Haha Phantasie! I never managed to beat that back when I had a C64, or on an emulator now, I'd always ended up lost somewhere. My cousin would spend hours creating characters just to find a party of people that could swim (the hard way). Heavily ripped off LOTR, what with the rings, the wandering dark knights, and "JRR Trollkin" in there.
So nevermind learning any lessons from history then.
Let me know when we've started.
What have we learned from terrorists bringing weapons on board planes? It wasn't "maybe we should have an air marshal on every flight" and certainly wasn't "maybe we should arm the pilots as a last defense against armed terrorists".
What have we learned from Richard Reid? It certainly wasn't "maybe we should ban matches". At least fingernail clippers are no longer considered to be a weapon.
What have we learned from the alleged British Bomber Squad, and the couple who allegedly planned to bring their infant along to smuggle explosives in its bottle? Was it "the profilers who think people with babies can't possibly be a threat are idiots"? It wasn't "maybe we should ban baby bottles", though banning babies would have made a lot of passengers much happier.
So far all our government seems to have learned is that it can hold anyone for any period of time, as long as they claim that they're a terrorist, but they don't have to prove it. They've learned that they can give people to other countries for "extraordinary rendition", which is just a fancy name for a game of "Uncle", except with more arm twisting and less laughing afterwards. And now, it's learned that if the president breaks the law, for instance by ordering illegal wiretaps, they can "fix" the problem by passing a law after the fact.
Are these really the lessons our government should be learning?
Do you think you'll have more civil liberties after that attack succeeds?
That depends, will the government still be full of people who believe that every time somebody blows something up they should automatically be able to cancel more of the Constitution?
Other posters pointed this out as well: hundreds of thousands of people will die this year, if the Constitution really has some hidden clause scribbled on the back that gives the government extraordinary powers to combat death, why is it only invoked for Terri Schiavo and terrorists, and not against carcinogens, fast foods and alcoholics, among many of the other more popular ways to die?
It's the government's duty to protect the USA from these attacks by preventing them.
How do you propose they do that? Dig up their cold war psychics?
No, seriously. How do you propose that the governments of the world stop something that might happen in the future? By rounding up a bunch of britons with no plane tickets, no bombs, and no passports, and claiming they were going to blow up planes headed for the US? By stopping everyone who looks vaguely Pakistani from getting on planes while allowing white boys with pipe bombs in their backpacks to pass the checkpoint?
We have systems in place that should be protecting us now. We have no fly lists to protect us from people who we think might try to blow up a plane but that we can't prove this, however they've pretty much been rendered useless by inaccuracy and incompetence. For every Democratic Senator who can't fly because he was on the no fly list or not, how many people are there that are not on the list but that we suspect they might try to blow up a plane? (Or, if you believe the DHS officer when he says it was just "an accident" how many people on the list are "accidentially" let on board planes?) The TSA currently allows people to bring up to 4 books of matches on board, just in case someone has a legitimate reason to set their shoes on fire, but refuses to let people who call them stupid get on the plane.
And now, the government wants to know who's calling who. Tell me, how exactly do you intend to discover terrorists based on call history when you don't already know who the terrorists are, since if you knew who the terrorists are, you'd have already gotten a warrant to listen in on every single call to or from them, and subsequently warrants for those people's call histories as well? What exactly will the government learn from this, beyond the most popular pizza delivery?
Being pissed off at the loss of liberty is only a fraction of the rage I'm feeling now. The rest is reserved for the Republicans who are pissing my tax money away on things like this that they are incapable of justifying.
If you think you're going to get arrested for posting to Slashdot you've got a screw loose.
Why? Maybe I won't be arrested today. Or this year. Or this decade. But do you honestly believe that every single President for the rest of the life of the law will be as honest and good as Bush? Hell, let's leave the President out of it, no matter what you or I think of him, he's sitting around in the White House, not going around arresting people. All I need to do is cut off some homeland security agent in traffic while he's having a bad day.
