I'd guess maybe around 18-gauge all combined, and half that if you wanted to use one cat5 for both + and -. Nah, one Cat5 cable made up of 24ga conductors is equal to about 15ga all together, which (split into two) would make two 18ga conductors. Of course, anyone who thinks Cat5 wire is a cheaper way to do speaker wire obviously hasn't bought a box of Cat5 wire lately, or is stealing it from work. Cheaper to buy a nice roll of rubber jacket 18-2 lamp cord. Easier too. Can you imagine sitting there stripping, twisting up, and trimming four conductors for each pole, repeated twice for each cable? Insanity!
Explain to me how that is any different from Christianity?... How is that any different than most religions? Mohammad fucking Christ on a pogo stick.... Where the fuck did you get the idea that the GP poster gives a crap one way or the other about how Christianity compares to Islam? "Yeah, well Christianity was doing it too!" Fucking apologist bullshit is what that is. If your best defense is an indictment of others, your position is pretty fucking bad.
You do realize that a lot of the smallpox was spread by giving the natives blankets that had been used by people with smallpox. Basically biological warfare. You do realize that the whole "smallpox blankets biological warfare" bit is completely fabricated by Ward Churchill (a chronic liar and plagiarist) and has no factual basis, right?
However being crafty I can think of an instance where someone @ Verizon can make an argument charging that the copper coming into the home was causing some form of crosstalk which caused attenuation issues and required the copper being "disabled". Change "crafty" to "ignorant". Fiber conducts light. Copper conducts electricity. There's no crosstalk between them. Basic physics here.
I personally could see some twobit Verizon shlum doing something stupid on their own accord. "If we cut the copper John we never have to worry about losing our job!" More work doesn't give them job security. There's always more work than they have people for. About 10-odd years ago, GTE (now Verizon) laid off just about every field tech with more than 15 years experience because they cost too much. Management is their biggest threat to job security.
But *do* they own it? They're bringing in a new service. If Verizon isn't the one who laid down the copper originally, I'm not sure it's Verizon's to pull out. The copper belongs to whomever operates the system. That's what makes them your Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier. Access to their infrastructure is what they sell. In your case, it belongs to Verizon. It's 99.999% likely that it was also installed by Verizon (or rather, by GTE or Bell Atlantic before they merged) as it's almost unheard of for an area to change ILECs.
Various words just have no real translation. "Gesellig" (Dutch) just means so much more than the dictionary equivalents: genial, social. There are lots of words that have meanings that fall right in the middle of a cluster of words in another language, but have no perfect translation. Thing is, that's largely irrelevant. There's no large, gaping hole in your ability to describe your world to others simply because there's no exact word in English that means the same as "gesellig".
Similarly "mana" (Maori) means more than just pride or spirit. Yeah, it means prestige/honor. You might argue that "prestige" doesn't capture the true essence of "mana", but I'd argue that you don't know the true meaning of "prestige". Unless you can articulate what's missing, you can't say there's a gap in the meaning. If you can articulate the diference, then you've demonstrated the English is perfectly capable of communicating the concept--- it just doesn't have a singular word for it. There's nothing magic about having a special word for something. If it's truly an important concept, a word will be created for it, or borrowed from another language. Language is a living, flexible tool. It can adapt to anything.
Kill a language and you kill a culture. Kill a culture and you end up with disaffected people. RTFA. No one is "killing" these languages. They're dying because people are abandoning them. Cultures are dying for the same reason. The notion that aboriginal culture should be preserved at all costs ignores the fact that doing so requires that we keep people living in stone-age squalor and forbid them modern conveniences like manufactured clothing, steel tools, or (horrors!) television! Cultures come and go. Old people decry it, young people embrace it. It's the oldest story in human history.
Some guy for this Institute was on the Colbert Report last week, and one reason he gave was that many languages have very unique ways of expressing certain concepts(he gave an example, but heck if I can remember it). He considered the loss of these languages to be a loss of information. Not sure I agree that it is a good reason to spend a lot of time preserving languages, but it was kind of an interesting way to look at it.
It's also a load of crap. The concept still exists, whether there is a language capable of describing it or not. The extinct language developed a means of illustrating the concept at some point, so it is not unreasonable to expect that other languages can develop a similar means should the need arise. Language is an adaptive tool. The Sapir-Whorf notion of linguistic determinism is largely a crock of shit.
How do they account for the fact that there will always be an area that these security forces don't patrol because no one told the computer that the place exists. The above "fact" is not actually true. Basic security strategy calls for multiple overlapping patrols. This technique is as old as the freakin' Romans.
