That is incredibly amateurish. It's the RF engineering equivalent of a marketer explaining how the traditional computer is obsolete because his iPhone can do everything.
'Radar cross section' is an executive summary term that you use to explain concepts to a non-technical audience. It's an analogy. By trying trying to do calculations with it, you're assuming that RF propagates losslessly through the atmosphere, which is very wrong. Radar cross section is a proxy for reflection scattering (S_11 for RF engineers), but to calculate detection range you have to consider both the reflection and the free space path loss! And free space path loss is significant: signal strength drops of exponentially in the atmosphere, not quadratically as you assumed.
Let's assume the rain has a radius of 1mm, five times smaller than your example. That gives it a "cross section" of about 1x10^-6 m^2, or about -60dB. The F-22 reportedly has a RCS of about -30dB, so it's 1000 (!) times more visible than a raindrop. If we also assume a standard X-band radar at about 10GHz, and a detection range for the 1mm raindrop at 2km, then factoring in both the RCS and the FSPL, the radar has a sensitivity of about -180dB, which is pretty damn impressive. So at what range can a radar with a -180dB sensitivity pick up an object with an RCS of -30dB? About 60km.
That's not too shabby. But the air-to-surface missiles have ranges upward of 150km. To pick up the F-22 at that range you need about a 40dB improvement in sensitivity. Advanced military radars are already operating basically at the theoretical noise floor, so the only way to get that improvement is to increase transmitter power by about 5000 times. That's a 15 giga-watt radar. The largest nuclear power plant in the world is about 8GW electrical, so two of those per radar installation.
And in that case, what have they actually benefited from the drone? It's not like "reverse engineering" a downed American drone has suddenly given them access to commercial parts markets.
They could build their "version" of the drone with lower capability replacement parts, and then what? The airframe design represents an engineering compromise between the specifications of the components it was built for. Throw in a bunch of different components with different dimensions, masses and performance characteristics, and you have what we like to call "a shitty knock-off."
Canadian government bureaucracies are a nightmare. About seven years ago I was working on a project where we needed access to some government data under similar circumstances. It ended up being a lot quicker going through the US State Department to request the data from the US Army Corps of Engineers than it was to get it from the Canadian government.
There's been quite a few F-18 accidents in recent years. Despite being a two engine plane, it seems there are a lot more mechanical failures than the single engine F-16.
Yes, but it can take decades to correct even the simplest of errors. Take the Milikan oil drop experiment. A brilliantly simple experiment to measure the charge on the electron. Unfortunately, Milikan and Fletcher made a small error in their analysis which led to an incorrect result. It took a long time before the published values of the charge on the electron was correct.
Researchers would unintentionally fudge their results to match Milikan's, because the idea that the published figure could be wrong wasn't even considered.... if your replication got a different figure, you must have done something wrong. Repeat the experiment, and tweak the analysis and don't publish until you're in their error bars. Don't rock the boat.
And that's measuring a straightforward, easily defined concept (the charge on an electron), with an experiment renowned for the brilliance of its simplicity.
People outside of academia think peer review is this panacea which cures all ills. But in reality, 90% of peer review is just making sure you have the right citations in your introduction.
Moore's law? Not really. There are theoretical limits on maximum bandwidth that are far more restrictive than theoretical computation limits. For a given SNR, the maximum digital bandwidth of a communication channel is proportional to the frequency bandwidth. You can get closer to the Shannon-Hartley limit with better rf circuits coding, noise models, etc... but there's still a limit.
2000W, even for 60s, at 12V is over 150 amps. Try pulling that much current through any small lightweight battery pack and you're going to experience a large explosion.
Sigh, you have a very incorrect understanding of derivatives. First off,
These are pure bets stuff like: "derivative X pays out k(Z-W) for each cent asset Z rises above (K+U+Y)/3
No derivative works that way. Derivatives are, for the most part, options that allow you to make a trade in the future at a predetermined price today. For example, I can buy a put option which gives me the option of selling some shares 6 months from now at a preset price. Of course, it's not just shares. Futures are most heavily traded on commodities (wheat, oil) and currency (the US dollar, the euro, the yen).
