You do realize there are probably as many models as there are scientists right? And that your "example" is probably at best two separate and completely independent models?
And you do realize that the point of science is to actually make predictions then improve your prediction ability by monitoring those predictions and adjusting your theory to match physical results?
This isn't religion, they don't know the answer, they can only make predictions then adjust their predictions as more information comes in. This doesn't make it guessing, and it doesn't make it wrong, it just makes it science. That you don't understand how that work doesn't mean anything at all. Maybe you should leave the field to the experts, instead of inserting your baseless opinion into a discussion you can't even comprehend (as it's apparent you don't even know how the scientific method works or what the purpose of science is).
Do you honestly believe they aren't? Murdoch is single handily responsible for the division of American society, and yes I believe he's doing it intentionally.
What you usually find in these situations is that there is a defined scope of work and deliverable at the set price. Then every month the client (the city in this case) alters the scope of work which requires that the budget be adjusted. By the end of the day after everyone in the entire client organization has made sure all the changes they want are incorporated the original deadline passed 3 years ago, the developer has been chasing dead ends for entire time and to impliment the new final scope of work is a magnitude more expensive (60million to 600 million).
This isn't the developers fault, at least not entirely. These issues lie almost entirely with the client. Improper planning, scope adjustments and delays almost always fall to the client and they uniformly fail to realize the impact those failings cost. The biggest mistake of the developer is usually in not fully tracking these changes, their costs and time impacts and documenting officially every single time it happened. With a large Public Client like NYC you would need to devote a PM to only tracking scope and deliverable changes who would spend their entire time preparing adjusted costs and formally submitting these to the client BEFORE any work is done on the adjusted scope.
Damn wage protections. Like those stupid licensed Civil engineers. Anyone should be able to design a building for occupancy by the public. If that building falls down in a 20mph wind and kills everyone inside it doesn't matter because licensing isn't about making sure they are knowledgeable but in fact wage protection!
And what about those barbers and manicurists, who cares if they don't know what they are doing and they sever a major artery while shaving your, or the manicurist triggers an infection that results in your hands being amputated. It's just wage protection.
Plumbers are the worst in this, it shouldn't matter that if they don't know what they are doing the sewage will back-flow into the sinks or that if they calculate pressure wrong the pipe could explode and kill anyone standing next to it. Just stupid wage protection.
Electricians are just as bad, who cares if turning on a light switch could electrocute you. That they might electrify your toilet so that attempting to use it could kill you is only a minor problem, just wage protection!
And pharmacists, after all they only count pills, it shouldn't matter if two different doctors prescribe drugs that will kill you if taken together. That's your fault for going to separate doctors. And those drugs that have to be mixed in the pharmacy? Why you just hire some 15 year old to eyeball it. Doesn't matter if they get the dosage wrong and your arm dies. Minor problems, it's all about wage protection!
You are a FOOL. License in any profession exists because at some point in the past someone was either killed, maimed or severely harmed. Ensuring that certain professions are staffed by not only knowledgeable but competent people is essential to life safety of the general public because the general public isn't smart enough to see a bearing wall and ceiling sagging that indicates a design flaw that will result in the roof caving in and killing the occupants. That you can't see why licensed professions exist should point you to where YOUR problems lie.
The tax system is predicated on voluntary compliance, severe penalties and enforcement of high profile cases. If everyone stopped paying taxes they wouldn't have enough enforcement in place to get them. That's exactly the problem in this case, the sales tax system has become so broken by internet sales (no one is voluntarily paying the taxes owed) that they are at the point where the states can't use normal enforcement measures. Expect this to get much worse and much more aggressive because the states are being starved of sales tax revenue by internet sales. The boiling point will be a federal sales tax compact between states or even a compact between states without federal involvement.
Make no mistake though, sales tax free internet purchases are going to be gone very very soon.
The only reason he thought that is because in the first match (or test match, don't remember) he discovered a weakness and exploited it and beat deep blue handily. In the second match he tried to exploit the same weakness and the computer made a super subtle attack on his attempt to exploit the weakness and once he realized what happened he was in deep shit, then he started second guessing everything the computer did that appeared like a weak move. In the third round he was so spooked by the second round that he played terribly and was pretty much guaranteed to lose because he spent the whole game second guessing himself. He psyched himself out of the match.
