I'm not really seeing where government control would change that. If they were quicker to pull the trigger and cut power to 100,000 homes, we'd just be seeing that every 3 months as soon as anything trivial went wrong. And because it's the government, there's nothing you can do about it. No, I'm not ready to give up on an industry that, so far, is so exceptionally reliable that most people are without electricity for maybe 5 hours out of the year. We get excited just for approaching that level of reliability in computers.
And don't forget how the cheap energy they produce literally saves lives.
Consider the heat-wave in Europe that killed thousands. The mean summer temperature in Paris is the same as Detroit, Chicago, and Denver and when heat-waves strike these cities, very few lives are lost.
Why? Because cheap energy makes things like air-conditioning affordable and people don't die. In places like France, it's just too expensive to have air-conditioning.
How about simply abolishing the corporate income tax completely?
It will never happen because people believe "corporate income" or "corporate profits" are the same thing as CEO or shareholder income or profits.
Of course they are completely different things, but it doesn't matter. People will continue to be confused.
How often do people complain about some corporation not paying any income tax? Plenty. Why, because they really believe that some REAL PERSON is getting away without paying their fair share.
There are plenty of good economic arguements for abolishing the tax, but they are no match for ignorance.
People think many companies are rolling in money. Well, things are much tougher than people generally believe and it looks like things might get even tougher down the road.
I'm not saying what they're are doing is understandable. It absolutely is not. But the way the current business climate is, workers need to more vigilant than ever. The tougher things get, the more desparate businesses will be to survive, and if that means screwing you instead of going out of business, believe me, they will screw you.
When business is good, workers generally get treated better. Well, guess what, business ain't good right now.
If power producers are making so much money, you'd think outside investors would be funding the building of more plants, so that they can get a piece of that big pie.
Why must the distribution be a normal distribution? Are the employees at the company random selections from the population at large? Of course not.
I would lobby to have the distribution changed. You're not dealing with random people. You're dealing with people that are mostly exceptional when compared to the overall population. You already have a biased sample. The distribution used should reflect this.
True, the soviet union wasn't in a perpetual boom, but its collapse had more to do with its social policies (dictatorship) than with its economic ones.
Economic policy is part of social policy and it DID play an important part in the collapse.
Let me direct you to one of the minor players in the fall of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. He had this to say in an interview:
Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can't resolve the problem of women's pantyhose. There's no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government. And so our people were already worked up, and that is why the dissident movement occurred.
So, how did you get it so wrong? I really want to know where you got the idea that economics was a minor part of the collapse. Seriously. Was it predjudice, mis-information, or what?
The government's purpose is whatever its citizens decide it should be.
Whoa there. The US may be part democracy but equally important is it's emphasis on individual rights. We all don't have to go along with what the majority wishes.
There are appropriate limits to democracy. For more information, see the bill of rights.
No, Any type of government that falls in bad favor with the U.S is in for a tough ride. We have the economic power to sanction any country (Including capitalist countries) into the ground. Our economic power should be just as respected as our military power.
Yeah, but we only restrict ourselves from trading with that country. People of other countries are free to continue trading with Cuba, Canadians, for example.
The U.S. was the only industrialized nation that was untouched by WWI and WWII. The aftermath of WWII combined with our amazing wealth of natural resources left us in a "Winner takes all Position."
Not really. WWII was very expensive for the US. And after essentially paying for the allies' weapons and contributing 500,000 dead to the cause, we then went on to pay for the rebuilding of Europe. The US was hardly untouched.
We are very fortunate that we have a wealth of natural resources and that we were geographically isolated from those wars. While others were rebuilding their cities from rubble we were able to sieze the oppurtunity to expand.