You're right that they can be used for gambling. A speculator can buy and sell options, for example, and take the risk of market movements. But the reason why derivatives are profitable for traders is because they're buying risk for a premium. That means somebody else is selling risk.
Let's say I live in the US, and I want to sell my product in Europe. The revenue I gain in Europe will be in Euros, but it's not fiscally sensible to repatriate those funds constantly: it's cheaper to keep my european revenue in Euros, and repatriate it once a year, or once a quarter. But if the Euro suddenly tanks, I could stand to lose an enormous amount of money. If I'm a small business and my European business is big enough, that could be a big enough disruption to my cashflow to bankrupt my company. So I buy Euro put options... they'll allow me to reconvert my Euros into Dollars at today's exchange rate, regardless of what happens on the currency markets. I'll let a bank, with billions in assets, take the risk. That's a service, no different from insurance.
Hell, even if I'm not a small company, it's still worthwhile. Even if my Euro exposure is small, accounting for the long-term risk is complicated and requires an in-depth understanding of the European and international economy. If I'm just welling widgets, I probably don't have that expertise in house, but large currency speculators do. The currency speculator that I'll buy the options from will certainly be making a decent profit margin on the trade, but they can hedge their cashflow more efficiently than me, since they have a better understanding of the risk.
It's not just currency either. The futures market has long been exploited by agriculture to insulate farmers from price variations. It takes months to grow wheat. If the wheat price collapses between now and harvest time, I could be out a lot of money. The futures market lets me push that risk onto speculators, and let me - the farmer - worry about what I'm good at: farming.
Or let's say I'm interested in Apple's new dividend, but I'm not so confident in their stock price. A stock price captures both current revenues, and expectations of growth... if I think Apple's not likely to continue their revenue growth, I can buy their stock to get the current income stream, and use call and put options to insulate my investment from the fluctuations in the stock price. I won't make any money if Apple's stock continues to go up, but I also wont lose any money if the stock goes down.
Derivatives aren't gambling. They're insurance. Saying we should ban derivatives because they're gambling is as stupid as religious types who say insurance is a sin.
This is properly analogous to you paying the manufacturer for your car to be produced, and then having the manufacturer give it a car dealer who you now have to pay an additional fee to if you want the car you've already paid for.
Which is exactly the case. Most US states enforce franchise laws, making direct sales of cars illegal. If you want to buy a car, the government makes you pay, effectively, an additional ~$1,500 fee to the dealer.
The detailed studies of the impact of restrictive franchise laws done before the Internet dramatically increased potential efficiency gains from a more streamlined distribution system found potential savings of at least 6 percent per vehicle. At today’s prices and volumes the potential savings are on the order $1,500 per vehicle, or more than $20 billion per year.
When it comes to propping up your business model with government regulation, the publishers have nothing on car dealerships.
- were convicted of campaign finance fraud (the in-and-out scandal), using accounting tricks to funnel more money than allowed into critical campaigns,
Which the NDP - the official opposition - also engaged in. After the Conservatives were convicted, the NDP settled and repaid.
- suspended parliament to kill an inquiry into the treatment of Afghan detainees,
Which happened under the previous Liberal administration.
- were found in contempt of parliament for refusing to disclose the cost of several big ticket items (including law & order programs, corporate tax cuts and purchasing fighters.) This is the first time a British style parliament anywhere has been found in contempt.
Which is about as relevant to Canadian politics as Bill Clinton's impeachment was to American politics: the other parties got together and voted the Conservatives in contempt. Regardless of the merits, most Canadians view it as political maneuvering.
Then we had an election, and voted them back in, this time with a majority. So, yeah, they figure than pretty much get away with it.
Well the lastest polls show that: 1. they haven't lost any public support since the election, and 2. they have a 60% approval rating outside of Quebec (and a 35% approval rating in Quebec).
