Optimizing the economy IS NOT what a society wants. If it was the primary goal, we would never have abolish slavery.
I don't see slavery as economically optimizing, because it inherently limits the abilities of slaves to make choices to maximize their utility so they can specialize in the skills that they are best at, providing the maximal benefits of comparative advantage. This is standard neoclassical economics!
Questions about "whether too many people are going to college" represent a bunch of sub-questions.
1) Is the student actually never going to graduate (due to low skills, bad performance, or financial problems)? 2) If the student graduates, will they be able to get a job to pay off their loans? 3) If the student graduates, and they get a job, will it pay enough to pay off their loans?
Regarding (1), just 54% of students entering four-year colleges in 1997 had a degree six years later. It is worse at some institutions, for example only 33% of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years.
Regarding (2), based on unemployment by major, here are the majors with the most unemployment:
Industrial Design 30.0% Architecture & Urban Planning 22.2% Natural Resources 20.0% Cultures/Civilization 18.2% Interior Design 16.7% Agriculture/Horticulture 16.1% Zoology 15.0% Civil Engineering 14.4% Video/Media 12.0% (I know a TV production assistant who now works as an admin) Art & Design 10.9% PreLaw and Legal 10.1% (I suspect this reflects the number of people who didn't go on to law school) Music - Composition/Theory 10.0%
And regarding (3), the following degrees have less than 10% unemployment, but here are the ten-year in salaries:
English: 4% unemployment, $76,348 (call me crazy, but I suspect a lot of English majors leave the workforce when they get married...) Journalism: 6.4% unemployment, $77,161 Linguistics: $48,534 Music performance: 6.6% unemployment, $52,803 Performance arts: 4.6% unemployment, $55,770 PreVet and Veterinary: $59,774 Social Work: 6.4% unemployment, $69,535 Sociology: 4.2% unemployment, $68,462
Compare with:
Electrical Engineering: 3.7% unemployment, $104,344 10 years in. Computer Science, 5.1% unemployment, $98,678 10 years in.
The Laser Weapon Calculator says that at a distance of 35,786 km, a laser with a wavelength of 2.9e-7m, to vaporize 1cm of aluminum, you would need a 1.0 GW laser operating for 1 second with a lens 20m radius.
The most powerful CW lasers used currently are of MW class, not GW, such as the COIL laser on the Airborne Laser Testbed. It's wavelength is 1.3um, so let's imagine you can run it at 1MW and hold it on target for 100s, to vaporize 1cm of aluminum you'd need a 200m radius lens....even if you crank the laser up to 10 MW, you still need a 90m radius lens.
Currently the largest effective aperture of any telescope is ~11m.
1) Java is the leading OO language. But it is a pain for a beginner to learn due to an overly complex and organically developed class library, and the whole JAR thing is pretty complex.
2) I'm the biggest OO-skeptic, but I recognize that is the way the world is going, and it is best to indoctrinate the children at a young age. So Object Pascal isn't such a bad idea. Frankly C# would be even better.
3) ((((((don't) talk) to) me ) about ) (cons LISP Scheme etc))
Last I checked, the FCC only mandated the switch to digital over the air and had nothing to say what format was broadcast over private networks.
Indeed, I know of at least one satellite-based TV syndicator that continues to use a whole transponder for analog video.
Also PBS puts up an analog TV feed on AMC-4 transponder 16C. They did this because when they moved from analog to digital video over satellite, there was a big political issue because the signal was encrypted (using DigiCipher), although it was the digital video technology they wanted, not the encryption, but the two were linked together.
So U.S. Code, Title 47, Chapter 5, Subchapter VI, Section 605(c) was written to say "No person shall encrypt or continue to encrypt satellite delivered programs included in the National Program Service of the Public Broadcasting Service and intended for public viewing by retransmission by television broadcast stations; except that as long as at least one unencrypted satellite transmission of any program subject to this subsection is provided, this subsection shall not prohibit additional encrypted satellite transmissions of the same program."
Legally and politically, it has been determined that analog satellite service is the only way to obey this law, although most of the PBS satellite interconnection system with stations is digital.
I bet that the frequency of certain searches can predict whether a company stock will increase or decrease, e.g. lots of searches for " problems" is a precursor to that company stock crashing.
If insider trading was legal, we could simply watch what insiders were trading on the public markets to find out what is going on in a company. Instead, it gets hidden until the big quarterly SEC filing, unless simply camouflaged by accounting gimmicks until too late.
Writes for the entire drive, but most SLC NAND flash chips have a lifetime of 100,000 write cycles per physical sector, and MLC only survives 10,000 write cycles per physical sector. And most flash memory is going to MLC because of the much higher density.
