If you have a "business" that loses money too often, the IRS will start to get suspicious and they will try to declare the business as a hobby. The exact rules are unclear, but you need to be able to show the IRS that you really are trying to make a profit, are dependent on that income, etc.
The last time I checked, the rules were pretty clear: you had to have a net profit in two or three of the past five years, or something like that, in order to claim the activity as a business rather than a hobby. That seems fair to me; it gives startups a few years to become profitable, while benefiting from the tax break of deducting losses, without letting anyone get that tax break year after year on money they spend for fun.
If you buy an item for your business, and deduct that purchase from your taxes, and then sell that item later, you owe taxes on it. You can't buy a $2000 laptop, deduct $2000 from you income, and then sell the laptop for $1500 and still retain the $2000 deduction.
Of course you still retain the $2000 deduction, but now the $1500 sale is all income, because from the IRS' point of view the laptop has a $0 cost. Assuming your tax rate is 30%, you'll wind up owning the laptop for a total net cost of just $350 between the time you buy it and the time you sell it. That's not bad.
From your point of view:
Buy $2000 laptop Net Cost: $2000
Deduct $2000 laptop as business expense Net Cost: $2000 - $2000 * 30% = $1400 (you get $600 in tax savings due to the deduction)
Sell laptop for $1500 Net Cost: $1400 - $1500 = -$100 (a profit)
Pay taxes on sale Net Cost: -$100 - $1500 * 30% = $350 (The $1500 is added to your gross taxable income)
Final Net Cost of laptop: $350
Sure, it would be nice for the taxes at step 4 to be based on either the $100 profit (relative to your actual net cost) or $500 profit (if you ignore the tax savings from step 2) but neither of those options would be fair; you'd be double-dipping. As an alternative, you could not take the deduction:
Buy $2000 laptop Net Cost: $2000
No deduction Net Cost: $2000 (you're paying $600 more in taxes now)
Sell laptop for $1500 Net Cost: $2000 - $1500 = $500
No taxes on sale Net Cost: $500 (no tax because you sold at a loss)
Final Net Cost of laptop: $500
The laptop winds up costing you more, plus you're paying additional taxes; if you count that the laptop has cost you $1100 instead of $350 with the first approach. That's still not bad, considering that most people would buy the $2000 laptop and wind up burying it in a closet or throwing it away, never recouping any of the cost. But you can see how businesses (included self-employeed individuals) manage to lower their overall taxes.
That doesn't work, because you need to get permits for any significant improvements, and those permits are then used to adjust your valuation and increase the taxes you owe. To me, that's a disincentive to improving the property.
I would much rather have a system where property taxes are paid on the profits when a house is sold, just like the real estate commission and other 'cost of sale' items. That way, the tax isn't levied until you have some actual income, and a precise determination of what the house is actually worth.
Disclaimer: I live in the highest taxed municipality in NJ, which is the highest taxed state in the US. My property tax is about 50% as much as my mortgage. My town is also almost entirely residential; there are very few businesses paying local taxes out of real income. Just about the entire cost of government is paid through property taxes.
Simple Answer: Over the course of your working career, let's say you save $1,000,000. That's great, if you don't have any major problems until well into your career. But what do you do if you get into an accident, or get ill, and need to spend a few hundred thousand early on, before you've saved it?
You either go into debt, if you have enough credit, or you carry insurance to pay for it. A savings plan with a high-limit credit card used just for healthcare emergencies and a health insurance plan are basically the same thing, financially. You'd have to do some analysis on the CC interest rate - savings interest rate vs the insurance premiums to figure out which one costs less. I predict they're both excessively expensive, though.
What's ironic is that this is exactly how we fought and won against the British during our revolution. Our regular troops that went toe to toe with the British army rarely did well, but snipers taking out officers were very effective, as were sabotours and assassinations of loyalists.
And when we use up those, we'll find more, right? And when we use up those, we'll find more, right? And when we use up those...
... We'll start to manufacture more, by recycling our plastic and organic waste that we've been stockpiling in garbage dumps. The technology for doing this on a sufficiently large scale is already here and in use; it's just not economically competitive in most areas yet due to the abundance of oil and govenment subsidies to the oil companies.
