It has been repeatedly shown that, because of the mandatory appeals process and the cost of lawyers, it costs more to carry out the death sentence than life imprisonment. About three million dollars, last time I read about it. Which pays for a lot of imprisonment.
As it happens, they lost an amount of money they could just about afford. But they could have lost more money than they had - leaving other people with losses in what is supposed to be a safe market place. It is like fining people for speeding - they have not caused an accident, but they are driving in a way likely to cause an accident. As it was, it nearly wiped out Knight: if it had gone further, it would have wiped out other, innocent, parties and done serious damage to the market, which the SEC is tasked to protect.
What happened to the Dr Who episodes was mainly due to the cost of storage. The tapes on which they were stored were relatively expensive, and no-one saw any possibility of future sales because they didn't foresee the number of channels available now. So the bean-counters ordered the tapes re-used.
The cost of storage for those episodes is now trivial: they could probably all fit onto one memory stick, at a few tens of dollars. But this new tungsten storage is likely to be expensive, at least initially. Yes, you can get almost anything of that size onto dozens of disk drives all over the world, making them proof against any single cataclysm. But disk drives have a life of a few years - then what? Yes, they may roll forward onto new drives - or they may not. "Dormant" accounts may be deleted after a decade or so. So somebody has to want the data enough to pay for it to be transcribed to this new process.
From TFA " Typically an extremely reactive fuel, the company has developed a treatment that turns it into a sold form that's safe to handle but is still useful as a fuel, said Aizawa."
Hence no 3000psi gas. But also, no credibility to me. Until this miracle is explained, it sounds fake to me. Most likely, some other (probably extremely expensive) fuel that generates hydrogen as an intermediate.
But you cannot determine whether a particular file is pirated. See the fiasco at the Hugo Award ceremony when an automatic anti-piracy device cut of the streaming coverage because they were playing copyrighted music - which they had licensed. Child porn is illegal at all times. A music file or film may be legal or not, depending on circumstances. iTunes distributes copyrighted music: should it be blocked? Co can I tell the difference between iTunes and jTunes, its pirate cousin?
Since the BBC makes its money from the license fee, not from advertising, it has no concept of "return" for a particular program. And, while viewer figures are not totally ignored, it is regarded as having some mandate to put on programs for minority groups not well catered for by commercial TV - such as, for example, amateur astronomers. On the other hand, TFA gives no idea what viewer figures actually are. If everybody has stopped watching after Moore died, it makes sense to drop the program. If viewer figures are holding up, it makes no more sense to drop it now than at any time over the past decades.
No. There is very little power behind that voltage, so your conductive body shorts it out. Effectively the field lines detour round your body - and hills, buildings etc. This has been used to make model aircraft avoid obstacles. Keep the voltage between wingtips zero.: as you approach a hill, the field lines lift, banking the aircraft and steering it away from the hill.
For this to work, the web silk would have to be a pretty effective insulator, which I believe is the case.
As I have read, yes. Somewhere about spiders suggested that a hair fifty miles long, given an atmosphere 50 miles deep, and a follicle much stronger than that actually fitted, could support a human, You might have to scale up the charge/m as well, but the physics still works.
I think the "Social Contract" exists, but I agree that it is a problem, but also an advantage, that it is not written down. There is an implicit contract between all of us on how society works: that we give up some freedoms, as do our fellow citizens, in order to make society work. The fact that it is not written down means that we can actually have different views of what is actually in the contract - and privacy is a golden example of that. On the other hand, being unwritten allows it to evolve. Writing things down fixes them, while society changes. A prime example here is the Second Amendment: while not saying it is right or wrong, I am certain those who wrote and passed it did not foresee current firearms technology.
Can confirm this. My ex-boss makes a $500 tuning accessory for a $24,000 miniature but working steam locomotive. The guy who builds the locomotives is building them in batches of twenty, OK, the locomotive is the main cost of your miniature railway, but you are probably looking at $50,000 for a working setup, for something with no practical use at all. $10,000 for something that makes useful stuff? No problem. I could see the upper end of the steam enthusiasts getting a CNC machine, if it were easy enough to use (not trivial) just for fixing and enhancing their locomotives.