All he has to do is tell the computer when he files the paperwork that I was "fighting for the other side" (you know, its funny how so many Republicans (talking heads and Senators alike) love to use exactly that language when talking about liberals, are you really sure about me having a screw loose?) and I lose everything, even the ability to go to court to prove that I wasn't fighting for the other side.
Or hell, I could just be arrested by mistake. Or you could. Wouldn't that just suck? Just think, it'll be like a game of uncle, except instead of "uncle" they keep beating you until you admit you're a terrorist. Doesn't that sound like fun?
Why do you believe that this law only applies to foreign enemy combatants, and not American citizens who were minding their own business until they posted on slashdot to complain about this law? The government certainly had no problem holding all these Iraqis without a trial for years now, this law can only mean one of two things, either A) Before this law the government was breaking the law, or B) This law doesn't do what you seem to think it does.
Employers, not individuals, should buy insurance for employees rather than give them the cash equivalent
Thats half the point of the argument. If the employers gave the employee the exact cash value of their benefits, their employees would be unable to buy back the insurance they had using the extra cash (even if they received the same tax breaks that the companies have now). Now, if ALL of the employers did this, insurers would be forced to lower their rates in order to do business in the new market, but its unlikely that anything short of more government intervention would bring this about. Of course, the whole argument is like arguing over what flavor shit you'd like to eat...
Life insurance, car insurance, home/renter insurance, and expatriation insurance are "different". Somehow.
Which you'd realize if you understood what makes health insurance different. Think about it for a while. If you need help, I suggest calling up your car insurance agent, tell them you've got a million dollar Ferrari Enzo and you want to slam it into the wall of your house at 180MPH, and you want to know how much an insurance policy that will pay for the repairs on that will be. Then call up your homeowner's insurance agent and let them know you intend to try to knock your house down with your car. Be sure to let your life insurance agent know you're planning to be the one driving.
Then, call up your health insurance agent and ask him how much it costs to get an insurance policy that will cover your care when you get sick. Chances are, the first three will cancel your policy and tell you to go to hell. The fourth will happily give you a quote, because all they do is move money from healthy people to sick people. Even life insurance has term policies that can expire before you do, but only health insurance basically guarantees a payout. And pay out it does, over and over again. Whether it's to 20somethings that get the bug going around the office, 40somethings that stroke after a stressful day at work, 60somethings who lived through too much mcdonalds, beer, and cigarettes or 80somethings with a personal pharmacy and a list of diseases that could fill a dictionary. Don't forget their spouses and kids.
At least when the government socializes healthcare, skimming hundreds of thousands of dollars off the top sometimes gets people arrested, unless they've got connections. When companies socialize it, the skimmers are called CEOs. Abolishing health insurance completely is the only truly sane way to proceed. The market should readjust fairly quickly without insurers contractually setting the prices doctors charge the uninsured (people like to believe only the government does this, but they're either misled or misleading). Doctors and Hospitals will return to competing on service and cost, rather than just whether they take your insurance or not. Service will stratify of course, poorer people will only be able to afford older technology and shared hospital rooms, but the vast majority of them will be receiving better care at rates they can afford than they did in today's world where service basically existed for the insured and those willing to go deep into debt.
and it turns out their BANKING or STOCK site doesn't work
There are plenty of bank and stock sites out there, and most work fine. Ask them if they'd date someone who wouldn't accept their phonecalls until they switched cellphone providers and joined their "friends plan". If they say they wouldn't, ask them why they accept the same from their bank.
In reality, if you mix the fresh meltwater with the salty ocean, you get an new, slightly less salty ocean
So what you're saying is that if I took a glass, filled it to the brim with saltwater, and then added pure water, it would not overflow? How much water could I add that way? One cup? 10 gallons? This "mixes with the saltwater" idea doesn't make sense even though several people proposed it as a counter argument.
If you'd stop to think about it, you'd realize you can't have more water after a freeze-melt cycle than you did before.
When was the last time we had the melt end of the freeze-melt cycle?
The law is fixed. The law specifically disallows software patents. The "infamous" directive mentioned in the writeup failed, so the law still specifically disallows software patents. The patent office issues them anyway. Isn't it funny how laws telling people what to do result in fines, jail time, and execution if you break them, but laws telling the government what to do have absolutely no punishment when the government breaks them?