1) Galileo invented the thermometer in 1593.
I don't trust any temperature data for dates prior to 1593.
Galileo may have invented the thermometer, but he didn't invent temperature, and we have a variety of methods of determining relative temperatures from the distant past. Tree rings and ice cores are pretty good, since they both vary in size relative to general weather patterns. I'll bet sedimentation layer thickness from lake and sea beds could be used too, under the right conditions. Hmm... coral reefs could also work. In fact, we can also determine average sea levels along coastlines by looking for ancient beaches and other evidence of erosion, and can use that to judge how much water must have been locked up in polar ice at the time. (The fact that we have this kind of evidence above sea level now suggests that sea levels used to be higher, and that the planet must have been warmer at some point in the geologically recent past.)
In historical times predating thermometers, we can still infer temperature data from things people wrote. For example, the article mentions a Chinese naval expedition circling the artic ocean in the 1400s. We may not have temperature recordings from that expedition, but we know if they really did it then there couldn't have been much ice, and we can estimate the average temperature that would be required to make such a voyage possible. (Hint: warmer than today.)
2) Isn't global warming better than another ice age?
That depends on where you live, I suppose. Global warming is definitely better for plants, generally, though maybe not cold-adapted ones. I think it'd be generally better for us humans too, though we may have to move many of our cities.
That, by the way, is the big problem with the typical "We need to do something, anything, now to stop global warming" reaction. If the evidence suggested that global warming was most likely due to human activity, then sure, we should stop doing that. The problem is that the evidence strongly suggests that global warming is largely a natural event, which means it's unlikely there is anything we can do to stop it. Now, making more fuel efficient cars and reducing pollution is fine either way, but many of the evironmentalist strategies would weaken us economically and technologically, and that will be a problem when the rising oceans start to flood our coastal cities. We need to have the resources, energy, and technology that will be needed to protect our cities or move them if/when the time comes.
The problem is that China isn't going electric, they are going to coal. For example this BBC article says that 80% of there energy comes from coal and they have plans to build 544 more stations. Basically coal is the cheapest and fastest way for them to create power so that's what they will go for, not electricity.
How do they plug their computers into a lump of coal?
Sorry; couldn't resist. The point you're making, of course, is that they will primarily burn coal to generate electricity, rather than using nuclear or solar electricity generation. Just like the U.S . does, in fact.
Nuclear would be better for everybody in the long run, since it produces less waste, the waste is completely contained, and the power is cheaper to produce. They're expensive to build though, so in the short term coal power plants are cheaper.
Do 'fly-by-wire' pilots have to control yaw and roll independently of turning? I'm sure that acrobatic pilots do, but I ruled them out as a special case.
If you're flying a plane, in real life, you're mostly working with two dimensions as well: you can turn left and right, and you can climb and descend. A small subset of planes and pilots can roll without changing direction, but normally that's not done; partial rolls are just a part of turning. There is also a throttle control, but that just controls how fast you're moving in your chosen 2D direction.
My point isn't that planes can't be controlled in 3D, it's that most of the time they aren't. I think the reason for that is because we evolved on a large and basically two dimensional space, and 2D navigation is simply more natural for us. That makes 2D controls easier to understand and use, even for navigating 3D spaces.
If you want an example of true 3D controls, think of a helicopter: up/down, left/right, forward/back, and apparently very difficult to control safely.
Normally you'd be right, the time period is three years if you're married to a US citizen, but you also need to be a Permanent Resident. The form requires your name "As it appears on your Permanent Resident Card", and "The Date you became a Permanent Resident."
The K-1 Visa process, and probably other visas as well, has a two-year "Conditional Permanent Resident" period. During this period you have all of the rights of a permanent resident, except it's not permanent. Before the end of the two year period, you have to apply for "Removal of Conditional Status". Once that's approved, you go to an INS office, they take away your Conditional green card, put a stamp in your passport saying that you're a Permanent Resident, and then mail you a new Permanent green card within six months. That's the stage my wife is in (except that her passport had expired, and they wouldn't stamp it, so now she can't travel until the new card arrives or Canada sends her renewed passport. It's a race between the tortoise and the slug...)