It was after that he made the accusation based simply on the fact that he didn't believe a computer could be that subtle to exploit his attempt to exploit a programming weakness. The problem is that IBM was allowed to change the code every match (so his reliance on an exploit/weakness he discovered in one game was very foolish) and secondly he was the world's best player, does he honestly believe there is some secret human on the IBM payroll that's better than him but has never played competitively and isn't known?
It was very poor sportsmanship. Honestly IBM was only in this to sell computers, and because they acted like that it cemented it in his mind that they somehow cheated. Honestly I think all major chess stars are frankly quite loony.
It's all very silly, he got his butt whooped and didn't like it and made unfounded accusations as a result.
I use GE in the analogy because GE requires that every division they own produce 20% returns or the company is sold. They have a corporate policy to avoid risky ventures and their movement into any new industry is a signal that industry has achieved a certain level of acceptance and growth that fits the GE prospects. As the single largest industrial conglomerate in the US they are a sign of a real market being developed. Up until the First solar acquisition GE only lended their name to solar panels (buying from current producers and branding as a sell in product on other industrial lines). With the purchase they are probably going to be the largest thin film producer in the world with more capacity in the single factory under construction than nearly every other factory in the world combined.
But if you don't buy the GE angle, here is the other one. Solar panels are considered cost competitive against other power sources (nuke/coal/wind/gas/etc) when prices hit $1/Watt. At that price you can achieve $2/Watt installed and with a 25 year guaranteed life your amortized costs per watt bring a commercially viable power rate against traditional base load generation. The beauty of solar is that it also tends to peak output on a very similar curve to the usage peaking curve. Anyway, if you bother to read this the following is informative: (http://www.solardaily.com/reports/Historic_One_Dollar_Per_Watt_Solar_Modules_Just_Months_Away_999.html) as according to the article the per/watt prices of panels at the 2011 solar expo in Munich hit $1.35 a watt by the end of the fair and are predicted to hit $1 by the first quarter of 2012.
Please understand that if Solar becomes cost competitive against coal generation we'll hit a major inflection point where solar power could become a significant portion of power generation.
Thank PETA. If you've ever been stupid enough to support PETA you need to understand they want to ban pet ownership. Yes Ban it. It's one of their top priorities.
There are plenty of good organizations out there that try to stop animal abuse, but PETA gets all the attention and I'd be 90% of the people that support PETA fail to realize just how radical the beliefs of their founder. PETA believe pet ownership is slavery and they want it gone. Honestly if you want to stop animal abuse you are far better off sending your money to ASPCA or Humane Society.
They aren't dieing. See that's the problem when you have a 2 second attention span. Most of these inventions are being incorporated into viable production lines. From discovery to production is at least 5 years and that's if they already have a factory in place that can utilize the new technology. If they have to build the factory as well it's another 2-3 years. So when you hear about one of these great new ideas do you check back on it in 8 years? Didn't think so.
Bulk solar power is on our door step, otherwise GE wouldn't have just bought one of the most important thin-film solar producers, coincidentally the company in question was already building the largest solar cell production plant in the world. The CdTe panels that this company produces use little of the very expensive rare earths that the other panels do, they can be produced on roll-roll processes (flexible panels as well) and it's expected that they can be produced for significantly less than a $1 a watt (considered the break point for mass acceptance).
I'd rather have the courts stick to the letter of the law and implement congress's bad law then have them try to dance around bad language and end up with a situation that's just as bad and has no clarity. This type of thing SHOULD fall under the DMCA and some high profile people should get stung by it.
You mean his pretend worth based on completely factless estimates from the people that want to take the company IPO (for the millions they will be paid). Facebook makes no money as in zero net revenue. Once that is common knowledge the "real" value of this company will be near zero and Zuckerberg's share will be pennies on the current value.
