Movies in theaters tend to be more social than TV. People invite friends to something that they haven't experienced yet. Inviting someone to a good movie improves your status with them. Wasting your friends' time and money with a bad movie makes you look bad. It's worth checking a review to be certain that everyone else will have a good time.
TV tends to be more solitary. You can watch the first couple of episodes on your own to try it out with no loss of social status. Once you're sure it's good, then you can invite your friends and family to watch with you. There is no need for a review, if you're only wasting your own time.
In baseball, it's more about geometry than how frequently you see left-handers.
Right-handed batters bat from the third-base side of home plate. When facing a right handed pitcher, curve balls curve towards the batter's body. When facing a left-handed pitcher, curve balls curve away from their body. Left-handed hitters are the opposite. They bat from the first-base side of the plate. For them, left-handed curve balls break towards the batter's body, and right-handed curve balls break away from their body.
Most batters find it easier to hit a ball that is breaking away from their body. Therefore, left-handed batters tend to hit better against right-handed pitchers, and vice-versa. It's good to have both left-handed and right-handed players, both batters and pitchers, to gain the geometry advantage whenever it makes sense.
Moore's Law says that transistor density doubles about every two years. It's been forty years since the late 1970's, so we've had about 20 iterations of Moore's Law. In that time transistor density has gone up exponentially from x to roughly x^20. Meanwhile, the number of engineers necessary to continue the advancement has gone up linearly from y to 18y.
An exponential reward for a linear cost doesn't seem like a bad a trade-off.
There is well established precedent on how to reduce speeds on highly used residential roads. It's called "Traffic Calming". Essentially, you redesign the road so that it is narrower, curvier and gives better access to pedestrians and bikers. The basics of Traffic Calming can be found here:
Generally, urban roads that have traffic where it's even possible to move at 50 mph are straight, wide and flat. That is definitely the case with Locust Ave, as seen below.
Some suggestions for slowing traffic on this street might include:
- Put curb extensions at the sidewalks to reduce the distance that pedestrians have to walk to cross the street. This also makes the intersections tighter for cars, requiring them to slow down.
- Currently, parking is only on the left side of the street. About every half a block alternate parking between the left and the right sides causing the traffic to have to curve back and forth. This will slow down the traffic.
- Mark the parking with stripes, making the traffic lanes look smaller.
- If there is room, add another bicycle lane to the left side of the street.
Although this street is in a more dense urban area (Cambridge, MA) than Locust, it used to look similar to it. All parking was on one side, and there were no curb extensions. Now you can see the tightened intersections and the curvy traffic lanes. Speeds have dropped significantly on this road.
It's worth a try.
If someone's disability prevents them from completing the test, it simply means that they cannot be evaluated using this method. It does not affect the research results for the people who can successfully complete the test in any way.
You are correct that we already know that healthier people have a smaller chance of dying. How do you quantify "healthy", however? How do you go beyond, "He kind of ran on a treadmill for a while, so I guess he won't die soon?"
If this research proves correct, then it gives people a powerful new metric for interpreting the results of Cardiac Stress Tests. We already know that heart rate, METs, age and gender are individual predictors or heart health. This research, however, indicates that the relationship between these four may be a more precise predictor of overall heart health than any one of those factors alone. It may also provide non-physicians a way of identifying people with heart problems that need medical attention.
For example, let's say that you go to the gym for the first time, and a personal trainer there routinely gives you a stress test to determine your health fitness prior to determining your exercise plan. By calculating this score, she may be able to quickly determine that you are high-risk for a cardiac event in the next five years. If that's the case, then your personal trainer can recommend that you go to a doctor and get further evaluation. This would be a huge benefit to people with undiagnosed cardiac disease.
The results are calculated following an official medical study called a Cardiac Stress Test. It consists of attaching an ECG machine to a patient and then having them exercise in a very precise, repeatable way. Typically, for patients who can walk or run to their personal maximum heart rate this is done on a treadmill. Some patients cannot run, but they can bike. In that case the test would be performed on a stationary bicycle. If the patient can neither run nor bike, an arm cycle (i.e. bicycle pedals that you twirl with your arms) is used.