So you're right, they pretty much can. The Liberals, NDP and Bloc have been trying to stick scandals to the Conservatives, and paint them as extremists for years. We've been told that the Conservatives would make abortion illegal, they'd get rid of gay marriage. There was the infamous attack ad which claimed the CPC, if elected, would have soldiers on the streets! The "Secret Agenda" it was called. Once the Conservatives were in power, the "Secret Agenda" would be out, and they'd destroy the country.
But the thing about scandals and mud is... if you can't make it stick, it tends to backfire and damage the accuser's credibility, not the accused. The CPC been in power for over half a decade now, and abortion isn't illegal, gay marriage isn't illegal, the economy is doing reasonably well and hey look, there aren't any soldiers deployed onto the streets. So far, the secret agenda appears to be mostly deficit reduction and following through on their campaign promises (like the omnibus crime bill).
Hell, even since the last election it's been a constant hail of 'C-11 = SOPA, C-11 = SOPA,' when it turns out to be nothing of the sort.
So right now, there's no proof of any wrongdoing by anybody in the CPC at all. There's an investigation underway, and I'll wait to see what Elections Canada and the RCMP discover. The CPC's loudest critics are accusing them of stealing the election, but I stopped listening to what the CPC's loudest critics have to say a long time ago. Ever heard the tale of the boy who cried wolf?
No it's not. It's a paper file stored at the courthouse which you have to sign out to view. That's how we know who was responsible: the record of who has viewed your divorce file is also "public" information.
These kinds of divorce records are 'public' in the sense that anybody can look them up, which is public in the same sense that your personal whereabouts are public, since somebody can always follow you around, or the government could track your car's license plate. If your car's location is public, but police require a warrant to use a GPS tracker, why should details of somebody's personal life be considered public knowledge, just because the records are publicly available?
The line between public and private has always been grey. This didn't use to be a huge issue... if the cops wanted to know where you are, they'd have to physically follow you around. And 30 years ago, if you dug out Vic Toews' divorce file, you wouldn't be able to spread his dirty laundry far and wide. The availability of modern technology that lets you track thousands, or disseminate details of somebody's private life to the world, means we now have to be a lot more thoughtful about what we do.
So yes, the information is publicly available. But there's a difference between 'legal' and 'right,' and the attitude of 'fuck Vic Toews' simply contributes to the ugly, slanderous nature of modern politics and modern society in general. So suck it yourself: you're part of what's wrong with this country.
For the most part, C-11 is puppy dogs and unicorns. Remember that Star Wars reedit which made slashdot a few days ago? It wasn't released, copyright concerns and all... C-11 is supposed to update copyright law to reflect changes in technology. One of those technology changes is low cost and widely available production/editing software and equipment, and so one C-11's updates is to make use of copyrighted content in private noncommercial projects (like that Star Wars reedit) explicitly legal.
I've read the entire bill, and as far as I can tell the only bad thing about it is the digital locks provision, which is just a small part. If your complaint was about how awful C-11 was and SOPA this and SOPA that, like almost all of the criticisms I've seen, then they were right. C-11 is not and has never been anything close to resembling SOPA, and with the conclusion of the legislative committee, it will continue to be nothing like SOPA.
The digital locks provision certainly is distasteful, but it's hard to take criticisms of a bill seriously which fail to demonstrate more than a passing acquaintance with its actual contents.
Whatever you may think of him, we're four years away from a federal election and Harper's Conservatives control parliament the C-11 committee. If Stephen Harper want to give his "corporate buddies" "everything they want," he wouldn't need to "try again in a few months." The amendments would have been approved, and the bill would pass the house of commons. In fact, C-11 is a reintroduction of a bill that died on the order paper last parliament, so they wouldn't have even needed to put them in as amendments: "everything they want" would have been introduced with the rest of the bill at second reading. Either way, any public outcry would be drowned out in a few weeks by the forthcoming budget debate.
But you can run your power hungry AC when the sun is at its hottest and brightest. In fact, HVAC accounts for about a third of US energy consumption.
