I don't think they complain about the horse moving through the yard, it's the lingering, the shitting and that they eat the bushes and decorative plants on their way through.
The GPL doesn't prohibit the sale of any product containing GPL code. The only requirement is that the source be made available to those you sell it to. As long as these vendors are making the source available to purchasers they are in full compliance with the GPL.
Might shock you to learn but every one of those PDF vendors that sell PDF printers are in fact selling the GPL PDF code in a windows driver. As long as they provide the source to the GPL bits they aren't in violation. The GPL has no statements about the sale of products with GPL code, you just can't stop someone that purchased the product from compiling it and selling it themselves. I'm always amazed when someone asserts a GPL violation because someone is selling GPL products which is absolutely not prohibited by the license.
The little guy in this case being the multinational conglomerates that produced it and lobbied their asses off to prevent the banning. You are an idiot. The evidence and proof of CFC's destroying the ozone layer is in the science journals. It involves thousands of research projects including sampling the layer (including the CFC's in it) to year on year measurements to the simple chemical reaction formula that shows it's possible. It was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to the entire community of scientists involved in the discipline.
If you can't be bothered to read the journals yourself, nor trust the expects then why don't you go live in a cave somewhere and spend your time trying to figure out how Apollo carries the torch across the sky without burning his hands. Because that's how fucking ignorant you are, flat earth, gods throwing lighting bolts kind of stupid.
As someone else said the atmosphere isn't stationary long enough for the constituent elements to separate into layers by weight. It's like asking why sediment in moving water doesn't settle out immediately.
Also consider this, Ozone is also a product of combustion products (smog) being mixed with high temperatures air (summer). Ozone is actually a pollutant monitored by the clean air act that LA frequently violates in the summer. So why doesn't all that ozone float up and fill the hole in? Because if it's not exactly the right environment the ozone is destroyed, it's a very unstable molecule of oxygen. It's the reason the R-12 refrigerant could get up there and catalyze O3 back to O2 for 20 some odd years before the R-12 molecule was destroyed. Ozone is easily destroyed, it's also highly toxic (one reason they use it in water purification where taste is important enough to justify the cost).
The amount of CFC released into the atmosphere is insignificant against the sheer volume of CO2 (millions of tons of gas versus probably less than a ton of CFC). In addition Methane is even more potent than CFC's (IIRC it is 10 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2) and is an unregulated emission just like CO2. You could do more to stop global climate change by making natural gas illegal than you would ever cause by outlawing CFC's. In fact you probably emit personally more Methane through intestinal gases than the CFC that is released due to your commercial activity (AC use, etc).
In addition they are in a continual cycle of improvement in refrigerants now. The original badboy CFC was Freon R-12, it was replaced by R-22, which 2 years ago was replaced by R-410A (there are numerous steps in there), most cars right now use R-134A, the AC unit I just replaced uses 410A and the HVAC tech said that's standard now. Each revision improves the coolant properties along with eliminating the negative effects. R-12 was banned in the 90's, R-22 is also now banned. I have no doubt in a dozen years R-134A will be banned and a dozen after than R-410A might be as well. This doesn't even count the regulations in the US that make it illegal to vent CFC's and require that they be recovered under some rather nasty fines. When the HVAC was replaced the tech spent a good 15 minutes draining every drop of CFC from the old unit.
Copper is a short term solution to the engineering problem of IC lasers. Intel has IC lasers working and easily producible but the cost per unit is still to high. There is also the issue that all that new bendable (you can wrap it around a pencil) fiber made from plastic that corning is making is already committed to the FIOS installs in NYC and the other major metro areas. Corning can barely make enough for FIOS let alone trying to supply the entire electronics industry with thousands of miles a year. Intel's roadmap shows that the Fiber Optic version of Thunderbird will happen as soon as the IC laser unit costs are low enough and likely when Corning solves their supply issues.
In summary, the Fiber optic version of Thunderbird is still going to happen. It's necessary for the 100GB version which is on the roadmap. The connector was also designed to handle either Copper or fiber cabling (supposedly also backward compatible, ie you can buy the copper version now and use the fiber version later, though I'm skeptical that's even possible) so as soon as the costs are in line the Fiber version will likely roll out.
Fiber is the future of almost all data wiring. It's got far to many advantages (the biggest is lack of E/M field interference). Thunderbird copper cable lengths are very limited (~2 meters), the Fiber version of Thunderbird is supposed to exceed network cable lengths (more than 100 meters) and be capable of much longer travel with repeaters. I don't know why everyone thinks the fiber version of Thunderbird is dead because it's not and in fact will likely be in the next version probably before widespread adoption of the current version.
Bingo. It's an illegal attempt to shield assets in a legal proceeding. I'd like the judge to rule that the agreement is a legal work for hire contract and that LRJ is responsible for any counter damages.
You think inflation is a big deal? How about this. The content owner is the one that sets the value. The owner is now in the position to arbitrarily decide if your case is a felony or misdemeanor. So the individual or company that under the law was wronged gets to decide the punishment by setting the value of the loss. Do you not see how that can be abused?
Got friends and connections in high places? It's a misdemeanor. Someone the content owner doesn't like or is a pain for them like an activist? Guess how much the content will be worth? The very idea that the value of an object with an arbitrary value (independent of demand or market forces) defines the level of infraction such that the owner can arbitrarily change the punishment is so bad it's beyond words.