The typical treadmill version of the test is called a Bruce Protocol, and it proceeds as follows. The patient walks and then runs on the treadmill as it progresses through several 3 minute intervals. For each successive interval, the speed of the treadmill is increased, and the slope of the ramp is increased (making the patient walk or run up a steeper hill). Based on this speed and slope, we can calculate the METs achieved. The protocol for increasing the difficulty of the exercise is as follows:
Only an athlete will be able to finish all seven intervals, as the final interval means that you are running 10 minute miles up a very steep hill. The vast majority of people will stop before the end of the final interval. The test is officially stopped for one of the following reasons:
(a) The patients says that they are exhausted and cannot proceed any longer.
(b) The patient experiences chest pain or shortness of breath.
(c) The patient's ECG changes in such a way that the physiologist running the test determines that it is unsafe to continue.
If you do not perform the test in this way (or some other medically approved way), then you will not get accurate results. For example, if you immediately start with Stage 7, you may be able to sprint for 1 minute, and achieve your maximum heart rate. Unfortunately, you will be overestimating your METs, because during a normal test, you may have had to stop during Stage 3 or Stage 4 with the same heart rate, but at a lower METs rate.
It is also important to note that unless you consider yourself to be completely healthy, it is best to perform this test with an ECG machine and under the supervision of a licensed physiologist. They will stop you, if you have a serious change in your ECG.
2) Social engineer the car to be a part of this "rental agreement".
3) "rent" car using the usual fake ID stuff (or just tell them you're an illegal and they're not allowed to discriminate against you).
4) Drive to steel walled warehouse or just strip the parts you want, after all they have fake ID.
5) Profit!
I am virtually certain GM is not prepared for the security implications of this.
It seems that you don't have a very good idea of how the program works.
First of all, you can't provide fake ID, because to participate as a renter you must present a driver's license to RelayRides. They check with your state's DMV to determine if the license is up to date and if you have a relatively clean driving record before they agree to insure you. Only then will you be able to go on-line and rent someone else's car. It would be very difficult to "fake" this.
GM is simply making OnStar anti-theft protection standard on all of their cars. One feature of this is that the owner can use a smart phone app to unlock the car. So, you must have a valid smartphone account for this to work, again identifying you as the culprit.
If the car is stolen, OnStar's GPS tracking features will be a huge help in locating the car.
I'm not saying that there's no way to spoof the app and make it look like someone else stole the car. I'm just saying, it would take a much more sophisticated approach than you mention.
In the United States, the hospital as a whole is legally responsible for maintaining the privacy of all patient records. You are asking to open a port that has a very high probability of transmitting patient records (for example patient names, appointment schedule time and exam type) to hand-held devices that are taken off hospital premises and frequently lost, stolen or casually discarded when upgraded. iPhones do not have passwords or encryption turned on by default. Calendars are frequently shared between multiple calendar services like Google and Yahoo.
I think it is completely inappropriate for you to provide this service outside of the enterprise environment in the first place. I believe that your IT group is being excessively lenient allowing you to do it at all.
Because if people can't agree on what a word means, it leads to potential for misunderstandings and fraud. I don't think anyone can define "App" in the way that agrees with how Apple, Google and everyone else is using the word.
Let's try this definition: App is short for "Any computer code that, when applied to a general purpose information system, results in a more specialized application of said system."
There, an app is any computer program -- big or small -- single hardware platform or multi-tier.
A shame that Cameron didn't take a more original story and risk it like Star Wars.
I find it interesting that you should mention this, because I found the parallel between Avatar and Star Wars to be striking. Unlike you, I don't find the plot of the 1977 Star Wars movie to be original at all. It was simply that a farm-boy found a message from a princess who was captured by an evil knight and imprisoned in a dark fortress. With the help of a good knight and a pirate, he frees the princess and destroys the fortress before the dark knight can destroy the village.
