You're kidding right? MSNBC? MS NBC? Do you know what the MS is short for? Slashdot has never been a particularly friendly environment to the works of that company. It's not because other News outlets are good. They're generally disasters. If Fox News is attacked more than others it's because it is more consistently terrible.
They, like many companies after large cash infusions and full of optimism about how they'll make it all back in the first year, obviously overspent in setting their factory. Zeroing in on the "whistling robots" thing is a bit silly though. They're industrial robots, they have speakers and they're programmable. The alert sounds can be set to anything. I've seen motherboards that play classical music and so forth instead of beep codes on error conditions. It works too. The end user is typically far too unreliable to report to a tech that the board was, for example, producing three long beeps and a short one. If it plays Fur Elise, on the other hand, they can usually hum it.
Well, lead acetate is sugar and fructose is sugar and glucose (both as dextrose and sinistrose ) is sugar and sucrose is sugar and so on, but they're not the same. Lead acetate is poisonous (and yet has still been used as a sweetener), sinistrose is undigestible, fructose and dextrose can both be used as fuel by our cells, although dextrose is more "clean burning" so might be mildly better for you than fructose, and sucrose is a polysaccharide that breaks down cleanly into one fructose and one dextrose molecule. High fructose corn syrup is a mix that tends to have a slightly higher proportion of fructose than sucrose does when broken down. As such, sucrose is probably very slightly better for you than high fructose corn syrup. Plain dextrose is better than either of them, but we're probably still not talking about a lot of difference here. In terms of taste though, I would have to say that dextrose tastes better than sucrose, which tastes better than high fructose corn syrup. On the other hand, I'm not sure why everything needs to be sweetened so much in the first place.
Sorry to rant, but when I hear a line like "sugar is sugar", it makes me think of propaganda commercials produced by the corn growers, preying on people's ignorance. Just like the Nestle Pure Life water commercials with their false "nothing hydrates better than water" premise. It just hits a raw nerve. Sugars are a class of chemical compounds with different properties and your body _can_ tell the difference (by taste, for starters) and oral rehydration therapy (which is all sports drinks are) hydrates better than plain water, so those commercials are outright disinformation. Sorry if I sound like I'm ranting at you. I'm just ranting in general because that kind of thing hits a raw nerve with me.
All that said, just like you, I'm also not sure why we're subsidizing corn farming the way we do. Especially when the primary beneficiaries are the large corporate farms as opposed to the small farms. Clearly we do have to ensure that the food supply doesn't dry up, and relying purely on market forces would be too unstable, but the subsidies are clearly more influenced by the corn lobby than by careful analysis of the agricultural sector.
Put simply, why should either country have more or less sun?
Because the point in Germany closest to the equator is 47.5 degrees of latitude. Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Michigan all extend that far North, but the southern tip of all of those states is further South. For most of those states, the bulk of the land area is below 47.5 degrees. Alaska is the only US state that starts above 47.5 degrees and that extends further north than Germany. The other 43 US States are all further South, in their entirety, than Germany.
The amount of insolation a location gets is determined first by its latitude, then secondly by other factors such as cloud cover. Except in weird microclimates, latitude pretty much dominates this.
Latitude is important because, the further a point is from the equator, the lower the angle of the sun is. Above the Tropic of Cancer at about 23 degrees, the sun will _never_ be directly overhead, even at high noon on the summer solstice. It will always be south, which means that the light will be coming in at an angle. The way that the ground is angled away means that less actual light will hit an area than will hit an equal area which is perpendicular to the suns rays. It also means that the sunlight travels through more atmosphere before hitting the ground.
The effect local weather has on insolation should be obvious. The more cloudy/rainy/hazy, the less sunlight actually gets through. Of course, locations that get less sun to begin with, and are therefore colder, also tend to get more overcast weather. There are exceptions, usually in places where mountain ranges cause clouds to bunch up on one side, but those don't throw off the average much in large countries such as the US. Also, Germany has its fair share of such places in any case.
So, except for Alaska, every state in the United States should get more sun on average than Germany. It would require some remarkable exception for anything else to be the case. Any exception so remarkable would be remarkable enough that I think we would have heard of it. Well, ok, the moron who originally did this analysis probably wouldn't have heard of it because they clearly don't know a thing about geography and where seasons come from (or maybe they do and they're just lying through their teeth as paid shills, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and just call them ignorant morons).
A little late to reply to this, but had to comment on:
Fossil Fuels aren't found on asteroids...
That may or may not be true depending on whether there's any life out there to be fossilized. The thing to remember is that fossil fuels on Earth originated at some point from organic molecules of non-biological origin. Although if space is full of life, it could actually be of biological origin, but it still came from non-biological organic material at some point, somewhere. Anyway, given the presence of life and time, non-biological organics eventually become biological ones because something eats them. In space, the organic molecules can stay uneaten and non-biological (provided there's no life), but can still be quite similar to fossil fuels.
One thing we do know is that there are carbonaceous asteroids. Kerogen-like material has been found in some meteorites. Kerogen is a precursor to oil. So, provided the aliens have abundant energy (which they should have if they can travel here, the same raw materials found in fossil fuels are to be found on asteroids and comets and can be processed into whatever they might want fossil fuels for (more likely as chemical feedstocks for manufacturing than as fuel).