As to the "amazing wealth of natural resources", you should take a look at what resources the former USSR had access to:
(from http://countrystudies.us/russia/59.htm)
"Russia is one of the world's richest countries in raw materials, many of which are significant inputs for an industrial economy. Russia accounts for around 20 percent of the world's production of oil and natural gas and possesses large reserves of both fuels. This abundance has made Russia virtually self-sufficient in energy and a large-scale exporter of fuels. Oil and gas were primary hard-currency earners for the Soviet Union, and they remain so for the Russian Federation. Russia also is self-sufficient in nearly all major industrial raw materials and has at least some reserves of every industrially valuable nonfuel mineral--even after the productive mines of Ukraine, Kazakstan, and Uzbekistan no longer were directly accessible. Tin, tungsten, bauxite, and mercury were among the few natural materials imported in the Soviet period. Russia possesses rich reserves of iron ore, manganese, chromium, nickel, platinum, titanium, copper, tin, lead, tungsten, diamonds, phosphates, and gold, and the forests of Siberia contain an estimated one-fifth of the world's timber, mainly conifers.
The iron ore deposits of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, close to the Ukrainian border in the southwest, are believed to contain one-sixth of the world's total reserves. Intensive exploitation began there in the 1950s. Other large iron ore deposits are located in the Kola Peninsula, Karelia, south-central Siberia, and the Far East. The largest copper deposits are located in the Kola Peninsula and the Urals, and lead and zinc are found in North Ossetia."
The USSR also had access to plenty of farm land, too. In fact, under the Czars, Russia was an exporter of food. After the communism and the forced collectivization of the farms (about 12 million dead, there) they became importers of food.
Don't fall into the mindset that Capatalism is infallable. I enjoy our society and quality of life. However, we must be realistic. All known forms of government can falter. Capatalism is succesful because the environment is favorable. Lets hope we can adapt when the wind changes. Remember, Capatilsm != Democracy and Freedom.
Capitalism is successful for a lot of reasons beyond just a favorable environment.
You should also remember that Democracy != Freedom. At best, it means freedom for the majority.
Every major Communist country has also been subject to US embargo's and sactions. It's pretty hard to prosper when you can't trade. I think Cuba would be doing very well if it wasn't economically sactioned by the U.S.
What you're really saying is that communism can't function on it's own, while capitalism can.
I actually had a 6th grade class where the students were asked to bring in ingredients labels from various food products.
The teacher ranted aboout how all those evil corporations were putting mysterious chemicals in our food, like niacin, riboflavin, and citric acid! Oh no!
When I saw Intel was doing this I immediately thought "that's the end of Moore's" law. Intel has been trying to win the clock rate race for years. But, consider there newest Pentium, Prescott. This chip now has a 31 stage pipeline and is built for high clock rates. Yet, it still is clocked at less than 3.2 Ghz -- the highest speed of the older Northwood. Why is this? Even the earliest Pentium 4s were able to greatly out-clock the pentium III's when they first came out. They weren't faster overall, but did have higher clock rates than the PIII. But now we have the 31 stage Prescott and the about same clock rate.
If Intel thought it could keep bumping the clock rate up, they wouldn't move to something like AMD's performance rating. Yet here we are.
I'm looking for a theory that says the earth was a warmer place with most of that fossil fuel carbon still on the surface (where we're presently putting it again, one study observed plants are taking up the extra carbondioxide in the air, what's the long term impact of that?) As the carbon became buried (ever think about how much green stuff it took to make pertroleum deposits or coal seams?) the food changed and those at the bottom of the chain adapted or perished.
So you're saying that, basically, as carbon was drawn out of the atmosphere and put into what are now coal seams and oil fields, plant productivity was reduced. This reduction made food less available for dinosaurs and so they perished. Interesting theory.
There have been studies showing that many plants are CO2 limited. When CO2 is increased, plant biomass increases greatly. Conversely, the less CO2 available, the less productive the plants are.
Don't help your fellow man, it's a screw everyone before they screw you world.
The only thing you need to measure yourself with is money. If you do something and don't make money from it, you're a failure.
Most people get their money BECAUSE they have helped their fellow man. People don't just give up their money for nothing. You've got to do something for them to get it.
The money is just a promise that those they helped will, at some time in the future, help them.
