DDT is not as widely useful as you believe. It does nothing to the wide range of mosquitos that do not linger on indoor surfaces. It does nothing to the wide range of mosquitos (and other pests) that adapted to be immune to it. It does nothing to stop farmers from spraying it on crops instead of homes.
Add to this that the locales that used DDT the heaviest saw the greatest threats from adapted species after very few years, and DDT became an albatross.
There are effective ways to fight malaria without DDT. And DDT is still generally approved for use in epidemics and special situations (even in the USA).
I did some further reading and the drag was when operating in interstellar space. But inside out system, or even inside the Earth's magnetosphere, I think it still has a lot of potential use.
I mean, it's not like we're swarming in propulsion systems that can get us around the solar system.
This reminds me of M2P2 that was all the rage on this site a decade or so ago. Looks like the Dr. Winglee kept up some research, but their page was last updated in 2011. But, some pretty pictures, movies, and results from actual experiments.
If you've never heard of this, the basics are to create a magnetic sail by trapping plasma in a magnetic field around a spacecraft. Solar wind particles push against the plasma, which is able to expand the range of the magnetic field, and provide force to push the craft. This is somewhat similar to the concept of solar sails, except the plasma expands outward (increasing surface area exposed to the wind) as the density of the wind decreases. This provides more force than a solar sail the further you are from the sun.
Another benefit was the plasma and magnetic field are deflecting solar particles, so it can shield the occupants, much as this article describes.
And many libertarians also don't connect all the past experience this country has with not having public police or fire services. Take a tour of Philadelphia; they'll gladly show you the remaining emblems for the various private fire services that existed long ago.
Then you'll gradually learn how those services were incompatible within the city or between cities. This lead to a lot more property damage and lives lost.
It's not an accident that such things became public over the course of time.
which will be if they allow the government (screw it - allow the current batch of GOP politicians) to reduce SS benefits to future generations
And even if we do not a thing to change the current issues, the most pessimistic projections by the SS Board suggests:
projected benefits will be 75% of the full promise to future beneficiaries
In inflation adjusted dollars, this amount is significantly higher than today's payouts
The less pessimistic projections, which followed America's growth until the current recession, showed the program remaining able to fund to 100% for at least 75 years (the outer horizon of projections).
Further, if we rebalance the growth in inequality our society has allowed to occur for the last 30 years, then everyone in those time horizons is better off financially.
Since there is no cap on the profits of insurance companies, they are free to simply raise premiums to pass on the cost of bad investment of past premiums. For instance, all their internet stocks become worthless, then raise premiums to meet profit expectations. Or deny more claims, or pay doctors less for procedures.
The $12 Q-tip (uncited) is just a symptom of the inequties in the system. Doctors and hospitals need to be paid (not always what they want, but fairly). When the payers (insurance companies) refuse to pay for some services, then others have to priced higher to recoup the costs. And on and on...
This is correct, however I ask a follow up. Why are hospitals forced to provide healthcare services to people that cannot pay - this is one of the main drivers behind escalating costs of healthcare, but why is this the case?
Because.
You can rationalize several reasons depending on your bent.
Public health is a national priority. Having destitute sick people hanging around is worse for all citizens.
Public health is a matter of national security. To fight wars you need a healthy population. Look at the British experience in WWI. They lost nearly their entire upper class because the lower classes were too sick to fight. They lost a generation of the fittest young men.
Public health has greater utility to society than letting the slob die. If he dies or is permanently disabled, we lose the value of his labor and other contributions to society. The gambit is that on average, these contributions are far greater than saving his life today.
Public health is a religious duty. All of the Abrahamic religions (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) see assisting the poor as a mandated act of charity.
Because we have a society that values individual life and holds it to be something worth saving.
Remember, that's the only way all insurance works - by forcing one group to subsidize another.
FTFY.
Also, with all for profit insurance, you're subsidizing the losses of the insurance company when they make bad investments with your premiums (i.e. American insurance companies after 1999). If they make good investments, they don't see a reason to lower the premiums and just keep the profits.
I think you can see that growth in health care costs to the the individual have direct relationships to the lack of profits to the insurance company. If they don't hit a target, they raise the premium ever higher or reduce the payout or reject more claims. There is not direct relationship between premiums and quality of service, especially if you live in a captive market like Alabama.