The point you missed is that panels can be mounted to the roofs of already existing buildings. It's a simple fact but if we covered the roofs of every building with solar panels we would have more power than we could use (probably ever) during daylight hours.
The OP also made a serious mistake in taking the initial build-out costs as a yearly cost. Solar panels are typically warrantied to not fail for 25 years. Depending on type they can reliably produce power for an unknown period (there are panels built in the 70's still in operation, although amount of power produced declines gradually over time) although a certain number will die every year. It's been estimated that if you can put panels on every building that the yearly maintenance and panel replacement costs would be approximately what we spend on generation and maintenance anyway and in the panels favor is that there are no replacement costs for 25 years due to the warranty nor are there any emissions or resources used in the generation.
Solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and others like wave generation are the future. Yes they are more labor and maintenance but they also don't consume resources in the power generation. Don't get me wrong, I still fully support Nuclear as a viable night and peak power provider. Personally I'd rather my money for power was spent on fueling US jobs than going to some oil baron that's using the money to fund terrorism (Saudi's) or going to someone like Chavez who's trying to destroy Venezuelan free society in the name of communism while enriching his family and friends.
I can almost guarantee that they could run a 1st rate national campaign of prime time commercials where a commercial runs every commercial break for more than a year and still not get close to what this case is going to cost in legal fees. They've hired probably the most expensive IP firm in the US to defend a case that the MPAA is probably likely to appeal all the way to the supreme court if they lose. I wouldn't be surprised if legal fees top 100 million if it goes all the way to the supreme court.
On the upside if they do win they are likely to be in business all of a few months until Netflix copies the model and puts them out of business.
I'm not trying to play down the importance of this case, and I hope they succeed, both in business and in the court but in cases like this the guy that wins the battle often loses the war.
I'm not saying they didn't have sea walls. I'm saying that the protections constructed didn't match the site conditions or historic record of tsunami's. They ignored those stone monuments all over the hillsides that were 600 years old because obviously what does someone from 600 years ago know. I'll point out that those monuments were significantly higher than this tsunami, indicating that an even larger tsunami hit the location previously. There are dozens of these monuments all over the island. The Japanese at the time built these 6' tall stone monuments to warn future generations not to build homes to close to the sea.
And yes, the reactors SCRAM'd (dumped in the control rods and turned the generators and emergency pumping systems on) after the earthquake and did so completely automatically. Then the tsunami destroyed the pumps and generators so that the reactors had NO cooling. There are operational questions on why the reactor SCRAM'd itself that can be dealt with by the operator on whether that was the right course of action. But the site plan given the record was inadequate. This isn't an American site where records are at best a few hundred years old so there is a lot of guessing on site conditions and maximum events, Japanese culture is thousands of years old and they have Tsunami markers from nearly a thousand years ago that were higher up in the hills than this wave hit and there are no doubt written records in storage in museums and temples that discuss these Tsunami's. That's a bonafide historical record to indicate possible Tsunami height and from all indications they ignored the history when the built the plant and that's unforgivable. There is a critical failure in the site engineering in this plant and it's the primary cause of this disaster. If the AP can walk around Japan and take pictures of dozens of these massive stone monuments in parks then why did the site engineers ignore them?
I'm also not saying that they should have built 46m high sea walls, but they could have put the pumps and generators in water tight hardened and reinforced concrete bunkers in the event the plant was submerged by a larger Tsunami. Such considerations would have been relatively inexpensive against the cost of taller sea walls. Or they could have built the plant above the markers. Or they could have built taller sea walls. But why on earth did they ignore the advice of their ancestors who no doubt lost friends and family to the Tsunami that caused them in their grief to build those big stone markers?
The problem wasn't the technology or the construction. The only flaw I saw in the entire setup was that the system SCRAM'd without backup power to run the cooling system. What this failure points out is a critical failure in site planning and design for site specific conditions. This reactors was built at sea level on the side of the island hit more times than any other by Tsunami's where there are 600 year old (600!) markers saying don't build below this point because a Tsunami destroyed everything below the marker and it appear that although they took into account earthquake engineering they didn't even account for a Tsunami hitting the plant.
Had they taken the Tsunami incident into account they could have either built the plant with sea walls and significant concrete protection for the generators and backup systems or they could have built the plant above the markers. They did neither, so the reactors began building up latent heat from the reactions when the backup cooling system and generators were destroyed by the Tsunami. The key thing here though is that the safety systems and containment vessels prevented a full blown disaster. Sure there was radiation released that will wash into the ocean and dissipate entirely within a year. Sure the reactors have been poisoned and ruined and many people have been displaced but outside the plant operators there will likely not be a single death from radiation. That's an amazing achievement given the glaring site and design problem.
The point of this disaster and what people need to learn isn't that nuclear is bad, it's that site specific conditions need to be taken into account when designing the plant. You need to design for the 100 year storms and disasters to be fully avoided and make preparations and planning probably out to the 500-1000 year events. (for those that aren't aware thats the re-occurrence interval. It doesn't mean it happens every 500 years, it means there is a 1/500 chance of it happening that year). What needs to happen in Japan is an inquiry into why this plant was built at this site (in particular given those 600 year old monuments up the hill from the plant), why it wasn't designed to survive a Tsunami and Earthquake of this magnitude and what happened to make all this possible. Then they need to evaluate every other plant and it's site and make sure they are all designed to survive natural disasters. It's easy for the press to focus on the scary of the nuclear aspect while ignoring the site and engineering failures that made this accident possible.