I was working with a group of employees from a MAJOR computer systems company, and suddenly no one could use their PCs - we were about to set up a Web conference call, and luckily one of the personnel had been traveling and had not hooked up to the corporate network for a day or two. He was the only one with a functioning PC. It was pretty embarrassing...
The US has far longer telephone/DSL local loop lengths than almost any other country. Average US local loops are over 4 km, compared with 3 km in the UK and France, or under 2 km in Germany and Italy. And unlike most European countries, almost no loops in the US are under 1.5 km, and the US is one of the few countries to have significant numbers of loops (10% of customers) over 5.5 km. Data source here.
Thanks to everyone shutting down factories during the recession, there is a severe shortage of analog parts, electrolytic capacitors, and some FET's.
I got burnt on 4-port HWIC cards for 1841 routers (HWIC-4ESW) and had to start using the 2-port cards (HWIC-2FE). Supposedly due to factories being shut down during the recession...
It's social problems like corruption, over-bearing governments, aristocrats with no sense of noblesse oblige to the common man, inefficient and ineffective legal systems and other things which make the development of those societies to western standards exceedingly difficult.
Many of these elements are measured in indexes of Economic Freedom, such as the Heritage / WSJ index or the Fraser Institute Economic Freedom of the World project.
Where you have poverty, disease, and low economic growth, you tend to have low levels of economic freedom as measured by these indexes.
are there going to be 3D Blu-Ray disks that require new hardware?
Yes, "full-resolution" 3D Blu-Ray discs encoded with H.264 MVC need new players, they are just becoming available, such as the Sony BDP-S470 and the Samsung BD-C6900.
Some of the new 3D sets will be also able to use a side-by-side or top-bottom "half resolution" / "frame compatible" modes that are likely going to be used by satellite and cable providers for the time being. Some independents might release "half resolution" 3D content that work with current DVD or Blu-Ray players, but the major studios are unlikely to do so.
Exxon earns money money on oil pumped in foreign countries, thus they pay taxes outside the US, and they keep their foreign profits re-invested in assets outside the US as well because that is where there business is.
Similarly, a foreign company pumping and selling US oil would pay US income taxes (as well as US oil royalties).
He showed that, by nature, inner city hispanic kids were just as capable at advanced studies as anyone else
We know that general intelligence (the kind measured by an IQ test) is real. Some people have more than others. And it is partially genetically determined.
However the important part is that you don't necessarily need an excessively high IQ to learn calculus. Moreover, even in impoverished areas, there are likely some people with higher IQs than others.
I'm not opposed to a voucher system, but I'll be damn pissed if my tax dollars go to religious schools.
While on Constitutional grounds, there may be no excuse for tax dollars to go to religious schools, on a practical level, perhaps fear of (a fake) God may help students to concentrate on their lessons...
The Netherlands provides per-pupil subsidies to public-run, private-run, and religous-based schools. Only 30% of Netherlands children attend public-run schools.
If I-95 had been completed according to the original plans, it would have continued from the Center Leg to north of New York Avenue, and it would have junctioned the North Leg of the Inner Loop, turned east, and followed the North Leg, which would have paralleled the New York Avenue corridor, about a block to the north of it. At the B&O Railroad corridor (today's CSX Transportation), I-95 would have turned northward as the North Central Freeway, following the railroad corridor to beyond the Brookland area, being tunneled (cut and cover) for 3/4 mile from south of Rhode Island Avenue to north of Michigan Avenue, then leaving the railroad corridor at Fort Totten Park, heading northeast into Maryland as the Northeast Freeway, passing west of Hyattsville and College Park before junctioning I-495 at the I-95/I-495 interchange that was completed in 1971.
Where I-95 joins the Washington Beltway on the north side of town there is this odd interchange with a lot of empty space, that is where I-95 would have continued in to the city.
They learned from the USA that if you keep the populace fat-dumb-and happy by getting them TV then they are "happy"
In the 1950's, China starved around 30 million people to death during the "Great Leap Forward" farm collectivizations. I guess they learned that fat-happy is better than starving-to-death happy.
I suspect that local subsidence and/or erosion is responsible.
Subsidence is typical in deltas if there has been any kind of civil engineering projects such as diversion of freshwater for human use, dykes, or other flood control projects. And indeed, this has occurred in the Ganges delta.
This link claims that subsidence in the Ganges delta is 4mm/year, while sea level rise is only 1.4mm/year.
They're one of the main reasons there is such a thing as a middle class.
What is the definition of the middle class? People keep using this term, but no one appears intellectually honest enough to define it. People aren't object oriented constructs.
The screen is a frame-sequential two-view autostereoscopic system based on directional backlight. The left eye frame is displayed with the backlight applied on one side of the 3M film that directs the light into your left eye, the right eye frame is then displayed with the backlight applied to the other side of the 3M file to direct the light into your right eye.