They are refusing to sell American's stock because they will violate US regulations by concealing the financial documents. Do you know why they want to conceal the financials? Because they are very very scary and indicate how little money the company actually makes.
You don't SUE the government. You sue the jackass working for the government for negligence. The Government will then be forced to step in and defend the employee and can't use the sovereign immunity defense.
Last I saw he wasn't that far from home (where his teeth show he's from that is). Unless they changed the theory they suspect he was wealthy or someone of high social rank and he was in a hand-to-hand fight that resulted in him running away and someone shooting him in the back with an arrow which he extracted himself (leaving the head embedded in his back) he died while running away (from the punctured lung and the blood loss) and that he likely fell and died and was buried in snow (and thus never found) before his attackers caught up to him. The snow continued to fall and grew in depth every year until he was encased in a glacier fortunately he was buried in a nook in the ground that prevented him from being ground to bits by the glacier.
Where is this theory that he was buried ritually? From what I saw of the pictures of his corpse he didn't look buried, he looked like someone that died where they fell. People of that time were faced certain directions and buried in very specific positions with ornamentation (including flowers) and last I saw he has none of those hallmarks of a planned burial.
Consider for a moment all those books you have you kept in a nice climate controlled living space and took patient attention to their care. These books are shrinkwrapped and sitting on pallets in a warehouse. In 20 years if the rats haven't eaten them through or the roof hasn't leaked and ruined them chances are the temperature, humidity and vermin will have done all the damage necessary.
Books can last a long time, but they need to be cared for, that means proper temperatures, humidity and free of vermin. A warehouse contains none of that and all those shrinkwrapped pallets will likely be big molding piles of rat nests in 20 years.
Not a Dime. It's a a loan guarantee. It's entire purpose is to allow the borrower to borrow the money to build at government interest rates (currently 3%) rather than the market rates that would likely be MUCH MUCH higher for a power plant with an unproven design (by unproven I mean there aren't 50,000 of them). Something like this helps develop technology like this without high interest rates that make the project uneconomic. Because the reality is you can't build a power plant and make money at 9% interest rates and only proven technology (as in 20% of the nations power is generated by the technology) is given market rates.
The single greatest barrier to the development of new technology is the interest rate barrier that applies to such projects. Banks assume because it's not "proven" that there is a higher risk of default and charge much higher interest rates. Those higher rates make projects ROI negative or so small as to essentially make the project worthless. If we want to move away from Coal power and to carbon-less sources of power we MUST provide loan guarantees and grants to move the projects from theory to reality. Unlike what politicians these days like to tell you the purpose of government is help move the infrastructure and the country as a whole forward. When you put market forces behind infrastructure you inevitably end up with little to no progress without economic incentive to move forward. Coal is cheap, the technology is proven, if we want to move away from coal (and I do) then Government needs to help find the alternative technology that's just as good because the reality is the banks don't like risk and power is a business where margins are razor thin. Power and Energy are national security issues, we've forgotten that as a nation, particularly if people like you post such sarcastic posts and ignore the reality of the market and it's driving forces.
Nobody is going to be handing out weapons. Even if it went that far the Feds would do what the Brits did in the revolutionary war and move in and seize the weapons depots before it reached the point.
But my main point is the millitary wouldn't obey a mission to attack US civilians. Why do you think Vietnam ended, because of protests? No the Vietnam war ended because the millitary refused to fight. The personal charged with identifying targets started sending in reports that no targets were found. Ground and Naval forces refused to fight. It got so bad the Navy had several hundred men who refused to fight locked up in a single 20x20 foot room in SanFran and then the prisoners staged a sit in and refused orders and the Navy had no way to put it down because the guards were outnumbered 50-1. Similar things happened in the Army. In fact one of the great discussions after the war ended was how to get an army to fight that won't fight. It's a primary reason they ended the draft permanently because they feared the same thing happening again.
One of the major differences between US soldiers and those throughout the world is that the US millitary doesn't swear allegiance to any person, they swear allegiance to the constitution. That Constitution says attacking Civilians is against the law. Now you might point to Kent State, but here is where I turn it around on you. Kent State was National Guard.