So, aliens looking for chemical resources don't have to touch down on a planet and, unless some very neat advanced technology is actually possible, can extract and process them at lower energy cost from asteroids than from a planet. That leaves some resources that aliens still might want though. Land, for one thing. Even if they can build perfectly good space habitats, it would be understandable, even expected, that some of them would value plain old real-gravity, open sky, planetary land. Then, there's us. They might want to destroy us because we might someday be a threat, or out of plain old xenophobia or racism, or religious zealotry, or to establish a political claim of some kind over local space, etc. They also might want us alive as slaves (not necessarily because they need the labour, but for the cachet), or some kind of serfs, or even as warm bodies in political schemes (for example, to count as part of the population in a proportional representation scheme, like with US slaves in the South, which is what led to that whole 3/5ths a person deal), or to establish some sort of claim on local space, or as religious converts, etc. There are a lot of potential reasons why aliens might want to invade Earth. They're at least as varied as the reasons humans have found to do the same thing over the ages, and might include some options that a human just wouldn't think of.
All that said, just because there are all these possible reasons aliens might want to attack us, doesn't mean that aliens would want to attack us. If there are technologically advanced aliens out there, we'll just have to wait and see. If there aren't technologically advanced aliens out there, but we manage to start up space travel in earnest, then we just have to give it a few million years and, whether they were bio-engineered by us from ourselves, or other life, or from scratch, or they evolve naturally from same, there will be aliens, some probably technologically advanced.
Abuse of science to provide flimsy justification for outrageous public policy is not the same thing as "atempt[ing] to make government rational and based on scientific principles". Just as a country can have the word "Democratic" in its official name and still not actually be so, a country can claim to be scientific and rational and really not be.
Lending a car or a vacuum cleaner are as different from one another as either is different from reading a book, but they're all an example of lending something that aren't really significantly different from lending a game or a movie, or music, etc. Someone has a copy and they let someone else use it instead of themselves for a while. The utility of all of those examples is time limited in some way. You can only listen to the same music for so long (usually) or spend so much time reading a book, or so much time vacuuming, or so much time driving before you're tired of the particular music, done reading (and possibly re-reading) the book, or done vacuuming, or done driving. Most people will eventually want to listen to the music again, or read the same book again if they enjoyed it, or the floor will get dirty and they will need to vacuum again, or they will need to drive somewhere else. The time frame on these things is different, but they're still alike. Let's say you borrow a friends roofing equipment and put a new roof on your house that will last for forty years. Does the one time usefulness of the roofing tools fit the pattern you claim for books, games and movies? It doesn't have to be roofing tools either, it could be all kinds of tools that many people realistically might borrow once and then never need to use again in their lives. The fact of one time use doesn't materially alter the nature of a loan from a friend.
In short, the act of lending may have prevented a sale.
Same with the anything else someone loans you. I may never buy fencing tools in my entire life. On the rare occasions I've needed anything like that, I just borrow them from my father. So, someone lost a sale because of he's willing to lend me his. This is the way it has always back through history and beyond. There have been societies in the past that have enacted laws to outlaw borrowing (or any out of channel acquisition method, such as making it yourself) of certain goods in order to force people to buy (and generally to buy from specific people). From a modern perspective, such societies look like antiquated, corrupt, tyrannies. It's sad how little we've changed.
Didn't someone (I think it was Microsoft) file a patent for using biometric recognition through kinect-like devices to deny access to copyrighted materials? If the game requires it to operate, it doesn't matter if you loan just the game or the whole console.
It's a different operating space ; pharma patents the molecule. Medicines only have a few components. Patents are narrow - a molecule is a molecule and can't be interpreted as anything else.
Interesting that you take it as a given that you patent the molecule rather than a specific treatment based on the molecule, which is supposed to be the only thing you can legally patent. It's theoretically not supposed to be the case that you can just sift through the biochemistry of living things, pluck out a likely looking molecule and claim it as your own. The slippery slope on this one is, however, very slippery.
If the US government was tolerating or ignoring someone on US soil who England believes is a terrorist they could attempt to go after them if they had the capability.
That's not a hypothetical. Look into the history of the IRA.
Blind faith? I repeatedly refer to historical examples to justify my understanding and expectations; this included exponential technological improvement. That's evidence based faith. My "faith" may be wrong, but it's not blind. Yet another wrong label.
I think the term blind faith was appropriate there and I'm going to stick with it. If you were saying that these self-correcting situations _could_ happen while pointing at past examples, that would be one thing, but you were saying that they _will_ happen as a matter of absolute certainty.
The existence of negative feedback is not in of itself proof that the system will be stable or that the equilibrium is good; but if you're going to dismiss negative feedback without analysis, then I know your predictions are based on feelings instead of thought.
Oh come on, be serious! I know you haven't done any actual analysis of the kind you seem to be demanding from me. If you have, you've certainly kept quiet about it.
I've been using it in the sense of "unavoidable `permanent' unemployment".
Absolutely permanent unemployment isn't the way it's usually meant. If you're talking about a particular sector of employment that gets completely obsoleted (Dodo bird hunters, for example), then it does mean permanent unemployment for that particular sector, I suppose. Basically, it boils down to employment caused by external factors taking a big bite out of a labour market.
I know you think that that technology causes non-brief structural (permanent) unemployment
I think that it can cause long-lasting structural unemployment. It's not permanent since the unemployed are eventually no longer counted in the labour market one way or the other. You don't seem to care by which method they're no longer counted in the labour market, while I think it's of critical importance.
Your prediction of a robotic dystopia where the masses are poor requires this trend to reverse direction. Complete robotic automation would be a huge technological improvement over now; but everyone having no job and starving without the benevolent socialist state is a huge downgrade over now. The relationship between technology and prosperity must flip if you think technology is a force towards your robotic dystopia.