I have one on the viewfinder of my Fuji FinePix Real 3D stereoscopic digital camera, and it works pretty well. You do have to position yourself fairly precisely in front of the screen to get the stereoscopic effect, but that is not too hard with a portable device.
Read up on the labor movement of the early 1900's, or the era of the robber baron, and tell me that capitalists have a good track record with civil rights.
I don't think anyone (including the labor movement) was particularly interested in anyone else's rights - except their own - in the early 1900's. For that matter, it may still be the case. Here is another example.
Slashdot Mirror
Optimizing the economy IS NOT what a society wants. If it was the primary goal, we would never have abolish slavery.
I don't see slavery as economically optimizing, because it inherently limits the abilities of slaves to make choices to maximize their utility so they can specialize in the skills that they are best at, providing the maximal benefits of comparative advantage. This is standard neoclassical economics!
Questions about "whether too many people are going to college" represent a bunch of sub-questions.
1) Is the student actually never going to graduate (due to low skills, bad performance, or financial problems)?
2) If the student graduates, will they be able to get a job to pay off their loans?
3) If the student graduates, and they get a job, will it pay enough to pay off their loans?
Regarding (1), just 54% of students entering four-year colleges in 1997 had a degree six years later. It is worse at some institutions, for example only 33% of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years.
Regarding (2), based on unemployment by major, here are the majors with the most unemployment:
Industrial Design 30.0%
Architecture & Urban Planning 22.2%
Natural Resources 20.0%
Cultures/Civilization 18.2%
Interior Design 16.7%
Agriculture/Horticulture 16.1%
Zoology 15.0%
Civil Engineering 14.4%
Video/Media 12.0% (I know a TV production assistant who now works as an admin)
Art & Design 10.9%
PreLaw and Legal 10.1% (I suspect this reflects the number of people who didn't go on to law school)
Music - Composition/Theory 10.0%
And regarding (3), the following degrees have less than 10% unemployment, but here are the ten-year in salaries:
English: 4% unemployment, $76,348 (call me crazy, but I suspect a lot of English majors leave the workforce when they get married...)
Journalism: 6.4% unemployment, $77,161
Linguistics: $48,534
Music performance: 6.6% unemployment, $52,803
Performance arts: 4.6% unemployment, $55,770
PreVet and Veterinary: $59,774
Social Work: 6.4% unemployment, $69,535
Sociology: 4.2% unemployment, $68,462
Compare with:
Electrical Engineering: 3.7% unemployment, $104,344 10 years in.
Computer Science, 5.1% unemployment, $98,678 10 years in.
The Laser Weapon Calculator says that at a distance of 35,786 km, a laser with a wavelength of 2.9e-7m, to vaporize 1cm of aluminum, you would need a 1.0 GW laser operating for 1 second with a lens 20m radius.
The most powerful CW lasers used currently are of MW class, not GW, such as the COIL laser on the Airborne Laser Testbed. It's wavelength is 1.3um, so let's imagine you can run it at 1MW and hold it on target for 100s, to vaporize 1cm of aluminum you'd need a 200m radius lens....even if you crank the laser up to 10 MW, you still need a 90m radius lens.
Currently the largest effective aperture of any telescope is ~11m.
1) Java is the leading OO language. But it is a pain for a beginner to learn due to an overly complex and organically developed class library, and the whole JAR thing is pretty complex.
2) I'm the biggest OO-skeptic, but I recognize that is the way the world is going, and it is best to indoctrinate the children at a young age. So Object Pascal isn't such a bad idea. Frankly C# would be even better.
3) ((((((don't) talk) to) me ) about ) (cons LISP Scheme etc))
Last I checked, the FCC only mandated the switch to digital over the air and had nothing to say what format was broadcast over private networks.
Indeed, I know of at least one satellite-based TV syndicator that continues to use a whole transponder for analog video.
Also PBS puts up an analog TV feed on AMC-4 transponder 16C. They did this because when they moved from analog to digital video over satellite, there was a big political issue because the signal was encrypted (using DigiCipher), although it was the digital video technology they wanted, not the encryption, but the two were linked together.
So U.S. Code, Title 47, Chapter 5, Subchapter VI, Section 605(c) was written to say "No person shall encrypt or continue to encrypt satellite delivered programs included in the National Program Service of the Public Broadcasting Service and intended for public viewing by retransmission by television broadcast stations; except that as long as at least one unencrypted satellite transmission of any program subject to this subsection is provided, this subsection shall not prohibit additional encrypted satellite transmissions of the same program."
Legally and politically, it has been determined that analog satellite service is the only way to obey this law, although most of the PBS satellite interconnection system with stations is digital.
I bet that the frequency of certain searches can predict whether a company stock will increase or decrease, e.g. lots of searches for " problems" is a precursor to that company stock crashing.
