Once you own the equipment, it's essentially a matter of paying for labor and fuel.
Fortunately for detroit, there are extreme levels of unemployment due to the failure of heavy industries. They already have 2/3 of the resources necessary to begin a large-scale demolition project. Seems to me like you'd be able to do it very cheaply, given the abundance of surplus heavy equipment in the city, not to mention the hordes of laborers desperate for employment.
Mod parent up! If the rates were that high, the problem would effectively take care of itself in a few years!
(For something to chew on, England and Wales reported 784 homicides in 2007/8. Detroit alone reported 394 murders during that period. In other words, Detroit alone could account for over half the murders in a country that is 63 times as large.)
"Main street" in modern suburbia is a 6-lane highway. Take a ride out to Northern Virginia if you don't believe me. Very few places today are bicycle-friendly.
Ironically, the most bike-friendly city I've ever lived in was Fairbanks, AK. They had bike paths along all major roads, and wide shoulders on all others. I took up biking while I was there as a form of both transportation and recreation. (Unfortunately, cycling in the winter isn't much of an option there. Shame too, because it's a surprisingly nice place to live when it isn't winter)
However, if a road carries very little traffic and leads to nowhere, it makes no sense to pour buckets of money into its maintenance. If anything, it will encourage people to move to areas that are more productive and sustainable.
In many cases, I see several roads running parallel (particularly along interstates). If a certain route can be served by other means, it makes sense to consolidate.
Perhaps our "essential" services are no longer sustainable. Even the ones that are genuinely legitimate (ie. things that you cannot possibly provide for on your own)
Not every society has a "stable" equilibrium in which taxes are acceptable, and all services are provided for. Suburbia requires a specific set of parameters in order to remain viable. Currently, several of those parameters are out of range, and the society is beginning to crumble. Taxation does enter into the equation, but is only one of many variables.
Africa desperately needs a solution to the AIDS epidemic. Proper healthcare would go a long way toward solving this crisis. Unfortunately, the governments can't afford to provide healthcare, because their taxes are too low. Unfortunately, the governments also cannot raise taxes because the people cannot afford to pay them. In this situation, the governments cannot provide a legitimately essential service, and don't have the resources to solve the problem on their own.
Our own situation is beginning to get out of hand as well. Although many conservatives would love to use the current economic crisis to criticize government spending that they deem to be wasteful, the roots of the problem go much, much deeper. If we are unable to restore the previous equilibrium (low fuel prices, low levels of unemployment in the middle-classes), there will be a societal shift, and certain regions will have no choice but to wither and die.
There's really no "good" answer to the problem. Large-scale deportation isn't terribly effective, and requires heavy-handed tactics that will inevitably infringe upon the privacy of law-abiding citizens, and cause a great deal of pain and suffering to those being deported (children in particular).
Xenophobia and racism complicates the issue even further. Many people in my area have the unfortunate tendency to label any dark-skinned individual without a perfect command of English (or a full-time job) as an 'illegal,' despite the fact that census data indicates a large legal immigrant population, while the various "crackdowns" that have been attempted have yielded virtually nothing.
IE will probably render any video tag through Silverlight, forcing you to install it. That's how you make market share for your products in Microsoft land./p>
Uhm. Won't IE just include Silverlight by default? I'm failing to see any grand conspiracy here.
There's no "forcing" either. You're always welcome to use Firefox. (As an aside, Microsoft even semi-officially support Firefox with Silverlight, which is a pretty big step forward for them.)
And yet, people are somehow okay with ubiquitous surveillance present in every supermarket and convenience store on the planet.
I also don't understand how anybody in the "heavily survailed" areas of London has any expectation of privacy to begin with. London is a very large and crowded city. All major public areas are likely to have several police on patrol as it is.
(Parent poster is also correct that there is considerable geographic diversity within the UK. Cultural variations between adjacent cities can be larger than the cultural divide between entire US states on opposite ends of the country)
Although I have my doubts about the rise of the "open source" car, this does hint at the direction that the automotive industry is heading.
