I thought the Swiss bought power from France ('s nuclear reactors) at cheap off-peak rates and used the power to pump water into elevated reservoirs, then let the water back through the dams during peak times, selling the power back to the French for a profit.
On an operational cost basis, practically nothing competes with nuclear. The challenge is that it has a very high capital cost outlay and a long startup phase (~10y from decision to operational). It's still more efficient than fossil fuels, which is multiples better than any "renewable" source (save hydroelectric, which can be efficient, but is geographically very limited).
While I want solar to win, the cost to produce a panel in energy is more than the panel will generate (dollars for dollars over a typical/reasonable 25 year return period). Right now, in my area, solar companies are financing their own installations, and selling the power to the business on whose roof they've placed the panels. The cost? $0.30/kWh on a 30 year contract. That may be a bargain 15 years from now, but commercial rates are still just under $0.10/kWh right now. Even if you take your cost of money as 0%, energy costs will have to double every ten years to break even, and even in recent years the increase has accelerated to about half that (4% actual vs 7% breakeven).
If it's on the main character, and he's in 30% of the shots of a 100 minute movie, which is (25fps x 0.3 x 60 sec/min x 100 min) = 45000 instances per movie. Now, I haven't the faintest idea what kind of distribution is involved in this movie, but I'm going to go with 1000 prints made for distribution (40 prints per state, on average).
So we've got 45 million copies floating around at $150,000 each in statutory damages is $6,750,000,000,000 total. Now, I suppose it would be in both sides interest to settle for a nominal fee per infraction - say 3x the actual value of about $100. $13.5B should cover it. You know, he should really hire the RIAA lawyers for this one.
The "fair" tax misses a lot, and is exceptionally regressive. The "fair tax" is an economy stifling measure - the less people spend, the less they pay in taxes. And you have to exempt things, which is a slippery slope (does the Fair Tax suggest a 23% tax on houses and realestate? On bonds, stocks, and other investment instruments? On insurance?)
No what we need is a gross receipts tax. I'm not against a progressive version, but I doubt it would be necessary. Every dollar you receive is taxed at a fixed rate. There is no married, single, head of household - only taxpayer id number (SSN or EIN). A legal citizen may deduct from his or her gross receipts 2087x Federal minimum wage (i.e. those working at or below FMW would pay no tax). Any corporation which pays employees residing within the US must have a US corporation and all money for US operations must be received by that entity.
There are no discretionary deductions, no dodges, no games. Yes, churches pay tax. If a corporation makes no "profit" they still pay tax. Why? The phone company doesn't base your fees on profit, nor does the common business rent, or your web hosting provider. The fees are based on the perceived value of the services provided or the cost to provide those services. The government musters and armed forces to defend the country, health inspectors to ensure the safety of the various products sold, and a myriad of other things (yes, debatable) which are "agreed" upon as useful and/or necessary.
While I'm not an advocate of social engineering via the tax code, it would benefit those with the shortest supply chains (a receipt occurs at every handoff of a product), and would double (or more) tax nested corporate entities meant to divert revenue out of state and/or to limit liability.
A gross receipts tax would likely need to be between 3 and 5 percent (less than a real estate agent gets to sell your house) to make for an even tax stream.
It's a rule of thumb. You won't find the same laptop with options for an Atom and an i5. If you get a laptop with a non-netbook processor, get the second-to-the bottom (maybe the third from the bottom if there are 5 or more levels); never choose the fastest. ATFAS (as the..says), buy the RAM aftermarket and install it yourself.
Both are limited, actually. For most otherwise identical computers - laptops especially - there is a very limited range of processors. Until there was an option of getting single or multiple cores, there was often less than a 40% difference in processor performance from the bottom of the options to the top. That was a little skewed when you could get single or dual cores. Now that practically everything new is dual or quad core, and the chips are designed to maximize the speed on a single core when only a single thread is running, the field has compressed again.
RAM, otoh, can often be quadrupled or octupled by the user after the purchase - for less than the difference between processor options adding only 20-25% speed. Nothing makes you hate a laptop like swapping, even if you got the SSD. For a laptop, unless you're going for a "workstation" grade, in which case rules of thumb don't apply, you really don't need top speed on a processor. I have a 1.4GHz single core laptop and I almost never want for more speed. Of course, I've got 8GB of RAM, so I don't even have a swap file. I also don't do my Finite Element work on it, nor do I do much CAD, but I do run several engineering analysis programs on it, view and edit multi-hundred page PDFs, and do minor photo manipulation for reports. I have - and have used - photoshop and premiere on it as well, but again - why would I do my main work there when my desktop has a 4960x1600 3 monitor setup?