Two problems occured for us: everything leading up to getting the Conditional Permement Resident status took much longer than it should have, partly because the INS was getting folded into the Department of Homeland Security, and partly because her paperwork was lost for about six months, until we hired a lawyer to harass the INS employees enough to get them to go find it. As a result, we're a year behind schedule.
As soon as her new card comes, we'll be applying for naturalization.
Marry US citizen. No problem here as long as you can get to the country and find somebody who want to marry you. If you are married already, well you have a tough luck. Only divorce can help. Even if you get married you can not work legally for 2 years. That helps welfare and Social Security a lot.
You can work legally right away, if you do it right. My wife entered the US on a Fiancee Visa and we got married right away; this allowed her to get a SS# and work permit immediately. Going through the process to get a temporary Green Card and then a permanent Green Card has taken longer; we just had our fourth anniversary last month, and we're waiting for the permanent Green Card to finally arrive in the mail. Next year, she'll be eligible to apply for citizenship; we expect that she'll be able to vote in the next presidential election.
This approach has cost a lot of time and a couple thousand dollars in application fees, and only worked because she was still in Canada when we got engaged, and didn't move until we were ready to get married. It was the best approach though, because she was able to work during the whole process.
Many of the posts have explained that galaxies are moving apart greater than the speed of light, because the space between them is expanding. Ok, got that.
But what's going on with the space inside of us, between our atoms and molecules? If big-S Space is expanding, it must be expanding everywhere, right? Between galaxies, between stars, between planets, between atoms, and right on down to, well, whatever it is down there.
That would mean that we should be getting bigger... not noticably, since everything is expanding together, but stretching nonetheless. Someone brought up the 'ant on a balloon' analogy to explain the expanding universe, but that's not right: the ant isn't embedded in the rubber of the balloon. A truer analogy would be a spot made by a marker on the balloon surface: as the balloon expands, so does the spot. It gets bigger, and fades too, as its constituents (drops of dye) spread apart.
Are we like that? Are the forces binding atoms together getting weaker due to the extra Space that's expanding between them? Is this a measurable effect?
Maybe that's how it will all end: not with a big crunch, or cold death, but with all matter dissolving into sub-atomic dust.
I think the idea is that this kind of system works in reverse during the winter, pulling that stored heat out of the ground and using it to heat the house. This way, you're taking advantage of the insulating properties of the ground more than its normally contstant temperature.
Here's a detailed description of the technique: http://mb-soft.com/solar/saving.html Once you have the basic concept down, it's basically just a matter of doing the math and figuring out the system dimensions, and then figuring out if you can build it for a reasonable cost vs a traditional system. I think it helps a lot if you're building a home from scratch rather than retro-fitting an existing home.
When asked how long a project will take, I've told Project Managers "I'll tell you after I'm done, because that'll be the first moment when I can give you a precise response." They don't like to hear that, of course, because it doesn't help them do their job (scheduling and tracking the project.)
It's true though; as long as there is still work to be done, there is uncertainty in how much effort is needed to complete the work. There may be a lot of uncertainty or just a little, but there is always some, until the work is completed.
As Software Engineers, we need to accept and embrace the fact that this uncertainty exists, account for it, and help our Project Managers to account for it too. Afterall, they need to estimate risks to the project, and getting a quantifiable handle on uncertainty will help them to do that.
My approach to estimating:
First, always estimate in terms of 'effort', not 'time'. Time is for schedules, which take into account weekends, holidays, sick days, meetings, dependencies on other people, and work on other projects. When estimating a task, only consider how much effort that particular task will require, as if absolutely nothing else was going on in your life.
Second, only use whole numbers from one to six, and specify the units: effort-quarter-hours, effort-hours, effort-days, effort-weeks, effort-months, effort-quarters, effort-years. This ensures that longer-term estimates are expressed in less-precise units. You need to do that because of the inherent uncertainty in longer-term estimates.
