Anything that gets this close to the Earth probably has a chance of hitting the moon.
So, what happens to all the dust that's kicked up? You often hear about the effects of dust if such an object hits Earth, but isn't there a risk of moon dust getting kicked up in orbit around Earth and cooling Earth?
Technically, he's just reinjecting his capital into the economy. Fiscally speaking, this is more responsible than tucking the cash away under your pillow.
I think this is wrong for two reasons:
#1 Money spent is a demand on the productive capacity of the economy. It represents a burden. Many people are, of course, willing to accept this burden because they get to put a demand on other's labor later on to obtain what they want. But it still represents a burden. The question is, does this added burden produce something good?
#2 The utility function of money usually isn't linear. X amount of money often has less than half the utility of 2*X amount of money.
Think about the task of starting a business, like a dry cleaning store for example. Equipment might cost you $100,000. Now $100,000 concentrated in the hands of one person will buy the needed equipment.
Now split that $100,000 among 100 people. You still have a total of $100,000 but is it as useful?
Now combine these two ideas. The parent poster is putting a demand on the economy to produce video games (good use of labor?) and at the same time getting less for his money because his spends it in small amounts.
There comes a point in any losing battle where you cut your losses, step back, and re-evaluate your situation. We passed that point long ago.
Right.
There was a time when you could actually put something out for sale, unattended on a table, next to a jar, and expect people to take the item and add money to the jar.
It was called the honor system.
I think what we have now is the "you make it, I take it" system.
The congressmen that are taking money directly from the entertainment industry as campaign donations (which are nothing more than loosely veiled bribes) need to be brought to task. Someone putting a bigger harddrive in an X-Box should not be a crime unto itself. That's the kind of nonsense you get when you let corrupt companies directly fund corrupt politicians.
Don't blame this on bribery. There are legitimate arguements for these laws.
You may not like them, but that doesn't mean those that disagree with you have been "bought off".
In other news, federal authorities raided and destroyed core Internet routers citing that the hardware was facilitating piracy.
In all seriousness, Internet hardware providers have financially benifited from the theft of copyrighted material.
For some users, paying for the hardware means getting the content for "free". They'd never have bought broadband connections if not for the warez and music and other files.
In effect, the hardware people don't produce the content but are paid for it by the users.
The worst part of the whole thing is that China is a capitalist's dream, cheap labor, who have no chance to redress grievances. No wonder we can't compete.
It is interesting that capitalism, not democracy, seems to be responsible for the new prosperity in China.
To those who say that economic capitalism leads to democracy, we'll just have to wait and see. I'm not holding my breath.
I think it will happen.
People are much less uptight when they have a lot of the things economic prosperity offers and I think this attitude will eventually be reflected in the leadership.
There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras - and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper
Afterall, their students appear to be performing better than those in the USA.
Given the simple formula offered by the education establishment, student performance = money spent * k, its obvious we're spending much less than Poland or Latvia.
China demonstrates that well; for most of the past half-century it was basically communist and totalitarian; now it is rapidly moving towards capitalism, but the totalitarianism shows few signs of abating, unfortunately.
Looks like they're proving that capitalism, not democracy, is the source of prosperity.
It wasnt lack of regulation that led to the AT&T breakup - it was lack of competition, eg AT&T was a monopoly, becuase land-based copper is inherently a geographic monopoly, and AT&T just bought up all the small companies.
Bzzt, yourself.
One of the main reasons AT&T became a monopoly was because telecommunications were nationalized during WW1 for "nation security reasons".
Claims of "natural monopoly" were used not as a description of the situtation of phone service but to actually justify the regulatory elimination of competition in the name of greater efficiency.
Slashdot Mirror
What a crock of propaganda.
The United States is 3rd in total internet penetration rate (68.8%), only behind Sweden(74.6%) and Hong Kong(72.5%).France, Portugal, and Estonia, aren't even in the top 25.
Pathetic, and by your logic much less informed than USAians. Europeans should be ashamed.
Oh sure. Maybe broadband is cheaper some places. Or more people have it in other places. Big deal. Many Americans seem happy with modems.
1 Sweden 74.6 %
6,722,576
9,010,700
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
2 Hong Kong 72.5 %
4,878,713
6,727,900
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
3 United States 68.8 %
201,661,159
293,271,500
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
4 Iceland 66.6 %
195,000
292,800
ITU - Dec./03
5 Netherlands 66.5 %
10,806,328
16,254,900
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
6 Australia 65.9 %
13,359,821
20,275,700
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
7 Canada 64.2 %
20,450,000
31,846,900
C.I.Almanac - Dec/03
8 Switzerland 63.5 %
4,432,190
7,433,000
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
9 Denmark 62.5 %
3,375,850
5,397,600
Nielsen//NR June/02
10 Korea, (South) 62.4 %
30,670,000
49,131,700
KRNIC - July/04
Am I seeing this right?
It looks like it's up to a 4, now.
Anything that gets this close to the Earth probably has a chance of hitting the moon.
So, what happens to all the dust that's kicked up? You often hear about the effects of dust if such an object hits Earth, but isn't there a risk of moon dust getting kicked up in orbit around Earth and cooling Earth?
I wish it were different.
Clever kids get bored out of their minds doing "busy-work", but that's what you're graded on.
Welcome to socialized education.
as a defense against the possibility of rapid cooling.
It would be irresponsible not to, wouldn't it?
Unfortunately this expensive, worthless boondoggle will only continue. Meanwhile, the cost of university tuition is skyrocketing.