2-3 years from now, I figure the new start screen will have largely been adopted as mainstream (at least if Microsoft doesn't abandon it in favor of a whole new UI next year...) and by then using it at work might be acceptable for the vast majority of employees, with minimal training.
I disagree. The tiles screen is right for tablets, not for keyboard-and-mouse desktops. Even touchscreen vertical monitors are not comfortable for extensive use. Win 8 is an attempt to provide a single OS for both tablet and keyboard users. I see that as a big mistake: you end up with something that please neither.
The competition have distinct UIs for tablet and desktop: iOS and OSX from Apple, Android and ChromeOS from Google. Note that this is not about the underlying OS, which may well be some flavour of Linux in many cases, but needn't be. This is about UI: the bit of the system the user sees. I use desktop OSes - Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS - and tablet/phone OSes - iOS, Android. I am happy to switch between them: horses for courses. But, from limited experience, I loathe Win8 because it is neither one thing nor the other. On the same hardware in the same environment, I have two completely different operating modes.
I have been struck how we are cued into different behaviours by different environments. Many years ago, to answer a question about an obsolete system, I had to fire up a development system, OS and editor I hadn't used for years. I was surprised to find that, on seeing its distinctive terminal and displays (VT-52 running RT-11 using TECO, for nostalgia freaks), I instantly retrieved OS commands and editor hot keys for that particular system. I think we have no difficulty in running diverse systems, provided they are in diverse environments and the devices give us cues accordingly. With a tablet in my hand, I poke, slide and pinch. With a mouse in my hand, I click, double click and use the scroll wheel. With Win8, I get confused and revert to basic, single button mouse behaviour which is common to both.
I reckon they have had a good look at it, decided it won't work, so they are leaking that they are going to do it to make Samsung etc. waste effort on something that will never work. My bet is on the iHat as an answer to Google Goggles. After all, Dick Tracey wore a hat as well.
The gas giants are believed not to have an actual surface, but rather a steadily increasing density from what we could call gas to what we would call solid. It is difficult to see how a volcano, which has a defined surface, could exist. If as surface does, contrary to belief, exist, we cannot see it and therefore can say nothing about its structure - including volcanoes.
Futures might work - again, if you trust the government. I don't think Bolivia would expect to get to battery production in the foreseeable future: this obviously requires the kind of huge scale precision operation perfected by the Far east producers such as Panasonic. If it were simple enough, there would be factories all over the world. But I think it is too complex for a third world country. The fact is, it requires billions, and years, just to extract the ore,
It requires a huge mine, ore purifiers if not smelters, roads and railways to be built, To get small amounts of lithium from half way up a mountain to a port where it can be shipped in quantity to battery manufacturers requires investment of the order of billions of dollars, which Bolivia doesn't have, plus mining and technology skills it doesn't have. You need the investment to product the lithium before you can sell it. And potential investors are scared that a sovereign country will either nationalise the mine as soon as it is completed, or increase extraction taxes so it is not profitable enough to repay the investment.
Not so. Or at least, the demand can be invisible. Lots of pundits said there was no demand for tablets before the iPad launched, and the market was negligible. Apple announced a supply, and demand turned to take it.
And as transport planners have found, build the roads and the traffic will come.
What was the demand for Tesla-type cars before Tesla started up? Negligible.
As a geezer, one of the main criticisms at my review was that I tend to overload younger staff with too much information. Because I have seen so much before, I can jump on new problems faster. And I am working at what thinks of itself as a leading edge chip design company on the newest products.The company chooses me for the bleeding edge.
Who said Low orbit? How much can you see from geostationary orbit? Even the Lagrange point has some blind angles - intentionally, to hide the sun. Orbit is not one place.
So, if I'm uninsured and facing major narrowing of the arteries, I can go smoke a joint in a police station and get free heart surgery?