That's about the most unoriginal story ever. It's been done over and over again since the middle ages. That's not why I loved Star Wars, however. I loved it because the visual spectacle at the time it was created was unlike anything that I had seen before. (I was only 9 years old in 1977, but still...) Fighting with laser swords is cool! Fast moving spaceships with rapid fire lasers are cool! It had never been done before. The feeling was electric.
As I was watching Avatar at age 41, I got that same feeling. I felt like I was 9 years old again and seeing something absolutely amazing for the first time. The 3D effects were awkward for about the first 15 minutes of the movie, and then I stopped noticing them. The simply became the experience. The computer animation sequences were ridiculously good -- fantastically detailed. I think you can tell, I loved the movie.
Movies don't always have to be story-telling masterpieces. Sometimes they can just take you out of life for a while and put you on a visual roller-coaster ride. This movie did that more successfully than anything that I've seen in a long, long time.
Yeah, the ParkMagic is a joke. They could just as easily set up the system so that you park, enter your parking space number and press a big red button on the front of the box and a timer starts indicating how long you've parked. You put it in your windshield to let the parking enforcers know that you're paying. When you get back, you press the red button again and only get charged for the amount of time that you were in the space.
If the spot is two-hour parking and your meter reads 2:05, then you get a passing parking enforcer can write you a ticket. If you enter the wrong number for someplace where the parking is cheaper, you can get a ticket. Otherwise, you only pay for what you use.
Instead they make you guess how long you'll be there, knowing that you're either going to guess too much or get a ticket. Come on... cut us a break.
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve.
"Since you are all such good customers", he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20". Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his "fair share?"
They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
You forgot about the cover charge to get into the bar. It's also figured out based on income, but in this case, it's calculated in the same way that pay-roll tax is and is capped for the folks at the top.
So, while it seems like the fifth and sixth men are getting the big discount when looking at income tax alone, we can see that in overall tax burden, the rich guys still making out both via actual dollars and by the percentage of tax break that he's receiving.
Once they've busted their asses in several jobs, risking hundreds of thousands of dollars on investments, and earned their first million, they can suddenely be taxed right back to where they started
In 1986, my first job during high school paid me $3.45 an hour. That's the equivalent of about $6.45 an hour today.
In 1991, my first job after college paid me $27,500, or about $40,000 in today's terms.
I promise you that when I make my hypothetical first $1 million, I will not be taxed back to either of those starting points.
"Uncontacted tribes" is a poor choice of phrasing. "Self-isolated tribes" may be better. These people are not stupid, and they know that other people exist. If anyone in that tribe wanted to contact the outside world, they'd just walk over to a logging camp or a park headquarters.
You say that these people should have a choice, and they do. They have specifically decided not to come to meet us, and in fact, they go out of their way to avoid us. We should respect that choice and leave them be.
Above and beyond this, I can't imagine that Google won't implement an "I agree to allow my anonymized records to be used for medical research" box. People will click it for free out of the goodness of their hearts. Google will then make millions of dollars selling that information to pharmaceutical companies, medical technology vendors and other research organizations.
In medical research, nothing is more valuable than a complete medical history with the actual tests, diagnosis, treatment and outcome.
As Gore's movie points out, the melting of the ice caps will not raise sea level. The melting of the huge landbound glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica, however, will. The estimates given in the movie indicate that if 1/2 of all ice on these two land masses melts, the sea levels will raise 20 feet covering large portions of Florida, Shanghai, and Manhattan among other places.
[sarcasm] Ticket prices rising, movie quality decreasing = fewer ticket sales. Go figure [/sarcasm]
When you adjust for inflation, ticket prices aren't really rising. I remember that movie tickets were $3.00 for adults when Star Wars came out in 1977. At that time the median household income was $13,572. The median household income is now $44,389. That's 3.27 times higher than in 1977. If you apply that to ticket prices, you get $9.81, which is pretty close to ticket prices in most major cities.
This research is not at all worthless. As others have pointed out, the group is not studying human responses, they are studying actual physical and chemical changes that are taking place in the brain. All bones, tissues and organs change rapidly at different points during childhood and adolescence. Frequently these changes are affected greatly by outside stimulus.