Heck look at Syria, they swear loyalty to the president and even in those cases soldiers are refusing orders and being shot. It's hard to convince people to shoot their own neighbors.
If the US loses control the only organization to handle it would be ITU under the UN. If you think it's bad under the US wait until the worlds dictators have a say under ITU. Domains that are offensive to the world dictators will be revoked, domains that offends Muslims will be revoked. You name it, the system will be destroyed. The solution is a legal block against the US doing what they are doing not to hand the system over to a bunch of nations that don't believe in free speech.
That's been so successful on the war on drugs it's sure to work! It's not like it would increase consumption and incarcerate several million people for doing nothing more than harming themselves.
Making a product illegal does two things. It makes the product sexy and desirable for those wishing to rebel and it increases the incarceration rate, and the US already has the highest. You don't solve medical problems by putting people in jail.
Excellent? You must be using different drivers than me. They haven't been "excellent" in quite a while.
Haven't used ATI's open source driver on their newer hardware, but I can tell you at the rate they are making progress nVidia is going to be in a world of hurt on the Linux front pretty soon.
It's already bloody. Several thousand dead at this point. It looked like the Regime was winning until the pictures of the dead kids, in particular the one with the mutilated genitals hit the internet and basically fanned some new fire into the resistance. My guess is the regime is trying to prevent their own people from accessing the imagery of the kids, though it's likely that everyones already seen it or has copies. They made a serious error in judgement on the effect mutilating a child would have. My guess is they thought it would inspire fear, they were very very wrong.
For solar, it would literally be a major break through to provide peak load competitive prices and they are no where near being close to being competitive with base load generation. Even moreso, voltaic requires HALF the price of base load to be competitive with base load as it can only generate power half the time. Only solar-thermal looks to be able to ever be price competitive with base load pricing and even that is just now coming out of the gate.
You should say that your statements are based entirely on utility scale PV installations. People installing them on their homes only need to beat their retail price per KW (average US value is $0.10 per KWh, with some states at $0.05 and others at $0.30). With panel prices at $2 a Watt and falling and a guaranteed 25 year life (that's the warranty on every PV panel sold) they already make sense to individual power purchasers.
So lets not be dishonest and use utility power pricing for homeowner economic value because they aren't equivalent. PV panels will be viable at the Utility scale level when they can get the thin film CdTe panels at $0.50 a Watt (which is theoretically possible). The fact that GE just bought the largest thin film CdTe panel producer and plans to build the largest solar panel production plant in the world should help.
Some of the early places that jumped on the securID tokens only used the securID as the password (in other words there was no password in front of the 6 digit random code), thus it was trivial to compromise if you could compromise the RSA securID system. What I don't get is why these organizations didn't immediately upgrade security when word came down the the root compromise of RSA. Like one of the previous posters I always believed that breaking the securID system was a deliberate and planned attack to gain access to secondary systems that used the tokens, it's only a question of who did it because one party is responsible for both.
In the US the USGS responds to questions about earthquake probabilities with "We can't predict earthquakes".
No one can, anyone that claims they can is a liar. Anyone that claims knowledge either way (for or against earthquakes) is lying. We have the barest grasp of plate tectonics and what causes earthquakes. Science indicates the events are entirely random but even if they weren't we simply don't understand the system well enough to make predictions. We're talking stress/strain situations over thousands of kilometers in all directions where stress has built up in a material with varying and unknown properties. Making any sort of prediction is fallacy. Maybe some day we'll have drilled enough holes deep enough into the crust to better understand this but I doubt it.
Most earthquake research money is spent on better understanding the wave mechanics so that you can predict strength and wave characteristics based on local soils rather than trying to predict when the event will occur. Better understanding of the waves and their properties allows engineers to better design buildings for life safety.
Because, if you accept Apple's legal theory that anything that looks like their product is an illegal copy then you understand. Of course they tried this with MS in the 90's (suing over the look and feel of MacOS) and got soundly trounced that doesn't mean that in the current environment they will lose. There has been a gradual shift in attitudes that copying the look or use of a product is illegal use of IP. That there is no basis in law for that doesn't stop them, after all half the patents now granted are on nothing more than look and feel patents that should have never been approved.