There's hope the Obamacare changes to cap profits at 18% of premiums received will remove some of these issues. Also the gradual change into a system that monitors the actual effectiveness of outcomes will increase the effectiveness of treatment for the same dollar.
But how much of the insurance is to protect against tort, and how much is actual malpractice.
In the annals of data about tort reform you can find some specialties (e.g. anestheticians) who changed their operational practices. As a specialty, their insurance rates went from the highest to among the lowest by simply adding things like check lists and adopting better practices.
These types of studies among the specialists would likely make a larger impact than tort reform, which only really impacts the outcomes of patients with legitimate medical malpractice claims. It's difficult to win such cases, which require a lot of proof. Tort reform only caps the results of the winners (very few), not the losers (most).
I'll take my chances of having an accident or being in a firefight rather than surrender to a criminal. I don't care if it's $20 or $2000.
Thus is the crux of the problem revealed. Regardless of how either of us random internet persons feel about firearm ownership, you seriously OVERESTIMATE your ability and UNDERESTIMATE the danger of escalating such a situation. Surrendering small private property to a criminal to avoid escalating to physical damage should not cause such a sharp cut to your ego.
Every single piece of defensive training material I have ever seen, studied, or discussed starts with an attempt to deescalate from violence. Awareness, prevention, avoidance, and deescalation of violence are orders of magnitude more effective in preventing bodily harm and serious injury (to all parties involved). Surrendering some private property may be the cost.
One of the things you clearly OVERESTIMATE is the effectiveness of having a firearm. Presumably your friend was surprised by his assailant. If you'd been present with your firearm, you would not be able to draw it and aim without alerting the assailant. While he may choose to flee, he may also choose to escalate to using that knife on you or one of your friends. That's a worse situation, all around.
Even more likely, and more dangerous, the assailant may have seen the firearm before hand. In that case, he may choose to disarm you before you are aware of his presence. In that case, you are now being robbed at gunpoint. At the very least, you've lost a gun worth much more than $20.
Being aware of your surroundings and being prepared to surrender a meager amount of personal property (you keep the real money hidden, right) is generally more effective. There are times when escalating to violence is unavoidable or more acceptable, but they are rare and you need proper training to have a chance of avoiding serious harm. I'm not against people carrying guns, just untrained, macho morons who don't have the good judgement to not use it.
I'm not a chemist, but why not deposit the Zn vapor onto a surface and sell it to produce Zn-metal batteries?
Would this provide an electricity storage source that is more dense than Hydrogen? Since the generators are distributed, then the Zn-battery plants could be built near the furnaces and the results distributed in local markets.
Something similar to the Better World battery swap stations could replace depleted batteries with fresh ones and the depleted batteries could be sent back and refined in the furnaces.
As a distribution matter, wouldn't this be somewhat less problematic than piping low-density Hydrogen around the community?
Usually when the government lowers taxes they see an increase in tax revenue because of increased spending since taxes are lower
No. This is the often-marketed Supply Side tax cut effect that is, as shown here, incorrect.
The correct statement is that a cut in taxes does not reduce tax revenues dollar for dollar. This is also over the long-term, like 30+ years. For instance, the Kennedy era tax cuts eventually reduced tax revenue by 70% of expected receipt.
While I do not have direct citations back this up, it has been the recent trend that the sellers of Supply Side Tax cuts to the Republican party have had to claw back the extreme claims. I think Bruce Bartlett has spent recent history setting the record straight. You can also find more information among Krugman's public articles.
Introducing classes for all of the Java programmers who can't understand a Self-like language...introducing classes into a prototype-based language just doesn't make sense.
Wrong!
The justification for classes in a prototype-based language is to use type safety properties in library and infrastructure code. Read enough from Brandon Eich and Douglas Crockford and you realize there are strict limitations on what safety properties can be guaranteed by current JS. At least, providing such properties is convoluted and error prone. Classes help provide needed structure for places that JS cannot hope to provide solutions today.
For example, I have a suspicion that Brandon is really attempting to replace the the Mozilla DOM code (C++) with JS2 code. This would simplify the interaction of the garbage collectors (some of those "memory leaks" everyone fusses about, ESPECIALLY in IE) and other infrastructure code.