Here are some more ideas (with graphs)
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This site includes a number of ideas for reducing that energy bill, including zoned heating/cooling. There are several interesting real-time graphs of current energy use.
I found the site while searching for information on heat pump water heaters. One example graph they give shows the heat pump water heater using less than half the energy as resistive heating.
If installed properly, a heat pump water heater will also help air-condition your house. A good place to put ducts is in the kitchen, where the waste heat from cooking can be removed and used to heat water. Ideally, the returned cooled air can be directed at your refrigerator's condenser coils for increased efficiency.
If Congress adopts the FCC's recommendations, it will loosen the stranglehold that companies like ClearChannel have on the airwaves.
This statement seems a bit backwards to me.
It seems congress has had a stranglehold on the airwaves.
Who is it that actually stops you from speaking, er, broadcasting over the airwaves? It isn't ClearChannel. It's government authorities.
It's shocking to me that a country that values free speach so much can put so many restrictions on communication.
If radio had been known of during the crafting of the bill of rights, the first amendment would have no doubt included freedom of the airwaves as well as the press.
I mean, I've been doing C for almost 20 years. One of the first lessons I learned --And not for 'security' so much as crash free programs-- was not to do such things.
I mean, holy crap, it's too damn simple to see the bug. What kindof idiots do they have working at MS?
Wait a second: "too damn simple to see"? Ok, so I've only been coding in C for 10 years, but seriously, at what point did you start actually checking for integer overflow in your code?
I wouldn't call them idiots that did this. The primary cause, IMO, is the semantic difference between what we think of as integers in the real world and how C actually treats them. That distance is huge.
All kinds of rules break down. If a>0 and b>0, a+b isn't necessarily >0.
Now suppose you try to be mathematically consistant and claim C just uses some set of ints Z_n. What do you do about multiplicative inverses? Suppose you hypothetically have 4-bit ints. Do you now make 7/3 = 13 mod 16, for example? Do you think programmers will assume division works that way?
What about the case when you are using even numbers? They have no multiplicative inverse when n is a power of 2, so division isn't even defined for that case.
Now, I agree the bug should have been caught. Hell, all bugs SHOULD be caught. But calling these guys idiots is letting programming language designers off the hook.
How about a jammer for wreckless drivers or loud bassers?
Inappropriate cell phone use is just another example of people not giving a damn about those around them.
I say screw-em. If they won't care about me, I don't care about them.
It's really too bad. It should be obvious to everyone that the logical conclusion of all this will be social friction making people's lives more miserable in the end.
I am way too lazy to think it up or write it out, but the OR is unnecessary. All logical gates can be constructed out of XOR gates. It is champion of all the gates.
Actually, it's not possible to create all gates with XOR gates.
Now if you can use both XOR and something else like NAND or NOR or AND or OR, then you have a complete basis.
Of course, just NAND or just NORs will also let you build all the other gates. ANDs or ORs by themselves won't do it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the most primitive CMOS gate a NAND gate? So I highly doubt you would make AND out of and XOR gate [XOR being the more costly of the three].
The most primative gate is the inverter. It only takes two transistors. The NAND gate takes 4.
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I'm not really seeing where government control would change that. If they were quicker to pull the trigger and cut power to 100,000 homes, we'd just be seeing that every 3 months as soon as anything trivial went wrong. And because it's the government, there's nothing you can do about it.
No, I'm not ready to give up on an industry that, so far, is so exceptionally reliable that most people are without electricity for maybe 5 hours out of the year. We get excited just for approaching that level of reliability in computers.
And don't forget how the cheap energy they produce literally saves lives.
Consider the heat-wave in Europe that killed thousands. The mean summer temperature in Paris is the same as Detroit, Chicago, and Denver and when heat-waves strike these cities, very few lives are lost.
Why? Because cheap energy makes things like air-conditioning affordable and people don't die. In places like France, it's just too expensive to have air-conditioning.
How about simply abolishing the corporate income tax completely?
It will never happen because people believe "corporate income" or "corporate profits" are the same thing as CEO or shareholder income or profits.