Better would be to say the price is skyrocketing.
Why? Because the more money that is made available, the more money the educational system will charge for its services.
Give every student another $1000 and Universities will simply raise prices to match.
The time it takes for a signal to propagate down a wire is now much more important than it used to be.
A 24% increase in transistor speed is not going to instantly create a 24% faster processor.
Slow wires (relative to transistor speeds) will soon dominate.
I never really understood why "Native American" was considered a PC term.
I mean it wasn't America until the West made it America.
Would you prefer "stone-age peoples of North America"?
Software patents do hinder innovation.
No, what they hinder is other people using those ideas to make money.
The fact that the patent is publicly viewable means you get to see how it's done and build on it.
You may not be able to use it for free, but that doesn't stop the innovation.
Technically, he's just reinjecting his capital into the economy. Fiscally speaking, this is more responsible than tucking the cash away under your pillow.
I think this is wrong for two reasons:
#1 Money spent is a demand on the productive capacity of the economy. It represents a burden. Many people are, of course, willing to accept this burden because they get to put a demand on other's labor later on to obtain what they want. But it still represents a burden. The question is, does this added burden produce something good?
#2 The utility function of money usually isn't linear. X amount of money often has less than half the utility of 2*X amount of money.
Think about the task of starting a business, like a dry cleaning store for example. Equipment might cost you $100,000. Now $100,000 concentrated in the hands of one person will buy the needed equipment.
Now split that $100,000 among 100 people. You still have a total of $100,000 but is it as useful?
Now combine these two ideas. The parent poster is putting a demand on the economy to produce video games (good use of labor?) and at the same time getting less for his money because his spends it in small amounts.
I'm really starting to think there should be an alternative.
Slashdot seems to be making some money.
Maybe there's room for some competition.
There comes a point in any losing battle where you cut your losses, step back, and re-evaluate your situation. We passed that point long ago.
Right.
There was a time when you could actually put something out for sale, unattended on a table, next to a jar, and expect people to take the item and add money to the jar.
It was called the honor system.
I think what we have now is the "you make it, I take it" system.
The congressmen that are taking money directly from the entertainment industry as campaign donations (which are nothing more than loosely veiled bribes) need to be brought to task. Someone putting a bigger harddrive in an X-Box should not be a crime unto itself. That's the kind of nonsense you get when you let corrupt companies directly fund corrupt politicians.
Don't blame this on bribery. There are legitimate arguements for these laws.
You may not like them, but that doesn't mean those that disagree with you have been "bought off".
In other news, federal authorities raided and destroyed core Internet routers citing that the hardware was facilitating piracy.
In all seriousness, Internet hardware providers have financially benifited from the theft of copyrighted material.
For some users, paying for the hardware means getting the content for "free". They'd never have bought broadband connections if not for the warez and music and other files.
In effect, the hardware people don't produce the content but are paid for it by the users.
As a result of this arrest, I'll feel a little bit safer tonight when I go to sleep.
And as a programmer, I feel more likely to be paid for my work.
Just what kind of work do you do?
Maybe I should blow off the theft of your services or the goods you produced.
That's exactly what it is; all rights belong only to the people as a whole, not to the individual person.
That doesn't make sense.
What is "the people as a whole"?
Describe this thing to me and how rights belong to it rather than to individuals.
The worst part of the whole thing is that China is a capitalist's dream, cheap labor, who have no chance to redress grievances. No wonder we can't compete.
It is interesting that capitalism, not democracy, seems to be responsible for the new prosperity in China.
To those who say that economic capitalism leads to democracy, we'll just have to wait and see. I'm not holding my breath.
I think it will happen.
People are much less uptight when they have a lot of the things economic prosperity offers and I think this attitude will eventually be reflected in the leadership.
Your right, no one in the US ever gets pissed off about things like the confederate flag or some other separatists nonsense.
There's a big difference between people getting angry about a symbol and people throwing you in jail.
Since you seem to know a bit about Texas culture, why don't more people support division of Texas into 5 states?
That would generally increase your political power by adding 8 senators and some more reps.
http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm
There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras - and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper
Afterall, their students appear to be performing better than those in the USA.
Given the simple formula offered by the education establishment, student performance = money spent * k, its obvious we're spending much less than Poland or Latvia.
China demonstrates that well; for most of the past half-century it was basically communist and totalitarian; now it is rapidly moving towards capitalism, but the totalitarianism shows few signs of abating, unfortunately.
Looks like they're proving that capitalism, not democracy, is the source of prosperity.
No.
Yes.
Cheaper isn't better. It's just cheaper. Business is about more than earnings.
Cheaper (assuming similar quality) means more production overall and that is better.
That's where much of the savings go -- to purchase additional products and services.
The net effect is an overall increase in economic production.
Sure, the people making big money don't like making less, but at the same time, consumers get less for their money by paying, indirectly, large wages.
If someone died as a result of not having 911 services, these guys could be in even bigger trouble.
It wasnt lack of regulation that led to the AT&T breakup - it was lack of competition, eg AT&T was a monopoly, becuase land-based copper is inherently a geographic monopoly, and AT&T just bought up all the small companies.
.
Bzzt, yourself.
One of the main reasons AT&T became a monopoly was because telecommunications were nationalized during WW1 for "nation security reasons".
Claims of "natural monopoly" were used not as a description of the situtation of phone service but to actually justify the regulatory elimination of competition in the name of greater efficiency.
Read UNNATURAL MONOPOLY: CRITICAL MOMENTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BELL SYSTEM MONOPOLY