I just have to repeat myself over and over again on this, don't I. I think complete robotic automation in and of itself would be great. The productivity it would enable and the way it could free people from pointless drudgery to pursue more worthwhile endeavours is something to strive for. I'm just concerned that people are too short-sighted and mean-spirited to allow that to happen without provoking disaster. History is full of horrors two-strikes and you're dead (first strike is just some savage physical punishment, a little slavery and a branding) vagrancy laws and situations like the Irish Potato Famine. No-one would ever set a bunch of robots to digging holes just to fill them back in because it would be non-sensical. Meanwhile, they would happily set people to do the exact same thing to teach them "the value of hard work" (that value being payment insufficient to ever escape the situation).
There's no need for any relationship between technology and productivity or even (average) prosperity to flip. The majority of people just won't have any personal claim on any of the benefits of that technology and will have to rely on the benefits trickling down to them. Unless something amazing can be found that regular people can do that the automated technologies can't _and_ that actually has high demand, then the majority of people could end up, at best, as some sort of neo-serfs.
And... I'm not going to give you a very good grade on that test. I rigged the test in asking you to read my mind, but you've said that you understood what I'm talking about, even as you failed
The mass shadow of what is almost certainly dark matter has been observed by way of gravitational lensing. It's looking like a pretty strong possibility that it does exist.
Economics is a mess because it's a social science, not one of the "hard" sciences. It's self-interfering. if any economist actually comes up with any theory with any real predictive power and publishes, it's put to use for the purpose of making money. As soon as the theory is out in the wild, it can destroy itself.
Have to quote this from _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_:
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
The fundamental problem of gesture recognition has been recognized for quite some time now.
Negative feedback must seem like magic to you then. With that sentence, you've again demonstrated a lack of understanding of my PoV, despite your repeated insistence that you do. It's not magic; it's your lack of understanding that makes it seem like "magic".
You've provided me with some happy nostalgia there. I once took a video course and spent a large amount of time working on analog feedback effects. Pointing a camera at a screen displaying the output of the camera and using the right combination of angle, distance, focus, brightness, contrast, etc. and placing various objects in front of the screen allowed me to create interactive video artifacts that would grow or shrink, or pulsate, or shift back and forth between multiple states and positions. I was particularly happy with the persistent interactive light blot that you could reach out to with a finger and drag around the screen. I still have the tapes of that stored around here somewhere. I really need to get those into digital form. If I recall correctly, they're on broadcast quality betamax though, so it might be a pain to find the equipment to convert them.
Between that sort of experience and other experiences with feedback effects and emergent properties in electronics and purely digital systems, I think I have a reasonable background in such systems. Certainly enough to say that your blind faith that any feedback effect is going to kick in fast enough, or at all, in changing conditions is magical thinking.
I didn't claim it directly, but if you inferred it from other things I said, I wouldn't disclaim it.
As for your attempt to re-phrase my claim - If it's brief, it's not "structural".
Firstly, I didn't say it was brief, I was saying that you were saying it's brief. You then said that you wouldn't disclaim it. Whatever. Secondly, it's structural unemployment if it has a structural cause such as a large local employer moving, widespread crop failure, sudden lack of a resource critical to an industry, or changing technology obsoleting a particular job or industry. There's no precise definition about the duration, just a vague understanding that it tends to last longer than some other forms of unemployment
Your ability to throw out nonsensical labels is amusing. But you did get closer this time.
Cute, but you have to realize that you're mis-representing me. When I say that you're claiming that unemployment is brief, it's not the same thing as me claiming that unemployment is brief. If you're not mis-representing me on purpose, then you must simply be failing to comprehend some pretty straight-forward sentences.
Technology can disrupt; there is a time period of chaos and oscillation as society adapts, but I claim, and recent history has shown that the end-state of increased productivity has been increased prosperity.
This statement is, overall, correct. I haven't actually denied this anywhere. My entire point, which I've stated and restated, has been that the period of "chaos and oscillation" has real human costs that you're ignoring. Poverty below a certain threshhold is not a sustainable condition. Half the population could die and you might not notice because the economy is doing well and unemployment has gone down. If you're averaging prosperity across the population, 1 billionaire and a thousand people eating garbage is prosperity. Your obsession with the "end-state" is frighteningly close to the idea that the ends justifies the means. Surprising coming from someone who is so adamantly against systems that treat people as mere meat.
If you can explain to me how this picture relates to the italicized sentence, I will concede that you understand my PoV. (if you want to try to research the topic; it's linked from the PID controller wiki page)
This is another one of those things where you're going to say that disagr
True, but some things are avoidable, and some things aren't. Engineers should be involved in designing and building these things, and engineers should be able to figure out when a yellow light is too short. Aside from that, we should be at a point, technologically, where sufficient information about timing is presented to drivers for them to make informed decisions about intersections. As long as there are fixable flaws in the system, I'm going to bring them up in discussions about those systems.
Wow. It's neither a straw man, nor a result of stupidity. It's an observation that there are intersections and situations where you legitimately can't tell if you're going to make it across an intersection before the light turns red. Quite aside from the fact that people are only estimating distances and time, they also don't know how long the light is actually going to last. The crack about pre-cognition was just a way of demonstrating that drivers are not given enough information to properly make a decision. They're forced to go by their best guess. That works almost all of the time, but it's still a guess.
Thinking that the remaining.3% is not a problem is insane. That would mean that you run into a problem once every three hundred or so intersections you come to. That means it will happen to every driver around every three months or so. Maybe I'm weird, but I tend to think that systems carelessly designed with gaping holes in them are a bad idea.