Classes in JS2 are NOT about needed to emulate Java, so much as it is about providing tools to write robust libraries. Want more proof: MS Silverlight and Adobe Air are both based around JS2-like enhanced scripting languages. Those products make extensive use of the type safety properties brought by classes. This is also Brandon's main complaint against MS ATM. MS is promoting proprietary products with a JS2-like language, but stonewalling support for an open standard (with a robust reference implementation). Think about that for a minute: JS2-like languages are shipping today. Why can't we have a public standard for everyone else to use? Prototypes stay useful, though. MS incorporated extention methods in.NET 3.5, which have much the flavor of prototypes (when combined with generics) in a class-based language. Classes also bring some performance improvements, but that seems to be a secondary concern.
So, we have classes to build robust libraries and prototypes to glue them together with random code. Best of both worlds.
Finally, JS2 is 95% backwards compatible with JS1. The missing 5% is due to clarification of murky parts of JS1 and fixing a few issues everyone complains about. This also obliterates the need for multiple implementations of JS1 and JS2. The JS2 engine can take care of code, old and new. Even with class-based programming and you can "route around" classes using prototypes to extend functionality if you don't need the safety properties (most web code, but not libraries).
But gas taxes do not really decrease driving, decreasing fuel consumption. Hell, the price of fuel, in my area, has stayed about double what it was two years ago: but people don't really drive less. They grin and bear the extra cost. The national stats show similar behavior.
However, raising CAFE (fuel efficiency) standards does decrease fuel consumption. It also seems to be more efficient than tax increases.
Except Geometry Wars was done by an experienced game developer while working on one of the Project Gotham Racing games. My understanding is that the game (sans some effects) is also availble as an ulockable extra in one of the XBox versions.
Idiot. How can the author violate his own license? Hint: he can't.
If its a derivative work of someone else's GPL code. As an example, nVidia cannot simply create and distribute an obfuscated driver. Sure, nVidia wrote the driver, but its derivative of the Linux Kernel driver architecture.
Maybe not up to "realtime", but probably to something a bit more useful
Useful, in this case, is defined as: less time to compute than load from the disk
In other words, the usefulness of this technique is that the latency of computing the textures can be made better than loading them off of the disk. This is especially true if you must load a compressed texture into memory and then decompress it before loading it into the rendering hardware. That ways it saves the memory size, memory bandwidth, and computation associated with decompressing a texture.
If Clinton (and Bush) wanted to reduce the USA's dependence on foreign oil, they would have raised the nation's average vehicle fuel economy.
Fuel economy is one thing, but so are emmissions.
A decision was made many years ago to forgoe many significant advances in fuel economy in favor of reducing emmissions. The last I heard, California's had a dramatic decrease in smog and increase in air quality. The Prius, though known and marketed for its fuel economy, is also marketed for its "Near Zero Emmissions" rating.
And if you don't think Clinton ignored bin Laden, why don't you tell us all what Clinton's response to the attack on the USS Cole was?
As Clinton says in both the interview in question and his autobiography, it took time for the US intelligence community to decide it was Bin Laden that was behind the Cole. Of course, the Cole was attacked a mere 2 months before Bush took office. They didn't know it was Bin Laden til just before the inauguration or afterwards.
The better question, and the one Clinton asks the interviewer, is what did Bush do after being briefed?
Here's a hint: it won't take you any time at all to tell us. Literally. No time at all.
All were second hand - a lot of people traded in their DS for the lite.
Me too! I bought my first for $80, used at a pawn shop. My second for $60,
because some kid was trying to seel it to Gamestop for $45 to reserve an XBox360.
He thought getting my $60 in cash, versus $45 in store credit, a great deal, and
so did I.
I used to be an avid reader of Die-Hard Game Fan (later shortened to just Game Fan). I stopped reading after Dave Halverson left as editor.
In its heyday, GF had the best quality paper, filled with content and artwork, the best quality pictures, and the the best articles. They had an anime review section and a real funny mailbag.
Today, Dave Halverson is the editor of Play. Play is a gorgeous magazine, dripping with artwork and high-quality screen captures over every milimeter of its pages.