Anyone know how they manage telling the computer which places exist? A list?
I think it's because there is very little, if any, accountability that the Government employees have to worry about. That may be part of it, but I think the amount of hassle increased not because it went from private to government, but because it went from slack and haphazard to tight and paranoid. I used to be able to walk into LAX to meet people at the gate. I used to be able to set off the metal detector with the steel plates in my shoes and the fat lazy security guy would just wave a metal detector over me and send me on my way. The security didn't become harsh and intrusive simply because the screeners became government employees.
Long story short, after a year of looking we couldn't fill the position at any price. At any price? Bullshit. You simply couldn't fill the position at the kind of wages you were offering. If you had credibly offered (say) $20 millon a year for the position, you'd have 'em lined up around the block. The problem is that you work in a sector that everyone knows underpays for the work they demand, so they don't even bother to send a resume.
Taxes on what? They're students. They paid for the course. That's money into your economy. What more do you want off them? Blood? No, just perhaps an economic return that's equal to or greater than the cost of educating them. Tuition doesn't cover it if you're talking about state schools. The rest is paid by tax money. A foreign national who can't legally work contributes little to the economy, and once he returns home, contributes nothing.
So? Why exactly are domestic students better uses of taxpayer dollars then foreign students? Foreign nationals cannot hold jobs, and upon graduation move back to their home countries. I think the notion is that government subsidies ought to be going to improve conditions within the country, rather than to give a hand to someone who doesn't contribute to the economy.
But they still make the majority of science/engineering grad students in the US?... Where education is renowned for being expensive.
It is indeed expensive. Chinese students have their education paid for by the Chinese government. Indian parents will eat dirt and wear old potato sacks to send a child to engineering school.
The best way to do that is to swamp our educational system with their own people, people who eventually return home with what they've learned leaving us with, well, not much. This may be true with many visitors, but my experience with them has been that once they're here they want to stay here. "Want to" is largely irrelevant when they're Chinese citizens with their tuition paid by the Chinese government. The only way they can stay is if they can continue to convince their government to continue paying them to stay in school.
there are only 7 US citizens in the engineering program this year. Why is that? An engineering grad student friend of mine has a theory about this:
Engineering education is in high demand. Medicine, you can learn anywhere, as evidenced by the hordes of doctors in the US HMO medical system who only barely speak or understand English. Law? What would a Chinese or Indian national do with a US law degree? Engineering, though.... the US is the place to get an engineering degree. Subsequently, there is a lot of competition to get into the limited space available. The reason colleges are so willing to fill their slots with foreigners even though their supposed purpose is to educate residents of the state (which supports the school with tax money) is that foreigners are considered "out of state students". Out of state students pay extremely high tuition compared to state residents, originally under the theory that this would limit the number of outsiders coming in to take advantage of a state-supported school and then leave the state to go home after. But over the last few decades, state universities have turned from state subsidized places of higher learning intended to increase the education level of state residents, into state subsidized businesses trying to maximize their tuition, grant, investment, and patent income. They are required to take a certain number of state resident students, but they strive to maximize their profit by taking as few as possible. This is the "greed" motivation.
As a side note, he adds that Indian immigrants are usually under enormous pressure from their parents to succeed in school, and that the Chinese students are scared to death of failing because that means it's right back to China where they'll end up assigned as the Third Assistant Injection Molding Technician in a plastic bucket factory in Shanghai. Subsequently, they have a tendency to vastly outperform "locals" and make up the majority of students.
has remained 'up on chocks' The correct phrase is 'up on blocks', a reference to an automobile being jacked up and suspended by solid objects (traditionally, cinder blocks or wood blocks in poor areas) contacting the undercarriage or frame to either allow free access to all four wheels or to take the strain of supporting the vehicle off the suspension for long term storage.
Wheel chocks, on the other hand, are wedge shaped items inserted at the front and/or back of a vehicle tire to prevent the wheel from turning and stop the vehicle from rolling. As the chocks simply prevent tire rotation, there is no 'up' associated with them. A vehicle with chocks applied is simply said to be "chocked".
This error is probably excusable under the "diminished capacity" defense. It is not fair to expect anyone who takes an interest in the Knight Rider franchise to have the sort of basic competence necessary to be familiar common with figures of speech.
Yeah -- I find it amazing that the US nuclear power industry insists that nuclear grade graphite doesn't burn They're correct, to the extent that the design of US reactors prevents it. It doesn't burn unless it has a source of oxygen. There is no free oxygen available inside the containment vessel. Chernobyl had no containment vessel, plus it had a positive void coefficient. We don't have those here.