Much like the major players in semiconductor industry are going "fabless," it appears that the next wave of automakers will also separate their manufacturing operations from their sales and marketing efforts.
The new owners of Saturn have opted to operate the company in this manner, and there are already a few factories in Europe that build other companies' vehicles on contract.
Although we'll have to see how this plays out, it does appear that this could improve agility and flexibility within the industry, thus promoting innovation.
Unlike many government programs, volcano monitoring can be easily justified with solid numbers and statistics.
I worked with a few folks in a volcano-monitoring program a few years ago.
Much of the justification for their existence comes from an incidentthat took place in 1989, in which a 747 flew into a cloud of volcanic ash, causing all 4 engines to fail.
A similar incident took place in 1982 with a British Airways 747. In both cases, the pilots at the controls had experience flying unpowered aircraft, and were able to perform a set of maneuvers to unclog and restart the engines, and land the planes safely. Both planes were severely damaged, and the KLM jet was nearly written off, requiring over $80 million worth of repairs. The landings had to be performed on instruments alone, as the ash sandblasted the windscreens, rendering them unusable.
Much like the infamous US Airways water landing that took place last year, it was a statistical anomaly that either of these planes landed safely. The odds of safely recovering from a complete loss of power are staggeringly low. (The presence of an unusually-experienced pilot with glider training can also be considered somewhat of an anomaly.)
Volcano monitoring can be tricky business, given that ash clouds look almost exactly like "normal" clouds on radar. (Popular legend states that the pilots didn't know anything was wrong until the engines abruptly stopped).
A 747-8 costs about $300 million in 2007 dollars, and can carry 467 passengers. An Airbus A-380 costs a bit more, and can hold up to 853 people in an all-economy configuration.
If one of these large planes were to crash in this manner, the monetary expenses due to the loss of the airframe, the recovery effort, and the inevitable insurance settlement could easily exceed several billion dollars.
If we prevent one such crash every 15 years, the program pays for itself. Additionally, much of the money spent is used to fund basic science research, and can be statistically demonstrated to have saved lives.
Since 1989, we have improved our ability to detect eruptions, and the major volcano observatories now have a direct line to the FAA, and the appropriate emergency management agencies to divert air traffic, and mobilize first responders within minutes of detection.
The governor of Louisiana should know better than to protest funding of an emergency preparedness measure.
Honestly, I could flip "left" and "right" in that dialogue, and it would be no more or less correct.
The (in)ability to use logic or rational discussion skills is not unique to any one political party or philosophy. Throwing around poorly-formed jokes (such as this one) only adds to the fire.
Can we agree that there are more than a few nuts on both the left and the right, and that many of these individuals tend to be given their own TV and radio shows to boost ratings?
This problem isn't unique to Silverlight. Quite frankly, all of the open/free video codecs are crap.
Silverlight uses VC-1, which is also used by both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. It's quite a good codec. To make the Apple side of the ecosystem happy, Microsoft also threw in H.264 support to the software. Although we can groan about proprietary standards, these are by far the two most modern codecs in widespread use.
Content-producers are extremely familiar with these formats, and it's hard to fault the Silverlight team (who are not in the business of making codecs) for supporting the two most popular codecs on the market.
Theora, which is part of the HTML5 spec, is not terribly great at the moment. Even the developers admit that it needs a lot of work. Dirac is also fairly open, and used (and developed) by the BBC. However, it's also very much a "previous generation" codec, and hasn't found much acceptance in the F/OSS community.
Are you serious? Half of the reason why we have such high medical costs are the over-the-top malpractice provisions we have in our laws.
If she can prove that the doctor overlooked a simple diagnosis in favor of an expensive treatment, that doctor will likely never practice medicine again, and will be forced to choke up a heavy settlement.