As for the work computer - gotta say, I got the middle of the road processor (i7 920) and am upgrading it to 24GB of RAM when the UPS guy stops by tomorrow. Everything I run runs fast enough, but when I get heavy into CAD, photoshop, premiere...I need as much memory as I can muster.
Hardly. Anyone willing to strap on a vest of C4, or snug the straps on someone else's vest, is already wearing a tinfoil hat. The moment the new broke every AQ member who even thought they might be linked to the data in OBL's possession was abandoning/poisoning accounts and moving their data.
Easy - extra beans in the Chipotle burritos and then hang out in a commercial freezer for the afternoon. Chilled methane coming right up! (or would that be down?)
Welcome to the agnostics. Please follow the line to the right, where you will be issued an asshole for public presentation at an unspecified future date. Or not.
And you didn't ask or research that there were other preliminary tests, you just went? You just had muscle pain...from what - lifting too much? Sounds like it all went away in a couple of days anyway...was is so chronic that you thought you'd busted something? Are you in an HMO where you can't go see a second independent doctor?
It mightily sucks that what happened to you did, but you seem awfully trusting for some serious hospital work "just in case." Then again, maybe I've just had better doctors.
And that's the rub. Physicians are smart folks, but there's still a whole range from valedictorian to barely passed the tests. George Carlin (I think) said, "Somewhere in the world is the world's worst doctor. And somebody has an appointment to see him tomorrow."
It's hard to come to grips with the fact that there are practitioners out there who really aren't that good. And there are a lot of them - 80% will not even be in the top fifth of their specialty (see what I did there?). I see it in nearly every field. I wish it weren't so, but it is. Sometimes it's easier to go through a checklist that see the whole picture. I think, on the whole, doctors are better than most professionals at that, but pressures can skew decisions either way.
Patients just make the problem worse - expecting a solution for every out-of-balance condition they feel. You've seen what we eat and the routine stress we subject ourselves to - it's amazing we're as well as we are. I feel lucky to be blessed with a physician who listens well, and allows me to be an active part of my diagnosis and treatment.
The reason you worry about the outlying cases, is that the risk/reward doesn't add up. For a malpractice suit, I can easily see $100k just in defense costs. That's a lot of patients at $75-150 a pop. If you miss 1:1000, you're just break-even.
Is it worth your livelihood to take a 1:10,000 chance 1000-5000 times a year? That's why you get all these tests, and treatments for borderline cases. If you tried and failed it's better than missing it entirely, in the eyes of the lawyers. Plus, the standard for malpractice is often based on what your peers do - which has been ratcheted up.
That and, of course, there's good money in investing in a testing service lab if you can refer enough business there.
Welcome to the hobbies of rocketry and pyrotechnics. You can't store a 2 gram electric match without a BATFE approved explosives magazine, or make a 60mg flash cracker without a high explosives manufacturing permet, but if you own a replica muzzle-loader you can store 25 pounds of black powder in your basement.
I happen to own six, four of which are my surname and my professional business name, the other two are community-based. Still, if there were a $4.5M pricetag for my surname, I'd gladly hand it over and change my email address (Though if somebody wanted it badly enough to pay me 4.5M, I could probably negotiate a redirect)
Yeah, but have you ever tried to get the military to spend their money on civilian road maintenance? It's probably easier to collect the odometer readings of the 400 million cars on the road.
It looks like a potato battery (that we used to make little clock kits back in the 80s) or any galvanic battery dating back 100+ years, but with a tweak to get more out of it, implemented on a larger scale, and slapped with a "New and Improved, now with NANOTECHNOLOGY" sticker.
Look - it's just at THEORY - you admitted it yourself right in your post. Go find some facts and get back with me. I've got a Bible full of them right here at my desk, and there isn't a single mention of gravity. I can't believe you're still blathering on about this...;-)
I thought the point was reducing cables. You still have two that have to be threaded under the desk (unless you have the poor taste to have outlets in the wall above your desk).
Again, for device to bulk storage transfers, you still need compatible hardware for direct transfer. I don't mean to sound like an ass, but direct FW transfer is a pretty damned small market. I can't argue the portability of a removable hard drive (I use a pair of 2GB for backup of my active dataset, myself), but again I'm hard pressed to find a fractional need beyond the fourth percentile decimal that would require a physical drive local at a machine the has to be transported regularly or locked up. Do you not lock your server room? Do you not lock your TS/SCI area?
I do like the docking port angle - a lot. That's where I see the biggest potential benefit in industry as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the Swiss bought power from France ('s nuclear reactors) at cheap off-peak rates and used the power to pump water into elevated reservoirs, then let the water back through the dams during peak times, selling the power back to the French for a profit.