Sorry, which part of my argument is a straw man? A straw man argument is when you present some easily demolished argument and pretend that it's the argument the other side made so that you can tear apart the fake argument and pretend you've demolished their actual argument. in this case, the argument goes that the rules of the road state that you should never enter an intersection if you can't make it all the way through before the red, I point out that you need to be able to see the future to reliably do that, an AC (you?) says that the yellow light gives you all the information you need, I point out that there are cases where there is insufficient information given by the lights (sometimes on purpose) to tell if you can safely make it through the intersection. I also point out that, with improperly timed lights, someone driving safely and following all laws can sometimes hit a "sweet spot" where it's unsafe or impossible to safely brake, but without stopping they will run a red light. This is not a straw man, it's pointing out that we don't live in an idealized world where the municipality bothers to get the timing of the lights right, and sometimes they even get them wrong on purpose.
As for suing the city, that first assumes that they've set the light too short in bad faith or through negligence. It's also possible for them to set the light too short in good faith. That can be the case, for example, if they have official guidelines with static times that don't actually account properly for the possible width of intersections and the local speed limit. If you can't prove bad faith or negligence, you can't sue, the best you can do is beat your ticket in traffic court. The impartiality of traffic courts tends to be a joke. They're just there to generate revenue, as such, they're often set up these days so that the fees and effort you have to put in to fight the ticket and win outweigh the cost of winning. So, if you lose, you lose and, if you win, you lose.
To prove bad faith, you can get the information with a FOIA request, but they can just lie on that, or you can go out and time the light, but that assumes that the light is timed the same all the time. It could be like the adjustable payout percentages on casino slot machines, and they adjust the timings when they need more revenue. For example, from the 15th to the end of the month, have a short light, then set it to long again, then send out tickets at the end of the month, requiring payment or a court appearance by the 15th so that anyone going to fight a ticket who decided to time the light would be disappointed and lose in court, then repeat the cycle. Finally, if you can sue, and do win, what do you actually think you'll get as damages? You'll probably still only get away with not paying the fine. In the meantime, while you're fighting, if you don't pay the fine, the municipality can retaliate by getting a default warrant for your arrest for not paying the fine. If you pay the fine, the court will probably accept that as evidence that you admit wrongdoing and, even if they don't, it means the municipality now has your money. Even if the court finds in your favor, if you've already given them the money, they don't have to give it back to you. To actually be paid back, you will have to sue several more times in different courts. Finally, after you force them to pay you back your fine amount, you can get to work trying to force them to pay you the thirty times that amount that you've spent on court fees and other legal costs.
On the plus side, you will have gained some legal experience with the hundreds of hours you've poured into the project. This experience will be of great value as a personal experience if you're into that sort of thing. If not, since you didn't get that experience in law school working towards a law degree, it won't be worth anything.
This is a worst case scenario of course, but the reality for most people is still that it's more costly and aggravating than just paying the fine. Maybe if you have a deep and abiding s
I wasn't advocating speeding. I was just pointing out that some intersections do not have yellow lights that last long enough to allow for both safety and following the law. Frankly, I've seen intersections wide enough, and with short enough yellows that you can enter the intersection while it's green and not have crossed the intersection before the light has turned red.
The correct way to find at least the minimum time for a yellow light is fairly obvious. You start with a speed, probably slightly above the speed limit, and figure out how far it would take for a car with, at best, average brakes to slow to a stop safely at that speed and call that distance X. Then you figure out how far the car will travel at that speed in an amount of time it would take, at best, the average person to react to a changing light and add that to X. Then you look at the intersection and determine how far across the intersection is far enough to be considered to have already crossed the intersection from a safety and legal point of view (ie, if someone is at that point when the light turns red, they are not considered to be running a red light). Then you add that distance to X. Then you calculate how long it takes a car to travel distance X at the chosen speed, and that's the absolute _minimum_ the yellow light should last. To really figure out the appropriate length of time, you need a differential equation based on the above and some safety margins so that you don't end up with any paradoxical speeds that make the intersection unsafe.
The problem is, planners don't do this. Sometimes they make good decisions. Sometimes they're arbitrary. Sometimes the decisions are deliberately malicious and designed to artificially inflate the number of people getting tickets. Unless you have foreknowledge of this, you cannot plan for whether or not you can make it through an intersection before the light changes red.
Frankly, I think the whole three light system is stupid. It used to be just stop and go lights and they added the middle light for safety and so that stops wouldn't be so jarring, but then they do things to defeat the purpose of the middle light such as making it just as illegal (or sometimes an even bigger fine) to run a yellow light as a red in some jurisdictions. We're well past the point where we should have modified the lights again to actually add visible time displays to the lights, either as digital displays or progress bars that tell us how much time is left on each light. That way, we have a much better idea of when we need to stop. Plus, I would never have to wait at another broken (or poorly programmed) red light that's never going to change for 20 minutes again at 3:00 AM in the morning with no traffic around. Grrr.
This is probably because of windows problems with old DOS devices: AUX, CON, PRN, COM1, LPT1 Using them in file names can cause all kinds of weird Windows issues even now. There used to be a spectacular Windows issue that affected just about any program that could interpret a URL. URLs containing a combination of the above device names separated by backslashes (or slashes) could cause a windows machine to crash or hang if the machine tried to parse a URL. Naturally, people would send other people links in e-mail and instant messaging programs with such URLs which would, depending on the program, cause a freeze or bluescreen on clicking, or even just on receipt. Sigh. Good times. Good times. I think there are still a few instant messaging programs that will mysteriously edit out anything you try to send with any of those combinations of letters in combination with a slash, even if it's not a combination that would cause a crash. DragonCon/NASFiC, for example, might do it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're kidding right? MSNBC? MS NBC? Do you know what the MS is short for? Slashdot has never been a particularly friendly environment to the works of that company. It's not because other News outlets are good. They're generally disasters. If Fox News is attacked more than others it's because it is more consistently terrible.