The physician might be stupid for missing the disease, but there's no way he's stupid enough to hedge his career on such a risk. Hanlon's Razor is generally a good guidline: "Never attribute to malice what you can to incompetence"
Uhm. The US doesn't have a free trade agreement with China. All imported goods are taxed, except for those within the NAFTA area, which doesn't include China. Obama and Clinton even suggested raising the import tariffs from China.
Monsanto are one of a very small number of entities who scare the living crap out of me.
I have no idea about if/how the government are involved with their affairs. However, I do know that they control 70-100% of the United States' supply of certain crops. I also know that they own and control a technology that can produce 'sterile' crops that don't yield any seeds at the end of the harvest.
They've literally got the ingredients for a mad-scientist-plotting-to-take-over-the-world scenario. I'm no libertarian, but that's an unreasonable amount of power for any one entity to hold over humanity. They might as well have a small stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Care to propose a government that can function without taxation? The Nobel Prize committee would love to hear about it.
If the government is unable to enforce its laws (tax evasion being among those laws), it becomes completely ineffective. Many consider the ability to systematically and consistently collect a tax to be one of the cornerstones of a stable government. The fact that the economy is fux0red has absolutely nothing to do with the government's enforcement of the tax code. As long as there's a code, it needs to be enforced, just like the rest of our laws.
I suppose you could question whether or not this law should be on the books to begin with. However, the fact that it's being enforced shouldn't even be the subject of discussion. It's quite well-known that this sort of activity is illegal, and there are plenty of legal venues for gambling available. The situation here isn't even remotely controversial.
In fact, we'd have huge problems if the government selectively chose which laws to enforce.
Say what you want about the glacial speed with which GNOME progresses. Their developers don't rip out 2/3 of the features of their applications, and call it a " major upgrade."
There's also a key difference between 'minimalism' and 'feature-deprived'. Apple understand this, and the GNOME team seem to be catching on. XFce's flexibility also makes it a surprisingly good environment to work in, despite being billed as a 'bare bones' environment. KDE almost certainly doesn't understand this distinction, and I'd frankly be surprised if they had any sort of UI-design review process in place.
Take a look at the most recent release of Amarok, and tell me how the user interface effectively helps the user complete the task that the program was designed to accomplish. Now consider the percentage of screen real-estate that the application devotes to this task (it's around 30%, although you could argue that it's even less than that).
Now compare it to Winamp's famous classic skin, which only takes up a fraction of a 640x480 monitor, has collapsable UI elements to make it smaller if desired, and offers more options to the user up-front with textually-labeled controls. I can only guess what 1 of the 7 icons on the bottom right corner of the previously-linked screenshot actually do. I'll give credit to the KDE team for moving away from the 'Dozens of identical-looking blue icons' paradigm, although the new standard frankly isn't much better.
Why should you give sharepoint a chance? Even it it works well, it is proprietary and you are locked in.
No less proprietary than other similar systems. Getting files in/out of Sharepoint is a fairly trivial process, and the API is open enough to craft your own migration plan if you ever decide to move away from it, given that everything else is equally (or even more) proprietary than Sharepoint.
MS Office might be proprietary, but is so widespread that it's a 'standard' in its own right -- Sharepoint integrates excellently with Office, and keeps your users happy.
I'm typically not one to advocate the use of Microsoft products. However, Sharepoint worked just fine when I was using it, and is definitely a huge step up from any of the competing products at the same price-level.
Slashdot Mirror
California is seriously considering shutting down the vast majority of its state parks to reconcile its budget surplus.
(To give an idea of how bad things are, it's been proven in unambiguous terms that the parks make money for the state and surrounding businesses)
Demolishing buildings isn't cheap.
Once you own the equipment, it's essentially a matter of paying for labor and fuel.