You can't simply take a "safe" design and slap it down at any location without taking into account local and regional disasters and site specific conditions that could compromise the safety systems. This is basic engineering and how this plant was built at this location without accommodations for a Tsunami is astounding to me.
This has been a issue for quite a while because the Republican refuse the raise the gas tax even though more than 60% of Americans support raising it.
Fact: The Federal Gas tax hasn't been raised since the early 80's.
Fact: The Federal Gas tax goes into a trust fund called the Highway Trust Fund entirely devoted to transportation construction and maintenance.
Fact: The Highway Trust Fund is completely exhausted. Maintenance and construction costs now dramatically exceed what the gas tax revenue is bringing in. The additional funding is coming out of brand new debt.
Fact: The principle driver of unemployment in this country right now is the construction industry. The near destruction of the housing market caused almost the total layoff of every single construction worker. Construction accounts for nearly 10% of GDP. If all the construction workers were put back to work the economy would likely come out of recession within a year.
Fact: The last federal transportation funding bill (SAFETEA) expired 2 years ago. Congress has failed to pass a new spending bill, instead passing 6 month extensions of the existing bill.
Fact: A transportation construction project typically takes 5-6 years from concept to commitment of construction dollars. (the 5-6 years composes, planning, environmental studies and engineering)
Fact: Without firm long term commitments the states are unwilling to commit their own funds to projects where federal supplemental dollars aren't guaranteed.
Fact: We are now in a 2 year hole where no Engineering or preliminary work on projects is being done. In addition, because long term money expired 2 years ago no further engineering was done after the expiration of SAFETEA.
Fact: Without commitment of transportation moneys the construction industry cannot recover without a massive burst in home building. Neither is going to occur so expect a triple dip recession beginning in 2013.
It's going to get worse every day they delay passing a transportation funding bill and every day they refuse to raise gas taxes to fund that bill. Federal gas tax is $0.17 a gallon. You could double that and at current prices and fluctuation most people wouldn't even notice.
But feel free to keep blaming Obama for it, after all the constitution makes him responsible for funding.
Yep anyone could have it. And the ISP keeps track of who had it. And they asked the ISP who had it. And the ISP told them who had it. You aren't stupid enough to think the ISP doesn't track which login has what IP are you?
Yea and that guy with the last name Hansen, where the sen means son of, where the last name means son of han. It would certainly be inappropriate to refer to him as Mr. Hansen. [/sarcasm]
Ah you are a history major defending your worthless degree. Yes you know history, but to imply that the STEM graduates don't know history is a gross over simplification. The STEM graduates can take history course and study history all they want without majoring in it. That history degree is not only worthless to the person it's worthless to the economy as a whole. They will end up working at Walmart and they aren't going to prevent Nevil Chamberlain from trying to make peace with Nazi Germany while working at Walmart.
You grossly overlook the fact that every major takes general education classes that cover the gamut of the spectrum while still being tailored to the individuals interests. A STEM graduate might not know as much history as a History major, but they can certainly learn as much as they desire. The History degree on the other hand in all probability will never make a significant contribution to society on the scale of what STEM graduates can achieve as a result of them majoring in History.
Liberal arts programs with little chance for employment should cost significantly more than a STEM degree. The price should be used to subsidize the STEM programs and it should be used to discourage people from pursuing full degrees in unemployable fields.
And where are you getting your demand numbers? The largest demand IS for the liberal arts degrees. The STEM degrees are declining rapidly. When I graduated in Engineering 15+ years ago class sizes had fallen in half from the previous 5 years. They've halved again since I graduated where my class was around 60 current classes are in the 30 range in the 60's the class sizes were in the 100-200 range. STEM degrees are on the decline, the course work is hard and if prices go up they will decline even more. Yet half the school is enrolled in sociology degrees that they will never use.
If you want to use Demand as a basis for pricing the Liberal arts degrees will be FAR more expensive than any other. Communications, Politics and Sociology/Psycology would be very expensive indeed.
You are rather stupid if you think this ruling only applies to this situation. The supreme court doesn't even hear such cases. This ruling means you can't launch a class action lawsuit if there is an arbitration clause in the contract regardless of what it's about. They could kill babies and rape children and you won't be able to launch a class action lawsuit.
Several states had put in place laws such that arbitration clauses in contracts by monopoly providers were unconscionable contractual clauses, the Supreme just said state rights don't matter and you will be unable to launch a class action suit even where you can't negotiate on contracts.
The moon is rather rich in the nice expensive and rare minerals such as Platinum, Palladium and Iridium. At a price of $1800 an ounce for Platinum that could be quite lucrative. It's also a material with massive industrial uses that people don't use because of it's cost. Bring the cost down and you will see it used a lot more in industry. Lunar miners also wouldn't need to worry about pesky environmental rules, they have easy solar power access with high power output and could probably even refine with solar furnaces.
I expect that Lunar mining will occur in my lifetime and probably before I retire in 2033. There are simply far to many valuable minerals near the surface and easily accessible. The beauty is that the moons gravity is so low that once you get the equipment up and running producing and delivering the product to the earth could be done quite cheaply as long as you build the base with proper water processing facilities negating the need to deliver water. Once you are there you can mine not only the most valuable minerals but some of the more common but plentiful surface minerals that are difficult to mine on the earth. And as others have noted you would be in a position to mine all that helium3 if it's ever needed.