On an operational cost basis, practically nothing competes with nuclear. The challenge is that it has a very high capital cost outlay and a long startup phase (~10y from decision to operational). It's still more efficient than fossil fuels, which is multiples better than any "renewable" source (save hydroelectric, which can be efficient, but is geographically very limited).
While I want solar to win, the cost to produce a panel in energy is more than the panel will generate (dollars for dollars over a typical/reasonable 25 year return period). Right now, in my area, solar companies are financing their own installations, and selling the power to the business on whose roof they've placed the panels. The cost? $0.30/kWh on a 30 year contract. That may be a bargain 15 years from now, but commercial rates are still just under $0.10/kWh right now. Even if you take your cost of money as 0%, energy costs will have to double every ten years to break even, and even in recent years the increase has accelerated to about half that (4% actual vs 7% breakeven).
If it's on the main character, and he's in 30% of the shots of a 100 minute movie, which is (25fps x 0.3 x 60 sec/min x 100 min) = 45000 instances per movie. Now, I haven't the faintest idea what kind of distribution is involved in this movie, but I'm going to go with 1000 prints made for distribution (40 prints per state, on average).
So we've got 45 million copies floating around at $150,000 each in statutory damages is $6,750,000,000,000 total. Now, I suppose it would be in both sides interest to settle for a nominal fee per infraction - say 3x the actual value of about $100. $13.5B should cover it. You know, he should really hire the RIAA lawyers for this one.
That does seem to be the general trend of copyright, no?
The "fair" tax misses a lot, and is exceptionally regressive.
The "fair tax" is an economy stifling measure - the less people spend, the less they pay in taxes. And you have to exempt things, which is a slippery slope (does the Fair Tax suggest a 23% tax on houses and realestate? On bonds, stocks, and other investment instruments? On insurance?)
No what we need is a gross receipts tax. I'm not against a progressive version, but I doubt it would be necessary. Every dollar you receive is taxed at a fixed rate. There is no married, single, head of household - only taxpayer id number (SSN or EIN). A legal citizen may deduct from his or her gross receipts 2087x Federal minimum wage (i.e. those working at or below FMW would pay no tax). Any corporation which pays employees residing within the US must have a US corporation and all money for US operations must be received by that entity.
There are no discretionary deductions, no dodges, no games. Yes, churches pay tax. If a corporation makes no "profit" they still pay tax. Why? The phone company doesn't base your fees on profit, nor does the common business rent, or your web hosting provider. The fees are based on the perceived value of the services provided or the cost to provide those services. The government musters and armed forces to defend the country, health inspectors to ensure the safety of the various products sold, and a myriad of other things (yes, debatable) which are "agreed" upon as useful and/or necessary.
While I'm not an advocate of social engineering via the tax code, it would benefit those with the shortest supply chains (a receipt occurs at every handoff of a product), and would double (or more) tax nested corporate entities meant to divert revenue out of state and/or to limit liability.
A gross receipts tax would likely need to be between 3 and 5 percent (less than a real estate agent gets to sell your house) to make for an even tax stream.
45/3 = $15
65/3 = $22
85/3 = $28/hr
Now you know how much the workers get paid. Welcome to business.
It's a rule of thumb. You won't find the same laptop with options for an Atom and an i5. If you get a laptop with a non-netbook processor, get the second-to-the bottom (maybe the third from the bottom if there are 5 or more levels); never choose the fastest. ATFAS (as the..says), buy the RAM aftermarket and install it yourself.
Both are limited, actually. For most otherwise identical computers - laptops especially - there is a very limited range of processors. Until there was an option of getting single or multiple cores, there was often less than a 40% difference in processor performance from the bottom of the options to the top. That was a little skewed when you could get single or dual cores. Now that practically everything new is dual or quad core, and the chips are designed to maximize the speed on a single core when only a single thread is running, the field has compressed again.
RAM, otoh, can often be quadrupled or octupled by the user after the purchase - for less than the difference between processor options adding only 20-25% speed. Nothing makes you hate a laptop like swapping, even if you got the SSD. For a laptop, unless you're going for a "workstation" grade, in which case rules of thumb don't apply, you really don't need top speed on a processor. I have a 1.4GHz single core laptop and I almost never want for more speed. Of course, I've got 8GB of RAM, so I don't even have a swap file. I also don't do my Finite Element work on it, nor do I do much CAD, but I do run several engineering analysis programs on it, view and edit multi-hundred page PDFs, and do minor photo manipulation for reports. I have - and have used - photoshop and premiere on it as well, but again - why would I do my main work there when my desktop has a 4960x1600 3 monitor setup?
As for the work computer - gotta say, I got the middle of the road processor (i7 920) and am upgrading it to 24GB of RAM when the UPS guy stops by tomorrow. Everything I run runs fast enough, but when I get heavy into CAD, photoshop, premiere...I need as much memory as I can muster.