A lot of the cost of having your own solar power comes from the complexity of the grid connection, or overnight energy storage. A very worthwhile investment would be building a standardized energy bus for powering AC directly from a solar panels, at ~500V DC, instead of going through the complexity of a grid inverter.
The benefits of this are many. It would cut the cost of micro solar installations enormously (which are already the majority of the cost). Peak solar power coincides strongly with peak AC demand. Taking these both off the grid frees up large scale generating infrastructure for other demands (like replacing oil consumption), and also makes the grid easier to manage (microsolar could cause real problems for grid management if it becomes popular enough, as there's no way to centrally control output).
Why would anyone who qualified as the best or the brightest want to be a teacher in the United States?
It pays reasonably well. The median household income in the US is around $44,000, but the national median salary for teachers was $52,000, while in some states the median is over $70,000. On top of that, it usually comes with a fantastic benefits plan, great pension and a lot of job security. And you only work 9 months of the year.
Perhaps that's not enough for the top 5% of the graduating class, but for that kind of compensation we should be expecting top third, not bottom third.
And? You get what you pay for. Linode is a cheap VPS provider. I doubt Linode signed up to accept tens of thousands of dollars of potential liability when they took these guys on as customers. I sure as hell wouldn't, not without charging a lot more.
Cheap is fine if you want to run a normal website, but obviously not sufficient if you plan on storing bitcoin. Remember this is currency. There's a reason banks have vaults and don't store their currency in utility closets built by the lowest bidder. And these are quasi-financial trading websites... does your bank or stock broker run its online banking on a lowest-bidder VPS platform? Probably not.
In the real world mistakes happen, and part of due diligence is making sure that either you've got a backup plan when things go wrong, or insurance. That these trading platforms haven't done that is incredible negligence.
As someone who is neither American nor European, here's what I see:
Outside of a few major centers, Americans have limited mass transit options, and they use 22% (not 25%) of the world's oil production. But Europeans, even with all the wonderful trains, still use 18.5%. Not a whole lot better.
And for every barrel of oil saved by European mass transit options, three quarters of a barrel is burned by poor freight distribution infrastructure. In the US, ten times more freight travels by rail than it does in Europe, and rail is about 4 times as fuel efficient than trucks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_country#Freight_rail_by_billions_of_tonne-kilometers)
On the other hand, the US could eliminate a third of its oil consumption in a decade, without any infrastructure investment, just by adopting existing technology at the consumer level. By putting people on rails and freight on wheels, Europe doesn't have that option. Europe needs new technology or very costly infrastructure investment to reduce its oil dependency... the US just needs to raise CAFE standards to European levels (or let it happen organically as fuel prices rise from growing Chinese demand).
Germany is 350,000 square km, with a population of 82 million people. Texas alone is 700,000 square km, with 25 million people.
It's tautologically true that you drive as much as you choose to drive, but the reality is that in Europe you can cover a much greater population and client/consumer base with much less travel.
Saturn cars were built differently from normal GM cars. Saturn was based on the idea of cooperation between management and labour: the strict work rules UAW negotiated over decades were done away with. Workers were flexible, and would do any job that needed doing. And instead of working on a long production line, teams were assigned to individual cars to create a sense of ownership. Decisions were made jointly by management and labour representatives, and the workers were given a profit sharing scheme.
Then the UAW leadership changed, and the new guard lobbied and fought to get rid of the cooperative environment and replace it with a standard GM production line. Not because it was ultimately better for the employees, but because it was a threat to the union: the success of Saturn undermined the union's culture of militancy and 'us-vs-them.' Profit and decision sharing was a definite no-no.
Slashdot Mirror
That is incredibly amateurish. It's the RF engineering equivalent of a marketer explaining how the traditional computer is obsolete because his iPhone can do everything.
'Radar cross section' is an executive summary term that you use to explain concepts to a non-technical audience. It's an analogy. By trying trying to do calculations with it, you're assuming that RF propagates losslessly through the atmosphere, which is very wrong. Radar cross section is a proxy for reflection scattering (S_11 for RF engineers), but to calculate detection range you have to consider both the reflection and the free space path loss! And free space path loss is significant: signal strength drops of exponentially in the atmosphere, not quadratically as you assumed.