Why any company would put up with ED is beyond me;
Given that in this day and age there are several prescription treatments for ED along with dozens of bogus "herbal" remedies I can understand your frustration. No one should put up with ED anymore.
They are a shell corporation created by lawyers and only employing those lawyers. They are also launching suits without the authority to do so. See what they are trying to do is sue without exposing the Las Vegas Journal to counter damages. So they set this up as a shell corporation, then LRJ sold the rights to sue to RightHaven. The problem is that under copyright law you can't sue if you don't own the copyrights. But if Righthaven is only legal representation for LRJ then the LRJ would be liable for damages. But the suits as filed say RightHaven owns the copyright.
What needs to happen is that two lawsuits need to be filed. One against Righthaven for not having the legal authority to pursue these suits, an out in the suit needs to be put in allowing RH out of the suit if they admit they are only legal representatives for the LRJ and can provide evidence of such. Then once said evidence is acquired a suit needs to be launched against the LRJ that seeks the entire assets of the company in damages. This action will successfully penetrate this shell corp play and expose the real culprits behind these suits to action. If it can be shown in the first suit that RH acted alone and duped the LRJ into this scam then you file motions to pierce the corporate veil of RH and take the investors and owners of RH to the cleaners.
Unless you go after the perpetrators of this and their assets then it won't do you any good. You need to bankrupt the people behind this as an example. Then you need to disbar the lawyers that came up with it. This entire thing is a travesty of justice.
I agree it's a cultural issue and it's exactly the reason No Child Left Behind was the STUPIDEST education bill ever passed. We absolutely should be leaving them behind, we should push every child that is willing to work hard as far and fast as we can and leave those students with no motivation and bad parents behind in the dust. I'm not saying we shouldn't have programs to try to find the students with motivation or those that develop it later and try to elevate them out of the ignorant masses but I am saying that handicapping the education of every child because of a handful of morons will do nothing to help society.
I was bored my entire time in HS, it wasn't until I reached collage (and experienced fast paced learning) that I realized that brain dead teaching aimed at the idiots in society held me back. I could have progressed much further had there been more opportunity (I took all the AP courses offered) to move forward quicker and without the drag of the idiots in society. I did very well in college (honor roll multiple times) where in most of my K-12 education I had poor grades (I always tested well but didn't do the busy work homework), which I know today was due to the slow repetitive learning.
What we've done with NCLB is elevated stupidity to the point that no smart child can advance faster than the laziest idiot in school. And that's going to do nothing to improve the education of the idiots and everything to handicap those that are smart. We've got this crazy idea of equality going that's feels like it's right out of Harrison Bergeron where we hold back everyone with talent and smarts. I can see why someone like Bush thought it was a good idea, after all IMO he was in the idiot group that should have been left behind in school. Maybe all of Congress was in those groups and thought it was a good idea, it wasn't.
Non-Lethal? Are you kidding? Do you know how many young Nobels died in duals in the early 18th century? France actually banned dueling (not that it worked) because so many young men were dieing in duels over silly disputes. Fencing is derived directly from this tradition with the added benefit of safety equipment like face guards and protective tips.
Without a protective tip a foil is just about as deadly as it gets as even a woman or small child can poke a hole in someone with one because the small point comes with incredible leverage and force concentration. Without the protective tip there is something like 1000psi concentrated onto the tip of the foil on impact, it's enough to puncture the rib cage and go all the way through soft tissue. A torso hit with a foil in these times was almost universally fatal, if not on the field within a few days due to internal bleeding or infection. It was the exception that someone survived a dual where there was a torso hit on one of the opponents.
As society tried to prevent death in the duals they moved to rapiers and first blood victory where the most of the strokes were cutting instead of stabbing. Later they moved to the safety tips and scored based systems which became what we know as modern fencing. But make no mistake, when Fencing was actually orchestrated dueling between nobels it was a very fatal endeavor.
Yep that's exactly what happens when you allow patents on raw ideas rather than specific and detailed implementations. No software patent should be valid without the source code detailing the implementation where simply changing code to work differently completely avoids the patent. Of course if that was the case nearly every software patent would be gone with the exception of things like the RSA patents where changing the code would make it no longer work.
The problem with the patent office is that when they started allowing companies to patent raw ideas in the form of software and business method patents suddenly you could get a patent for an idea with no implementation, make it as vague as possible and then sue everyone. And that's exactly what's been happening and getting more and more common. It's the reason the courts are being overwhelmed with patent suits and it's also the reason the patent office is being swarmed with patent applications. Reinforce the old rule that requires that the patent detail a specific implementation (and in the case of a software patent that means the source code is part of the patent) and much of the problems with the patent system will go away. The side benefit is all but the most important and innovative software inventions are no longer patentable and business method patents go away entirely.
Ah but we can hope the upcoming patent cases before the Supreme reach exactly this conclusion and reverse the nastiness the court created when they essentially allowed business method patents by invalidating previous tests. The only valid patent system is one that deals in specific implementations.
I'm going to steal your car and drive through a speed trap 3-400 hundred times at 20 or 30mph over the limit. Then Judge can explain to you that you are responsible for any offenses that happen in your car.
Don't be an idiot. What you propose is against every principle of our constitution. I'm not responsible for what another person does even if they are using my property to do it as long as I'm not helping, participating or covering it up. Next you will suggest we start punishing children for their parents actions. Your Father was a thief, slavery for you!