Fortunately for detroit, there are extreme levels of unemployment due to the failure of heavy industries. They already have 2/3 of the resources necessary to begin a large-scale demolition project. Seems to me like you'd be able to do it very cheaply, given the abundance of surplus heavy equipment in the city, not to mention the hordes of laborers desperate for employment.
Mod parent up! If the rates were that high, the problem would effectively take care of itself in a few years!
(For something to chew on, England and Wales reported 784 homicides in 2007/8. Detroit alone reported 394 murders during that period. In other words, Detroit alone could account for over half the murders in a country that is 63 times as large.)
"Main street" in modern suburbia is a 6-lane highway. Take a ride out to Northern Virginia if you don't believe me. Very few places today are bicycle-friendly.
Ironically, the most bike-friendly city I've ever lived in was Fairbanks, AK. They had bike paths along all major roads, and wide shoulders on all others. I took up biking while I was there as a form of both transportation and recreation. (Unfortunately, cycling in the winter isn't much of an option there. Shame too, because it's a surprisingly nice place to live when it isn't winter)
The problem is that the resurfacing of a road in rural Michigan will likely only benefit a few dozen individuals.
Perhaps.
However, if a road carries very little traffic and leads to nowhere, it makes no sense to pour buckets of money into its maintenance. If anything, it will encourage people to move to areas that are more productive and sustainable.
In many cases, I see several roads running parallel (particularly along interstates). If a certain route can be served by other means, it makes sense to consolidate.
Perhaps our "essential" services are no longer sustainable. Even the ones that are genuinely legitimate (ie. things that you cannot possibly provide for on your own)
Not every society has a "stable" equilibrium in which taxes are acceptable, and all services are provided for. Suburbia requires a specific set of parameters in order to remain viable. Currently, several of those parameters are out of range, and the society is beginning to crumble. Taxation does enter into the equation, but is only one of many variables.
Africa desperately needs a solution to the AIDS epidemic. Proper healthcare would go a long way toward solving this crisis. Unfortunately, the governments can't afford to provide healthcare, because their taxes are too low. Unfortunately, the governments also cannot raise taxes because the people cannot afford to pay them. In this situation, the governments cannot provide a legitimately essential service, and don't have the resources to solve the problem on their own.
Our own situation is beginning to get out of hand as well. Although many conservatives would love to use the current economic crisis to criticize government spending that they deem to be wasteful, the roots of the problem go much, much deeper. If we are unable to restore the previous equilibrium (low fuel prices, low levels of unemployment in the middle-classes), there will be a societal shift, and certain regions will have no choice but to wither and die.
It's a tough situation.
There's really no "good" answer to the problem. Large-scale deportation isn't terribly effective, and requires heavy-handed tactics that will inevitably infringe upon the privacy of law-abiding citizens, and cause a great deal of pain and suffering to those being deported (children in particular).
Xenophobia and racism complicates the issue even further. Many people in my area have the unfortunate tendency to label any dark-skinned individual without a perfect command of English (or a full-time job) as an 'illegal,' despite the fact that census data indicates a large legal immigrant population, while the various "crackdowns" that have been attempted have yielded virtually nothing.
IE will probably render any video tag through Silverlight, forcing you to install it. That's how you make market share for your products in Microsoft land./p>
Uhm. Won't IE just include Silverlight by default? I'm failing to see any grand conspiracy here.
There's no "forcing" either. You're always welcome to use Firefox. (As an aside, Microsoft even semi-officially support Firefox with Silverlight, which is a pretty big step forward for them.)
And yet, people are somehow okay with ubiquitous surveillance present in every supermarket and convenience store on the planet.
I also don't understand how anybody in the "heavily survailed" areas of London has any expectation of privacy to begin with. London is a very large and crowded city. All major public areas are likely to have several police on patrol as it is.
(Parent poster is also correct that there is considerable geographic diversity within the UK. Cultural variations between adjacent cities can be larger than the cultural divide between entire US states on opposite ends of the country)
As TFA stated, the technology is absurdly expensive.