So to enforce the patents, whoever is behind this clusterfuck intends to create an entirely new court system, specifically for the purpose of "legislating from the bench".
The problem with your solution is that ISPs don't have the 256k that John Doe is paying for, much less more bandwidth to set up special deals with Apple to transmit over the cap. Requiring that ISPs live up to the "minimum level of service" would pretty much kill every single one of them overnight thanks to oversubscription and the ISPs refusal to upgrade their infrastructure until they can guarantee that they can make everyone but themselves pay for it.
Density of fresh water at 0C: 999.9 kg/m^3 Density of ice at 0C: 915.0 kg/m^3 Density of Ocean: We'll take 1020kg/m^3, the minimum on the site, even though at the pole due to the salt concentration noted in the first link the density of the saltwater will be way higher, but any density over 999.9kg/m^3 means that the water level shall rise as I show below:
1 cubic meter of ice (915.0 kg) displaces 915.0kg of saltwater. 915.0kg of saltwater is 0.897m^3 (915kg/(1020kg/m^3)), which means that our 1m^3 of ice has.103m^3 above the surface of the water (so says the old sailor's adage of icebergs being 9/10ths below water).
Now, let's say the ice were to suddenly vanish. There would be a "hole" in the ocean with 0.897m^3 of air in it. Water would of course rush into the "hole" and the water level would drop by 0.897m^3 spread out over the entire surface of the ocean.
But let's say the ice were to melt. Our 915kg of ice would become 915kg of fresh water, which would occupy about 0.915m^3 (915kg/(999.9kg/m^3)). The hole the ice occupied previously was only 0.897m^3 large, which leaves us with.018m^3 more water than we began with. This.018m^3 would spread out over the surface of the ocean, raising the water level ever so slightly. (sorry, your "no difference" myth has just been busted.)
Don't forget that this tiny amount will be joined by water running off of Greenland, Antartica and other polar landmasses with ice on them, 100% of which will raise the water level.
I WOULD HATE IT. You know why? Because every annoying person in the world would converge on my airplane and make calls through-out the flight.
I smell a business model here.
You can pay $10 to use the internet. You can pay $20 to use the internet and let VoIP traffic through. You can pay $50 to disable the VoIP traffic for the people sitting in the seats around you:)
how the CA special emissions work. What if you have a car you've bought outside the state.
The CA "special" emissions work largely by becoming the de facto standard, since their emissions standards get adopted by several other states, not just California. Roughly 25% of the cars made meet whatever the Californians required at the time it was made, because to put it simply, it would cost more to design separate Civic, California Editions and Civic, Everyone Else Editions, except when the cost of manufacture is greater than the cost of designing a completely separate poorer-mileage version of the car.
And yes, if you want to register a car in California it has to pass California's tests. Or you pay more. If your chips don't make the exhaust exceed their smog levels or whatever they're checking for these days, then I'm pretty sure that they won't make you change them. Of course, you could always just forget to mention them;)
Still Excessive Complexity for a Simple Solution
on
Brave New Ballot
·
· Score: 1
The solution to E-ballots can be stated in 3 simple steps
1) Each vote is recorded onto an optically sortable paper ballot, with human readable votes 2) The ballots are mechanically sorted into piles based on the optical marks 3) The ballots are mechanically counted one pile at a time.
Sure, it means three machines to do the work that other e-voting companies claim to do with 1, but look at what happens:
1) The voting booth is now simply a frontend. People select what they're voting for, and a piece of paper comes out. My preferred idea for this is to have a blank, numbered ballot card issued to the person by a different staffer than the one that took their identification. This ballot (stiffer than just paper receipt tape, in order to survive sorting better) would be notched in one corner so it can only be loaded one way into the printer. The numbers would prevent people from bringing 50 of their own, and issuing it separately from the person being identified means that the number can't be tied to the person by [insert evil dictator], but can be checked against "This ballot was in fact cast at this precinct". If a vote comes out incorrectly, the supervisors destroy the ballot in front of the observers, and the number of the ballot is added to the list of destroyed ballots. As for the machine itself, it stores nothing, and therefore if it bursts into flames or crashes, nothing is lost, and can be replaced at any time, with any other machine. The machines should not need to be excessively protected, if anyone takes them home after the election, it's not a problem. If someone does screw with them, it can be wiped and reset with the correct ballot, and put back in service.