The GPU doesn't have pixel or vertex shader hardware, do you know what the last PC GPU that had a fixed function T&L pipeline was?
BZZT! Wrong! Or, at least, half wrong. The GameCube Flipper GPU does *not* have shaders. It uses indirect texturing units in its Texture Environment (TEV).
The TEV is *fully programmable*, just the methods to do so are different from modern per-pixel fragment shaders. Many of the same effects (bump-mapping, fancy water effects, motion blurs, heat blurs, etc.) are accomplished here.
Google for it, its pretty common knowledge outside the usual video game "journalism" sites.
Slashdot Mirror
It was written in September because transition planning in both parties was underway.
So....maybe its still relevant.
We'll know soon enough.
BS.
DDT is not as widely useful as you believe.
It does nothing to the wide range of mosquitos that do not linger on indoor surfaces.
It does nothing to the wide range of mosquitos (and other pests) that adapted to be immune to it.
It does nothing to stop farmers from spraying it on crops instead of homes.
Add to this that the locales that used DDT the heaviest saw the greatest threats from adapted species after very few years, and DDT became an albatross.
There are effective ways to fight malaria without DDT.
And DDT is still generally approved for use in epidemics and special situations (even in the USA).
I did some further reading and the drag was when operating in interstellar space.
But inside out system, or even inside the Earth's magnetosphere, I think it still has a lot of potential use.
I mean, it's not like we're swarming in propulsion systems that can get us around the solar system.
This reminds me of M2P2 that was all the rage on this site a decade or so ago.
Looks like the Dr. Winglee kept up some research, but their page was last updated in 2011.
But, some pretty pictures, movies, and results from actual experiments.
http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/space/M2P2/
If you've never heard of this, the basics are to create a magnetic sail by trapping plasma in a magnetic field around a spacecraft.
Solar wind particles push against the plasma, which is able to expand the range of the magnetic field, and provide force to push the craft.
This is somewhat similar to the concept of solar sails, except the plasma expands outward (increasing surface area exposed to the wind) as the density of the wind decreases. This provides more force than a solar sail the further you are from the sun.
Another benefit was the plasma and magnetic field are deflecting solar particles, so it can shield the occupants, much as this article describes.
And many libertarians also don't connect all the past experience this country has with not having public police or fire services. Take a tour of Philadelphia; they'll gladly show you the remaining emblems for the various private fire services that existed long ago.
Then you'll gradually learn how those services were incompatible within the city or between cities. This lead to a lot more property damage and lives lost.
It's not an accident that such things became public over the course of time.
which will be if they allow the government (screw it - allow the current batch of GOP politicians) to reduce SS benefits to future generations
And even if we do not a thing to change the current issues, the most pessimistic projections by the SS Board suggests:
The less pessimistic projections, which followed America's growth until the current recession, showed the program remaining able to fund to 100% for at least 75 years (the outer horizon of projections).
Further, if we rebalance the growth in inequality our society has allowed to occur for the last 30 years, then everyone in those time horizons is better off financially.
Wait it gets worse.
Since there is no cap on the profits of insurance companies, they are free to simply raise premiums to pass on the cost of bad investment of past premiums.
For instance, all their internet stocks become worthless, then raise premiums to meet profit expectations. Or deny more claims, or pay doctors less for procedures.
The $12 Q-tip (uncited) is just a symptom of the inequties in the system. Doctors and hospitals need to be paid (not always what they want, but fairly). When the payers (insurance companies) refuse to pay for some services, then others have to priced higher to recoup the costs. And on and on...
This is correct, however I ask a follow up. Why are hospitals forced to provide healthcare services to people that cannot pay - this is one of the main drivers behind escalating costs of healthcare, but why is this the case?
Because.
You can rationalize several reasons depending on your bent.
Remember, that's the only way all insurance works - by forcing one group to subsidize another.
FTFY.
Also, with all for profit insurance, you're subsidizing the losses of the insurance company when they make bad investments with your premiums (i.e. American insurance companies after 1999). If they make good investments, they don't see a reason to lower the premiums and just keep the profits.
I think you can see that growth in health care costs to the the individual have direct relationships to the lack of profits to the insurance company. If they don't hit a target, they raise the premium ever higher or reduce the payout or reject more claims. There is not direct relationship between premiums and quality of service, especially if you live in a captive market like Alabama.
