The problem with just having a list is that the police now get to choose which lawyers will be defending representatives (the police could remove a lawyer from the list because he's very good at winning). The whole point of a phone call is that you get to CHOOSE your lawyer.
3000 apartment buildings need new windows, and you think they can be replaced in "a couple of days"? If each building has 100 windows, then it's 300,000 windows to replace. I don't know how you think windows get replaced, or manufactured, but it takes about 1 man-hour to replace a small window (maybe 20 minutes if you don't care about damaging the walls or cleaning up the old window). 300,000 windows = 300,000 man-hours of work. To accomplish that in 2 days would require over 6,000 people to be working on it for 48 continuous hours. And that's not even taking the manufacturing of the windows into account.
This will take months to completely replace the windows.
If your humidity is only 17% with a humidifier running 24/7, you need a better humidifier. I had trouble keeping my place above 15% two years ago during the winter, but then I got a central humidifier and I can now choose any humidity level I want. It has no trouble keeping it even as high as 50%.
I grew up with white-on-black DOS screens. In my recent jobs, I spend a lot of time using command-line terminal windows. For years, I used white-on-black. But, stating about 2 years ago, I switched to black-on-white. I found an immediate relief. It is much easier to stare at and less tiring when viewed for long durations. Maybe there's no biological preference, but I'll let you know that, for me, it's not just about what I'm used to. Black-on-white is easier for me.
How is will-power not enough? The only situation that I can think of where will power would not be enough to lose weight would involve a robot shoving food down your throat. If it's your hand that shovels food into your mouth, then it's your will power that can prevent it. There are many medical conditions that make it more difficult to lose weight, but no matter what condition you have, if you eat less than you burn, you WILL LOSE WEIGHT! (unless someone changed the laws of thermodynamics when I wasn't looking).
Electricity is inexpensive in Quebec, almost half the rate that I pay over here in Ontario. But even at half the rate, there's no way that electric heating is cheaper than natural gas heating. I calculated, years ago, that it would be 4 to 6 times more expensive for me to heat my place with electricity. So, even at half the rate, electricity would still be 2 to 3 times more expensive than natural gas.
Of course, this all depends on the availability and price of natural gas, which I've assumed is flat across Canada.
But what is a "corporation"? If they enacted the tax you speak of, they would just transfer the money to an individual in another country. You would basically have to tax *all* money transfers out of the country (person-to-person included).
Why are you running Win7? I'm running XP at home and I don't see any reasons for me to upgrade. I don't have any disks >2T, I don't have an SSD, and I don't have more than 4G of RAM. Most home users don't need Win7. They'd be happy with XP.
They will upgrade for the same reason you are running Win7: because it probably shipped on your new computer.
All electric heaters are 100% efficient. Now, sometimes, some of the energy gets (temporarily) stuck as visible light, or sound or something else, but it all, eventually ends up as heat. It's just as efficient to heat your house with incandescent light bulbs (or even compact florescent light bulbs) as traditional baseboard heaters -- as long as you keep your curtains shut.
My fridge costs $2400 in Canada. I got it in the US for $1000. I had to rent a truck and drive down to the US to pick it up and pay tax at the board and it was still $1000 (41.7%) cheaper in the US. And you can't even claim warranty issues, because it is the exact same warranty (even valid in Canada).
You seem to have forgotten one essential part. Software. You can't just throw hardware together and have it magically know what you want it to do. It probably took man-years to write the software in this thing.
If you *really* think you can do it for $200, I would suggest that you do it. This is not an iPhone. The market for this type of thing is not in the millions of units. It's in the thousands, which is another reason why they mark it up so much. Do you really think it costs them $1300 to make this thing? I suspect it's closer to $300 and then $1000 in profit to pay for the development costs.
The universe is expanding at the exact speed of light at it's "edge" (at least the edge we can just barely not see). It's expansion appears to slow on objects closer to us. So this light has been trying to travel across space as it was expanding. The distances it had to travel kept expanding and it eventually reached us after traveling for 12.7B light years (from our perspective).
If you remove all selection pressures then it is random: yes. Our current genetic makeup is NOT random, therefore if we remove all (or most) selective pressures, we will become MORE random. That change is a form of evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift .
I'm saying that lions eat slow zebras, so zebras are generally fast. If you removed all lions, SOME of the zebras would lose their speed -- just by chance. And those zebras would not be eaten, therefore they would have children that would also be slow. I'm not saying that all zebras would become slow, or that all people would flip heads. I'm saying that SOME would be slow, and that is a form of evolution.
The same is happening to humans. We can effectively cure poor eye sight, so there is no longer any selective pressure to avoid it. It is (probably) becoming more popular in our collective gene pool because people with poor eye sight no longer die as young as they used to. I'm NOT saying everyone will end up with poor vision, I'm only saying that the percentage with poor vision will increase, and that is evolution.