2) Optical sorters are very fast and accurate these days. By sorting on particular patterns in particular locations on each ballot, the sorting machine doesn't even have to know what it's sorting, making tampering difficult at best. Write-ins can be handled with a unique code, and the user writes in their vote on the ballot, these will all be sorted out into their own pile and counted by hand. If there IS a problem, election observers can take the stacks and flip through them like a flipbook. Any changes in the optical pattern should be fairly easy to catch once the bars start to dance around.
3) Counters are very accurate and fast, at least the kinds the banks use. They trust stacks of hundreds of $100 bills to these things, so you know it's not going to miscount very often. The counter won't have any idea what it is its counting, so tampering is practically impossible without a "+10000000 vote" button, and a bribed staff member to push it for the right candidates. Problems at both the counter and scanner level can be caught by counting the entire stack of ballots first, and then totalling up the results for each candidate (plus undervotes for that spot plus writeins) and making sure they add up.
But 3 machines, that's going to be expensive, right? Not if the government does a real proposal for bids. Rather than a proposal for Diebold or another company to bid on by themselves (you've seen the stories: specifications for bidding so that only some guy's nephew could ever bid on the project), by saying "OK, Make me a machine that will take a vote and print out this ballot" they open up competition for the voting booth, driving down prices. Likewise, "Make me a machine that will sort out this ballot" and "Sell me a machine that will count this ballot" (Or just buy one online if your ballot can fit into a dollar bill counter) Not only that, but since the actual votes would not be stored in the devices, the government could relax certification requirements for the devices, making them even cheaper to deploy.
If you measure by "living through infancy", then compared to the United States. Cuba has a lower per-capita infant mortality than the US. Sad but true.
I wonder if that can be taken to court for some truth in advertising violation.
ISPs can charge the users whatever they want to. The problem is that they don't want to raise prices on their customers, they want to charge the other end of the line regardless of whose customer that end is, and how much they are already paying their provider.
The university I went to even had apartments on campus for married people, though they didn't require anyone to live on campus. I lived off campus my freshman year, then switched to a dorm room. $500 a semester (3 months) all utilities paid and janitorial staff to clean up the bathroom simply could not be beat, even if I had to share a prison cell sized room with another guy. This was before the dorms came with ethernet jacks so I had to dial in from my dorm room, but I'd have had to dial in from anywhere else as well. It became a better deal as years went by, since I grandfathered in all of the rate changes, so even after the dorms got ethernet and AC, I was still getting it quite cheap.
The univerisities that do require it claim to do it because it gets incoming students familiar with the campus, the other students, and social activities, but really they do it because it gets them more money and keeps their dorms full.
Speak out against the government and have your apartment ransacked for pirated DVDs. They find them everytime and you don't have to worry about a trial -- you were ready to distribute them! Makes the government look good and invites companies to come to China. Win-win situation for the government!
Hell, consider the numbers. 550 thousand distributors, 13 million discs. That makes each bootlegger selling what, 25 discs?
Sounds more like they raided everyone and just picked up the ones that were making trouble or that had tried to search for freedom on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha Phantasie! I never managed to beat that back when I had a C64, or on an emulator now, I'd always ended up lost somewhere. My cousin would spend hours creating characters just to find a party of people that could swim (the hard way). Heavily ripped off LOTR, what with the rings, the wandering dark knights, and "JRR Trollkin" in there.
So nevermind learning any lessons from history then.
Let me know when we've started.
What have we learned from terrorists bringing weapons on board planes? It wasn't "maybe we should have an air marshal on every flight" and certainly wasn't "maybe we should arm the pilots as a last defense against armed terrorists".
What have we learned from Richard Reid? It certainly wasn't "maybe we should ban matches". At least fingernail clippers are no longer considered to be a weapon.