Always provide your estimate as a range. My manager called this a surprise range: you'd be surprised if you got it done with less effort than X, and you'd be surprised if it took more effort than Y. Be as honest as you can about this; it does no one any good if you add a 'fudge factor', or are trying to reduce your estimate in order to please someone.
Typically, I'll provide my initial estimate as a single task, with a wide range between the min and max. If the Project Manager needs a more detailed estimate, I'll ask for some analysis time, and I'll spend that time breaking the large task into smaller tasks, providing estimates for each. Since these tasks are smaller, they'll typically have narrower ranges than my original estimate, even when I add up all of the mins and all of the maxes to get the overall estimate. This task breakdown is iterative, reducing tasks down to the point where the Project Manager is happy with the units (typically effort-weeks or less) or when the analysis shifts from being primarily estimating to primarily design. Also, as I'm breaking the tasks down, I'm also providing information about task dependencies. This allows the Project Manager to put this information into a Gannt chart / Work Breakdown Structure, which helps the PM to track the project and communicate estimates to upper management.
To reiterate, you determine the overall estimate, you add up the minimum estimate for each task, add up the maximum estimate for each task, and use those as the overall estimate for the overall task. It's ok to use larger numbers with small units when you do this, because you're working with more precise estimates than when you estimated the initial overall task.
To turn this estimate into a schedule, the Project Manager has to account for a variety of factors: the starting date, the weekend/holiday/vacation schedule, and the percentage of your time that will be spent actively working on the project. For me, the last factor is 60% / #concurrent projects, assuming equal priorities. That is to say that I spend 40% of my workday on non-project activities: answering email, attending meetings, doing HR-related stuff, and doing maintainence work for software I'm still responsible for. The 60% of my time is divided amongst the projects I'm currently working on, proportionally to their priorities.
One nice aspect of this approach is that, as tasks are completed, their estimate
There's no need to get all spirtual about a soul not having any weight... How much does wind weigh? Not air, wind. How much does electric current weigh? No, not the electrons, the current? What is the volume of an electric current? It doesn't have one, does it? Yet it certainly exists.
The brain is full of electrical fields, electrical potentials, chemical distributions, chemical flows, neural tendencies and activation triggers, and lots of other physical aspects. The soul could be the overall pattern of these physical things, just like an electric current is an overall pattern in the movement of electrons. And it may not matter that everything about the brain is constantly changing... afterall, a river is a river even though the water that composes it is always passing by.
The Pulaski Skyway reminds me of those toy car racetracks, where one section of the track narrows into an hourglass shape, so that if two cars try to go through it side-by-side they smack into one another. I think they designed the Skyway so that it was wide enough for horse traffic, not automobile traffic.
I've also noticed that, for some reason, NJ drivers on the Skyway go faster when it's raining. It's like they think "This is dangerous, so the faster I get through it the safer I'll be."
FYI, I grew up in Brooklyn, went to school and lived in Hoboken (near one end of the Skyway) for ten years, and now live further out in New Jersey. I never felt the need for a car, or even a license, until moving to the suburbs, and even now I rarely drive. (Commuter train into Manhattan every day.)
My Maltese came from a breeder, and her papers say in bold letters Not Show Quality. We don't show her that; she prances around like a show dog, loves to pose for the camera, and probably thinks she'll be in a show when she grows up.
She came with all her parts, but I think that's because she wasn't old enough to be spayed yet. She was only six months old when we got her, and we actually got her second hand. (The original owner thought she'd be a good puppy for the kids, but Maltese puppies are too delicate... adults too, when they're as small as mine.)
Well, there is divx the codec versus mpeg the codec, and divx/avi the container versus the DVD container.
The divx codec can give very good results, with the right quality settings. Most avis that you see on the net have been way overcompressed, with the poor quality results you're complaining about. Better settings will give results as good as mpeg, but with files one quarter the size.
As far as containers, you're right. If you want those extra features, avi doesn't cut it. Divx (the company) has a new container format that is supposed to have all of that stuff, but I haven't looked into it because those features aren't important to me, and won't be until I have a DVD player that supports it.