Let's assume the rain has a radius of 1mm, five times smaller than your example. That gives it a "cross section" of about 1x10^-6 m^2, or about -60dB. The F-22 reportedly has a RCS of about -30dB, so it's 1000 (!) times more visible than a raindrop. If we also assume a standard X-band radar at about 10GHz, and a detection range for the 1mm raindrop at 2km, then factoring in both the RCS and the FSPL, the radar has a sensitivity of about -180dB, which is pretty damn impressive. So at what range can a radar with a -180dB sensitivity pick up an object with an RCS of -30dB? About 60km.
That's not too shabby. But the air-to-surface missiles have ranges upward of 150km. To pick up the F-22 at that range you need about a 40dB improvement in sensitivity. Advanced military radars are already operating basically at the theoretical noise floor, so the only way to get that improvement is to increase transmitter power by about 5000 times. That's a 15 giga-watt radar. The largest nuclear power plant in the world is about 8GW electrical, so two of those per radar installation.
So no, stealth isn't obsolete.
Yeah. e4fsck is a much more modern name.
And in that case, what have they actually benefited from the drone? It's not like "reverse engineering" a downed American drone has suddenly given them access to commercial parts markets.
They could build their "version" of the drone with lower capability replacement parts, and then what? The airframe design represents an engineering compromise between the specifications of the components it was built for. Throw in a bunch of different components with different dimensions, masses and performance characteristics, and you have what we like to call "a shitty knock-off."
Canadian government bureaucracies are a nightmare. About seven years ago I was working on a project where we needed access to some government data under similar circumstances. It ended up being a lot quicker going through the US State Department to request the data from the US Army Corps of Engineers than it was to get it from the Canadian government.
If the quality of CEO has no impact on corporate success, that explains why Apple under Steve Jobs was never as successful as HP under Carly Fiorina.
There's been quite a few F-18 accidents in recent years. Despite being a two engine plane, it seems there are a lot more mechanical failures than the single engine F-16.
Yes, but it can take decades to correct even the simplest of errors. Take the Milikan oil drop experiment. A brilliantly simple experiment to measure the charge on the electron. Unfortunately, Milikan and Fletcher made a small error in their analysis which led to an incorrect result. It took a long time before the published values of the charge on the electron was correct.
Researchers would unintentionally fudge their results to match Milikan's, because the idea that the published figure could be wrong wasn't even considered.... if your replication got a different figure, you must have done something wrong. Repeat the experiment, and tweak the analysis and don't publish until you're in their error bars. Don't rock the boat.
And that's measuring a straightforward, easily defined concept (the charge on an electron), with an experiment renowned for the brilliance of its simplicity.
People outside of academia think peer review is this panacea which cures all ills. But in reality, 90% of peer review is just making sure you have the right citations in your introduction.
Moore's law? Not really. There are theoretical limits on maximum bandwidth that are far more restrictive than theoretical computation limits. For a given SNR, the maximum digital bandwidth of a communication channel is proportional to the frequency bandwidth. You can get closer to the Shannon-Hartley limit with better rf circuits coding, noise models, etc... but there's still a limit.
2000W, even for 60s, at 12V is over 150 amps. Try pulling that much current through any small lightweight battery pack and you're going to experience a large explosion.
Sigh, you have a very incorrect understanding of derivatives. First off,
These are pure bets stuff like: "derivative X pays out k(Z-W) for each cent asset Z rises above (K+U+Y)/3
No derivative works that way. Derivatives are, for the most part, options that allow you to make a trade in the future at a predetermined price today. For example, I can buy a put option which gives me the option of selling some shares 6 months from now at a preset price. Of course, it's not just shares. Futures are most heavily traded on commodities (wheat, oil) and currency (the US dollar, the euro, the yen).