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You do realize there are probably as many models as there are scientists right? And that your "example" is probably at best two separate and completely independent models?
And you do realize that the point of science is to actually make predictions then improve your prediction ability by monitoring those predictions and adjusting your theory to match physical results?
This isn't religion, they don't know the answer, they can only make predictions then adjust their predictions as more information comes in. This doesn't make it guessing, and it doesn't make it wrong, it just makes it science. That you don't understand how that work doesn't mean anything at all. Maybe you should leave the field to the experts, instead of inserting your baseless opinion into a discussion you can't even comprehend (as it's apparent you don't even know how the scientific method works or what the purpose of science is).
Do you honestly believe they aren't? Murdoch is single handily responsible for the division of American society, and yes I believe he's doing it intentionally.
What you usually find in these situations is that there is a defined scope of work and deliverable at the set price. Then every month the client (the city in this case) alters the scope of work which requires that the budget be adjusted. By the end of the day after everyone in the entire client organization has made sure all the changes they want are incorporated the original deadline passed 3 years ago, the developer has been chasing dead ends for entire time and to impliment the new final scope of work is a magnitude more expensive (60million to 600 million).
This isn't the developers fault, at least not entirely. These issues lie almost entirely with the client. Improper planning, scope adjustments and delays almost always fall to the client and they uniformly fail to realize the impact those failings cost. The biggest mistake of the developer is usually in not fully tracking these changes, their costs and time impacts and documenting officially every single time it happened. With a large Public Client like NYC you would need to devote a PM to only tracking scope and deliverable changes who would spend their entire time preparing adjusted costs and formally submitting these to the client BEFORE any work is done on the adjusted scope.
Damn wage protections. Like those stupid licensed Civil engineers. Anyone should be able to design a building for occupancy by the public. If that building falls down in a 20mph wind and kills everyone inside it doesn't matter because licensing isn't about making sure they are knowledgeable but in fact wage protection!
And what about those barbers and manicurists, who cares if they don't know what they are doing and they sever a major artery while shaving your, or the manicurist triggers an infection that results in your hands being amputated. It's just wage protection.
Plumbers are the worst in this, it shouldn't matter that if they don't know what they are doing the sewage will back-flow into the sinks or that if they calculate pressure wrong the pipe could explode and kill anyone standing next to it. Just stupid wage protection.
Electricians are just as bad, who cares if turning on a light switch could electrocute you. That they might electrify your toilet so that attempting to use it could kill you is only a minor problem, just wage protection!
And pharmacists, after all they only count pills, it shouldn't matter if two different doctors prescribe drugs that will kill you if taken together. That's your fault for going to separate doctors. And those drugs that have to be mixed in the pharmacy? Why you just hire some 15 year old to eyeball it. Doesn't matter if they get the dosage wrong and your arm dies. Minor problems, it's all about wage protection!
You are a FOOL. License in any profession exists because at some point in the past someone was either killed, maimed or severely harmed. Ensuring that certain professions are staffed by not only knowledgeable but competent people is essential to life safety of the general public because the general public isn't smart enough to see a bearing wall and ceiling sagging that indicates a design flaw that will result in the roof caving in and killing the occupants. That you can't see why licensed professions exist should point you to where YOUR problems lie.
It was a hearing and he was sworn in.
The tax system is predicated on voluntary compliance, severe penalties and enforcement of high profile cases. If everyone stopped paying taxes they wouldn't have enough enforcement in place to get them. That's exactly the problem in this case, the sales tax system has become so broken by internet sales (no one is voluntarily paying the taxes owed) that they are at the point where the states can't use normal enforcement measures. Expect this to get much worse and much more aggressive because the states are being starved of sales tax revenue by internet sales. The boiling point will be a federal sales tax compact between states or even a compact between states without federal involvement.
Make no mistake though, sales tax free internet purchases are going to be gone very very soon.