Of course they are completely different things, but it doesn't matter. People will continue to be confused.
How often do people complain about some corporation not paying any income tax? Plenty. Why, because they really believe that some REAL PERSON is getting away without paying their fair share.
There are plenty of good economic arguements for abolishing the tax, but they are no match for ignorance.
People think many companies are rolling in money. Well, things are much tougher than people generally believe and it looks like things might get even tougher down the road.
I'm not saying what they're are doing is understandable. It absolutely is not. But the way the current business climate is, workers need to more vigilant than ever. The tougher things get, the more desparate businesses will be to survive, and if that means screwing you instead of going out of business, believe me, they will screw you.
When business is good, workers generally get treated better. Well, guess what, business ain't good right now.
The dividend yield for publically traded companies of the S&P 500 is suggestive of how tough things are. It recently hit a record low of 1.5%
If power producers are making so much money, you'd think outside investors would be funding the building of more plants, so that they can get a piece of that big pie.
But they are not. So, why are they holding back?
Why must the distribution be a normal distribution? Are the employees at the company random selections from the population at large? Of course not.
I would lobby to have the distribution changed. You're not dealing with random people. You're dealing with people that are mostly exceptional when compared to the overall population. You already have a biased sample. The distribution used should reflect this.
True, the soviet union wasn't in a perpetual boom, but its collapse had more to do with its social policies (dictatorship) than with its economic ones.
Economic policy is part of social policy and it DID play an important part in the collapse.
Let me direct you to one of the minor players in the fall of the Soviet Union,
Mikhail Gorbachev. He had this to say in an interview:
Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can't resolve the problem of women's pantyhose. There's no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government. And so our people were already worked up, and that is why the dissident movement occurred.
So, how did you get it so wrong? I really want to know where you got the idea that economics was a minor part of the collapse. Seriously. Was it predjudice, mis-information, or what?
Most of the South Atlantic is actually cooler than average, so it seems unlikely that global warming is to blame.
The US is a democracy.
The government's purpose is whatever its citizens decide it should be.
Whoa there. The US may be part democracy but equally important is it's emphasis on individual rights. We all don't have to go along with what the majority wishes.
There are appropriate limits to democracy. For more information, see the bill of rights.
No, Any type of government that falls in bad favor with the U.S is in for a tough ride. We have the economic power to sanction any country (Including capitalist countries) into the ground. Our economic power should be just as respected as our military power.
Yeah, but we only restrict ourselves from trading with that country. People of other countries are free to continue trading with Cuba, Canadians, for example.
The U.S. was the only industrialized nation that was untouched by WWI and WWII. The aftermath of WWII combined with our amazing wealth of natural resources left us in a "Winner takes all Position."
Not really. WWII was very expensive for the US. And after essentially paying for the allies' weapons and contributing 500,000 dead to the cause, we then went on to pay for the rebuilding of Europe. The US was hardly untouched.
We are very fortunate that we have a wealth of natural resources and that we were geographically isolated from those wars. While others were rebuilding their cities from rubble we were able to sieze the oppurtunity to expand.
As to the "amazing wealth of natural resources", you should take a look at what resources the former USSR had access to:
(from http://countrystudies.us/russia/59.htm)
"Russia is one of the world's richest countries in raw materials, many of which are significant inputs for an industrial economy. Russia accounts for around 20 percent of the world's production of oil and natural gas and possesses large reserves of both fuels. This abundance has made Russia virtually self-sufficient in energy and a large-scale exporter of fuels. Oil and gas were primary hard-currency earners for the Soviet Union, and they remain so for the Russian Federation. Russia also is self-sufficient in nearly all major industrial raw materials and has at least some reserves of every industrially valuable nonfuel mineral--even after the productive mines of Ukraine, Kazakstan, and Uzbekistan no longer were directly accessible. Tin, tungsten, bauxite, and mercury were among the few natural materials imported in the Soviet period. Russia possesses rich reserves of iron ore, manganese, chromium, nickel, platinum, titanium, copper, tin, lead, tungsten, diamonds, phosphates, and gold, and the forests of Siberia contain an estimated one-fifth of the world's timber, mainly conifers.