They, like many companies after large cash infusions and full of optimism about how they'll make it all back in the first year, obviously overspent in setting their factory. Zeroing in on the "whistling robots" thing is a bit silly though. They're industrial robots, they have speakers and they're programmable. The alert sounds can be set to anything. I've seen motherboards that play classical music and so forth instead of beep codes on error conditions. It works too. The end user is typically far too unreliable to report to a tech that the board was, for example, producing three long beeps and a short one. If it plays Fur Elise, on the other hand, they can usually hum it.
Sugar is sugar
Well, lead acetate is sugar and fructose is sugar and glucose (both as dextrose and sinistrose ) is sugar and sucrose is sugar and so on, but they're not the same. Lead acetate is poisonous (and yet has still been used as a sweetener), sinistrose is undigestible, fructose and dextrose can both be used as fuel by our cells, although dextrose is more "clean burning" so might be mildly better for you than fructose, and sucrose is a polysaccharide that breaks down cleanly into one fructose and one dextrose molecule. High fructose corn syrup is a mix that tends to have a slightly higher proportion of fructose than sucrose does when broken down. As such, sucrose is probably very slightly better for you than high fructose corn syrup. Plain dextrose is better than either of them, but we're probably still not talking about a lot of difference here. In terms of taste though, I would have to say that dextrose tastes better than sucrose, which tastes better than high fructose corn syrup. On the other hand, I'm not sure why everything needs to be sweetened so much in the first place.
Sorry to rant, but when I hear a line like "sugar is sugar", it makes me think of propaganda commercials produced by the corn growers, preying on people's ignorance. Just like the Nestle Pure Life water commercials with their false "nothing hydrates better than water" premise. It just hits a raw nerve. Sugars are a class of chemical compounds with different properties and your body _can_ tell the difference (by taste, for starters) and oral rehydration therapy (which is all sports drinks are) hydrates better than plain water, so those commercials are outright disinformation. Sorry if I sound like I'm ranting at you. I'm just ranting in general because that kind of thing hits a raw nerve with me.
All that said, just like you, I'm also not sure why we're subsidizing corn farming the way we do. Especially when the primary beneficiaries are the large corporate farms as opposed to the small farms. Clearly we do have to ensure that the food supply doesn't dry up, and relying purely on market forces would be too unstable, but the subsidies are clearly more influenced by the corn lobby than by careful analysis of the agricultural sector.
Put simply, why should either country have more or less sun?
Because the point in Germany closest to the equator is 47.5 degrees of latitude. Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Michigan all extend that far North, but the southern tip of all of those states is further South. For most of those states, the bulk of the land area is below 47.5 degrees. Alaska is the only US state that starts above 47.5 degrees and that extends further north than Germany. The other 43 US States are all further South, in their entirety, than Germany.
The amount of insolation a location gets is determined first by its latitude, then secondly by other factors such as cloud cover. Except in weird microclimates, latitude pretty much dominates this.
Latitude is important because, the further a point is from the equator, the lower the angle of the sun is. Above the Tropic of Cancer at about 23 degrees, the sun will _never_ be directly overhead, even at high noon on the summer solstice. It will always be south, which means that the light will be coming in at an angle. The way that the ground is angled away means that less actual light will hit an area than will hit an equal area which is perpendicular to the suns rays. It also means that the sunlight travels through more atmosphere before hitting the ground.
The effect local weather has on insolation should be obvious. The more cloudy/rainy/hazy, the less sunlight actually gets through. Of course, locations that get less sun to begin with, and are therefore colder, also tend to get more overcast weather. There are exceptions, usually in places where mountain ranges cause clouds to bunch up on one side, but those don't throw off the average much in large countries such as the US. Also, Germany has its fair share of such places in any case.
So, except for Alaska, every state in the United States should get more sun on average than Germany. It would require some remarkable exception for anything else to be the case. Any exception so remarkable would be remarkable enough that I think we would have heard of it. Well, ok, the moron who originally did this analysis probably wouldn't have heard of it because they clearly don't know a thing about geography and where seasons come from (or maybe they do and they're just lying through their teeth as paid shills, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and just call them ignorant morons).
A little late to reply to this, but had to comment on:
Fossil Fuels aren't found on asteroids...
That may or may not be true depending on whether there's any life out there to be fossilized. The thing to remember is that fossil fuels on Earth originated at some point from organic molecules of non-biological origin. Although if space is full of life, it could actually be of biological origin, but it still came from non-biological organic material at some point, somewhere. Anyway, given the presence of life and time, non-biological organics eventually become biological ones because something eats them. In space, the organic molecules can stay uneaten and non-biological (provided there's no life), but can still be quite similar to fossil fuels.
One thing we do know is that there are carbonaceous asteroids. Kerogen-like material has been found in some meteorites. Kerogen is a precursor to oil. So, provided the aliens have abundant energy (which they should have if they can travel here, the same raw materials found in fossil fuels are to be found on asteroids and comets and can be processed into whatever they might want fossil fuels for (more likely as chemical feedstocks for manufacturing than as fuel).
So, aliens looking for chemical resources don't have to touch down on a planet and, unless some very neat advanced technology is actually possible, can extract and process them at lower energy cost from asteroids than from a planet. That leaves some resources that aliens still might want though. Land, for one thing. Even if they can build perfectly good space habitats, it would be understandable, even expected, that some of them would value plain old real-gravity, open sky, planetary land. Then, there's us. They might want to destroy us because we might someday be a threat, or out of plain old xenophobia or racism, or religious zealotry, or to establish a political claim of some kind over local space, etc. They also might want us alive as slaves (not necessarily because they need the labour, but for the cachet), or some kind of serfs, or even as warm bodies in political schemes (for example, to count as part of the population in a proportional representation scheme, like with US slaves in the South, which is what led to that whole 3/5ths a person deal), or to establish some sort of claim on local space, or as religious converts, etc. There are a lot of potential reasons why aliens might want to invade Earth. They're at least as varied as the reasons humans have found to do the same thing over the ages, and might include some options that a human just wouldn't think of.