By studying the normal function under different stimuli, you lay the groundwork for studying abnormal cases in the future. It could turn out that the changes recorded here will alert us to growth deficiencies that may be associated with neurological disorders such as autism. We may find that certain processes of the brain that are stimulated and developed at this stage of life that, if they could be replicated later, could counteract degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.
Understanding the phyical processes of our bodies we work and grow is rarely useless.
Slashdot Mirror
Movies in theaters tend to be more social than TV. People invite friends to something that they haven't experienced yet. Inviting someone to a good movie improves your status with them. Wasting your friends' time and money with a bad movie makes you look bad. It's worth checking a review to be certain that everyone else will have a good time.
TV tends to be more solitary. You can watch the first couple of episodes on your own to try it out with no loss of social status. Once you're sure it's good, then you can invite your friends and family to watch with you. There is no need for a review, if you're only wasting your own time.
In baseball, it's more about geometry than how frequently you see left-handers.
Right-handed batters bat from the third-base side of home plate. When facing a right handed pitcher, curve balls curve towards the batter's body. When facing a left-handed pitcher, curve balls curve away from their body. Left-handed hitters are the opposite. They bat from the first-base side of the plate. For them, left-handed curve balls break towards the batter's body, and right-handed curve balls break away from their body.
Most batters find it easier to hit a ball that is breaking away from their body. Therefore, left-handed batters tend to hit better against right-handed pitchers, and vice-versa. It's good to have both left-handed and right-handed players, both batters and pitchers, to gain the geometry advantage whenever it makes sense.
Moore's Law says that transistor density doubles about every two years. It's been forty years since the late 1970's, so we've had about 20 iterations of Moore's Law. In that time transistor density has gone up exponentially from x to roughly x^20 . Meanwhile, the number of engineers necessary to continue the advancement has gone up linearly from y to 18y .
An exponential reward for a linear cost doesn't seem like a bad a trade-off.
The twin prime conjecture is independent of the base, so the base doesn't matter for it to be true or false.
I would find this surprising, since in a base 2 system every prime number ending in 1 is followed by a prime number ending in 1.
There is well established precedent on how to reduce speeds on highly used residential roads. It's called "Traffic Calming". Essentially, you redesign the road so that it is narrower, curvier and gives better access to pedestrians and bikers. The basics of Traffic Calming can be found here:
http://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/CDD/Transportation/TrafficCalming/trcalm_brochure_2000.ashx?la=en
Generally, urban roads that have traffic where it's even possible to move at 50 mph are straight, wide and flat. That is definitely the case with Locust Ave, as seen below.
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0343513,-78.4694989,3a,75y,173.55h,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLC2p-2vz-idXmvJ1TaBg7w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Some suggestions for slowing traffic on this street might include:
- Put curb extensions at the sidewalks to reduce the distance that pedestrians have to walk to cross the street. This also makes the intersections tighter for cars, requiring them to slow down.
- Currently, parking is only on the left side of the street. About every half a block alternate parking between the left and the right sides causing the traffic to have to curve back and forth. This will slow down the traffic.
- Mark the parking with stripes, making the traffic lanes look smaller.
- If there is room, add another bicycle lane to the left side of the street.
Here is an example of traffic calming.
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3652093,-71.0988748,3a,75y,14.17h,59.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssPfDs88GgNpRJgOTW2Z7mA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Although this street is in a more dense urban area (Cambridge, MA) than Locust, it used to look similar to it. All parking was on one side, and there were no curb extensions. Now you can see the tightened intersections and the curvy traffic lanes. Speeds have dropped significantly on this road. It's worth a try.
If someone's disability prevents them from completing the test, it simply means that they cannot be evaluated using this method. It does not affect the research results for the people who can successfully complete the test in any way.
You are correct that we already know that healthier people have a smaller chance of dying. How do you quantify "healthy", however? How do you go beyond, "He kind of ran on a treadmill for a while, so I guess he won't die soon?"