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I don't think they complain about the horse moving through the yard, it's the lingering, the shitting and that they eat the bushes and decorative plants on their way through.
The GPL doesn't prohibit the sale of any product containing GPL code. The only requirement is that the source be made available to those you sell it to. As long as these vendors are making the source available to purchasers they are in full compliance with the GPL.
Might shock you to learn but every one of those PDF vendors that sell PDF printers are in fact selling the GPL PDF code in a windows driver. As long as they provide the source to the GPL bits they aren't in violation. The GPL has no statements about the sale of products with GPL code, you just can't stop someone that purchased the product from compiling it and selling it themselves. I'm always amazed when someone asserts a GPL violation because someone is selling GPL products which is absolutely not prohibited by the license.
The little guy in this case being the multinational conglomerates that produced it and lobbied their asses off to prevent the banning. You are an idiot. The evidence and proof of CFC's destroying the ozone layer is in the science journals. It involves thousands of research projects including sampling the layer (including the CFC's in it) to year on year measurements to the simple chemical reaction formula that shows it's possible. It was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to the entire community of scientists involved in the discipline.
If you can't be bothered to read the journals yourself, nor trust the expects then why don't you go live in a cave somewhere and spend your time trying to figure out how Apollo carries the torch across the sky without burning his hands. Because that's how fucking ignorant you are, flat earth, gods throwing lighting bolts kind of stupid.
As someone else said the atmosphere isn't stationary long enough for the constituent elements to separate into layers by weight. It's like asking why sediment in moving water doesn't settle out immediately.
Also consider this, Ozone is also a product of combustion products (smog) being mixed with high temperatures air (summer). Ozone is actually a pollutant monitored by the clean air act that LA frequently violates in the summer. So why doesn't all that ozone float up and fill the hole in? Because if it's not exactly the right environment the ozone is destroyed, it's a very unstable molecule of oxygen. It's the reason the R-12 refrigerant could get up there and catalyze O3 back to O2 for 20 some odd years before the R-12 molecule was destroyed. Ozone is easily destroyed, it's also highly toxic (one reason they use it in water purification where taste is important enough to justify the cost).
The amount of CFC released into the atmosphere is insignificant against the sheer volume of CO2 (millions of tons of gas versus probably less than a ton of CFC). In addition Methane is even more potent than CFC's (IIRC it is 10 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2) and is an unregulated emission just like CO2. You could do more to stop global climate change by making natural gas illegal than you would ever cause by outlawing CFC's. In fact you probably emit personally more Methane through intestinal gases than the CFC that is released due to your commercial activity (AC use, etc).
In addition they are in a continual cycle of improvement in refrigerants now. The original badboy CFC was Freon R-12, it was replaced by R-22, which 2 years ago was replaced by R-410A (there are numerous steps in there), most cars right now use R-134A, the AC unit I just replaced uses 410A and the HVAC tech said that's standard now. Each revision improves the coolant properties along with eliminating the negative effects. R-12 was banned in the 90's, R-22 is also now banned. I have no doubt in a dozen years R-134A will be banned and a dozen after than R-410A might be as well. This doesn't even count the regulations in the US that make it illegal to vent CFC's and require that they be recovered under some rather nasty fines. When the HVAC was replaced the tech spent a good 15 minutes draining every drop of CFC from the old unit.
Copper is a short term solution to the engineering problem of IC lasers. Intel has IC lasers working and easily producible but the cost per unit is still to high. There is also the issue that all that new bendable (you can wrap it around a pencil) fiber made from plastic that corning is making is already committed to the FIOS installs in NYC and the other major metro areas. Corning can barely make enough for FIOS let alone trying to supply the entire electronics industry with thousands of miles a year. Intel's roadmap shows that the Fiber Optic version of Thunderbird will happen as soon as the IC laser unit costs are low enough and likely when Corning solves their supply issues.
In summary, the Fiber optic version of Thunderbird is still going to happen. It's necessary for the 100GB version which is on the roadmap. The connector was also designed to handle either Copper or fiber cabling (supposedly also backward compatible, ie you can buy the copper version now and use the fiber version later, though I'm skeptical that's even possible) so as soon as the costs are in line the Fiber version will likely roll out.
Fiber is the future of almost all data wiring. It's got far to many advantages (the biggest is lack of E/M field interference). Thunderbird copper cable lengths are very limited (~2 meters), the Fiber version of Thunderbird is supposed to exceed network cable lengths (more than 100 meters) and be capable of much longer travel with repeaters. I don't know why everyone thinks the fiber version of Thunderbird is dead because it's not and in fact will likely be in the next version probably before widespread adoption of the current version.
Bingo. It's an illegal attempt to shield assets in a legal proceeding. I'd like the judge to rule that the agreement is a legal work for hire contract and that LRJ is responsible for any counter damages.
You think inflation is a big deal? How about this. The content owner is the one that sets the value. The owner is now in the position to arbitrarily decide if your case is a felony or misdemeanor. So the individual or company that under the law was wronged gets to decide the punishment by setting the value of the loss. Do you not see how that can be abused?
Got friends and connections in high places? It's a misdemeanor. Someone the content owner doesn't like or is a pain for them like an activist? Guess how much the content will be worth? The very idea that the value of an object with an arbitrary value (independent of demand or market forces) defines the level of infraction such that the owner can arbitrarily change the punishment is so bad it's beyond words.