None of our lives are remotely interesting enough for the police to bother dedicating that many resources toward spying on our daily activities.
Although I have my doubts about the rise of the "open source" car, this does hint at the direction that the automotive industry is heading.
Much like the major players in semiconductor industry are going "fabless," it appears that the next wave of automakers will also separate their manufacturing operations from their sales and marketing efforts.
The new owners of Saturn have opted to operate the company in this manner, and there are already a few factories in Europe that build other companies' vehicles on contract.
Although we'll have to see how this plays out, it does appear that this could improve agility and flexibility within the industry, thus promoting innovation.
Unlike many government programs, volcano monitoring can be easily justified with solid numbers and statistics.
I worked with a few folks in a volcano-monitoring program a few years ago.
Much of the justification for their existence comes from an incidentthat took place in 1989, in which a 747 flew into a cloud of volcanic ash, causing all 4 engines to fail.
A similar incident took place in 1982 with a British Airways 747. In both cases, the pilots at the controls had experience flying unpowered aircraft, and were able to perform a set of maneuvers to unclog and restart the engines, and land the planes safely. Both planes were severely damaged, and the KLM jet was nearly written off, requiring over $80 million worth of repairs. The landings had to be performed on instruments alone, as the ash sandblasted the windscreens, rendering them unusable.
Much like the infamous US Airways water landing that took place last year, it was a statistical anomaly that either of these planes landed safely. The odds of safely recovering from a complete loss of power are staggeringly low. (The presence of an unusually-experienced pilot with glider training can also be considered somewhat of an anomaly.)
Volcano monitoring can be tricky business, given that ash clouds look almost exactly like "normal" clouds on radar. (Popular legend states that the pilots didn't know anything was wrong until the engines abruptly stopped).
A 747-8 costs about $300 million in 2007 dollars, and can carry 467 passengers. An Airbus A-380 costs a bit more, and can hold up to 853 people in an all-economy configuration.
If one of these large planes were to crash in this manner, the monetary expenses due to the loss of the airframe, the recovery effort, and the inevitable insurance settlement could easily exceed several billion dollars.
If we prevent one such crash every 15 years, the program pays for itself. Additionally, much of the money spent is used to fund basic science research, and can be statistically demonstrated to have saved lives.
Since 1989, we have improved our ability to detect eruptions, and the major volcano observatories now have a direct line to the FAA, and the appropriate emergency management agencies to divert air traffic, and mobilize first responders within minutes of detection.
The governor of Louisiana should know better than to protest funding of an emergency preparedness measure.
Honestly, I could flip "left" and "right" in that dialogue, and it would be no more or less correct.
The (in)ability to use logic or rational discussion skills is not unique to any one political party or philosophy. Throwing around poorly-formed jokes (such as this one) only adds to the fire.
Can we agree that there are more than a few nuts on both the left and the right, and that many of these individuals tend to be given their own TV and radio shows to boost ratings?
This problem isn't unique to Silverlight. Quite frankly, all of the open/free video codecs are crap.
Silverlight uses VC-1, which is also used by both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. It's quite a good codec. To make the Apple side of the ecosystem happy, Microsoft also threw in H.264 support to the software. Although we can groan about proprietary standards, these are by far the two most modern codecs in widespread use.
Content-producers are extremely familiar with these formats, and it's hard to fault the Silverlight team (who are not in the business of making codecs) for supporting the two most popular codecs on the market.
Theora, which is part of the HTML5 spec, is not terribly great at the moment. Even the developers admit that it needs a lot of work. Dirac is also fairly open, and used (and developed) by the BBC. However, it's also very much a "previous generation" codec, and hasn't found much acceptance in the F/OSS community.
Are you serious? Half of the reason why we have such high medical costs are the over-the-top malpractice provisions we have in our laws.
If she can prove that the doctor overlooked a simple diagnosis in favor of an expensive treatment, that doctor will likely never practice medicine again, and will be forced to choke up a heavy settlement.