However such reactors could also breed weapons grade material (so I'm led to believe) You've been lead to believe an untruth. Breeding weapons grade plutonium is very tricky, requiring very short exposure time at low power and frequent fuel rod changes. "Regular" fuel reprocessing, which uses the "lazy" method of changing fuel rods only when absolutely necessary, creates a mix of plutonium isotopes that is utterly useless in warheads. Anyone authoritatively citing the non-proliferation argument against fuel reprocessing is either a blatant liar and propagandist, or woefully ignorant of the physics of the process. Either way, they're not worth listening to.
the previous poster probably meant South West US where there are significant hydroplants. He'd still be wrong, though. Only four states get more than half their power from hydro (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming) and their location as a "quadrant" of the US could only be considered the NorthWest. Look here for a nice interactive map showing the breakdown on power generation by state. GP poster was obviously just a trolling ass with no actual facts.
The kind of mil-tech that makes the Tom Clancy crowd cream their jeans is great (except when it isn't) but in the end it comes down to the grunts.
By that math China is the world's sole superpower, since they can field the most grunts. No, you're oversimplifying things. It doesn't come down to simply how many grunts. Technology is a force multiplier, and the "force" in question is essentially manpower. You don't win simply by having more guys, as the effect of assorted force multipliers can make one of hte enemies guys worth five of yours. You can't win with no guys, no matter how much you have in the way of force multipliers, as anything times zero is still zero.
Victory in warfare always comes down to one man standing in front of another and successfully asserting his will, or, by proxy, the will of his commander(s). It always comes down to grunts. It ain't battleships, or airplanes, but grunts that win wars. Sorry air force and navy, but you're just support staff. It's the army and (to a lesser extent) the marine corps that conducts warfare.
So, how much does a unit with a GPS, a 700 MHz transceiver, and a PDA weigh, anyways? You're probably one of those folks who thinks the coffee maker the DoD paid $8,000 for was just a Mr. Coffee, rather than the custom-fitted coffee-tea-soup dispenser built into a cargo plane it actually was. Specialty devices like the Land Warrior gear aren't simply a GPS unit wired to an iPaq and a walkie-talkie with a sack of AA batteries on the side. When you hand devices to grunts, they have to be 1) tough, and 2) easy. That costs money and weight, invariably.
about the world around you. It's not as if any of this stuff will ever affect you.
Unless you want to buy a house. Or a car. Or food. Or anything, really.
I mean, computers come free anyway. Computing time was never so costly that they ever had to divvy it up by time slices or something. And IT should never have to be affected by monetary concerns. Unlimited budgets for our departments are a good thing. Or at least were until the tech bubble crashed some years back.... Now you're just being an ass. You sound like congress torturing the commerce clause to invent authority to pass laws about shit that ain't their business. Yeah, anything can be said to be related to anything else if you loosen the definition enough.
Why would it be working on work-arounds for patents that it is not infringing? Because it doesn't matter what Vonage thinks, nor what we think, nor what Mrs. O'Leary's cow thinks, but what the most skillful lawyer in the courtroom can make the sub-90 IQ jurors think.
What are you talking about?! If someone invents something and is patent whoring it so nobody else can use it to compete, that CAUSES innovation not stomps it. When the patent is something overly broad, along the lines of "sending telephone conversations over a packet switched network" (which is essentially what the Verizon/Sprint patents amount to) then it is stifling innovation.
If dialup and dsl technologies were perfectly open patents for everyone to use, we'd still be using them because companies would be stuck on "Wow that dialup service is awesome and everyone's getting it! Let's copy it!" With people paying royalties and getting permission to use those inventions, they just say screw it, we can do better and invent cable and fiber and microwave transmission etc. Cable, fiber, and microwave as alternatives to dsl/dialup have bloody fuck-all to do with working around patents. You really think cable companies created DOCSIS because there were patents on (say) ATM DSL? If so, you're a fucking idiot. Cable companies created cable data protocols because their infrastructure is coax, not copper fucking pairs. I'm not even going to dignify the "fiber and microwave" bits with a response, as any half-intelligent fool knows that both technologies predate commercial dialup and DSL internet access by DECADES.
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You do realize that the whole "smallpox blankets biological warfare" bit is completely fabricated by Ward Churchill (a chronic liar and plagiarist) and has no factual basis, right?