The point you missed is that panels can be mounted to the roofs of already existing buildings. It's a simple fact but if we covered the roofs of every building with solar panels we would have more power than we could use (probably ever) during daylight hours.
The OP also made a serious mistake in taking the initial build-out costs as a yearly cost. Solar panels are typically warrantied to not fail for 25 years. Depending on type they can reliably produce power for an unknown period (there are panels built in the 70's still in operation, although amount of power produced declines gradually over time) although a certain number will die every year. It's been estimated that if you can put panels on every building that the yearly maintenance and panel replacement costs would be approximately what we spend on generation and maintenance anyway and in the panels favor is that there are no replacement costs for 25 years due to the warranty nor are there any emissions or resources used in the generation.
Solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and others like wave generation are the future. Yes they are more labor and maintenance but they also don't consume resources in the power generation. Don't get me wrong, I still fully support Nuclear as a viable night and peak power provider. Personally I'd rather my money for power was spent on fueling US jobs than going to some oil baron that's using the money to fund terrorism (Saudi's) or going to someone like Chavez who's trying to destroy Venezuelan free society in the name of communism while enriching his family and friends.
I can almost guarantee that they could run a 1st rate national campaign of prime time commercials where a commercial runs every commercial break for more than a year and still not get close to what this case is going to cost in legal fees. They've hired probably the most expensive IP firm in the US to defend a case that the MPAA is probably likely to appeal all the way to the supreme court if they lose. I wouldn't be surprised if legal fees top 100 million if it goes all the way to the supreme court.
On the upside if they do win they are likely to be in business all of a few months until Netflix copies the model and puts them out of business.
I'm not trying to play down the importance of this case, and I hope they succeed, both in business and in the court but in cases like this the guy that wins the battle often loses the war.
I'm not saying they didn't have sea walls. I'm saying that the protections constructed didn't match the site conditions or historic record of tsunami's. They ignored those stone monuments all over the hillsides that were 600 years old because obviously what does someone from 600 years ago know. I'll point out that those monuments were significantly higher than this tsunami, indicating that an even larger tsunami hit the location previously. There are dozens of these monuments all over the island. The Japanese at the time built these 6' tall stone monuments to warn future generations not to build homes to close to the sea.
And yes, the reactors SCRAM'd (dumped in the control rods and turned the generators and emergency pumping systems on) after the earthquake and did so completely automatically. Then the tsunami destroyed the pumps and generators so that the reactors had NO cooling. There are operational questions on why the reactor SCRAM'd itself that can be dealt with by the operator on whether that was the right course of action. But the site plan given the record was inadequate. This isn't an American site where records are at best a few hundred years old so there is a lot of guessing on site conditions and maximum events, Japanese culture is thousands of years old and they have Tsunami markers from nearly a thousand years ago that were higher up in the hills than this wave hit and there are no doubt written records in storage in museums and temples that discuss these Tsunami's. That's a bonafide historical record to indicate possible Tsunami height and from all indications they ignored the history when the built the plant and that's unforgivable. There is a critical failure in the site engineering in this plant and it's the primary cause of this disaster. If the AP can walk around Japan and take pictures of dozens of these massive stone monuments in parks then why did the site engineers ignore them?
I'm also not saying that they should have built 46m high sea walls, but they could have put the pumps and generators in water tight hardened and reinforced concrete bunkers in the event the plant was submerged by a larger Tsunami. Such considerations would have been relatively inexpensive against the cost of taller sea walls. Or they could have built the plant above the markers. Or they could have built taller sea walls. But why on earth did they ignore the advice of their ancestors who no doubt lost friends and family to the Tsunami that caused them in their grief to build those big stone markers?
The problem wasn't the technology or the construction. The only flaw I saw in the entire setup was that the system SCRAM'd without backup power to run the cooling system. What this failure points out is a critical failure in site planning and design for site specific conditions. This reactors was built at sea level on the side of the island hit more times than any other by Tsunami's where there are 600 year old (600!) markers saying don't build below this point because a Tsunami destroyed everything below the marker and it appear that although they took into account earthquake engineering they didn't even account for a Tsunami hitting the plant.
Had they taken the Tsunami incident into account they could have either built the plant with sea walls and significant concrete protection for the generators and backup systems or they could have built the plant above the markers. They did neither, so the reactors began building up latent heat from the reactions when the backup cooling system and generators were destroyed by the Tsunami. The key thing here though is that the safety systems and containment vessels prevented a full blown disaster. Sure there was radiation released that will wash into the ocean and dissipate entirely within a year. Sure the reactors have been poisoned and ruined and many people have been displaced but outside the plant operators there will likely not be a single death from radiation. That's an amazing achievement given the glaring site and design problem.
The point of this disaster and what people need to learn isn't that nuclear is bad, it's that site specific conditions need to be taken into account when designing the plant. You need to design for the 100 year storms and disasters to be fully avoided and make preparations and planning probably out to the 500-1000 year events. (for those that aren't aware thats the re-occurrence interval. It doesn't mean it happens every 500 years, it means there is a 1/500 chance of it happening that year). What needs to happen in Japan is an inquiry into why this plant was built at this site (in particular given those 600 year old monuments up the hill from the plant), why it wasn't designed to survive a Tsunami and Earthquake of this magnitude and what happened to make all this possible. Then they need to evaluate every other plant and it's site and make sure they are all designed to survive natural disasters. It's easy for the press to focus on the scary of the nuclear aspect while ignoring the site and engineering failures that made this accident possible.