And then there is OGG. I don't know what features the container supports, nor what codecs can be used inside it. It might be a good alternative, if it can handle your DVD menus and features.
I dunno about your claim that you can store 100 movies on a drive. Maybe if you have a really big drive or you compress your movies down to some shitty quality. My experience is that a 300GB drive can hold about 43 DVD-quality movies ripped in their full glory. At an average size of around 7GB each they aren't especially small files for transmission over the shitty slow Internet most of us Americans have even if we have broadband.
I've ripped a number of DVDs, and burned quite a few from my MythTV recordings. I've found that DVD quality mpegs tend to be no more than 2GB per hour. Commercial DVDs just get filled up with extra stuff to bring them up over the 4.5GB level, to make it a pain to copy then on single layer media.
If you're not tied to mpeg, which you wouldn't be if you're creating a 'view from hard drive' library, then divx or xvid can give you the same quality at much better compression ratios. You probably wouldn't notice the difference between a 2GB per hour mpeg and a 0.5GB per hour divx.
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Not true; Section 179 allows equipment like laptops to be fully deducted the year they're purchased.
The last time I checked, the rules were pretty clear: you had to have a net profit in two or three of the past five years, or something like that, in order to claim the activity as a business rather than a hobby. That seems fair to me; it gives startups a few years to become profitable, while benefiting from the tax break of deducting losses, without letting anyone get that tax break year after year on money they spend for fun.
Of course you still retain the $2000 deduction, but now the $1500 sale is all income, because from the IRS' point of view the laptop has a $0 cost. Assuming your tax rate is 30%, you'll wind up owning the laptop for a total net cost of just $350 between the time you buy it and the time you sell it. That's not bad.
From your point of view:
Sure, it would be nice for the taxes at step 4 to be based on either the $100 profit (relative to your actual net cost) or $500 profit (if you ignore the tax savings from step 2) but neither of those options would be fair; you'd be double-dipping. As an alternative, you could not take the deduction:
- Buy $2000 laptop Net Cost: $2000
- No deduction Net Cost: $2000 (you're paying $600 more in taxes now)
- Sell laptop for $1500 Net Cost: $2000 - $1500 = $500
- No taxes on sale Net Cost: $500 (no tax because you sold at a loss)
- Final Net Cost of laptop: $500
The laptop winds up costing you more, plus you're paying additional taxes; if you count that the laptop has cost you $1100 instead of $350 with the first approach. That's still not bad, considering that most people would buy the $2000 laptop and wind up burying it in a closet or throwing it away, never recouping any of the cost. But you can see how businesses (included self-employeed individuals) manage to lower their overall taxes.How do you get your blackberry to show you how many cell towers it can see? That sounds like an interesting feature to play with.
Send me a sample set of the account numbers, and I'll show you how to do it...
I seem to recall a passage about a prophet asking God to send some bears to maul a bunch of kids...
That doesn't work, because you need to get permits for any significant improvements, and those permits are then used to adjust your valuation and increase the taxes you owe. To me, that's a disincentive to improving the property.
I would much rather have a system where property taxes are paid on the profits when a house is sold, just like the real estate commission and other 'cost of sale' items. That way, the tax isn't levied until you have some actual income, and a precise determination of what the house is actually worth.
Disclaimer: I live in the highest taxed municipality in NJ, which is the highest taxed state in the US. My property tax is about 50% as much as my mortgage. My town is also almost entirely residential; there are very few businesses paying local taxes out of real income. Just about the entire cost of government is paid through property taxes.
Simple Answer: Over the course of your working career, let's say you save $1,000,000. That's great, if you don't have any major problems until well into your career. But what do you do if you get into an accident, or get ill, and need to spend a few hundred thousand early on, before you've saved it?
You either go into debt, if you have enough credit, or you carry insurance to pay for it. A savings plan with a high-limit credit card used just for healthcare emergencies and a health insurance plan are basically the same thing, financially. You'd have to do some analysis on the CC interest rate - savings interest rate vs the insurance premiums to figure out which one costs less. I predict they're both excessively expensive, though.