The only reason he thought that is because in the first match (or test match, don't remember) he discovered a weakness and exploited it and beat deep blue handily. In the second match he tried to exploit the same weakness and the computer made a super subtle attack on his attempt to exploit the weakness and once he realized what happened he was in deep shit, then he started second guessing everything the computer did that appeared like a weak move. In the third round he was so spooked by the second round that he played terribly and was pretty much guaranteed to lose because he spent the whole game second guessing himself. He psyched himself out of the match.
It was after that he made the accusation based simply on the fact that he didn't believe a computer could be that subtle to exploit his attempt to exploit a programming weakness. The problem is that IBM was allowed to change the code every match (so his reliance on an exploit/weakness he discovered in one game was very foolish) and secondly he was the world's best player, does he honestly believe there is some secret human on the IBM payroll that's better than him but has never played competitively and isn't known?
It was very poor sportsmanship. Honestly IBM was only in this to sell computers, and because they acted like that it cemented it in his mind that they somehow cheated. Honestly I think all major chess stars are frankly quite loony.
It's all very silly, he got his butt whooped and didn't like it and made unfounded accusations as a result.
I use GE in the analogy because GE requires that every division they own produce 20% returns or the company is sold. They have a corporate policy to avoid risky ventures and their movement into any new industry is a signal that industry has achieved a certain level of acceptance and growth that fits the GE prospects. As the single largest industrial conglomerate in the US they are a sign of a real market being developed. Up until the First solar acquisition GE only lended their name to solar panels (buying from current producers and branding as a sell in product on other industrial lines). With the purchase they are probably going to be the largest thin film producer in the world with more capacity in the single factory under construction than nearly every other factory in the world combined.
But if you don't buy the GE angle, here is the other one. Solar panels are considered cost competitive against other power sources (nuke/coal/wind/gas/etc) when prices hit $1/Watt. At that price you can achieve $2/Watt installed and with a 25 year guaranteed life your amortized costs per watt bring a commercially viable power rate against traditional base load generation. The beauty of solar is that it also tends to peak output on a very similar curve to the usage peaking curve. Anyway, if you bother to read this the following is informative: (http://www.solardaily.com/reports/Historic_One_Dollar_Per_Watt_Solar_Modules_Just_Months_Away_999.html) as according to the article the per/watt prices of panels at the 2011 solar expo in Munich hit $1.35 a watt by the end of the fair and are predicted to hit $1 by the first quarter of 2012.
Please understand that if Solar becomes cost competitive against coal generation we'll hit a major inflection point where solar power could become a significant portion of power generation.
Thank PETA. If you've ever been stupid enough to support PETA you need to understand they want to ban pet ownership. Yes Ban it. It's one of their top priorities.
There are plenty of good organizations out there that try to stop animal abuse, but PETA gets all the attention and I'd be 90% of the people that support PETA fail to realize just how radical the beliefs of their founder. PETA believe pet ownership is slavery and they want it gone. Honestly if you want to stop animal abuse you are far better off sending your money to ASPCA or Humane Society.
They aren't dieing. See that's the problem when you have a 2 second attention span. Most of these inventions are being incorporated into viable production lines. From discovery to production is at least 5 years and that's if they already have a factory in place that can utilize the new technology. If they have to build the factory as well it's another 2-3 years. So when you hear about one of these great new ideas do you check back on it in 8 years? Didn't think so.
Bulk solar power is on our door step, otherwise GE wouldn't have just bought one of the most important thin-film solar producers, coincidentally the company in question was already building the largest solar cell production plant in the world. The CdTe panels that this company produces use little of the very expensive rare earths that the other panels do, they can be produced on roll-roll processes (flexible panels as well) and it's expected that they can be produced for significantly less than a $1 a watt (considered the break point for mass acceptance).
I'd rather have the courts stick to the letter of the law and implement congress's bad law then have them try to dance around bad language and end up with a situation that's just as bad and has no clarity. This type of thing SHOULD fall under the DMCA and some high profile people should get stung by it.
You mean his pretend worth based on completely factless estimates from the people that want to take the company IPO (for the millions they will be paid). Facebook makes no money as in zero net revenue. Once that is common knowledge the "real" value of this company will be near zero and Zuckerberg's share will be pennies on the current value.
