no longer an issue. Yeah, so I guess we're both right. It just doesn't seem valid to call the remainder 'waste' once it's equivalent to natural rocks. That's like calling the stuff that comes out of a compost bin 'garbage' instead of 'earth'.
No, the best solution for dealing with highly radioactive nuclear waste is to burn it in a modern reactor design until we've extracted nearly all of the energy from it. The remainder is much lower volume, much less radioactive, and has a much shorter halflife. After a few hundred years, it'd be no more radioactive than the ground, so it'd be ok if it got out of storage and was sprinkled around at that point.
The reactors we currently use in the US are kind of like filling your car's tank with gas, driving a few miles, and then looking for a safe place to dump the 'dirty' gas that remains in your tank so you can refill it.
It's bad that they've got an bug that's gone ignored, but there's another way to search a group which seems to work ok.
I'm not sure if these results will actually address your problem, but maybe your problem hasn't been addressed in that group. In any case, it's certainly possible to search within a particular group, within the context of the group display, which is the way most web forums work too. So you've got a workaround which isn't awful, unless you want to search many groups at once.
We're talking about post World War II, when the UFO craze really ramped up, right? At the time, most of the technologically advanced parts of the world were pretty trashed, except for the US. We were also the only ones setting off nukes for a while. To an outside observer, it would be pretty clear that the US was well on the path to running the joint, so whether the aliens planned to make contact or invade, focusing their study on the US would make sense.
Since then, the rest of the world has recovered, but even today the US uses most of the energy, which can be seen as a sign of technological prominence. (Maybe, when you've got interstellar drives, power output is more impressive than efficiency.) So even today, a focus on the US doesn't seem unlikely. We should start to see more UFO activity ramping up in China, though, if this theory is correct.
The Russians are certainly capable of keeping secrets, even better than we realized. What they lack is, and always has been, the resources to do advanced R&D. We're learning now that a lot of the advanced weaponry and massive capacity we thought the Soviet Union had during the cold war was mostly smoke and mirrors: single test aircraft that we thought were both more capable than they actually were, and deployed in large numbers that were never actually built. It's unlikely that they would have designed and built something like the Aurora without (a) getting the design from someone else, and (b) waiting to see if it's even practical. The Russians are much better at building and operating proven and robust technology than at pushing the envelope, while the US is better at wasting massive resources pushing the envelope and blowing stuff up, while stubbornly claiming to be the most advanced.
While I don't necessarily accept the Hill's story as, let's say "accurate", the rolled-up map isn't so far fetched for a technologically advanced race. We're on the verge of having widely-available flexible displays and electronic paper, and it won't be long before you'll have a cell phone whose back folds out into an 8.5" x 11" display on which you can read the morning news, with full-motion video. It may be that the aliens who abducted Ms. Hill used something similar, and her description is just the best she could come up with using her 50's-era understanding of technology.
When looking at stories like this, especially historical ones, you can't just take the descriptions at face-value; you have to consider the observer's context as well, and try to extrapolate from what they're able to describe to what they might have actually been looking at. This is true for all areas of science where eye witness testimony is used for evidence; for example, we know that people all over the world have been digging up dinosaur fossils for a long time, based on the worldwide prevalence of 'dragon' stories.
jQuery's $().ready( function() {...} ); method has been a fantastic help in my Javascript development. It executes after the DOM has been initialized, but before all of the images have been loaded. window.onload() waits for the images to load, which delays your javascript from running until after the page has been rendered. jQuery doesn't do that; your code will often run before the page is rendered, so you can use javascript to enhance/replace elements that work without javascript too. For example, I often have UI controls which will refresh the entire page to perform their function when javascript is not enabled, but they'll use AJAX and refresh only the necessary elements if javascript is enabled. Using jQuery, I can attach events and alter CSS classes before the user sees the page, so javascript and non-javascript users get somewhat different looking, somewhat different behaving, but always fully functional views of my application.
That's a guiding principal for conveying quantitative information. There's accuracy, and there's precision. The accuracy of a measurement tells you how correct the measurement is relative to the actual value you're trying to measure. The precision tells you how specific the measurement is, or to put it another way, now narrow the range of actual values the measurement covers (since there is always a bit of uncertainty in a measurement.)
For example, I could tell you that the temperature is 95F outside. There is an implied precision of 1F (+/- 0.5F) in that measurement. I could also say that the temperature is in the 90s, which has an implied precision of 10F. (+/- 5F). That's precision. If the actual temperature is 65F, then despite the precision of my measurements, they're very inaccurate.
The guiding principle is that the precision with which you convey information should match the accuracy. If you have a digital thermometer that shows the temperature in tenths of a degree, it had better be accurate to within a tenth of a degree, otherwise it is misleading. On the other hand, if your thermometer is a color changing material that is blue when it's cold, green when it's moderate, and red when it's hot, you'd better label it 'cold moderate hot' rather than put a temperature scale with 1 degree precision on it.
Many developers (and other people) get this completely wrong, and report numbers with far too much precision.