Yes. Somebody did that, Not smoking a joint, but a totally and obviously incompetent armed bank robbery. Go to bank with unloaded gun, hand over "give me the money" note, then drop the gun and surrender. He reckoned that he would have more life after getting out with his medical conditions treated than staying out and dying soon, and uncomfortably, from untreated conditions.
I thought the reason for the JWT to be at the Lagrange point was shielding from the sun. With supercooled IR sensors, the less sunlight the better. The life of the JWT is determined by how long its coolant lasts, And the Earth makes a good sunshield. The same is not true for an optical telescope - though any darkness is good, and coolness probably helps. But there is not the same driving need for an optical telescope to be kept cold as there is for an IR one.
It wouldn't need adaptive optics. Those correct for atmospheric aberration, and the moon doesn't have any atmosphere.
However, I don't see the point of lunar rather than orbiting. Lunar has gravity, which must be compensated for in pointing the telescope, and half the sky is invisible at any instant. Orbiting has full access to the whole sky, and no pesky stray forces on the mirror.
I disagree. Capitalism is any accumulation of value intended to further future production - investing in tools rather than end products. You can have state capitalism, or free market capitalism.
And your assumption appears to be that the value of something is entirely composed of the value of the materials that make it up. Two cooks who take the same materials, but one produces a burned unsavoury mess and the other produces a gourmet dish, have in your book produced the same value. I strongly disagree: the same raw materials can be deployed in very different ways, and these represent value added. Such value added can come from capitalism (though it can come from other sources).
The Lump of Labour and the Lump of Materials models are deep fallacies. Organising both people and materials efficiently and effectively adds value. Free market capitalism is not the only method of performing such organisation, but it has shown itself to be a very effective one. It most definitely adds value. Of course, any other organising system of equal competence would add the same value, and capitalism can also, like other systems, subtract value when operating badly.
Can you justify this? Do you feel that capital structures like railways and roads add nothing to the value of production? Would the world be just as productive if all the capital goods - houses, road, cars, factories, the internet - were destroyed?
Slashdot Mirror
It has been repeatedly shown that, because of the mandatory appeals process and the cost of lawyers, it costs more to carry out the death sentence than life imprisonment. About three million dollars, last time I read about it. Which pays for a lot of imprisonment.
As it happens, they lost an amount of money they could just about afford. But they could have lost more money than they had - leaving other people with losses in what is supposed to be a safe market place. It is like fining people for speeding - they have not caused an accident, but they are driving in a way likely to cause an accident. As it was, it nearly wiped out Knight: if it had gone further, it would have wiped out other, innocent, parties and done serious damage to the market, which the SEC is tasked to protect.
What happened to the Dr Who episodes was mainly due to the cost of storage. The tapes on which they were stored were relatively expensive, and no-one saw any possibility of future sales because they didn't foresee the number of channels available now. So the bean-counters ordered the tapes re-used.
The cost of storage for those episodes is now trivial: they could probably all fit onto one memory stick, at a few tens of dollars. But this new tungsten storage is likely to be expensive, at least initially. Yes, you can get almost anything of that size onto dozens of disk drives all over the world, making them proof against any single cataclysm. But disk drives have a life of a few years - then what? Yes, they may roll forward onto new drives - or they may not. "Dormant" accounts may be deleted after a decade or so. So somebody has to want the data enough to pay for it to be transcribed to this new process.
From TFA " Typically an extremely reactive fuel, the company has developed a treatment that turns it into a sold form that's safe to handle but is still useful as a fuel, said Aizawa."
Hence no 3000psi gas. But also, no credibility to me. Until this miracle is explained, it sounds fake to me. Most likely, some other (probably extremely expensive) fuel that generates hydrogen as an intermediate.
I love the way Americans turn to guns to solve any problem. To bear arms - against jellyfish!
But you cannot determine whether a particular file is pirated. See the fiasco at the Hugo Award ceremony when an automatic anti-piracy device cut of the streaming coverage because they were playing copyrighted music - which they had licensed. Child porn is illegal at all times. A music file or film may be legal or not, depending on circumstances. iTunes distributes copyrighted music: should it be blocked? Co can I tell the difference between iTunes and jTunes, its pirate cousin?