What have we learned from the alleged British Bomber Squad, and the couple who allegedly planned to bring their infant along to smuggle explosives in its bottle? Was it "the profilers who think people with babies can't possibly be a threat are idiots"? It wasn't "maybe we should ban baby bottles", though banning babies would have made a lot of passengers much happier.
So far all our government seems to have learned is that it can hold anyone for any period of time, as long as they claim that they're a terrorist, but they don't have to prove it. They've learned that they can give people to other countries for "extraordinary rendition", which is just a fancy name for a game of "Uncle", except with more arm twisting and less laughing afterwards. And now, it's learned that if the president breaks the law, for instance by ordering illegal wiretaps, they can "fix" the problem by passing a law after the fact.
Are these really the lessons our government should be learning?
Do you think you'll have more civil liberties after that attack succeeds?
That depends, will the government still be full of people who believe that every time somebody blows something up they should automatically be able to cancel more of the Constitution?
Other posters pointed this out as well: hundreds of thousands of people will die this year, if the Constitution really has some hidden clause scribbled on the back that gives the government extraordinary powers to combat death, why is it only invoked for Terri Schiavo and terrorists, and not against carcinogens, fast foods and alcoholics, among many of the other more popular ways to die?
I expect the elected people to do their jobs or get out of the way of those who can.
If you want my ideas, elect me.
It's the government's duty to protect the USA from these attacks by preventing them.
How do you propose they do that? Dig up their cold war psychics?
No, seriously. How do you propose that the governments of the world stop something that might happen in the future? By rounding up a bunch of britons with no plane tickets, no bombs, and no passports, and claiming they were going to blow up planes headed for the US? By stopping everyone who looks vaguely Pakistani from getting on planes while allowing white boys with pipe bombs in their backpacks to pass the checkpoint?
We have systems in place that should be protecting us now. We have no fly lists to protect us from people who we think might try to blow up a plane but that we can't prove this, however they've pretty much been rendered useless by inaccuracy and incompetence. For every Democratic Senator who can't fly because he was on the no fly list or not, how many people are there that are not on the list but that we suspect they might try to blow up a plane? (Or, if you believe the DHS officer when he says it was just "an accident" how many people on the list are "accidentially" let on board planes?) The TSA currently allows people to bring up to 4 books of matches on board, just in case someone has a legitimate reason to set their shoes on fire, but refuses to let people who call them stupid get on the plane.
And now, the government wants to know who's calling who. Tell me, how exactly do you intend to discover terrorists based on call history when you don't already know who the terrorists are, since if you knew who the terrorists are, you'd have already gotten a warrant to listen in on every single call to or from them, and subsequently warrants for those people's call histories as well? What exactly will the government learn from this, beyond the most popular pizza delivery?
Being pissed off at the loss of liberty is only a fraction of the rage I'm feeling now. The rest is reserved for the Republicans who are pissing my tax money away on things like this that they are incapable of justifying.
If you think you're going to get arrested for posting to Slashdot you've got a screw loose.
Why? Maybe I won't be arrested today. Or this year. Or this decade. But do you honestly believe that every single President for the rest of the life of the law will be as honest and good as Bush? Hell, let's leave the President out of it, no matter what you or I think of him, he's sitting around in the White House, not going around arresting people. All I need to do is cut off some homeland security agent in traffic while he's having a bad day.
All he has to do is tell the computer when he files the paperwork that I was "fighting for the other side" (you know, its funny how so many Republicans (talking heads and Senators alike) love to use exactly that language when talking about liberals, are you really sure about me having a screw loose?) and I lose everything, even the ability to go to court to prove that I wasn't fighting for the other side.
Or hell, I could just be arrested by mistake. Or you could. Wouldn't that just suck? Just think, it'll be like a game of uncle, except instead of "uncle" they keep beating you until you admit you're a terrorist. Doesn't that sound like fun?
The detainees are unlawful combatants.