You're right that they can be used for gambling. A speculator can buy and sell options, for example, and take the risk of market movements. But the reason why derivatives are profitable for traders is because they're buying risk for a premium. That means somebody else is selling risk.
Let's say I live in the US, and I want to sell my product in Europe. The revenue I gain in Europe will be in Euros, but it's not fiscally sensible to repatriate those funds constantly: it's cheaper to keep my european revenue in Euros, and repatriate it once a year, or once a quarter. But if the Euro suddenly tanks, I could stand to lose an enormous amount of money. If I'm a small business and my European business is big enough, that could be a big enough disruption to my cashflow to bankrupt my company. So I buy Euro put options... they'll allow me to reconvert my Euros into Dollars at today's exchange rate, regardless of what happens on the currency markets. I'll let a bank, with billions in assets, take the risk. That's a service, no different from insurance.
Hell, even if I'm not a small company, it's still worthwhile. Even if my Euro exposure is small, accounting for the long-term risk is complicated and requires an in-depth understanding of the European and international economy. If I'm just welling widgets, I probably don't have that expertise in house, but large currency speculators do. The currency speculator that I'll buy the options from will certainly be making a decent profit margin on the trade, but they can hedge their cashflow more efficiently than me, since they have a better understanding of the risk.
It's not just currency either. The futures market has long been exploited by agriculture to insulate farmers from price variations. It takes months to grow wheat. If the wheat price collapses between now and harvest time, I could be out a lot of money. The futures market lets me push that risk onto speculators, and let me - the farmer - worry about what I'm good at: farming.
Or let's say I'm interested in Apple's new dividend, but I'm not so confident in their stock price. A stock price captures both current revenues, and expectations of growth... if I think Apple's not likely to continue their revenue growth, I can buy their stock to get the current income stream, and use call and put options to insulate my investment from the fluctuations in the stock price. I won't make any money if Apple's stock continues to go up, but I also wont lose any money if the stock goes down.
Derivatives aren't gambling. They're insurance. Saying we should ban derivatives because they're gambling is as stupid as religious types who say insurance is a sin.
EU still sticks to dictating what people and companies can do within it's own borders.
No they don't.
This is properly analogous to you paying the manufacturer for your car to be produced, and then having the manufacturer give it a car dealer who you now have to pay an additional fee to if you want the car you've already paid for.
Which is exactly the case. Most US states enforce franchise laws, making direct sales of cars illegal. If you want to buy a car, the government makes you pay, effectively, an additional ~$1,500 fee to the dealer.
http://www.consumerfed.org/pdfs/internetautosales.pdf
The detailed studies of the impact of restrictive franchise laws done before the Internet
dramatically increased potential efficiency gains from a more streamlined distribution system
found potential savings of at least 6 percent per vehicle. At today’s prices and volumes the
potential savings are on the order $1,500 per vehicle, or more than $20 billion per year.
When it comes to propping up your business model with government regulation, the publishers have nothing on car dealerships.
During their last term, the Conservatives:
- were convicted of campaign finance fraud (the in-and-out scandal), using accounting tricks to funnel more money than allowed into critical campaigns,
Which the NDP - the official opposition - also engaged in. After the Conservatives were convicted, the NDP settled and repaid.
- suspended parliament to kill an inquiry into the treatment of Afghan detainees,
Which happened under the previous Liberal administration.
- were found in contempt of parliament for refusing to disclose the cost of several big ticket items (including law & order programs, corporate tax cuts and purchasing fighters.) This is the first time a British style parliament anywhere has been found in contempt.
Which is about as relevant to Canadian politics as Bill Clinton's impeachment was to American politics: the other parties got together and voted the Conservatives in contempt. Regardless of the merits, most Canadians view it as political maneuvering.
Then we had an election, and voted them back in, this time with a majority. So, yeah, they figure than pretty much get away with it.
Well the lastest polls show that: 1. they haven't lost any public support since the election, and 2. they have a 60% approval rating outside of Quebec (and a 35% approval rating in Quebec).