Since the BBC makes its money from the license fee, not from advertising, it has no concept of "return" for a particular program. And, while viewer figures are not totally ignored, it is regarded as having some mandate to put on programs for minority groups not well catered for by commercial TV - such as, for example, amateur astronomers. On the other hand, TFA gives no idea what viewer figures actually are. If everybody has stopped watching after Moore died, it makes sense to drop the program. If viewer figures are holding up, it makes no more sense to drop it now than at any time over the past decades.
No. There is very little power behind that voltage, so your conductive body shorts it out. Effectively the field lines detour round your body - and hills, buildings etc. This has been used to make model aircraft avoid obstacles. Keep the voltage between wingtips zero.: as you approach a hill, the field lines lift, banking the aircraft and steering it away from the hill.
For this to work, the web silk would have to be a pretty effective insulator, which I believe is the case.
As I have read, yes. Somewhere about spiders suggested that a hair fifty miles long, given an atmosphere 50 miles deep, and a follicle much stronger than that actually fitted, could support a human, You might have to scale up the charge/m as well, but the physics still works.
I think the "Social Contract" exists, but I agree that it is a problem, but also an advantage, that it is not written down. There is an implicit contract between all of us on how society works: that we give up some freedoms, as do our fellow citizens, in order to make society work. The fact that it is not written down means that we can actually have different views of what is actually in the contract - and privacy is a golden example of that. On the other hand, being unwritten allows it to evolve. Writing things down fixes them, while society changes. A prime example here is the Second Amendment: while not saying it is right or wrong, I am certain those who wrote and passed it did not foresee current firearms technology.
Can confirm this. My ex-boss makes a $500 tuning accessory for a $24,000 miniature but working steam locomotive. The guy who builds the locomotives is building them in batches of twenty, OK, the locomotive is the main cost of your miniature railway, but you are probably looking at $50,000 for a working setup, for something with no practical use at all. $10,000 for something that makes useful stuff? No problem. I could see the upper end of the steam enthusiasts getting a CNC machine, if it were easy enough to use (not trivial) just for fixing and enhancing their locomotives.
2-3 years from now, I figure the new start screen will have largely been adopted as mainstream (at least if Microsoft doesn't abandon it in favor of a whole new UI next year...) and by then using it at work might be acceptable for the vast majority of employees, with minimal training.
I disagree. The tiles screen is right for tablets, not for keyboard-and-mouse desktops. Even touchscreen vertical monitors are not comfortable for extensive use. Win 8 is an attempt to provide a single OS for both tablet and keyboard users. I see that as a big mistake: you end up with something that please neither.
The competition have distinct UIs for tablet and desktop: iOS and OSX from Apple, Android and ChromeOS from Google. Note that this is not about the underlying OS, which may well be some flavour of Linux in many cases, but needn't be. This is about UI: the bit of the system the user sees. I use desktop OSes - Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS - and tablet/phone OSes - iOS, Android. I am happy to switch between them: horses for courses. But, from limited experience, I loathe Win8 because it is neither one thing nor the other. On the same hardware in the same environment, I have two completely different operating modes.
I have been struck how we are cued into different behaviours by different environments. Many years ago, to answer a question about an obsolete system, I had to fire up a development system, OS and editor I hadn't used for years. I was surprised to find that, on seeing its distinctive terminal and displays (VT-52 running RT-11 using TECO, for nostalgia freaks), I instantly retrieved OS commands and editor hot keys for that particular system. I think we have no difficulty in running diverse systems, provided they are in diverse environments and the devices give us cues accordingly. With a tablet in my hand, I poke, slide and pinch. With a mouse in my hand, I click, double click and use the scroll wheel. With Win8, I get confused and revert to basic, single button mouse behaviour which is common to both.
I reckon they have had a good look at it, decided it won't work, so they are leaking that they are going to do it to make Samsung etc. waste effort on something that will never work. My bet is on the iHat as an answer to Google Goggles. After all, Dick Tracey wore a hat as well.