That's not true. Even if the selection itself is completely random (which it's not), then some genes will by chance become more popular. Regardless, the people that end up with no children have heritable traits. They are either socially awkward or highly driven in work/business. I'm sure those are at least partially supported by genes.
A large portion of the population has no children at all. The average number of children may have gone down (along with the standard deviation of family size), but if you have some of the population having children and some not, that's about as selective as you can get.
Any trend can look flat with a sufficiently large y-range. Why is y-range on that char -65 to -25 when the data only varies between -51 and -48? I bet it would be more obvious if the range was -55 to -45.
Welcome to the past, where everything is done manually! People are not interested in doing things in person, even important things. [Americans] want to bank online, have sex online, delouse their children online, purchase a home online, elect their officials online and everything else worth doing. Doing things is for suckers, but clicking a web-page and having something done FOR you is for winners.
If you spill a *little* gasoline, it's not a big deal, to the person pumping the gas. Yes, I'm sure that many people are horribly burned from pumping gasoline while trying to light a cigarette every year, and you are never going to have a perfect system. But I could pretty easily (if I wanted to), go to a gas station, accidentally pump gas all over my pants and walk away uninjured, assuming I didn't do something stupid afterwards like try to dry myself off by a campfire. But if I tried the same thing with a high capacity charging cable, I'm pretty sure my testicles would pop like corn and I wouldn't be walking anywhere.
If you spill a little gasoline when filling your tank, it's not a big deal. If you spill a little electricity when charging your battery, it's more of a deal.
Think of your grandma trying to plug a giant 300A cable into her car, or someone trying to do it while on his phone and drinking a cup of coffee.
Are you kidding? "simple UI issue"? Yes, the *source* of the issue is a simple mistake (we think), but the result is a bias towards certain candidates. This is not the type of UI problem I would expect in any program like this. The types of problem I would expect are: "The fonts are hard to read" or "Colour-blind people can't read this".
Any issue that causes a voting bias is not something I expect. The order of candidates should be randomized for each vote anyway, that way you avoid problems with people just picking the first/last candidate (especially if they are not familiar or don't recognize any names). That would have avoided this problem almost entirely.
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The problem with just having a list is that the police now get to choose which lawyers will be defending representatives (the police could remove a lawyer from the list because he's very good at winning). The whole point of a phone call is that you get to CHOOSE your lawyer.
3000 apartment buildings need new windows, and you think they can be replaced in "a couple of days"? If each building has 100 windows, then it's 300,000 windows to replace. I don't know how you think windows get replaced, or manufactured, but it takes about 1 man-hour to replace a small window (maybe 20 minutes if you don't care about damaging the walls or cleaning up the old window). 300,000 windows = 300,000 man-hours of work. To accomplish that in 2 days would require over 6,000 people to be working on it for 48 continuous hours. And that's not even taking the manufacturing of the windows into account. This will take months to completely replace the windows.
Citation please. How do you know that the vast majority of CO2 production is not man-made?
This article says 1 billion years, but we will run out of atmospheric carbon dioxide long before that. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=908
If your humidity is only 17% with a humidifier running 24/7, you need a better humidifier. I had trouble keeping my place above 15% two years ago during the winter, but then I got a central humidifier and I can now choose any humidity level I want. It has no trouble keeping it even as high as 50%.
I grew up with white-on-black DOS screens. In my recent jobs, I spend a lot of time using command-line terminal windows. For years, I used white-on-black. But, stating about 2 years ago, I switched to black-on-white. I found an immediate relief. It is much easier to stare at and less tiring when viewed for long durations. Maybe there's no biological preference, but I'll let you know that, for me, it's not just about what I'm used to. Black-on-white is easier for me.
How is will-power not enough? The only situation that I can think of where will power would not be enough to lose weight would involve a robot shoving food down your throat. If it's your hand that shovels food into your mouth, then it's your will power that can prevent it. There are many medical conditions that make it more difficult to lose weight, but no matter what condition you have, if you eat less than you burn, you WILL LOSE WEIGHT! (unless someone changed the laws of thermodynamics when I wasn't looking).
Electricity is inexpensive in Quebec, almost half the rate that I pay over here in Ontario. But even at half the rate, there's no way that electric heating is cheaper than natural gas heating. I calculated, years ago, that it would be 4 to 6 times more expensive for me to heat my place with electricity. So, even at half the rate, electricity would still be 2 to 3 times more expensive than natural gas. Of course, this all depends on the availability and price of natural gas, which I've assumed is flat across Canada.
But what is a "corporation"? If they enacted the tax you speak of, they would just transfer the money to an individual in another country. You would basically have to tax *all* money transfers out of the country (person-to-person included).