So you're right, they pretty much can. The Liberals, NDP and Bloc have been trying to stick scandals to the Conservatives, and paint them as extremists for years. We've been told that the Conservatives would make abortion illegal, they'd get rid of gay marriage. There was the infamous attack ad which claimed the CPC, if elected, would have soldiers on the streets! The "Secret Agenda" it was called. Once the Conservatives were in power, the "Secret Agenda" would be out, and they'd destroy the country.
But the thing about scandals and mud is... if you can't make it stick, it tends to backfire and damage the accuser's credibility, not the accused. The CPC been in power for over half a decade now, and abortion isn't illegal, gay marriage isn't illegal, the economy is doing reasonably well and hey look, there aren't any soldiers deployed onto the streets. So far, the secret agenda appears to be mostly deficit reduction and following through on their campaign promises (like the omnibus crime bill).
Hell, even since the last election it's been a constant hail of 'C-11 = SOPA, C-11 = SOPA,' when it turns out to be nothing of the sort.
So right now, there's no proof of any wrongdoing by anybody in the CPC at all. There's an investigation underway, and I'll wait to see what Elections Canada and the RCMP discover. The CPC's loudest critics are accusing them of stealing the election, but I stopped listening to what the CPC's loudest critics have to say a long time ago. Ever heard the tale of the boy who cried wolf?
No it's not. It's a paper file stored at the courthouse which you have to sign out to view. That's how we know who was responsible: the record of who has viewed your divorce file is also "public" information.
These kinds of divorce records are 'public' in the sense that anybody can look them up, which is public in the same sense that your personal whereabouts are public, since somebody can always follow you around, or the government could track your car's license plate. If your car's location is public, but police require a warrant to use a GPS tracker, why should details of somebody's personal life be considered public knowledge, just because the records are publicly available?
The line between public and private has always been grey. This didn't use to be a huge issue... if the cops wanted to know where you are, they'd have to physically follow you around. And 30 years ago, if you dug out Vic Toews' divorce file, you wouldn't be able to spread his dirty laundry far and wide. The availability of modern technology that lets you track thousands, or disseminate details of somebody's private life to the world, means we now have to be a lot more thoughtful about what we do.
So yes, the information is publicly available. But there's a difference between 'legal' and 'right,' and the attitude of 'fuck Vic Toews' simply contributes to the ugly, slanderous nature of modern politics and modern society in general. So suck it yourself: you're part of what's wrong with this country.
For the most part, C-11 is puppy dogs and unicorns. Remember that Star Wars reedit which made slashdot a few days ago? It wasn't released, copyright concerns and all... C-11 is supposed to update copyright law to reflect changes in technology. One of those technology changes is low cost and widely available production/editing software and equipment, and so one C-11's updates is to make use of copyrighted content in private noncommercial projects (like that Star Wars reedit) explicitly legal.
I've read the entire bill, and as far as I can tell the only bad thing about it is the digital locks provision, which is just a small part. If your complaint was about how awful C-11 was and SOPA this and SOPA that, like almost all of the criticisms I've seen, then they were right. C-11 is not and has never been anything close to resembling SOPA, and with the conclusion of the legislative committee, it will continue to be nothing like SOPA.
The digital locks provision certainly is distasteful, but it's hard to take criticisms of a bill seriously which fail to demonstrate more than a passing acquaintance with its actual contents.
Whatever you may think of him, we're four years away from a federal election and Harper's Conservatives control parliament the C-11 committee. If Stephen Harper want to give his "corporate buddies" "everything they want," he wouldn't need to "try again in a few months." The amendments would have been approved, and the bill would pass the house of commons. In fact, C-11 is a reintroduction of a bill that died on the order paper last parliament, so they wouldn't have even needed to put them in as amendments: "everything they want" would have been introduced with the rest of the bill at second reading. Either way, any public outcry would be drowned out in a few weeks by the forthcoming budget debate.
Don't be a moron. It's not an endearing quality.
Well, no. You aren't accounting for how much solar energy is currently consumed by agriculture.