You can't simply take a "safe" design and slap it down at any location without taking into account local and regional disasters and site specific conditions that could compromise the safety systems. This is basic engineering and how this plant was built at this location without accommodations for a Tsunami is astounding to me.
This has been a issue for quite a while because the Republican refuse the raise the gas tax even though more than 60% of Americans support raising it.
Fact: The Federal Gas tax hasn't been raised since the early 80's.
Fact: The Federal Gas tax goes into a trust fund called the Highway Trust Fund entirely devoted to transportation construction and maintenance.
Fact: The Highway Trust Fund is completely exhausted. Maintenance and construction costs now dramatically exceed what the gas tax revenue is bringing in. The additional funding is coming out of brand new debt.
Fact: The principle driver of unemployment in this country right now is the construction industry. The near destruction of the housing market caused almost the total layoff of every single construction worker. Construction accounts for nearly 10% of GDP. If all the construction workers were put back to work the economy would likely come out of recession within a year.
Fact: The last federal transportation funding bill (SAFETEA) expired 2 years ago. Congress has failed to pass a new spending bill, instead passing 6 month extensions of the existing bill.
Fact: A transportation construction project typically takes 5-6 years from concept to commitment of construction dollars. (the 5-6 years composes, planning, environmental studies and engineering)
Fact: Without firm long term commitments the states are unwilling to commit their own funds to projects where federal supplemental dollars aren't guaranteed.
Fact: We are now in a 2 year hole where no Engineering or preliminary work on projects is being done. In addition, because long term money expired 2 years ago no further engineering was done after the expiration of SAFETEA.
Fact: Without commitment of transportation moneys the construction industry cannot recover without a massive burst in home building. Neither is going to occur so expect a triple dip recession beginning in 2013.
It's going to get worse every day they delay passing a transportation funding bill and every day they refuse to raise gas taxes to fund that bill. Federal gas tax is $0.17 a gallon. You could double that and at current prices and fluctuation most people wouldn't even notice.
But feel free to keep blaming Obama for it, after all the constitution makes him responsible for funding.
Yep anyone could have it. And the ISP keeps track of who had it. And they asked the ISP who had it. And the ISP told them who had it. You aren't stupid enough to think the ISP doesn't track which login has what IP are you?
Yea and that guy with the last name Hansen, where the sen means son of, where the last name means son of han. It would certainly be inappropriate to refer to him as Mr. Hansen.
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Ah you are a history major defending your worthless degree. Yes you know history, but to imply that the STEM graduates don't know history is a gross over simplification. The STEM graduates can take history course and study history all they want without majoring in it. That history degree is not only worthless to the person it's worthless to the economy as a whole. They will end up working at Walmart and they aren't going to prevent Nevil Chamberlain from trying to make peace with Nazi Germany while working at Walmart.
You grossly overlook the fact that every major takes general education classes that cover the gamut of the spectrum while still being tailored to the individuals interests. A STEM graduate might not know as much history as a History major, but they can certainly learn as much as they desire. The History degree on the other hand in all probability will never make a significant contribution to society on the scale of what STEM graduates can achieve as a result of them majoring in History.
Liberal arts programs with little chance for employment should cost significantly more than a STEM degree. The price should be used to subsidize the STEM programs and it should be used to discourage people from pursuing full degrees in unemployable fields.
And where are you getting your demand numbers? The largest demand IS for the liberal arts degrees. The STEM degrees are declining rapidly. When I graduated in Engineering 15+ years ago class sizes had fallen in half from the previous 5 years. They've halved again since I graduated where my class was around 60 current classes are in the 30 range in the 60's the class sizes were in the 100-200 range. STEM degrees are on the decline, the course work is hard and if prices go up they will decline even more. Yet half the school is enrolled in sociology degrees that they will never use.
If you want to use Demand as a basis for pricing the Liberal arts degrees will be FAR more expensive than any other. Communications, Politics and Sociology/Psycology would be very expensive indeed.
You are rather stupid if you think this ruling only applies to this situation. The supreme court doesn't even hear such cases. This ruling means you can't launch a class action lawsuit if there is an arbitration clause in the contract regardless of what it's about. They could kill babies and rape children and you won't be able to launch a class action lawsuit.
Several states had put in place laws such that arbitration clauses in contracts by monopoly providers were unconscionable contractual clauses, the Supreme just said state rights don't matter and you will be unable to launch a class action suit even where you can't negotiate on contracts.
The moon is rather rich in the nice expensive and rare minerals such as Platinum, Palladium and Iridium. At a price of $1800 an ounce for Platinum that could be quite lucrative. It's also a material with massive industrial uses that people don't use because of it's cost. Bring the cost down and you will see it used a lot more in industry. Lunar miners also wouldn't need to worry about pesky environmental rules, they have easy solar power access with high power output and could probably even refine with solar furnaces.
I expect that Lunar mining will occur in my lifetime and probably before I retire in 2033. There are simply far to many valuable minerals near the surface and easily accessible. The beauty is that the moons gravity is so low that once you get the equipment up and running producing and delivering the product to the earth could be done quite cheaply as long as you build the base with proper water processing facilities negating the need to deliver water. Once you are there you can mine not only the most valuable minerals but some of the more common but plentiful surface minerals that are difficult to mine on the earth. And as others have noted you would be in a position to mine all that helium3 if it's ever needed.