The gas giants are believed not to have an actual surface, but rather a steadily increasing density from what we could call gas to what we would call solid. It is difficult to see how a volcano, which has a defined surface, could exist. If as surface does, contrary to belief, exist, we cannot see it and therefore can say nothing about its structure - including volcanoes.
Futures might work - again, if you trust the government. I don't think Bolivia would expect to get to battery production in the foreseeable future: this obviously requires the kind of huge scale precision operation perfected by the Far east producers such as Panasonic. If it were simple enough, there would be factories all over the world. But I think it is too complex for a third world country. The fact is, it requires billions, and years, just to extract the ore,
But we could grow indefinite numbers more.
It requires a huge mine, ore purifiers if not smelters, roads and railways to be built, To get small amounts of lithium from half way up a mountain to a port where it can be shipped in quantity to battery manufacturers requires investment of the order of billions of dollars, which Bolivia doesn't have, plus mining and technology skills it doesn't have. You need the investment to product the lithium before you can sell it. And potential investors are scared that a sovereign country will either nationalise the mine as soon as it is completed, or increase extraction taxes so it is not profitable enough to repay the investment.
Not so. Or at least, the demand can be invisible. Lots of pundits said there was no demand for tablets before the iPad launched, and the market was negligible. Apple announced a supply, and demand turned to take it.
And as transport planners have found, build the roads and the traffic will come.
What was the demand for Tesla-type cars before Tesla started up? Negligible.
As a geezer, one of the main criticisms at my review was that I tend to overload younger staff with too much information. Because I have seen so much before, I can jump on new problems faster. And I am working at what thinks of itself as a leading edge chip design company on the newest products.The company chooses me for the bleeding edge.
Who said Low orbit? How much can you see from geostationary orbit? Even the Lagrange point has some blind angles - intentionally, to hide the sun. Orbit is not one place.
So, if I'm uninsured and facing major narrowing of the arteries, I can go smoke a joint in a police station and get free heart surgery?
Yes. Somebody did that, Not smoking a joint, but a totally and obviously incompetent armed bank robbery. Go to bank with unloaded gun, hand over "give me the money" note, then drop the gun and surrender. He reckoned that he would have more life after getting out with his medical conditions treated than staying out and dying soon, and uncomfortably, from untreated conditions.
I thought the reason for the JWT to be at the Lagrange point was shielding from the sun. With supercooled IR sensors, the less sunlight the better. The life of the JWT is determined by how long its coolant lasts, And the Earth makes a good sunshield. The same is not true for an optical telescope - though any darkness is good, and coolness probably helps. But there is not the same driving need for an optical telescope to be kept cold as there is for an IR one.
It wouldn't need adaptive optics. Those correct for atmospheric aberration, and the moon doesn't have any atmosphere.
However, I don't see the point of lunar rather than orbiting. Lunar has gravity, which must be compensated for in pointing the telescope, and half the sky is invisible at any instant. Orbiting has full access to the whole sky, and no pesky stray forces on the mirror.
I disagree. Capitalism is any accumulation of value intended to further future production - investing in tools rather than end products. You can have state capitalism, or free market capitalism.
And your assumption appears to be that the value of something is entirely composed of the value of the materials that make it up. Two cooks who take the same materials, but one produces a burned unsavoury mess and the other produces a gourmet dish, have in your book produced the same value. I strongly disagree: the same raw materials can be deployed in very different ways, and these represent value added. Such value added can come from capitalism (though it can come from other sources).
The Lump of Labour and the Lump of Materials models are deep fallacies. Organising both people and materials efficiently and effectively adds value. Free market capitalism is not the only method of performing such organisation, but it has shown itself to be a very effective one. It most definitely adds value. Of course, any other organising system of equal competence would add the same value, and capitalism can also, like other systems, subtract value when operating badly.
Can you justify this? Do you feel that capital structures like railways and roads add nothing to the value of production? Would the world be just as productive if all the capital goods - houses, road, cars, factories, the internet - were destroyed?