There's hope the Obamacare changes to cap profits at 18% of premiums received will remove some of these issues. Also the gradual change into a system that monitors the actual effectiveness of outcomes will increase the effectiveness of treatment for the same dollar.
But how much of the insurance is to protect against tort, and how much is actual malpractice.
In the annals of data about tort reform you can find some specialties (e.g. anestheticians) who changed their operational practices. As a specialty, their insurance rates went from the highest to among the lowest by simply adding things like check lists and adopting better practices.
These types of studies among the specialists would likely make a larger impact than tort reform, which only really impacts the outcomes of patients with legitimate medical malpractice claims. It's difficult to win such cases, which require a lot of proof. Tort reform only caps the results of the winners (very few), not the losers (most).
" because the meaning of life is answered with "ultimately, nothing".
Life is.
Any questions?
I'll take my chances of having an accident or being in a firefight rather than surrender to a criminal. I don't care if it's $20 or $2000.
Thus is the crux of the problem revealed. Regardless of how either of us random internet persons feel about firearm ownership, you seriously OVERESTIMATE your ability and UNDERESTIMATE the danger of escalating such a situation. Surrendering small private property to a criminal to avoid escalating to physical damage should not cause such a sharp cut to your ego.
Every single piece of defensive training material I have ever seen, studied, or discussed starts with an attempt to deescalate from violence. Awareness, prevention, avoidance, and deescalation of violence are orders of magnitude more effective in preventing bodily harm and serious injury (to all parties involved). Surrendering some private property may be the cost.
One of the things you clearly OVERESTIMATE is the effectiveness of having a firearm. Presumably your friend was surprised by his assailant. If you'd been present with your firearm, you would not be able to draw it and aim without alerting the assailant. While he may choose to flee, he may also choose to escalate to using that knife on you or one of your friends. That's a worse situation, all around.
Even more likely, and more dangerous, the assailant may have seen the firearm before hand. In that case, he may choose to disarm you before you are aware of his presence. In that case, you are now being robbed at gunpoint. At the very least, you've lost a gun worth much more than $20.
Being aware of your surroundings and being prepared to surrender a meager amount of personal property (you keep the real money hidden, right) is generally more effective. There are times when escalating to violence is unavoidable or more acceptable, but they are rare and you need proper training to have a chance of avoiding serious harm. I'm not against people carrying guns, just untrained, macho morons who don't have the good judgement to not use it.
I'm not a chemist, but why not deposit the Zn vapor onto a surface and sell it to produce Zn-metal batteries?
Would this provide an electricity storage source that is more dense than Hydrogen? Since the generators are distributed, then the Zn-battery plants could be built near the furnaces and the results distributed in local markets.
Something similar to the Better World battery swap stations could replace depleted batteries with fresh ones and the depleted batteries could be sent back and refined in the furnaces.
As a distribution matter, wouldn't this be somewhat less problematic than piping low-density Hydrogen around the community?
Usually when the government lowers taxes they see an increase in tax revenue because of increased spending since taxes are lower
No. This is the often-marketed Supply Side tax cut effect that is, as shown here, incorrect.
The correct statement is that a cut in taxes does not reduce tax revenues dollar for dollar. This is also over the long-term, like 30+ years. For instance, the Kennedy era tax cuts eventually reduced tax revenue by 70% of expected receipt.
While I do not have direct citations back this up, it has been the recent trend that the sellers of Supply Side Tax cuts to the Republican party have had to claw back the extreme claims. I think Bruce Bartlett has spent recent history setting the record straight. You can also find more information among Krugman's public articles.
Wrong!
The justification for classes in a prototype-based language is to use type safety properties in library and infrastructure code. Read enough from Brandon Eich and Douglas Crockford and you realize there are strict limitations on what safety properties can be guaranteed by current JS. At least, providing such properties is convoluted and error prone. Classes help provide needed structure for places that JS cannot hope to provide solutions today.
For example, I have a suspicion that Brandon is really attempting to replace the the Mozilla DOM code (C++) with JS2 code. This would simplify the interaction of the garbage collectors (some of those "memory leaks" everyone fusses about, ESPECIALLY in IE) and other infrastructure code.