Why do you believe that this law only applies to foreign enemy combatants, and not American citizens who were minding their own business until they posted on slashdot to complain about this law? The government certainly had no problem holding all these Iraqis without a trial for years now, this law can only mean one of two things, either A) Before this law the government was breaking the law, or B) This law doesn't do what you seem to think it does.
Employers, not individuals, should buy insurance for employees rather than give them the cash equivalent
Thats half the point of the argument. If the employers gave the employee the exact cash value of their benefits, their employees would be unable to buy back the insurance they had using the extra cash (even if they received the same tax breaks that the companies have now). Now, if ALL of the employers did this, insurers would be forced to lower their rates in order to do business in the new market, but its unlikely that anything short of more government intervention would bring this about. Of course, the whole argument is like arguing over what flavor shit you'd like to eat...
Life insurance, car insurance, home/renter insurance, and expatriation insurance are "different". Somehow.
Which you'd realize if you understood what makes health insurance different. Think about it for a while. If you need help, I suggest calling up your car insurance agent, tell them you've got a million dollar Ferrari Enzo and you want to slam it into the wall of your house at 180MPH, and you want to know how much an insurance policy that will pay for the repairs on that will be. Then call up your homeowner's insurance agent and let them know you intend to try to knock your house down with your car. Be sure to let your life insurance agent know you're planning to be the one driving.
Then, call up your health insurance agent and ask him how much it costs to get an insurance policy that will cover your care when you get sick. Chances are, the first three will cancel your policy and tell you to go to hell. The fourth will happily give you a quote, because all they do is move money from healthy people to sick people. Even life insurance has term policies that can expire before you do, but only health insurance basically guarantees a payout. And pay out it does, over and over again. Whether it's to 20somethings that get the bug going around the office, 40somethings that stroke after a stressful day at work, 60somethings who lived through too much mcdonalds, beer, and cigarettes or 80somethings with a personal pharmacy and a list of diseases that could fill a dictionary. Don't forget their spouses and kids.
At least when the government socializes healthcare, skimming hundreds of thousands of dollars off the top sometimes gets people arrested, unless they've got connections. When companies socialize it, the skimmers are called CEOs. Abolishing health insurance completely is the only truly sane way to proceed. The market should readjust fairly quickly without insurers contractually setting the prices doctors charge the uninsured (people like to believe only the government does this, but they're either misled or misleading). Doctors and Hospitals will return to competing on service and cost, rather than just whether they take your insurance or not. Service will stratify of course, poorer people will only be able to afford older technology and shared hospital rooms, but the vast majority of them will be receiving better care at rates they can afford than they did in today's world where service basically existed for the insured and those willing to go deep into debt.
The RIAA has raped these releases by not permitting them to be released with their original soundtracks intact.
Wait, what? How can the show be out of copyright but the music that was published in the show not be?
puts what you need in front of you, and buries everything else until you spend hours swearing at the machine until you convince it that you need it
I fixed that typo for you, no need to thank me.
and it turns out their BANKING or STOCK site doesn't work
There are plenty of bank and stock sites out there, and most work fine. Ask them if they'd date someone who wouldn't accept their phonecalls until they switched cellphone providers and joined their "friends plan". If they say they wouldn't, ask them why they accept the same from their bank.
In reality, if you mix the fresh meltwater with the salty ocean, you get an new, slightly less salty ocean
So what you're saying is that if I took a glass, filled it to the brim with saltwater, and then added pure water, it would not overflow? How much water could I add that way? One cup? 10 gallons? This "mixes with the saltwater" idea doesn't make sense even though several people proposed it as a counter argument.
If you'd stop to think about it, you'd realize you can't have more water after a freeze-melt cycle than you did before.
When was the last time we had the melt end of the freeze-melt cycle?
Am I missing something?
Your inner geek.
the best solution isn't to simply fix the law
The law is fixed. The law specifically disallows software patents. The "infamous" directive mentioned in the writeup failed, so the law still specifically disallows software patents. The patent office issues them anyway. Isn't it funny how laws telling people what to do result in fines, jail time, and execution if you break them, but laws telling the government what to do have absolutely no punishment when the government breaks them?