All that said, just because there are all these possible reasons aliens might want to attack us, doesn't mean that aliens would want to attack us. If there are technologically advanced aliens out there, we'll just have to wait and see. If there aren't technologically advanced aliens out there, but we manage to start up space travel in earnest, then we just have to give it a few million years and, whether they were bio-engineered by us from ourselves, or other life, or from scratch, or they evolve naturally from same, there will be aliens, some probably technologically advanced.
Abuse of science to provide flimsy justification for outrageous public policy is not the same thing as "atempt[ing] to make government rational and based on scientific principles". Just as a country can have the word "Democratic" in its official name and still not actually be so, a country can claim to be scientific and rational and really not be.
Lending a car or a vacuum cleaner are as different from one another as either is different from reading a book, but they're all an example of lending something that aren't really significantly different from lending a game or a movie, or music, etc. Someone has a copy and they let someone else use it instead of themselves for a while. The utility of all of those examples is time limited in some way. You can only listen to the same music for so long (usually) or spend so much time reading a book, or so much time vacuuming, or so much time driving before you're tired of the particular music, done reading (and possibly re-reading) the book, or done vacuuming, or done driving. Most people will eventually want to listen to the music again, or read the same book again if they enjoyed it, or the floor will get dirty and they will need to vacuum again, or they will need to drive somewhere else. The time frame on these things is different, but they're still alike. Let's say you borrow a friends roofing equipment and put a new roof on your house that will last for forty years. Does the one time usefulness of the roofing tools fit the pattern you claim for books, games and movies? It doesn't have to be roofing tools either, it could be all kinds of tools that many people realistically might borrow once and then never need to use again in their lives. The fact of one time use doesn't materially alter the nature of a loan from a friend.
In short, the act of lending may have prevented a sale.
Same with the anything else someone loans you. I may never buy fencing tools in my entire life. On the rare occasions I've needed anything like that, I just borrow them from my father. So, someone lost a sale because of he's willing to lend me his. This is the way it has always back through history and beyond. There have been societies in the past that have enacted laws to outlaw borrowing (or any out of channel acquisition method, such as making it yourself) of certain goods in order to force people to buy (and generally to buy from specific people). From a modern perspective, such societies look like antiquated, corrupt, tyrannies. It's sad how little we've changed.
Someone else has already pointed this out, but I'm going to re-iterate. My question was related to your statement that:
I think the point is that filmed pornography and written/drawn content are quite different and merit different rules.
So your response in that context either just doesn't make sense at all or is inconsistent with your previously stated position.
So where do you stand with traditional animation? CGI animation? Combination live action and CGI? How about books on tape?
Apparently when a company offers you a free sample, that's not good enough. You want a free game.
No, they want to use a friend's paid-for game while the friend isn't using it. Like they might do with a vacuum cleaner, or a car, or a book.
Didn't someone (I think it was Microsoft) file a patent for using biometric recognition through kinect-like devices to deny access to copyrighted materials? If the game requires it to operate, it doesn't matter if you loan just the game or the whole console.
It's a different operating space ; pharma patents the molecule. Medicines only have a few components. Patents are narrow - a molecule is a molecule and can't be interpreted as anything else.
Interesting that you take it as a given that you patent the molecule rather than a specific treatment based on the molecule, which is supposed to be the only thing you can legally patent. It's theoretically not supposed to be the case that you can just sift through the biochemistry of living things, pluck out a likely looking molecule and claim it as your own. The slippery slope on this one is, however, very slippery.
That's right, the real crazies were ranting that Nixon was doing things like conducting secret wars in Cambodia and conducting illegal wiretaps, etc.
Scientific principles like Lysenkoism?
If the US government was tolerating or ignoring someone on US soil who England believes is a terrorist they could attempt to go after them if they had the capability.
That's not a hypothetical. Look into the history of the IRA.
Blind faith? I repeatedly refer to historical examples to justify my understanding and expectations; this included exponential technological improvement. That's evidence based faith. My "faith" may be wrong, but it's not blind. Yet another wrong label.
I think the term blind faith was appropriate there and I'm going to stick with it. If you were saying that these self-correcting situations _could_ happen while pointing at past examples, that would be one thing, but you were saying that they _will_ happen as a matter of absolute certainty.
The existence of negative feedback is not in of itself proof that the system will be stable or that the equilibrium is good; but if you're going to dismiss negative feedback without analysis, then I know your predictions are based on feelings instead of thought.
Oh come on, be serious! I know you haven't done any actual analysis of the kind you seem to be demanding from me. If you have, you've certainly kept quiet about it.
I've been using it in the sense of "unavoidable `permanent' unemployment".
Absolutely permanent unemployment isn't the way it's usually meant. If you're talking about a particular sector of employment that gets completely obsoleted (Dodo bird hunters, for example), then it does mean permanent unemployment for that particular sector, I suppose. Basically, it boils down to employment caused by external factors taking a big bite out of a labour market.
I know you think that that technology causes non-brief structural (permanent) unemployment
I think that it can cause long-lasting structural unemployment. It's not permanent since the unemployed are eventually no longer counted in the labour market one way or the other. You don't seem to care by which method they're no longer counted in the labour market, while I think it's of critical importance.
Your prediction of a robotic dystopia where the masses are poor requires this trend to reverse direction. Complete robotic automation would be a huge technological improvement over now; but everyone having no job and starving without the benevolent socialist state is a huge downgrade over now. The relationship between technology and prosperity must flip if you think technology is a force towards your robotic dystopia.