If this research proves correct, then it gives people a powerful new metric for interpreting the results of Cardiac Stress Tests. We already know that heart rate, METs, age and gender are individual predictors or heart health. This research, however, indicates that the relationship between these four may be a more precise predictor of overall heart health than any one of those factors alone. It may also provide non-physicians a way of identifying people with heart problems that need medical attention.
For example, let's say that you go to the gym for the first time, and a personal trainer there routinely gives you a stress test to determine your health fitness prior to determining your exercise plan. By calculating this score, she may be able to quickly determine that you are high-risk for a cardiac event in the next five years. If that's the case, then your personal trainer can recommend that you go to a doctor and get further evaluation. This would be a huge benefit to people with undiagnosed cardiac disease.
The results are calculated following an official medical study called a Cardiac Stress Test. It consists of attaching an ECG machine to a patient and then having them exercise in a very precise, repeatable way. Typically, for patients who can walk or run to their personal maximum heart rate this is done on a treadmill. Some patients cannot run, but they can bike. In that case the test would be performed on a stationary bicycle. If the patient can neither run nor bike, an arm cycle (i.e. bicycle pedals that you twirl with your arms) is used.
The typical treadmill version of the test is called a Bruce Protocol, and it proceeds as follows. The patient walks and then runs on the treadmill as it progresses through several 3 minute intervals. For each successive interval, the speed of the treadmill is increased, and the slope of the ramp is increased (making the patient walk or run up a steeper hill). Based on this speed and slope, we can calculate the METs achieved. The protocol for increasing the difficulty of the exercise is as follows:
Minutes 0-3: 1.7 mph / 10% grade
Minutes 3-6: 2.5 mph / 12 % grade
Minutes 6-9: 3.4 mph / 14% grade
Minutes 9-12: 4.2 mph / 16% grade
Minutes 12-15: 5 mph / 18% grade
Minutes 15-18: 5.5 mph / 20% grade
Minutes 18-21: 6 mph / 22% grade
Only an athlete will be able to finish all seven intervals, as the final interval means that you are running 10 minute miles up a very steep hill. The vast majority of people will stop before the end of the final interval. The test is officially stopped for one of the following reasons:
(a) The patients says that they are exhausted and cannot proceed any longer.
(b) The patient experiences chest pain or shortness of breath.
(c) The patient's ECG changes in such a way that the physiologist running the test determines that it is unsafe to continue.
If you do not perform the test in this way (or some other medically approved way), then you will not get accurate results. For example, if you immediately start with Stage 7, you may be able to sprint for 1 minute, and achieve your maximum heart rate. Unfortunately, you will be overestimating your METs, because during a normal test, you may have had to stop during Stage 3 or Stage 4 with the same heart rate, but at a lower METs rate.
It is also important to note that unless you consider yourself to be completely healthy, it is best to perform this test with an ECG machine and under the supervision of a licensed physiologist. They will stop you, if you have a serious change in your ECG.
What happens when they attempt to hand out the 1,000,000,001th SSN?
The Rapture.
I believe that is projected to happen on the exact same day as the end of the Mayan calendar.
1) Find car you'd like to steal or strip.
2) Social engineer the car to be a part of this "rental agreement".
3) "rent" car using the usual fake ID stuff (or just tell them you're an illegal and they're not allowed to discriminate against you).
4) Drive to steel walled warehouse or just strip the parts you want, after all they have fake ID.
5) Profit!
I am virtually certain GM is not prepared for the security implications of this.
It seems that you don't have a very good idea of how the program works.
First of all, you can't provide fake ID, because to participate as a renter you must present a driver's license to RelayRides. They check with your state's DMV to determine if the license is up to date and if you have a relatively clean driving record before they agree to insure you. Only then will you be able to go on-line and rent someone else's car. It would be very difficult to "fake" this.
GM is simply making OnStar anti-theft protection standard on all of their cars. One feature of this is that the owner can use a smart phone app to unlock the car. So, you must have a valid smartphone account for this to work, again identifying you as the culprit.