Of course, most plants are incredibly inefficient at capturing solar energy (an order of magnitude worse than solar panels).
But you can run your power hungry AC when the sun is at its hottest and brightest. In fact, HVAC accounts for about a third of US energy consumption.
A lot of the cost of having your own solar power comes from the complexity of the grid connection, or overnight energy storage. A very worthwhile investment would be building a standardized energy bus for powering AC directly from a solar panels, at ~500V DC, instead of going through the complexity of a grid inverter.
The benefits of this are many. It would cut the cost of micro solar installations enormously (which are already the majority of the cost). Peak solar power coincides strongly with peak AC demand. Taking these both off the grid frees up large scale generating infrastructure for other demands (like replacing oil consumption), and also makes the grid easier to manage (microsolar could cause real problems for grid management if it becomes popular enough, as there's no way to centrally control output).
You're right. In fact, it has already been done.
Why would anyone who qualified as the best or the brightest want to be a teacher in the United States?
It pays reasonably well. The median household income in the US is around $44,000, but the national median salary for teachers was $52,000, while in some states the median is over $70,000. On top of that, it usually comes with a fantastic benefits plan, great pension and a lot of job security. And you only work 9 months of the year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teacher#United_States
Perhaps that's not enough for the top 5% of the graduating class, but for that kind of compensation we should be expecting top third, not bottom third.
C-11 is nothing like SOPA.
Don't believe me? Read it for yourself.
And? You get what you pay for. Linode is a cheap VPS provider. I doubt Linode signed up to accept tens of thousands of dollars of potential liability when they took these guys on as customers. I sure as hell wouldn't, not without charging a lot more.
Cheap is fine if you want to run a normal website, but obviously not sufficient if you plan on storing bitcoin. Remember this is currency. There's a reason banks have vaults and don't store their currency in utility closets built by the lowest bidder. And these are quasi-financial trading websites... does your bank or stock broker run its online banking on a lowest-bidder VPS platform? Probably not.
In the real world mistakes happen, and part of due diligence is making sure that either you've got a backup plan when things go wrong, or insurance. That these trading platforms haven't done that is incredible negligence.
As someone who is neither American nor European, here's what I see:
Outside of a few major centers, Americans have limited mass transit options, and they use 22% (not 25%) of the world's oil production. But Europeans, even with all the wonderful trains, still use 18.5%. Not a whole lot better.
And for every barrel of oil saved by European mass transit options, three quarters of a barrel is burned by poor freight distribution infrastructure. In the US, ten times more freight travels by rail than it does in Europe, and rail is about 4 times as fuel efficient than trucks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_country#Freight_rail_by_billions_of_tonne-kilometers)
On the other hand, the US could eliminate a third of its oil consumption in a decade, without any infrastructure investment, just by adopting existing technology at the consumer level. By putting people on rails and freight on wheels, Europe doesn't have that option. Europe needs new technology or very costly infrastructure investment to reduce its oil dependency... the US just needs to raise CAFE standards to European levels (or let it happen organically as fuel prices rise from growing Chinese demand).
Germany is 350,000 square km, with a population of 82 million people. Texas alone is 700,000 square km, with 25 million people.
It's tautologically true that you drive as much as you choose to drive, but the reality is that in Europe you can cover a much greater population and client/consumer base with much less travel.
GM didn't kill Saturn, the UAW did.
Saturn cars were built differently from normal GM cars. Saturn was based on the idea of cooperation between management and labour: the strict work rules UAW negotiated over decades were done away with. Workers were flexible, and would do any job that needed doing. And instead of working on a long production line, teams were assigned to individual cars to create a sense of ownership. Decisions were made jointly by management and labour representatives, and the workers were given a profit sharing scheme.
Then the UAW leadership changed, and the new guard lobbied and fought to get rid of the cooperative environment and replace it with a standard GM production line. Not because it was ultimately better for the employees, but because it was a threat to the union: the success of Saturn undermined the union's culture of militancy and 'us-vs-them.' Profit and decision sharing was a definite no-no.