Why are you running Win7? I'm running XP at home and I don't see any reasons for me to upgrade. I don't have any disks >2T, I don't have an SSD, and I don't have more than 4G of RAM. Most home users don't need Win7. They'd be happy with XP. They will upgrade for the same reason you are running Win7: because it probably shipped on your new computer.
Do you consider cooking yourself "even better"?
All electric heaters are 100% efficient. Now, sometimes, some of the energy gets (temporarily) stuck as visible light, or sound or something else, but it all, eventually ends up as heat. It's just as efficient to heat your house with incandescent light bulbs (or even compact florescent light bulbs) as traditional baseboard heaters -- as long as you keep your curtains shut.
My fridge costs $2400 in Canada. I got it in the US for $1000. I had to rent a truck and drive down to the US to pick it up and pay tax at the board and it was still $1000 (41.7%) cheaper in the US. And you can't even claim warranty issues, because it is the exact same warranty (even valid in Canada).
You seem to have forgotten one essential part. Software. You can't just throw hardware together and have it magically know what you want it to do. It probably took man-years to write the software in this thing. If you *really* think you can do it for $200, I would suggest that you do it. This is not an iPhone. The market for this type of thing is not in the millions of units. It's in the thousands, which is another reason why they mark it up so much. Do you really think it costs them $1300 to make this thing? I suspect it's closer to $300 and then $1000 in profit to pay for the development costs.
The universe is expanding at the exact speed of light at it's "edge" (at least the edge we can just barely not see). It's expansion appears to slow on objects closer to us. So this light has been trying to travel across space as it was expanding. The distances it had to travel kept expanding and it eventually reached us after traveling for 12.7B light years (from our perspective).
If you remove all selection pressures then it is random: yes. Our current genetic makeup is NOT random, therefore if we remove all (or most) selective pressures, we will become MORE random. That change is a form of evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift . I'm saying that lions eat slow zebras, so zebras are generally fast. If you removed all lions, SOME of the zebras would lose their speed -- just by chance. And those zebras would not be eaten, therefore they would have children that would also be slow. I'm not saying that all zebras would become slow, or that all people would flip heads. I'm saying that SOME would be slow, and that is a form of evolution. The same is happening to humans. We can effectively cure poor eye sight, so there is no longer any selective pressure to avoid it. It is (probably) becoming more popular in our collective gene pool because people with poor eye sight no longer die as young as they used to. I'm NOT saying everyone will end up with poor vision, I'm only saying that the percentage with poor vision will increase, and that is evolution.
That's not true. Even if the selection itself is completely random (which it's not), then some genes will by chance become more popular. Regardless, the people that end up with no children have heritable traits. They are either socially awkward or highly driven in work/business. I'm sure those are at least partially supported by genes.
A large portion of the population has no children at all. The average number of children may have gone down (along with the standard deviation of family size), but if you have some of the population having children and some not, that's about as selective as you can get.
[...] the Deepwater Horizon spill was stopped in a few short months. [...]
I'm pretty sure they were normal-duration months.
Any trend can look flat with a sufficiently large y-range. Why is y-range on that char -65 to -25 when the data only varies between -51 and -48? I bet it would be more obvious if the range was -55 to -45.
Welcome to the past, where everything is done manually! People are not interested in doing things in person, even important things. [Americans] want to bank online, have sex online, delouse their children online, purchase a home online, elect their officials online and everything else worth doing. Doing things is for suckers, but clicking a web-page and having something done FOR you is for winners.
If you spill a *little* gasoline, it's not a big deal, to the person pumping the gas. Yes, I'm sure that many people are horribly burned from pumping gasoline while trying to light a cigarette every year, and you are never going to have a perfect system. But I could pretty easily (if I wanted to), go to a gas station, accidentally pump gas all over my pants and walk away uninjured, assuming I didn't do something stupid afterwards like try to dry myself off by a campfire. But if I tried the same thing with a high capacity charging cable, I'm pretty sure my testicles would pop like corn and I wouldn't be walking anywhere.
If you spill a little gasoline when filling your tank, it's not a big deal. If you spill a little electricity when charging your battery, it's more of a deal. Think of your grandma trying to plug a giant 300A cable into her car, or someone trying to do it while on his phone and drinking a cup of coffee.
Well, in C, constants must be evaluable at compile time. In C++, they must only be evaluable at run time.
Are you kidding? "simple UI issue"? Yes, the *source* of the issue is a simple mistake (we think), but the result is a bias towards certain candidates. This is not the type of UI problem I would expect in any program like this. The types of problem I would expect are: "The fonts are hard to read" or "Colour-blind people can't read this". Any issue that causes a voting bias is not something I expect. The order of candidates should be randomized for each vote anyway, that way you avoid problems with people just picking the first/last candidate (especially if they are not familiar or don't recognize any names). That would have avoided this problem almost entirely.