What's ironic is that this is exactly how we fought and won against the British during our revolution. Our regular troops that went toe to toe with the British army rarely did well, but snipers taking out officers were very effective, as were sabotours and assassinations of loyalists.
... We'll start to manufacture more, by recycling our plastic and organic waste that we've been stockpiling in garbage dumps. The technology for doing this on a sufficiently large scale is already here and in use; it's just not economically competitive in most areas yet due to the abundance of oil and govenment subsidies to the oil companies.
Galileo may have invented the thermometer, but he didn't invent temperature, and we have a variety of methods of determining relative temperatures from the distant past. Tree rings and ice cores are pretty good, since they both vary in size relative to general weather patterns. I'll bet sedimentation layer thickness from lake and sea beds could be used too, under the right conditions. Hmm... coral reefs could also work. In fact, we can also determine average sea levels along coastlines by looking for ancient beaches and other evidence of erosion, and can use that to judge how much water must have been locked up in polar ice at the time. (The fact that we have this kind of evidence above sea level now suggests that sea levels used to be higher, and that the planet must have been warmer at some point in the geologically recent past.)
In historical times predating thermometers, we can still infer temperature data from things people wrote. For example, the article mentions a Chinese naval expedition circling the artic ocean in the 1400s. We may not have temperature recordings from that expedition, but we know if they really did it then there couldn't have been much ice, and we can estimate the average temperature that would be required to make such a voyage possible. (Hint: warmer than today.)
That depends on where you live, I suppose. Global warming is definitely better for plants, generally, though maybe not cold-adapted ones. I think it'd be generally better for us humans too, though we may have to move many of our cities.
That, by the way, is the big problem with the typical "We need to do something, anything, now to stop global warming" reaction. If the evidence suggested that global warming was most likely due to human activity, then sure, we should stop doing that. The problem is that the evidence strongly suggests that global warming is largely a natural event, which means it's unlikely there is anything we can do to stop it. Now, making more fuel efficient cars and reducing pollution is fine either way, but many of the evironmentalist strategies would weaken us economically and technologically, and that will be a problem when the rising oceans start to flood our coastal cities. We need to have the resources, energy, and technology that will be needed to protect our cities or move them if/when the time comes.
How do they plug their computers into a lump of coal?
Sorry; couldn't resist. The point you're making, of course, is that they will primarily burn coal to generate electricity, rather than using nuclear or solar electricity generation. Just like the U.S . does, in fact.
Nuclear would be better for everybody in the long run, since it produces less waste, the waste is completely contained, and the power is cheaper to produce. They're expensive to build though, so in the short term coal power plants are cheaper.
Do 'fly-by-wire' pilots have to control yaw and roll independently of turning? I'm sure that acrobatic pilots do, but I ruled them out as a special case.
Yes, but as I said the control for that is 'speed in the chosen direction', and not a directional control in and of itself.
I'm not a pilot, but I'd assume spiraling upward is a combination of 'turning' and 'climbing'.
If you're flying a plane, in real life, you're mostly working with two dimensions as well: you can turn left and right, and you can climb and descend. A small subset of planes and pilots can roll without changing direction, but normally that's not done; partial rolls are just a part of turning. There is also a throttle control, but that just controls how fast you're moving in your chosen 2D direction.
My point isn't that planes can't be controlled in 3D, it's that most of the time they aren't. I think the reason for that is because we evolved on a large and basically two dimensional space, and 2D navigation is simply more natural for us. That makes 2D controls easier to understand and use, even for navigating 3D spaces.
If you want an example of true 3D controls, think of a helicopter: up/down, left/right, forward/back, and apparently very difficult to control safely.
Normally you'd be right, the time period is three years if you're married to a US citizen, but you also need to be a Permanent Resident. The form requires your name "As it appears on your Permanent Resident Card", and "The Date you became a Permanent Resident."