So to enforce the patents, whoever is behind this clusterfuck intends to create an entirely new court system, specifically for the purpose of "legislating from the bench".
The problem with your solution is that ISPs don't have the 256k that John Doe is paying for, much less more bandwidth to set up special deals with Apple to transmit over the cap. Requiring that ISPs live up to the "minimum level of service" would pretty much kill every single one of them overnight thanks to oversubscription and the ISPs refusal to upgrade their infrastructure until they can guarantee that they can make everyone but themselves pay for it.
makes no difference to sea levels.
.103m^3 above the surface of the water (so says the old sailor's adage of icebergs being 9/10ths below water).
.018m^3 more water than we began with. This .018m^3 would spread out over the surface of the ocean, raising the water level ever so slightly. (sorry, your "no difference" myth has just been busted.)
EVERY time this comes up I have to debunk this stuff.
Do you understand why things float in water? Because the mass of water they displace is equal to the mass of the thing floating.
So now you have very dense saltwater, and much less dense freshwater ice (do you understand why ice is freshwater? It forces the salt out as the surface freezes, so the saltwater below it is even saltier and denser) If you have 1kg of ice, it displaces 1kg of saltwater. Simple enough right? Now let's hit it with the math.
Density of fresh water at 0C: 999.9 kg/m^3
Density of ice at 0C: 915.0 kg/m^3
Density of Ocean: We'll take 1020kg/m^3, the minimum on the site, even though at the pole due to the salt concentration noted in the first link the density of the saltwater will be way higher, but any density over 999.9kg/m^3 means that the water level shall rise as I show below:
1 cubic meter of ice (915.0 kg) displaces 915.0kg of saltwater. 915.0kg of saltwater is 0.897m^3 (915kg/(1020kg/m^3)), which means that our 1m^3 of ice has
Now, let's say the ice were to suddenly vanish. There would be a "hole" in the ocean with 0.897m^3 of air in it. Water would of course rush into the "hole" and the water level would drop by 0.897m^3 spread out over the entire surface of the ocean.
But let's say the ice were to melt. Our 915kg of ice would become 915kg of fresh water, which would occupy about 0.915m^3 (915kg/(999.9kg/m^3)). The hole the ice occupied previously was only 0.897m^3 large, which leaves us with
Don't forget that this tiny amount will be joined by water running off of Greenland, Antartica and other polar landmasses with ice on them, 100% of which will raise the water level.
I WOULD HATE IT. You know why? Because every annoying person in the world would converge on my airplane and make calls through-out the flight.
:)
I smell a business model here.
You can pay $10 to use the internet.
You can pay $20 to use the internet and let VoIP traffic through.
You can pay $50 to disable the VoIP traffic for the people sitting in the seats around you
He said every significant new format, so I guess that means the Wii and the... uh...
how the CA special emissions work. What if you have a car you've bought outside the state.
;)
The CA "special" emissions work largely by becoming the de facto standard, since their emissions standards get adopted by several other states, not just California. Roughly 25% of the cars made meet whatever the Californians required at the time it was made, because to put it simply, it would cost more to design separate Civic, California Editions and Civic, Everyone Else Editions, except when the cost of manufacture is greater than the cost of designing a completely separate poorer-mileage version of the car.
Interesting fact I found looking this stuff up: Only California can make more-stringent emissions requirements (see paragraph 6 about "why should anyone care"). No state can require less pollution than California requires.
And yes, if you want to register a car in California it has to pass California's tests. Or you pay more. If your chips don't make the exhaust exceed their smog levels or whatever they're checking for these days, then I'm pretty sure that they won't make you change them. Of course, you could always just forget to mention them
The solution to E-ballots can be stated in 3 simple steps
1) Each vote is recorded onto an optically sortable paper ballot, with human readable votes
2) The ballots are mechanically sorted into piles based on the optical marks
3) The ballots are mechanically counted one pile at a time.