I personally could see some twobit Verizon shlum doing something stupid on their own accord. "If we cut the copper John we never have to worry about losing our job!" More work doesn't give them job security. There's always more work than they have people for. About 10-odd years ago, GTE (now Verizon) laid off just about every field tech with more than 15 years experience because they cost too much. Management is their biggest threat to job security.
Similarly "mana" (Maori) means more than just pride or spirit. Yeah, it means prestige/honor. You might argue that "prestige" doesn't capture the true essence of "mana", but I'd argue that you don't know the true meaning of "prestige". Unless you can articulate what's missing, you can't say there's a gap in the meaning. If you can articulate the diference, then you've demonstrated the English is perfectly capable of communicating the concept--- it just doesn't have a singular word for it. There's nothing magic about having a special word for something. If it's truly an important concept, a word will be created for it, or borrowed from another language. Language is a living, flexible tool. It can adapt to anything. Kill a language and you kill a culture. Kill a culture and you end up with disaffected people. RTFA. No one is "killing" these languages. They're dying because people are abandoning them. Cultures are dying for the same reason. The notion that aboriginal culture should be preserved at all costs ignores the fact that doing so requires that we keep people living in stone-age squalor and forbid them modern conveniences like manufactured clothing, steel tools, or (horrors!) television! Cultures come and go. Old people decry it, young people embrace it. It's the oldest story in human history.
It's also a load of crap. The concept still exists, whether there is a language capable of describing it or not. The extinct language developed a means of illustrating the concept at some point, so it is not unreasonable to expect that other languages can develop a similar means should the need arise. Language is an adaptive tool. The Sapir-Whorf notion of linguistic determinism is largely a crock of shit.
It is indeed expensive. Chinese students have their education paid for by the Chinese government. Indian parents will eat dirt and wear old potato sacks to send a child to engineering school.
Engineering education is in high demand. Medicine, you can learn anywhere, as evidenced by the hordes of doctors in the US HMO medical system who only barely speak or understand English. Law? What would a Chinese or Indian national do with a US law degree? Engineering, though.... the US is the place to get an engineering degree. Subsequently, there is a lot of competition to get into the limited space available. The reason colleges are so willing to fill their slots with foreigners even though their supposed purpose is to educate residents of the state (which supports the school with tax money) is that foreigners are considered "out of state students". Out of state students pay extremely high tuition compared to state residents, originally under the theory that this would limit the number of outsiders coming in to take advantage of a state-supported school and then leave the state to go home after. But over the last few decades, state universities have turned from state subsidized places of higher learning intended to increase the education level of state residents, into state subsidized businesses trying to maximize their tuition, grant, investment, and patent income. They are required to take a certain number of state resident students, but they strive to maximize their profit by taking as few as possible. This is the "greed" motivation.
As a side note, he adds that Indian immigrants are usually under enormous pressure from their parents to succeed in school, and that the Chinese students are scared to death of failing because that means it's right back to China where they'll end up assigned as the Third Assistant Injection Molding Technician in a plastic bucket factory in Shanghai. Subsequently, they have a tendency to vastly outperform "locals" and make up the majority of students.
Wheel chocks, on the other hand, are wedge shaped items inserted at the front and/or back of a vehicle tire to prevent the wheel from turning and stop the vehicle from rolling. As the chocks simply prevent tire rotation, there is no 'up' associated with them. A vehicle with chocks applied is simply said to be "chocked".
This error is probably excusable under the "diminished capacity" defense. It is not fair to expect anyone who takes an interest in the Knight Rider franchise to have the sort of basic competence necessary to be familiar common with figures of speech.
Bullshit. Tell that to the Hetch-Hetchy valley.
Victory in warfare always comes down to one man standing in front of another and successfully asserting his will, or, by proxy, the will of his commander(s). It always comes down to grunts. It ain't battleships, or airplanes, but grunts that win wars. Sorry air force and navy, but you're just support staff. It's the army and (to a lesser extent) the marine corps that conducts warfare.
Unless you want to buy a house. Or a car. Or food. Or anything, really.
I mean, computers come free anyway. Computing time was never so costly that they ever had to divvy it up by time slices or something. And IT should never have to be affected by monetary concerns. Unlimited budgets for our departments are a good thing. Or at least were until the tech bubble crashed some years back.... Now you're just being an ass. You sound like congress torturing the commerce clause to invent authority to pass laws about shit that ain't their business. Yeah, anything can be said to be related to anything else if you loosen the definition enough.
Because it doesn't matter what Vonage thinks, nor what we think, nor what Mrs. O'Leary's cow thinks, but what the most skillful lawyer in the courtroom can make the sub-90 IQ jurors think.