The K-1 Visa process, and probably other visas as well, has a two-year "Conditional Permanent Resident" period. During this period you have all of the rights of a permanent resident, except it's not permanent. Before the end of the two year period, you have to apply for "Removal of Conditional Status". Once that's approved, you go to an INS office, they take away your Conditional green card, put a stamp in your passport saying that you're a Permanent Resident, and then mail you a new Permanent green card within six months. That's the stage my wife is in (except that her passport had expired, and they wouldn't stamp it, so now she can't travel until the new card arrives or Canada sends her renewed passport. It's a race between the tortoise and the slug...)
Two problems occured for us: everything leading up to getting the Conditional Permement Resident status took much longer than it should have, partly because the INS was getting folded into the Department of Homeland Security, and partly because her paperwork was lost for about six months, until we hired a lawyer to harass the INS employees enough to get them to go find it. As a result, we're a year behind schedule.
As soon as her new card comes, we'll be applying for naturalization.
You can work legally right away, if you do it right. My wife entered the US on a Fiancee Visa and we got married right away; this allowed her to get a SS# and work permit immediately. Going through the process to get a temporary Green Card and then a permanent Green Card has taken longer; we just had our fourth anniversary last month, and we're waiting for the permanent Green Card to finally arrive in the mail. Next year, she'll be eligible to apply for citizenship; we expect that she'll be able to vote in the next presidential election.
This approach has cost a lot of time and a couple thousand dollars in application fees, and only worked because she was still in Canada when we got engaged, and didn't move until we were ready to get married. It was the best approach though, because she was able to work during the whole process.
Many of the posts have explained that galaxies are moving apart greater than the speed of light, because the space between them is expanding. Ok, got that.
But what's going on with the space inside of us, between our atoms and molecules? If big-S Space is expanding, it must be expanding everywhere, right? Between galaxies, between stars, between planets, between atoms, and right on down to, well, whatever it is down there.
That would mean that we should be getting bigger... not noticably, since everything is expanding together, but stretching nonetheless. Someone brought up the 'ant on a balloon' analogy to explain the expanding universe, but that's not right: the ant isn't embedded in the rubber of the balloon. A truer analogy would be a spot made by a marker on the balloon surface: as the balloon expands, so does the spot. It gets bigger, and fades too, as its constituents (drops of dye) spread apart.
Are we like that? Are the forces binding atoms together getting weaker due to the extra Space that's expanding between them? Is this a measurable effect?
Maybe that's how it will all end: not with a big crunch, or cold death, but with all matter dissolving into sub-atomic dust.
I think the idea is that this kind of system works in reverse during the winter, pulling that stored heat out of the ground and using it to heat the house. This way, you're taking advantage of the insulating properties of the ground more than its normally contstant temperature.
Here's a detailed description of the technique: http://mb-soft.com/solar/saving.html Once you have the basic concept down, it's basically just a matter of doing the math and figuring out the system dimensions, and then figuring out if you can build it for a reasonable cost vs a traditional system. I think it helps a lot if you're building a home from scratch rather than retro-fitting an existing home.
When asked how long a project will take, I've told Project Managers "I'll tell you after I'm done, because that'll be the first moment when I can give you a precise response." They don't like to hear that, of course, because it doesn't help them do their job (scheduling and tracking the project.)
It's true though; as long as there is still work to be done, there is uncertainty in how much effort is needed to complete the work. There may be a lot of uncertainty or just a little, but there is always some, until the work is completed.
As Software Engineers, we need to accept and embrace the fact that this uncertainty exists, account for it, and help our Project Managers to account for it too. Afterall, they need to estimate risks to the project, and getting a quantifiable handle on uncertainty will help them to do that.
My approach to estimating:
Typically, I'll provide my initial estimate as a single task, with a wide range between the min and max. If the Project Manager needs a more detailed estimate, I'll ask for some analysis time, and I'll spend that time breaking the large task into smaller tasks, providing estimates for each. Since these tasks are smaller, they'll typically have narrower ranges than my original estimate, even when I add up all of the mins and all of the maxes to get the overall estimate. This task breakdown is iterative, reducing tasks down to the point where the Project Manager is happy with the units (typically effort-weeks or less) or when the analysis shifts from being primarily estimating to primarily design. Also, as I'm breaking the tasks down, I'm also providing information about task dependencies. This allows the Project Manager to put this information into a Gannt chart / Work Breakdown Structure, which helps the PM to track the project and communicate estimates to upper management.