The iron ore deposits of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, close to the Ukrainian border in the southwest, are believed to contain one-sixth of the world's total reserves. Intensive exploitation began there in the 1950s. Other large iron ore deposits are located in the Kola Peninsula, Karelia, south-central Siberia, and the Far East. The largest copper deposits are located in the Kola Peninsula and the Urals, and lead and zinc are found in North Ossetia."
The USSR also had access to plenty of farm land, too. In fact, under the Czars, Russia was an exporter of food. After the communism and the forced collectivization of the farms (about 12 million dead, there) they became importers of food.
Don't fall into the mindset that Capatalism is infallable. I enjoy our society and quality of life. However, we must be realistic. All known forms of government can falter. Capatalism is succesful because the environment is favorable. Lets hope we can adapt when the wind changes. Remember, Capatilsm != Democracy and Freedom.
Capitalism is successful for a lot of reasons beyond just a favorable environment.
You should also remember that Democracy != Freedom. At best, it means freedom for the majority.
It's an excuse to pad the pockets of the fat shareholders at the expense of the middle class.
According to the Bereau of Economic Analysis, shareholders dividends amounted to just 4.7% of income in the US.
Employee compensation plus government transfer payments (social security, etc) amount to 82% of income in the US.
So the idea that all this money churning around out there is going into the "pockets of the fat shareholders" is a myth.
Every major Communist country has also been subject to US embargo's and sactions. It's pretty hard to prosper when you can't trade. I think Cuba would be doing very well if it wasn't economically sactioned by the U.S.
What you're really saying is that communism can't function on it's own, while capitalism can.
These sorts of rules are always motivated by some sense that the "rules must apply to everybody".
BS. Responsible people should have less restrictions on them than irresponsible people.
If someone is using their cell phone too much at work, can them. Let responsible people keep their jobs and their phones.
Of course, some will cry "unfair!" Too bad.
What's unfair is making everyone suffer for your buffoonery.
I actually had a 6th grade class where the students were asked to bring in ingredients labels from various food products.
The teacher ranted aboout how all those evil corporations were putting mysterious chemicals in our food, like niacin, riboflavin, and citric acid! Oh no!
When I saw Intel was doing this I immediately thought "that's the end of Moore's" law. Intel has been trying to win the clock rate race for years. But, consider there newest Pentium, Prescott. This chip now has a 31 stage pipeline and is built for high clock rates. Yet, it still is clocked at less than 3.2 Ghz -- the highest speed of the older Northwood. Why is this? Even the earliest Pentium 4s were able to greatly out-clock the pentium III's when they first came out. They weren't faster overall, but did have higher clock rates than the PIII. But now we have the 31 stage Prescott and the about same clock rate.
If Intel thought it could keep bumping the clock rate up, they wouldn't move to something like AMD's performance rating. Yet here we are.
Something has changed.
I'm looking for a theory that says the earth was a warmer place with most of that fossil fuel carbon still on the surface (where we're presently putting it again, one study observed plants are taking up the extra carbondioxide in the air, what's the long term impact of that?) As the carbon became buried (ever think about how much green stuff it took to make pertroleum deposits or coal seams?) the food changed and those at the bottom of the chain adapted or perished.
So you're saying that, basically, as carbon was drawn out of the atmosphere and put into what are now coal seams and oil fields, plant productivity was reduced. This reduction made food less available for dinosaurs and so they perished. Interesting theory.
There have been studies showing that many plants are CO2 limited. When CO2 is increased, plant biomass increases greatly. Conversely, the less CO2 available, the less productive the plants are.
Seems to be compatible with your theory.
I need to clarify what my letter just said:
Don't help your fellow man, it's a screw everyone before they screw you world.
The only thing you need to measure yourself with is money. If you do something and don't make money from it, you're a failure.