I disagree. Without inflation, investment would be even more desirable, because you wouldn't be losing a percentage of your investment gains to inflation. That reduces the risk of investment, and more modest investments become attractive which would not be worthwhile in an inflationary environment. You're also suggesting that money ought to depreciate over time if it sits unused, like a physical asset that ages and deteriorates. That's nonsense, and that's why gold has been used as a currency rather than something like iron: you can collect it without worrying that it will slowly dissolve away to nothing just by sitting in your vault.
What allows an economy to grow, in a fiat economy, isn't inflation: it's the ability to go into unending debt through the fractional reserve system. With a gold-backed economy, banks are limited in how much they can lend to borrowers for investment because of the effort of moving gold around and the limited availability of gold. Get rid of the gold, and it's just bookkeeping; the federal reserve can increase the money supply at will, which allows more lending for more investment. Inflation, the devaluing of the currency, is the side-effect of increasing the money supply. The trick is to keep the debt spread out and build it slowly so that most people don't notice; the extra investment keeps ahead of the inflation and debt, potentially for a long time.
As long as the real wealth in the economy continues to grow (ie: natural resources being developed, manufacturing infrastructure being built, new industries being created) this can go on for a long time. But eventually the debt becomes overwhelming, the wealth creation in the economy slows down (industry moving elsewhere, resources running out or going untouched), and now all you've got is cascading inflation and debt. Sound familiar?
Actually, you've just figured out a ballpark figure of how much the dollar has been devalued since we left the gold standard, when the value of the dollar was set at 1/20th of an oz of gold, eg: 1oz Gold = $20.
Another example I once read was that 1oz of gold, at $20, used to be enough to buy a very nice suit. Today, with 1oz of gold costing ~$900, it's still enough to buy a very nice suit. The value of the gold and the suit haven't changed much, it's the dollars that are worth less.
If we wanted to go back onto the gold standard, then yeah, we'd have to divide the number of dollars in circulation by the ounces of gold the government has left, and that'd be the exchange rate. It's probably not too far from $900/oz, which the gold-trading market has already set as a fair exchange rate between gold and US dollars. You got the order of magnitude right; you were only off by a factor of two.
Another example is what happened to Spain after they discovered Central and South America. Extracting gold from the natives was significantly cheaper than mining it themselves, and their economy went nuts for a while due to all of the surplus gold they imported.
Perhaps you didn't get your money's worth. When I sold my condo (before my wife became an agent) I had pretty much the same experience; I paid $17k in commissions for two visits, a couple days on the market (including an open house) and a quick and easy transaction. I'd be surprised if either agent put in more than 10 hours on the deal (though I don't know how much time the buyer's agent had to work with the buyer; it might've been much more.)
To be honest, for lower-price listings, my wife will recommend that the seller do or pay for some of the repairs rather than paying for them herself. She's got a network of related-industry professionals that she knows well, trusts, and who will often either give her breaks on the service or preferential treatment on the scheduling because of the amount of work she refers to them; this is a benefit that is passed on directly to my wife's clients, and they're always made aware of the relationship and told that they're free to use anyone they like. Usually they go with my wife's recommendations, because of the level of trust and because it's a better deal.
In our area, starter homes go for $400k and up, so most clients get at least some services thrown in, but it's the $800k+ listings that get the gold treatment. Otherwise, I start getting on her case about spending too much out-of-pocket for the commission she's going to get. So, for example, while a higher-end listing will get staging professionals hired and paid for to come in and stage the house, the lower-end listing will get my wife's services as a stager (she's working on getting a certification) and they'll get to use the fairly large collection of lightweight extra furniture we've built up just for this purpose. One time, we actually put our living room couch and dining room set into a client's home for a month because the home was vacant, and looked too empty without the furnishings. (I wasn't too pleased, but it would've cost a lot of money to rent the furniture, and it did make the house look a lot nicer.)
That's discussed a lot within the industry, and there are certainly agents and brokerage companies who operate that way. They did ok during the boom, but I think they've all gone out of business since the downturn started. The problem is that being a Real Estate agent doesn't provide a steady paycheck; you're a self-employed contractor, and the longer a deal takes or the longer a house is on the market, the less your hourly-rate becomes for the time you spend on that client. A flat-rate service might work if it's an open-ended hourly rate, rather than a fixed fee per-transaction, but then you add a bunch of time-tracking overhead and billing to the cost of running your business, which will have to drive the rates up higher than buyers and sellers are already paying. By basing the fee on a percentage of the selling price, everyone involved has a pretty good idea of what the agents will get right from the start.
You can relate this to being a software development contractor. There are some jobs which are simple, which you've done a hundred times before, and you know pretty much exactly how much time and effort they'll take. For those, you can set a fixed fee. In a Real Estate transaction, the buyers and sellers attorneys, the mortgage broker, the property inspector, the staging and cleaning professionals, and the bank's assessor all operate this way. On the other hand, there are jobs where you just don't know how long it's going to take, or how much work you're going to have to do, so you negotiate either an hourly rate or royalties. This is what the buyers and sellers agents face, and they essentially get a royalty on the transaction, which is simpler to deal with than an hourly rate.