To reiterate, you determine the overall estimate, you add up the minimum estimate for each task, add up the maximum estimate for each task, and use those as the overall estimate for the overall task. It's ok to use larger numbers with small units when you do this, because you're working with more precise estimates than when you estimated the initial overall task.
To turn this estimate into a schedule, the Project Manager has to account for a variety of factors: the starting date, the weekend/holiday/vacation schedule, and the percentage of your time that will be spent actively working on the project. For me, the last factor is 60% / #concurrent projects, assuming equal priorities. That is to say that I spend 40% of my workday on non-project activities: answering email, attending meetings, doing HR-related stuff, and doing maintainence work for software I'm still responsible for. The 60% of my time is divided amongst the projects I'm currently working on, proportionally to their priorities.
One nice aspect of this approach is that, as tasks are completed, their estimate
There's no need to get all spirtual about a soul not having any weight... How much does wind weigh? Not air, wind. How much does electric current weigh? No, not the electrons, the current? What is the volume of an electric current? It doesn't have one, does it? Yet it certainly exists.
The brain is full of electrical fields, electrical potentials, chemical distributions, chemical flows, neural tendencies and activation triggers, and lots of other physical aspects. The soul could be the overall pattern of these physical things, just like an electric current is an overall pattern in the movement of electrons. And it may not matter that everything about the brain is constantly changing... afterall, a river is a river even though the water that composes it is always passing by.
The Pulaski Skyway reminds me of those toy car racetracks, where one section of the track narrows into an hourglass shape, so that if two cars try to go through it side-by-side they smack into one another. I think they designed the Skyway so that it was wide enough for horse traffic, not automobile traffic.
I've also noticed that, for some reason, NJ drivers on the Skyway go faster when it's raining. It's like they think "This is dangerous, so the faster I get through it the safer I'll be."
FYI, I grew up in Brooklyn, went to school and lived in Hoboken (near one end of the Skyway) for ten years, and now live further out in New Jersey. I never felt the need for a car, or even a license, until moving to the suburbs, and even now I rarely drive. (Commuter train into Manhattan every day.)
My Maltese came from a breeder, and her papers say in bold letters Not Show Quality. We don't show her that; she prances around like a show dog, loves to pose for the camera, and probably thinks she'll be in a show when she grows up.
She came with all her parts, but I think that's because she wasn't old enough to be spayed yet. She was only six months old when we got her, and we actually got her second hand. (The original owner thought she'd be a good puppy for the kids, but Maltese puppies are too delicate... adults too, when they're as small as mine.)
Well, there is divx the codec versus mpeg the codec, and divx/avi the container versus the DVD container.
The divx codec can give very good results, with the right quality settings. Most avis that you see on the net have been way overcompressed, with the poor quality results you're complaining about. Better settings will give results as good as mpeg, but with files one quarter the size.
As far as containers, you're right. If you want those extra features, avi doesn't cut it. Divx (the company) has a new container format that is supposed to have all of that stuff, but I haven't looked into it because those features aren't important to me, and won't be until I have a DVD player that supports it.
And then there is OGG. I don't know what features the container supports, nor what codecs can be used inside it. It might be a good alternative, if it can handle your DVD menus and features.
I've ripped a number of DVDs, and burned quite a few from my MythTV recordings. I've found that DVD quality mpegs tend to be no more than 2GB per hour. Commercial DVDs just get filled up with extra stuff to bring them up over the 4.5GB level, to make it a pain to copy then on single layer media.
If you're not tied to mpeg, which you wouldn't be if you're creating a 'view from hard drive' library, then divx or xvid can give you the same quality at much better compression ratios. You probably wouldn't notice the difference between a 2GB per hour mpeg and a 0.5GB per hour divx.
Adapting to death is easy. It's adapting to "clinging to life" that's hard.