I just have to repeat myself over and over again on this, don't I. I think complete robotic automation in and of itself would be great. The productivity it would enable and the way it could free people from pointless drudgery to pursue more worthwhile endeavours is something to strive for. I'm just concerned that people are too short-sighted and mean-spirited to allow that to happen without provoking disaster. History is full of horrors two-strikes and you're dead (first strike is just some savage physical punishment, a little slavery and a branding) vagrancy laws and situations like the Irish Potato Famine. No-one would ever set a bunch of robots to digging holes just to fill them back in because it would be non-sensical. Meanwhile, they would happily set people to do the exact same thing to teach them "the value of hard work" (that value being payment insufficient to ever escape the situation).
There's no need for any relationship between technology and productivity or even (average) prosperity to flip. The majority of people just won't have any personal claim on any of the benefits of that technology and will have to rely on the benefits trickling down to them. Unless something amazing can be found that regular people can do that the automated technologies can't _and_ that actually has high demand, then the majority of people could end up, at best, as some sort of neo-serfs.
And ... I'm not going to give you a very good grade on that test. I rigged the test in asking you to read my mind, but you've said that you understood what I'm talking about, even as you failed
The mass shadow of what is almost certainly dark matter has been observed by way of gravitational lensing. It's looking like a pretty strong possibility that it does exist.
Economics is a mess because it's a social science, not one of the "hard" sciences. It's self-interfering. if any economist actually comes up with any theory with any real predictive power and publishes, it's put to use for the purpose of making money. As soon as the theory is out in the wild, it can destroy itself.
Have to quote this from _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ :
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
The fundamental problem of gesture recognition has been recognized for quite some time now.
Negative feedback must seem like magic to you then. With that sentence, you've again demonstrated a lack of understanding of my PoV, despite your repeated insistence that you do. It's not magic; it's your lack of understanding that makes it seem like "magic".
You've provided me with some happy nostalgia there. I once took a video course and spent a large amount of time working on analog feedback effects. Pointing a camera at a screen displaying the output of the camera and using the right combination of angle, distance, focus, brightness, contrast, etc. and placing various objects in front of the screen allowed me to create interactive video artifacts that would grow or shrink, or pulsate, or shift back and forth between multiple states and positions. I was particularly happy with the persistent interactive light blot that you could reach out to with a finger and drag around the screen. I still have the tapes of that stored around here somewhere. I really need to get those into digital form. If I recall correctly, they're on broadcast quality betamax though, so it might be a pain to find the equipment to convert them.
Between that sort of experience and other experiences with feedback effects and emergent properties in electronics and purely digital systems, I think I have a reasonable background in such systems. Certainly enough to say that your blind faith that any feedback effect is going to kick in fast enough, or at all, in changing conditions is magical thinking.
I didn't claim it directly, but if you inferred it from other things I said, I wouldn't disclaim it.
As for your attempt to re-phrase my claim - If it's brief, it's not "structural".
Firstly, I didn't say it was brief, I was saying that you were saying it's brief. You then said that you wouldn't disclaim it. Whatever. Secondly, it's structural unemployment if it has a structural cause such as a large local employer moving, widespread crop failure, sudden lack of a resource critical to an industry, or changing technology obsoleting a particular job or industry. There's no precise definition about the duration, just a vague understanding that it tends to last longer than some other forms of unemployment
Your ability to throw out nonsensical labels is amusing. But you did get closer this time.
Cute, but you have to realize that you're mis-representing me. When I say that you're claiming that unemployment is brief, it's not the same thing as me claiming that unemployment is brief. If you're not mis-representing me on purpose, then you must simply be failing to comprehend some pretty straight-forward sentences.
Technology can disrupt; there is a time period of chaos and oscillation as society adapts, but I claim, and recent history has shown that the end-state of increased productivity has been increased prosperity.
This statement is, overall, correct. I haven't actually denied this anywhere. My entire point, which I've stated and restated, has been that the period of "chaos and oscillation" has real human costs that you're ignoring. Poverty below a certain threshhold is not a sustainable condition. Half the population could die and you might not notice because the economy is doing well and unemployment has gone down. If you're averaging prosperity across the population, 1 billionaire and a thousand people eating garbage is prosperity. Your obsession with the "end-state" is frighteningly close to the idea that the ends justifies the means. Surprising coming from someone who is so adamantly against systems that treat people as mere meat.
If you can explain to me how this picture relates to the italicized sentence, I will concede that you understand my PoV. (if you want to try to research the topic; it's linked from the PID controller wiki page)
This is another one of those things where you're going to say that disagr
True, but some things are avoidable, and some things aren't. Engineers should be involved in designing and building these things, and engineers should be able to figure out when a yellow light is too short. Aside from that, we should be at a point, technologically, where sufficient information about timing is presented to drivers for them to make informed decisions about intersections. As long as there are fixable flaws in the system, I'm going to bring them up in discussions about those systems.
Wow. It's neither a straw man, nor a result of stupidity. It's an observation that there are intersections and situations where you legitimately can't tell if you're going to make it across an intersection before the light turns red. Quite aside from the fact that people are only estimating distances and time, they also don't know how long the light is actually going to last. The crack about pre-cognition was just a way of demonstrating that drivers are not given enough information to properly make a decision. They're forced to go by their best guess. That works almost all of the time, but it's still a guess.
Thinking that the remaining .3% is not a problem is insane. That would mean that you run into a problem once every three hundred or so intersections you come to. That means it will happen to every driver around every three months or so. Maybe I'm weird, but I tend to think that systems carelessly designed with gaping holes in them are a bad idea.