If the car is stolen, OnStar's GPS tracking features will be a huge help in locating the car.
I'm not saying that there's no way to spoof the app and make it look like someone else stole the car. I'm just saying, it would take a much more sophisticated approach than you mention.
In the United States, the hospital as a whole is legally responsible for maintaining the privacy of all patient records. You are asking to open a port that has a very high probability of transmitting patient records (for example patient names, appointment schedule time and exam type) to hand-held devices that are taken off hospital premises and frequently lost, stolen or casually discarded when upgraded. iPhones do not have passwords or encryption turned on by default. Calendars are frequently shared between multiple calendar services like Google and Yahoo.
I think it is completely inappropriate for you to provide this service outside of the enterprise environment in the first place. I believe that your IT group is being excessively lenient allowing you to do it at all.
Because if people can't agree on what a word means, it leads to potential for misunderstandings and fraud. I don't think anyone can define "App" in the way that agrees with how Apple, Google and everyone else is using the word.
Let's try this definition: App is short for "Any computer code that, when applied to a general purpose information system, results in a more specialized application of said system." There, an app is any computer program -- big or small -- single hardware platform or multi-tier.
... but will it blend?
Will it blend? - iPhone
A shame that Cameron didn't take a more original story and risk it like Star Wars.
I find it interesting that you should mention this, because I found the parallel between Avatar and Star Wars to be striking. Unlike you, I don't find the plot of the 1977 Star Wars movie to be original at all. It was simply that a farm-boy found a message from a princess who was captured by an evil knight and imprisoned in a dark fortress. With the help of a good knight and a pirate, he frees the princess and destroys the fortress before the dark knight can destroy the village.
That's about the most unoriginal story ever. It's been done over and over again since the middle ages. That's not why I loved Star Wars, however. I loved it because the visual spectacle at the time it was created was unlike anything that I had seen before. (I was only 9 years old in 1977, but still ...) Fighting with laser swords is cool! Fast moving spaceships with rapid fire lasers are cool! It had never been done before. The feeling was electric.
As I was watching Avatar at age 41, I got that same feeling. I felt like I was 9 years old again and seeing something absolutely amazing for the first time. The 3D effects were awkward for about the first 15 minutes of the movie, and then I stopped noticing them. The simply became the experience. The computer animation sequences were ridiculously good -- fantastically detailed. I think you can tell, I loved the movie.
Movies don't always have to be story-telling masterpieces. Sometimes they can just take you out of life for a while and put you on a visual roller-coaster ride. This movie did that more successfully than anything that I've seen in a long, long time.
Yeah, the ParkMagic is a joke. They could just as easily set up the system so that you park, enter your parking space number and press a big red button on the front of the box and a timer starts indicating how long you've parked. You put it in your windshield to let the parking enforcers know that you're paying. When you get back, you press the red button again and only get charged for the amount of time that you were in the space.
If the spot is two-hour parking and your meter reads 2:05, then you get a passing parking enforcer can write you a ticket. If you enter the wrong number for someplace where the parking is cheaper, you can get a ticket. Otherwise, you only pay for what you use.
Instead they make you guess how long you'll be there, knowing that you're either going to guess too much or get a ticket. Come on ... cut us a break.
Driving in MA would actually be nice if we could get rid of all the drivers east of Worcester, everyone from New York, and all the Vermontards.
... because then there would only be about 7 drivers on the roads at any given time.
As always, if you want to protect your keys from being copied, wrap them in tin foil.
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve.
"Since you are all such good customers", he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20". Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his "fair share?" They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
You forgot about the cover charge to get into the bar. It's also figured out based on income, but in this case, it's calculated in the same way that pay-roll tax is and is capped for the folks at the top.
So to start with each person pays (bar tab + cover at door):
# 1 - $0 + $0 = $0
# 2 - $0 + $2 = $2
# 3 - $0 + $4 = $4
# 4 - $0 + $6 = $6
# 5 - $1 + $8 = $9
# 6 - $3 + $10 = $13
# 7 - $7 + $12 = $19
# 8 - $12 + $14 = $26
# 9 - $28 + $14 = $32
# 10 - $59 + $14 = $73
Now, the bar tab goes down and the deductions take place.