Most people get their money BECAUSE they have helped their fellow man. People don't just give up their money for nothing. You've got to do something for them to get it.
The money is just a promise that those they helped will, at some time in the future, help them.
This site includes a number of ideas for reducing that energy bill, including zoned heating/cooling. There are several interesting real-time graphs of current energy use.
I found the site while searching for information on heat pump water heaters. One example graph they give shows the heat pump water heater using less than half the energy as resistive heating.
If installed properly, a heat pump water heater will also help air-condition your house. A good place to put ducts is in the kitchen, where the waste heat from cooking can be removed and used to heat water. Ideally, the returned cooled air can be directed at your refrigerator's condenser coils for increased efficiency.
If Congress adopts the FCC's recommendations, it will loosen the stranglehold that companies like ClearChannel have on the airwaves.
This statement seems a bit backwards to me.
It seems congress has had a stranglehold on the airwaves.
Who is it that actually stops you from speaking, er, broadcasting over the airwaves? It isn't ClearChannel. It's government authorities.
It's shocking to me that a country that values free speach so much can put so many restrictions on communication.
If radio had been known of during the crafting of the bill of rights, the first amendment would have no doubt included freedom of the airwaves as well as the press.
I'm a bit confused.
I mean, I've been doing C for almost 20 years. One of the first lessons I learned --And not for 'security' so much as crash free programs-- was not to do such things.
I mean, holy crap, it's too damn simple to see the bug. What kindof idiots do they have working at MS?
Wait a second: "too damn simple to see"? Ok, so I've only been coding in C for 10 years, but seriously, at what point did you start actually checking for integer overflow in your code?
I wouldn't call them idiots that did this. The primary cause, IMO, is the semantic difference between what we think of as integers in the real world and how C actually treats them. That distance is huge.
All kinds of rules break down. If a>0 and b>0, a+b isn't necessarily >0.
Now suppose you try to be mathematically consistant and claim C just uses some set of ints Z_n. What do you do about multiplicative inverses? Suppose you hypothetically have 4-bit ints. Do you now make 7/3 = 13 mod 16, for example? Do you think programmers will assume division works that way?
What about the case when you are using even numbers? They have no multiplicative inverse when n is a power of 2, so division isn't even defined for that case.
Now, I agree the bug should have been caught. Hell, all bugs SHOULD be caught. But calling these guys idiots is letting programming language designers off the hook.
How about a jammer for wreckless drivers or loud bassers?
Inappropriate cell phone use is just another example of people not giving a damn about those around them.
I say screw-em. If they won't care about me, I don't care about them.
It's really too bad. It should be obvious to everyone that the logical conclusion of all this will be social friction making people's lives more miserable in the end.
Yes, and monkeys fly out of my but. Are you listening to Bush's scientists?
Hey, I even provided you a couple of links to check out to verify the claim.
Don't be so lazy. The information is out there.
And you should learn to separate politics from science. The two don't mix.
Unfortunately, this paint doesn't seem to help with the hydrocarbons released by plants that can contribute to smog.
Oak trees, for example, give off isoprene, which combined with water and sunlight create formaldehyde.
Trees have been blamed for up to 65 percent of ozone-forming chemicals in cities such as Houston.
also referred to as NAND gates as the grandparent post already stated. ;) 3, count em 3, transistors to make a nand.
Actually, it's 4 transistors for CMOS: 2 in parallel on the Vdd side and 2 in series on the ground side.
I am way too lazy to think it up or write it out, but the OR is unnecessary. All logical gates can be constructed out of XOR gates. It is champion of all the gates.
Actually, it's not possible to create all gates with XOR gates.
Now if you can use both XOR and something else like NAND or NOR or AND or OR, then you have a complete basis.
Of course, just NAND or just NORs will also let you build all the other gates. ANDs or ORs by themselves won't do it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the most primitive CMOS gate a NAND gate? So I highly doubt you would make AND out of and XOR gate [XOR being the more costly of the three].
The most primative gate is the inverter. It only takes two transistors. The NAND gate takes 4.