They are refusing to sell American's stock because they will violate US regulations by concealing the financial documents. Do you know why they want to conceal the financials? Because they are very very scary and indicate how little money the company actually makes.
You don't SUE the government. You sue the jackass working for the government for negligence. The Government will then be forced to step in and defend the employee and can't use the sovereign immunity defense.
Last I saw he wasn't that far from home (where his teeth show he's from that is). Unless they changed the theory they suspect he was wealthy or someone of high social rank and he was in a hand-to-hand fight that resulted in him running away and someone shooting him in the back with an arrow which he extracted himself (leaving the head embedded in his back) he died while running away (from the punctured lung and the blood loss) and that he likely fell and died and was buried in snow (and thus never found) before his attackers caught up to him. The snow continued to fall and grew in depth every year until he was encased in a glacier fortunately he was buried in a nook in the ground that prevented him from being ground to bits by the glacier.
Where is this theory that he was buried ritually? From what I saw of the pictures of his corpse he didn't look buried, he looked like someone that died where they fell. People of that time were faced certain directions and buried in very specific positions with ornamentation (including flowers) and last I saw he has none of those hallmarks of a planned burial.
Consider for a moment all those books you have you kept in a nice climate controlled living space and took patient attention to their care. These books are shrinkwrapped and sitting on pallets in a warehouse. In 20 years if the rats haven't eaten them through or the roof hasn't leaked and ruined them chances are the temperature, humidity and vermin will have done all the damage necessary.
Books can last a long time, but they need to be cared for, that means proper temperatures, humidity and free of vermin. A warehouse contains none of that and all those shrinkwrapped pallets will likely be big molding piles of rat nests in 20 years.
Not a Dime. It's a a loan guarantee. It's entire purpose is to allow the borrower to borrow the money to build at government interest rates (currently 3%) rather than the market rates that would likely be MUCH MUCH higher for a power plant with an unproven design (by unproven I mean there aren't 50,000 of them). Something like this helps develop technology like this without high interest rates that make the project uneconomic. Because the reality is you can't build a power plant and make money at 9% interest rates and only proven technology (as in 20% of the nations power is generated by the technology) is given market rates.
The single greatest barrier to the development of new technology is the interest rate barrier that applies to such projects. Banks assume because it's not "proven" that there is a higher risk of default and charge much higher interest rates. Those higher rates make projects ROI negative or so small as to essentially make the project worthless. If we want to move away from Coal power and to carbon-less sources of power we MUST provide loan guarantees and grants to move the projects from theory to reality. Unlike what politicians these days like to tell you the purpose of government is help move the infrastructure and the country as a whole forward. When you put market forces behind infrastructure you inevitably end up with little to no progress without economic incentive to move forward. Coal is cheap, the technology is proven, if we want to move away from coal (and I do) then Government needs to help find the alternative technology that's just as good because the reality is the banks don't like risk and power is a business where margins are razor thin. Power and Energy are national security issues, we've forgotten that as a nation, particularly if people like you post such sarcastic posts and ignore the reality of the market and it's driving forces.
Nobody is going to be handing out weapons. Even if it went that far the Feds would do what the Brits did in the revolutionary war and move in and seize the weapons depots before it reached the point.
But my main point is the millitary wouldn't obey a mission to attack US civilians. Why do you think Vietnam ended, because of protests? No the Vietnam war ended because the millitary refused to fight. The personal charged with identifying targets started sending in reports that no targets were found. Ground and Naval forces refused to fight. It got so bad the Navy had several hundred men who refused to fight locked up in a single 20x20 foot room in SanFran and then the prisoners staged a sit in and refused orders and the Navy had no way to put it down because the guards were outnumbered 50-1. Similar things happened in the Army. In fact one of the great discussions after the war ended was how to get an army to fight that won't fight. It's a primary reason they ended the draft permanently because they feared the same thing happening again.