Given that in this day and age there are several prescription treatments for ED along with dozens of bogus "herbal" remedies I can understand your frustration. No one should put up with ED anymore.
They are a shell corporation created by lawyers and only employing those lawyers. They are also launching suits without the authority to do so. See what they are trying to do is sue without exposing the Las Vegas Journal to counter damages. So they set this up as a shell corporation, then LRJ sold the rights to sue to RightHaven. The problem is that under copyright law you can't sue if you don't own the copyrights. But if Righthaven is only legal representation for LRJ then the LRJ would be liable for damages. But the suits as filed say RightHaven owns the copyright.
What needs to happen is that two lawsuits need to be filed. One against Righthaven for not having the legal authority to pursue these suits, an out in the suit needs to be put in allowing RH out of the suit if they admit they are only legal representatives for the LRJ and can provide evidence of such. Then once said evidence is acquired a suit needs to be launched against the LRJ that seeks the entire assets of the company in damages. This action will successfully penetrate this shell corp play and expose the real culprits behind these suits to action. If it can be shown in the first suit that RH acted alone and duped the LRJ into this scam then you file motions to pierce the corporate veil of RH and take the investors and owners of RH to the cleaners.
Unless you go after the perpetrators of this and their assets then it won't do you any good. You need to bankrupt the people behind this as an example. Then you need to disbar the lawyers that came up with it. This entire thing is a travesty of justice.
I agree it's a cultural issue and it's exactly the reason No Child Left Behind was the STUPIDEST education bill ever passed. We absolutely should be leaving them behind, we should push every child that is willing to work hard as far and fast as we can and leave those students with no motivation and bad parents behind in the dust. I'm not saying we shouldn't have programs to try to find the students with motivation or those that develop it later and try to elevate them out of the ignorant masses but I am saying that handicapping the education of every child because of a handful of morons will do nothing to help society.
I was bored my entire time in HS, it wasn't until I reached collage (and experienced fast paced learning) that I realized that brain dead teaching aimed at the idiots in society held me back. I could have progressed much further had there been more opportunity (I took all the AP courses offered) to move forward quicker and without the drag of the idiots in society. I did very well in college (honor roll multiple times) where in most of my K-12 education I had poor grades (I always tested well but didn't do the busy work homework), which I know today was due to the slow repetitive learning.
What we've done with NCLB is elevated stupidity to the point that no smart child can advance faster than the laziest idiot in school. And that's going to do nothing to improve the education of the idiots and everything to handicap those that are smart. We've got this crazy idea of equality going that's feels like it's right out of Harrison Bergeron where we hold back everyone with talent and smarts. I can see why someone like Bush thought it was a good idea, after all IMO he was in the idiot group that should have been left behind in school. Maybe all of Congress was in those groups and thought it was a good idea, it wasn't.
Non-Lethal? Are you kidding? Do you know how many young Nobels died in duals in the early 18th century? France actually banned dueling (not that it worked) because so many young men were dieing in duels over silly disputes. Fencing is derived directly from this tradition with the added benefit of safety equipment like face guards and protective tips.
Without a protective tip a foil is just about as deadly as it gets as even a woman or small child can poke a hole in someone with one because the small point comes with incredible leverage and force concentration. Without the protective tip there is something like 1000psi concentrated onto the tip of the foil on impact, it's enough to puncture the rib cage and go all the way through soft tissue. A torso hit with a foil in these times was almost universally fatal, if not on the field within a few days due to internal bleeding or infection. It was the exception that someone survived a dual where there was a torso hit on one of the opponents.
As society tried to prevent death in the duals they moved to rapiers and first blood victory where the most of the strokes were cutting instead of stabbing. Later they moved to the safety tips and scored based systems which became what we know as modern fencing. But make no mistake, when Fencing was actually orchestrated dueling between nobels it was a very fatal endeavor.
Yep that's exactly what happens when you allow patents on raw ideas rather than specific and detailed implementations. No software patent should be valid without the source code detailing the implementation where simply changing code to work differently completely avoids the patent. Of course if that was the case nearly every software patent would be gone with the exception of things like the RSA patents where changing the code would make it no longer work.
The problem with the patent office is that when they started allowing companies to patent raw ideas in the form of software and business method patents suddenly you could get a patent for an idea with no implementation, make it as vague as possible and then sue everyone. And that's exactly what's been happening and getting more and more common. It's the reason the courts are being overwhelmed with patent suits and it's also the reason the patent office is being swarmed with patent applications. Reinforce the old rule that requires that the patent detail a specific implementation (and in the case of a software patent that means the source code is part of the patent) and much of the problems with the patent system will go away. The side benefit is all but the most important and innovative software inventions are no longer patentable and business method patents go away entirely.
Ah but we can hope the upcoming patent cases before the Supreme reach exactly this conclusion and reverse the nastiness the court created when they essentially allowed business method patents by invalidating previous tests. The only valid patent system is one that deals in specific implementations.
I'm going to steal your car and drive through a speed trap 3-400 hundred times at 20 or 30mph over the limit. Then Judge can explain to you that you are responsible for any offenses that happen in your car.
Don't be an idiot. What you propose is against every principle of our constitution. I'm not responsible for what another person does even if they are using my property to do it as long as I'm not helping, participating or covering it up. Next you will suggest we start punishing children for their parents actions. Your Father was a thief, slavery for you!