Sorry, which part of my argument is a straw man? A straw man argument is when you present some easily demolished argument and pretend that it's the argument the other side made so that you can tear apart the fake argument and pretend you've demolished their actual argument. in this case, the argument goes that the rules of the road state that you should never enter an intersection if you can't make it all the way through before the red, I point out that you need to be able to see the future to reliably do that, an AC (you?) says that the yellow light gives you all the information you need, I point out that there are cases where there is insufficient information given by the lights (sometimes on purpose) to tell if you can safely make it through the intersection. I also point out that, with improperly timed lights, someone driving safely and following all laws can sometimes hit a "sweet spot" where it's unsafe or impossible to safely brake, but without stopping they will run a red light. This is not a straw man, it's pointing out that we don't live in an idealized world where the municipality bothers to get the timing of the lights right, and sometimes they even get them wrong on purpose.
As for suing the city, that first assumes that they've set the light too short in bad faith or through negligence. It's also possible for them to set the light too short in good faith. That can be the case, for example, if they have official guidelines with static times that don't actually account properly for the possible width of intersections and the local speed limit. If you can't prove bad faith or negligence, you can't sue, the best you can do is beat your ticket in traffic court. The impartiality of traffic courts tends to be a joke. They're just there to generate revenue, as such, they're often set up these days so that the fees and effort you have to put in to fight the ticket and win outweigh the cost of winning. So, if you lose, you lose and, if you win, you lose.
To prove bad faith, you can get the information with a FOIA request, but they can just lie on that, or you can go out and time the light, but that assumes that the light is timed the same all the time. It could be like the adjustable payout percentages on casino slot machines, and they adjust the timings when they need more revenue. For example, from the 15th to the end of the month, have a short light, then set it to long again, then send out tickets at the end of the month, requiring payment or a court appearance by the 15th so that anyone going to fight a ticket who decided to time the light would be disappointed and lose in court, then repeat the cycle. Finally, if you can sue, and do win, what do you actually think you'll get as damages? You'll probably still only get away with not paying the fine. In the meantime, while you're fighting, if you don't pay the fine, the municipality can retaliate by getting a default warrant for your arrest for not paying the fine. If you pay the fine, the court will probably accept that as evidence that you admit wrongdoing and, even if they don't, it means the municipality now has your money. Even if the court finds in your favor, if you've already given them the money, they don't have to give it back to you. To actually be paid back, you will have to sue several more times in different courts. Finally, after you force them to pay you back your fine amount, you can get to work trying to force them to pay you the thirty times that amount that you've spent on court fees and other legal costs.
On the plus side, you will have gained some legal experience with the hundreds of hours you've poured into the project. This experience will be of great value as a personal experience if you're into that sort of thing. If not, since you didn't get that experience in law school working towards a law degree, it won't be worth anything.
This is a worst case scenario of course, but the reality for most people is still that it's more costly and aggravating than just paying the fine. Maybe if you have a deep and abiding s
I wasn't advocating speeding. I was just pointing out that some intersections do not have yellow lights that last long enough to allow for both safety and following the law. Frankly, I've seen intersections wide enough, and with short enough yellows that you can enter the intersection while it's green and not have crossed the intersection before the light has turned red.
The correct way to find at least the minimum time for a yellow light is fairly obvious. You start with a speed, probably slightly above the speed limit, and figure out how far it would take for a car with, at best, average brakes to slow to a stop safely at that speed and call that distance X. Then you figure out how far the car will travel at that speed in an amount of time it would take, at best, the average person to react to a changing light and add that to X. Then you look at the intersection and determine how far across the intersection is far enough to be considered to have already crossed the intersection from a safety and legal point of view (ie, if someone is at that point when the light turns red, they are not considered to be running a red light). Then you add that distance to X. Then you calculate how long it takes a car to travel distance X at the chosen speed, and that's the absolute _minimum_ the yellow light should last. To really figure out the appropriate length of time, you need a differential equation based on the above and some safety margins so that you don't end up with any paradoxical speeds that make the intersection unsafe.
The problem is, planners don't do this. Sometimes they make good decisions. Sometimes they're arbitrary. Sometimes the decisions are deliberately malicious and designed to artificially inflate the number of people getting tickets. Unless you have foreknowledge of this, you cannot plan for whether or not you can make it through an intersection before the light changes red.
Frankly, I think the whole three light system is stupid. It used to be just stop and go lights and they added the middle light for safety and so that stops wouldn't be so jarring, but then they do things to defeat the purpose of the middle light such as making it just as illegal (or sometimes an even bigger fine) to run a yellow light as a red in some jurisdictions. We're well past the point where we should have modified the lights again to actually add visible time displays to the lights, either as digital displays or progress bars that tell us how much time is left on each light. That way, we have a much better idea of when we need to stop. Plus, I would never have to wait at another broken (or poorly programmed) red light that's never going to change for 20 minutes again at 3:00 AM in the morning with no traffic around. Grrr.
This is probably because of windows problems with old DOS devices: AUX, CON, PRN, COM1, LPT1 Using them in file names can cause all kinds of weird Windows issues even now. There used to be a spectacular Windows issue that affected just about any program that could interpret a URL. URLs containing a combination of the above device names separated by backslashes (or slashes) could cause a windows machine to crash or hang if the machine tried to parse a URL. Naturally, people would send other people links in e-mail and instant messaging programs with such URLs which would, depending on the program, cause a freeze or bluescreen on clicking, or even just on receipt. Sigh. Good times. Good times. I think there are still a few instant messaging programs that will mysteriously edit out anything you try to send with any of those combinations of letters in combination with a slash, even if it's not a combination that would cause a crash. DragonCon/NASFiC, for example, might do it.