One of the major differences between US soldiers and those throughout the world is that the US millitary doesn't swear allegiance to any person, they swear allegiance to the constitution. That Constitution says attacking Civilians is against the law. Now you might point to Kent State, but here is where I turn it around on you. Kent State was National Guard.
Heck look at Syria, they swear loyalty to the president and even in those cases soldiers are refusing orders and being shot. It's hard to convince people to shoot their own neighbors.
If the US loses control the only organization to handle it would be ITU under the UN. If you think it's bad under the US wait until the worlds dictators have a say under ITU. Domains that are offensive to the world dictators will be revoked, domains that offends Muslims will be revoked. You name it, the system will be destroyed. The solution is a legal block against the US doing what they are doing not to hand the system over to a bunch of nations that don't believe in free speech.
That's been so successful on the war on drugs it's sure to work! It's not like it would increase consumption and incarcerate several million people for doing nothing more than harming themselves.
Making a product illegal does two things. It makes the product sexy and desirable for those wishing to rebel and it increases the incarceration rate, and the US already has the highest. You don't solve medical problems by putting people in jail.
Excellent? You must be using different drivers than me. They haven't been "excellent" in quite a while.
Haven't used ATI's open source driver on their newer hardware, but I can tell you at the rate they are making progress nVidia is going to be in a world of hurt on the Linux front pretty soon.
It's already bloody. Several thousand dead at this point. It looked like the Regime was winning until the pictures of the dead kids, in particular the one with the mutilated genitals hit the internet and basically fanned some new fire into the resistance. My guess is the regime is trying to prevent their own people from accessing the imagery of the kids, though it's likely that everyones already seen it or has copies. They made a serious error in judgement on the effect mutilating a child would have. My guess is they thought it would inspire fear, they were very very wrong.
You should say that your statements are based entirely on utility scale PV installations. People installing them on their homes only need to beat their retail price per KW (average US value is $0.10 per KWh, with some states at $0.05 and others at $0.30). With panel prices at $2 a Watt and falling and a guaranteed 25 year life (that's the warranty on every PV panel sold) they already make sense to individual power purchasers.
So lets not be dishonest and use utility power pricing for homeowner economic value because they aren't equivalent. PV panels will be viable at the Utility scale level when they can get the thin film CdTe panels at $0.50 a Watt (which is theoretically possible). The fact that GE just bought the largest thin film CdTe panel producer and plans to build the largest solar panel production plant in the world should help.
Some of the early places that jumped on the securID tokens only used the securID as the password (in other words there was no password in front of the 6 digit random code), thus it was trivial to compromise if you could compromise the RSA securID system. What I don't get is why these organizations didn't immediately upgrade security when word came down the the root compromise of RSA. Like one of the previous posters I always believed that breaking the securID system was a deliberate and planned attack to gain access to secondary systems that used the tokens, it's only a question of who did it because one party is responsible for both.
In the US the USGS responds to questions about earthquake probabilities with "We can't predict earthquakes".
No one can, anyone that claims they can is a liar. Anyone that claims knowledge either way (for or against earthquakes) is lying. We have the barest grasp of plate tectonics and what causes earthquakes. Science indicates the events are entirely random but even if they weren't we simply don't understand the system well enough to make predictions. We're talking stress/strain situations over thousands of kilometers in all directions where stress has built up in a material with varying and unknown properties. Making any sort of prediction is fallacy. Maybe some day we'll have drilled enough holes deep enough into the crust to better understand this but I doubt it.
Most earthquake research money is spent on better understanding the wave mechanics so that you can predict strength and wave characteristics based on local soils rather than trying to predict when the event will occur. Better understanding of the waves and their properties allows engineers to better design buildings for life safety.
Because, if you accept Apple's legal theory that anything that looks like their product is an illegal copy then you understand. Of course they tried this with MS in the 90's (suing over the look and feel of MacOS) and got soundly trounced that doesn't mean that in the current environment they will lose. There has been a gradual shift in attitudes that copying the look or use of a product is illegal use of IP. That there is no basis in law for that doesn't stop them, after all half the patents now granted are on nothing more than look and feel patents that should have never been approved.