Classes in JS2 are NOT about needed to emulate Java, so much as it is about providing tools to write robust libraries. Want more proof: MS Silverlight and Adobe Air are both based around JS2-like enhanced scripting languages. Those products make extensive use of the type safety properties brought by classes. This is also Brandon's main complaint against MS ATM. MS is promoting proprietary products with a JS2-like language, but stonewalling support for an open standard (with a robust reference implementation). Think about that for a minute: JS2-like languages are shipping today. Why can't we have a public standard for everyone else to use? Prototypes stay useful, though. MS incorporated extention methods in .NET 3.5, which have much the flavor of prototypes (when combined with generics) in a class-based language. Classes also bring some performance improvements, but that seems to be a secondary concern.
So, we have classes to build robust libraries and prototypes to glue them together with random code. Best of both worlds.
Finally, JS2 is 95% backwards compatible with JS1. The missing 5% is due to clarification of murky parts of JS1 and fixing a few issues everyone complains about. This also obliterates the need for multiple implementations of JS1 and JS2. The JS2 engine can take care of code, old and new. Even with class-based programming and you can "route around" classes using prototypes to extend functionality if you don't need the safety properties (most web code, but not libraries).
http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/propulsion.htm l
I used to think so, as well.
But gas taxes do not really decrease driving, decreasing fuel consumption. Hell, the price of fuel, in my area, has stayed about double what it was two years ago: but people don't really drive less. They grin and bear the extra cost. The national stats show similar behavior.
However, raising CAFE (fuel efficiency) standards does decrease fuel consumption. It also seems to be more efficient than tax increases.
Remember Geometry Wars?
Except Geometry Wars was done by an experienced game developer while working on one of the Project Gotham Racing games. My understanding is that the game (sans some effects) is also availble as an ulockable extra in one of the XBox versions.
If its a derivative work of someone else's GPL code. As an example, nVidia cannot simply create and distribute an obfuscated driver. Sure, nVidia wrote the driver, but its derivative of the Linux Kernel driver architecture.
Useful, in this case, is defined as: less time to compute than load from the disk
In other words, the usefulness of this technique is that the latency of computing the textures can be made better than loading them off of the disk. This is especially true if you must load a compressed texture into memory and then decompress it before loading it into the rendering hardware. That ways it saves the memory size, memory bandwidth, and computation associated with decompressing a texture.
Fuel economy is one thing, but so are emmissions.
A decision was made many years ago to forgoe many significant advances in fuel economy in favor of reducing emmissions. The last I heard, California's had a dramatic decrease in smog and increase in air quality. The Prius, though known and marketed for its fuel economy, is also marketed for its "Near Zero Emmissions" rating.
Priorities and all that . . . .
As Clinton says in both the interview in question and his autobiography, it took time for the US intelligence community to decide it was Bin Laden that was behind the Cole. Of course, the Cole was attacked a mere 2 months before Bush took office. They didn't know it was Bin Laden til just before the inauguration or afterwards.
The better question, and the one Clinton asks the interviewer, is what did Bush do after being briefed?
Here's a hint: it won't take you any time at all to tell us. Literally. No time at all.
Me too! I bought my first for $80, used at a pawn shop. My second for $60, because some kid was trying to seel it to Gamestop for $45 to reserve an XBox360. He thought getting my $60 in cash, versus $45 in store credit, a great deal, and so did I.
I used to be an avid reader of Die-Hard Game Fan (later shortened to just Game Fan). I stopped reading after Dave Halverson left as editor.
In its heyday, GF had the best quality paper, filled with content and artwork, the best quality pictures, and the the best articles. They had an anime review section and a real funny mailbag.
Today, Dave Halverson is the editor of Play. Play is a gorgeous magazine, dripping with artwork and high-quality screen captures over every milimeter of its pages.
BZZT! Wrong! Or, at least, half wrong. The GameCube Flipper GPU does *not* have shaders. It uses indirect texturing units in its Texture Environment (TEV).
The TEV is *fully programmable*, just the methods to do so are different from modern per-pixel fragment shaders. Many of the same effects (bump-mapping, fancy water effects, motion blurs, heat blurs, etc.) are accomplished here.
Google for it, its pretty common knowledge outside the usual video game "journalism" sites.