# 1 : $0 - $0 = $0 (Still drinks for free.)
# 2 : $2 - $0 = $2 (0% deduction)
# 3 : $4 - $0 = $4 (0% deduction)
# 4 : $6 - $0 = $6 (0% deduction)
# 5 : $9 - $1 = $8 (11.1% deduction)
# 6 : $13 - $1 = $12 (7.7% deduction)
# 7 : $19 - $2 = $17 (10.5% deduction)
# 8 : $26 - $3 = $23 (11.5% deduction)
# 9 : $32 - $4 = $28 (12.5% deduction)
#10 : $73 - $10 = $63 (13.7% deduction)
So, while it seems like the fifth and sixth men are getting the big discount when looking at income tax alone, we can see that in overall tax burden, the rich guys still making out both via actual dollars and by the percentage of tax break that he's receiving.
Once they've busted their asses in several jobs, risking hundreds of thousands of dollars on investments, and earned their first million, they can suddenely be taxed right back to where they started
In 1986, my first job during high school paid me $3.45 an hour. That's the equivalent of about $6.45 an hour today.
In 1991, my first job after college paid me $27,500, or about $40,000 in today's terms.
I promise you that when I make my hypothetical first $1 million, I will not be taxed back to either of those starting points.
"Uncontacted tribes" is a poor choice of phrasing. "Self-isolated tribes" may be better. These people are not stupid, and they know that other people exist. If anyone in that tribe wanted to contact the outside world, they'd just walk over to a logging camp or a park headquarters.
You say that these people should have a choice, and they do. They have specifically decided not to come to meet us, and in fact, they go out of their way to avoid us. We should respect that choice and leave them be.
Where did they think that money was going to come from? That IBM would suddenly have that much extra money to throw around?
I don't have 2007 numbers yet, but here's IBM's reported profits from 2006:
Total Revenue -> $91.424 billion
Total Cost -> $53.129 billion
Gross Profit -> $38.295 billion
Yes, they have that much extra money to throw around.
Source: http://www.ibm.com/investor/financials/index.phtml
Above and beyond this, I can't imagine that Google won't implement an "I agree to allow my anonymized records to be used for medical research" box. People will click it for free out of the goodness of their hearts. Google will then make millions of dollars selling that information to pharmaceutical companies, medical technology vendors and other research organizations.
In medical research, nothing is more valuable than a complete medical history with the actual tests, diagnosis, treatment and outcome.
As Gore's movie points out, the melting of the ice caps will not raise sea level. The melting of the huge landbound glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica, however, will. The estimates given in the movie indicate that if 1/2 of all ice on these two land masses melts, the sea levels will raise 20 feet covering large portions of Florida, Shanghai, and Manhattan among other places.
[sarcasm] Ticket prices rising, movie quality decreasing = fewer ticket sales. Go figure [/sarcasm]
When you adjust for inflation, ticket prices aren't really rising. I remember that movie tickets were $3.00 for adults when Star Wars came out in 1977. At that time the median household income was $13,572. The median household income is now $44,389. That's 3.27 times higher than in 1977. If you apply that to ticket prices, you get $9.81, which is pretty close to ticket prices in most major cities.
This research is not at all worthless. As others have pointed out, the group is not studying human responses, they are studying actual physical and chemical changes that are taking place in the brain. All bones, tissues and organs change rapidly at different points during childhood and adolescence. Frequently these changes are affected greatly by outside stimulus.
By studying the normal function under different stimuli, you lay the groundwork for studying abnormal cases in the future. It could turn out that the changes recorded here will alert us to growth deficiencies that may be associated with neurological disorders such as autism. We may find that certain processes of the brain that are stimulated and developed at this stage of life that, if they could be replicated later, could counteract degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.
Understanding the phyical processes of our bodies we work and grow is rarely useless.