Sure, it means three machines to do the work that other e-voting companies claim to do with 1, but look at what happens:
1) The voting booth is now simply a frontend. People select what they're voting for, and a piece of paper comes out. My preferred idea for this is to have a blank, numbered ballot card issued to the person by a different staffer than the one that took their identification. This ballot (stiffer than just paper receipt tape, in order to survive sorting better) would be notched in one corner so it can only be loaded one way into the printer. The numbers would prevent people from bringing 50 of their own, and issuing it separately from the person being identified means that the number can't be tied to the person by [insert evil dictator], but can be checked against "This ballot was in fact cast at this precinct". If a vote comes out incorrectly, the supervisors destroy the ballot in front of the observers, and the number of the ballot is added to the list of destroyed ballots. As for the machine itself, it stores nothing, and therefore if it bursts into flames or crashes, nothing is lost, and can be replaced at any time, with any other machine. The machines should not need to be excessively protected, if anyone takes them home after the election, it's not a problem. If someone does screw with them, it can be wiped and reset with the correct ballot, and put back in service.
2) Optical sorters are very fast and accurate these days. By sorting on particular patterns in particular locations on each ballot, the sorting machine doesn't even have to know what it's sorting, making tampering difficult at best. Write-ins can be handled with a unique code, and the user writes in their vote on the ballot, these will all be sorted out into their own pile and counted by hand. If there IS a problem, election observers can take the stacks and flip through them like a flipbook. Any changes in the optical pattern should be fairly easy to catch once the bars start to dance around.
3) Counters are very accurate and fast, at least the kinds the banks use. They trust stacks of hundreds of $100 bills to these things, so you know it's not going to miscount very often. The counter won't have any idea what it is its counting, so tampering is practically impossible without a "+10000000 vote" button, and a bribed staff member to push it for the right candidates. Problems at both the counter and scanner level can be caught by counting the entire stack of ballots first, and then totalling up the results for each candidate (plus undervotes for that spot plus writeins) and making sure they add up.
But 3 machines, that's going to be expensive, right? Not if the government does a real proposal for bids. Rather than a proposal for Diebold or another company to bid on by themselves (you've seen the stories: specifications for bidding so that only some guy's nephew could ever bid on the project), by saying "OK, Make me a machine that will take a vote and print out this ballot" they open up competition for the voting booth, driving down prices. Likewise, "Make me a machine that will sort out this ballot" and "Sell me a machine that will count this ballot" (Or just buy one online if your ballot can fit into a dollar bill counter) Not only that, but since the actual votes would not be stored in the devices, the government could relax certification requirements for the devices, making them even cheaper to deploy.
Who is the parasite, "me" or "my" mithochondria. It's not an easy question to answer.
;)
You should give the first Parasite Eve game a try
Compared to where?
If you measure by "living through infancy", then compared to the United States. Cuba has a lower per-capita infant mortality than the US. Sad but true.
I wonder if that can be taken to court for some truth in advertising violation.
ISPs can charge the users whatever they want to. The problem is that they don't want to raise prices on their customers, they want to charge the other end of the line regardless of whose customer that end is, and how much they are already paying their provider.
The university I went to even had apartments on campus for married people, though they didn't require anyone to live on campus. I lived off campus my freshman year, then switched to a dorm room. $500 a semester (3 months) all utilities paid and janitorial staff to clean up the bathroom simply could not be beat, even if I had to share a prison cell sized room with another guy. This was before the dorms came with ethernet jacks so I had to dial in from my dorm room, but I'd have had to dial in from anywhere else as well. It became a better deal as years went by, since I grandfathered in all of the rate changes, so even after the dorms got ethernet and AC, I was still getting it quite cheap.
The univerisities that do require it claim to do it because it gets incoming students familiar with the campus, the other students, and social activities, but really they do it because it gets them more money and keeps their dorms full.
Speak out against the government and have your apartment ransacked for pirated DVDs. They find them everytime and you don't have to worry about a trial -- you were ready to distribute them! Makes the government look good and invites companies to come to China. Win-win situation for the government!
Hell, consider the numbers. 550 thousand distributors, 13 million discs. That makes each bootlegger selling what, 25 discs?
Sounds more like they raided everyone and just picked up the ones that were making trouble or that had tried to search for freedom on the internet.