The physician might be stupid for missing the disease, but there's no way he's stupid enough to hedge his career on such a risk. Hanlon's Razor is generally a good guidline: "Never attribute to malice what you can to incompetence"
Turns out it was Mostly Harmless.
Re:Good News Everyone! (Score:0, Redundant) by Megane (129182)
The Redundant mods are going to be flying all over this thread today.
I smell karma burning. Hope you anticipated that :-P
Don't forget that the US has all but pulled out of the ILC
Uhm. The US doesn't have a free trade agreement with China. All imported goods are taxed, except for those within the NAFTA area, which doesn't include China. Obama and Clinton even suggested raising the import tariffs from China.
Dollar collapse?
Say what you want about the economy, but the dollar is doing just fine.
Monsanto are one of a very small number of entities who scare the living crap out of me.
I have no idea about if/how the government are involved with their affairs. However, I do know that they control 70-100% of the United States' supply of certain crops. I also know that they own and control a technology that can produce 'sterile' crops that don't yield any seeds at the end of the harvest.
They've literally got the ingredients for a mad-scientist-plotting-to-take-over-the-world scenario. I'm no libertarian, but that's an unreasonable amount of power for any one entity to hold over humanity. They might as well have a small stockpile of nuclear weapons.
'+5, Insightful'? Really?
Care to propose a government that can function without taxation? The Nobel Prize committee would love to hear about it.
If the government is unable to enforce its laws (tax evasion being among those laws), it becomes completely ineffective. Many consider the ability to systematically and consistently collect a tax to be one of the cornerstones of a stable government. The fact that the economy is fux0red has absolutely nothing to do with the government's enforcement of the tax code. As long as there's a code, it needs to be enforced, just like the rest of our laws.
I suppose you could question whether or not this law should be on the books to begin with. However, the fact that it's being enforced shouldn't even be the subject of discussion. It's quite well-known that this sort of activity is illegal, and there are plenty of legal venues for gambling available. The situation here isn't even remotely controversial.
In fact, we'd have huge problems if the government selectively chose which laws to enforce.
Say what you want about the glacial speed with which GNOME progresses. Their developers don't rip out 2/3 of the features of their applications, and call it a " major upgrade."
There's also a key difference between 'minimalism' and 'feature-deprived'. Apple understand this, and the GNOME team seem to be catching on. XFce's flexibility also makes it a surprisingly good environment to work in, despite being billed as a 'bare bones' environment. KDE almost certainly doesn't understand this distinction, and I'd frankly be surprised if they had any sort of UI-design review process in place.
Take a look at the most recent release of Amarok, and tell me how the user interface effectively helps the user complete the task that the program was designed to accomplish. Now consider the percentage of screen real-estate that the application devotes to this task (it's around 30%, although you could argue that it's even less than that).
Now compare it to Winamp's famous classic skin, which only takes up a fraction of a 640x480 monitor, has collapsable UI elements to make it smaller if desired, and offers more options to the user up-front with textually-labeled controls. I can only guess what 1 of the 7 icons on the bottom right corner of the previously-linked screenshot actually do. I'll give credit to the KDE team for moving away from the 'Dozens of identical-looking blue icons' paradigm, although the new standard frankly isn't much better.
Why should you give sharepoint a chance? Even it it works well, it is proprietary and you are locked in.
No less proprietary than other similar systems. Getting files in/out of Sharepoint is a fairly trivial process, and the API is open enough to craft your own migration plan if you ever decide to move away from it, given that everything else is equally (or even more) proprietary than Sharepoint.
MS Office might be proprietary, but is so widespread that it's a 'standard' in its own right -- Sharepoint integrates excellently with Office, and keeps your users happy.
I'm typically not one to advocate the use of Microsoft products. However, Sharepoint worked just fine when I was using it, and is definitely a huge step up from any of the competing products at the same price-level.