Hardly. Anyone willing to strap on a vest of C4, or snug the straps on someone else's vest, is already wearing a tinfoil hat. The moment the new broke every AQ member who even thought they might be linked to the data in OBL's possession was abandoning/poisoning accounts and moving their data.
Easy - extra beans in the Chipotle burritos and then hang out in a commercial freezer for the afternoon. Chilled methane coming right up! (or would that be down?)
...on a planet that's evolving
revolving at nine hundred miles and hour...
Welcome to the agnostics. Please follow the line to the right, where you will be issued an asshole for public presentation at an unspecified future date. Or not.
This.
And you didn't ask or research that there were other preliminary tests, you just went? You just had muscle pain...from what - lifting too much? Sounds like it all went away in a couple of days anyway...was is so chronic that you thought you'd busted something? Are you in an HMO where you can't go see a second independent doctor?
It mightily sucks that what happened to you did, but you seem awfully trusting for some serious hospital work "just in case." Then again, maybe I've just had better doctors.
Part of being a good physician
And that's the rub. Physicians are smart folks, but there's still a whole range from valedictorian to barely passed the tests. George Carlin (I think) said, "Somewhere in the world is the world's worst doctor. And somebody has an appointment to see him tomorrow."
It's hard to come to grips with the fact that there are practitioners out there who really aren't that good. And there are a lot of them - 80% will not even be in the top fifth of their specialty (see what I did there?). I see it in nearly every field. I wish it weren't so, but it is. Sometimes it's easier to go through a checklist that see the whole picture. I think, on the whole, doctors are better than most professionals at that, but pressures can skew decisions either way.
Patients just make the problem worse - expecting a solution for every out-of-balance condition they feel. You've seen what we eat and the routine stress we subject ourselves to - it's amazing we're as well as we are. I feel lucky to be blessed with a physician who listens well, and allows me to be an active part of my diagnosis and treatment.
The reason you worry about the outlying cases, is that the risk/reward doesn't add up. For a malpractice suit, I can easily see $100k just in defense costs. That's a lot of patients at $75-150 a pop. If you miss 1:1000, you're just break-even.
Is it worth your livelihood to take a 1:10,000 chance 1000-5000 times a year? That's why you get all these tests, and treatments for borderline cases. If you tried and failed it's better than missing it entirely, in the eyes of the lawyers. Plus, the standard for malpractice is often based on what your peers do - which has been ratcheted up.
That and, of course, there's good money in investing in a testing service lab if you can refer enough business there.
Welcome to the hobbies of rocketry and pyrotechnics. You can't store a 2 gram electric match without a BATFE approved explosives magazine, or make a 60mg flash cracker without a high explosives manufacturing permet, but if you own a replica muzzle-loader you can store 25 pounds of black powder in your basement.
I happen to own six, four of which are my surname and my professional business name, the other two are community-based. Still, if there were a $4.5M pricetag for my surname, I'd gladly hand it over and change my email address (Though if somebody wanted it badly enough to pay me 4.5M, I could probably negotiate a redirect)
Because Republicans don't like being taxed on things they don't use or don't agree with.
Only in America do you have people complain about taxes while the hold their hand out for government money.
Yeah, but have you ever tried to get the military to spend their money on civilian road maintenance? It's probably easier to collect the odometer readings of the 400 million cars on the road.
They already do - it's called the gas tax, and before hybrid and electric vehicles it was both simple and accurate at tracking road wear.
Will somebody punch this guy's frequent geek card?
It looks like a potato battery (that we used to make little clock kits back in the 80s) or any galvanic battery dating back 100+ years, but with a tweak to get more out of it, implemented on a larger scale, and slapped with a "New and Improved, now with NANOTECHNOLOGY" sticker.
Look - it's just at THEORY - you admitted it yourself right in your post. Go find some facts and get back with me. I've got a Bible full of them right here at my desk, and there isn't a single mention of gravity. I can't believe you're still blathering on about this... ;-)
I thought the point was reducing cables. You still have two that have to be threaded under the desk (unless you have the poor taste to have outlets in the wall above your desk).
Again, for device to bulk storage transfers, you still need compatible hardware for direct transfer. I don't mean to sound like an ass, but direct FW transfer is a pretty damned small market. I can't argue the portability of a removable hard drive (I use a pair of 2GB for backup of my active dataset, myself), but again I'm hard pressed to find a fractional need beyond the fourth percentile decimal that would require a physical drive local at a machine the has to be transported regularly or locked up. Do you not lock your server room? Do you not lock your TS/SCI area?
I do like the docking port angle - a lot. That's where I see the biggest potential benefit in industry as a whole.