If insider trading was legal, we could simply watch what insiders were trading on the public markets to find out what is going on in a company. Instead, it gets hidden until the big quarterly SEC filing, unless simply camouflaged by accounting gimmicks until too late.
The obvious reason Microsoft has standardized on h.264 is its support for DRM.
Uh, what DRM is in H.264? There are plenty of DRM schemes out there, but they can usually be wrapped around a number of different codecs.
over 2,000,000 writes for some SSDs.
Writes for the entire drive, but most SLC NAND flash chips have a lifetime of 100,000 write cycles per physical sector, and MLC only survives 10,000 write cycles per physical sector. And most flash memory is going to MLC because of the much higher density.
I was working with a group of employees from a MAJOR computer systems company, and suddenly no one could use their PCs - we were about to set up a Web conference call, and luckily one of the personnel had been traveling and had not hooked up to the corporate network for a day or two. He was the only one with a functioning PC. It was pretty embarrassing...
(I have a MacBook myself.)
Unfortunately, this is pretty useless for the US.
The US has far longer telephone/DSL local loop lengths than almost any other country. Average US local loops are over 4 km, compared with 3 km in the UK and France, or under 2 km in Germany and Italy. And unlike most European countries, almost no loops in the US are under 1.5 km, and the US is one of the few countries to have significant numbers of loops (10% of customers) over 5.5 km. Data source here.
Thanks to everyone shutting down factories during the recession, there is a severe shortage of analog parts, electrolytic capacitors, and some FET's.
I got burnt on 4-port HWIC cards for 1841 routers (HWIC-4ESW) and had to start using the 2-port cards (HWIC-2FE). Supposedly due to factories being shut down during the recession...
It's social problems like corruption, over-bearing governments, aristocrats with no sense of noblesse oblige to the common man, inefficient and ineffective legal systems and other things which make the development of those societies to western standards exceedingly difficult.
Many of these elements are measured in indexes of Economic Freedom, such as the Heritage / WSJ index or the Fraser Institute Economic Freedom of the World project.
Where you have poverty, disease, and low economic growth, you tend to have low levels of economic freedom as measured by these indexes.
are there going to be 3D Blu-Ray disks that require new hardware?
Yes, "full-resolution" 3D Blu-Ray discs encoded with H.264 MVC need new players, they are just becoming available, such as the Sony BDP-S470 and the Samsung BD-C6900.
Some of the new 3D sets will be also able to use a side-by-side or top-bottom "half resolution" / "frame compatible" modes that are likely going to be used by satellite and cable providers for the time being. Some independents might release "half resolution" 3D content that work with current DVD or Blu-Ray players, but the major studios are unlikely to do so.
But companies like Exxon aren't playing fair.
Exxon earns money money on oil pumped in foreign countries, thus they pay taxes outside the US, and they keep their foreign profits re-invested in assets outside the US as well because that is where there business is.
Similarly, a foreign company pumping and selling US oil would pay US income taxes (as well as US oil royalties).
What's not fair?
He showed that, by nature, inner city hispanic kids were just as capable at advanced studies as anyone else
We know that general intelligence (the kind measured by an IQ test) is real. Some people have more than others. And it is partially genetically determined.
However the important part is that you don't necessarily need an excessively high IQ to learn calculus. Moreover, even in impoverished areas, there are likely some people with higher IQs than others.
I'm not opposed to a voucher system, but I'll be damn pissed if my tax dollars go to religious schools.
While on Constitutional grounds, there may be no excuse for tax dollars to go to religious schools, on a practical level, perhaps fear of (a fake) God may help students to concentrate on their lessons...
The Netherlands provides per-pupil subsidies to public-run, private-run, and religous-based schools. Only 30% of Netherlands children attend public-run schools.
For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio
Wire and radio eh? I don't see the word "fiber" in there...
I've driven 95 from NY to Boston, from NY to DC, many times.
Yes, but driving through DC originally would not have taken you around on the Beltway:
If I-95 had been completed according to the original plans, it would have continued from the Center Leg to north of New York Avenue, and it would have junctioned the North Leg of the Inner Loop, turned east, and followed the North Leg, which would have paralleled the New York Avenue corridor, about a block to the north of it. At the B&O Railroad corridor (today's CSX Transportation), I-95 would have turned northward as the North Central Freeway, following the railroad corridor to beyond the Brookland area, being tunneled (cut and cover) for 3/4 mile from south of Rhode Island Avenue to north of Michigan Avenue, then leaving the railroad corridor at Fort Totten Park, heading northeast into Maryland as the Northeast Freeway, passing west of Hyattsville and College Park before junctioning I-495 at the I-95/I-495 interchange that was completed in 1971.
Where I-95 joins the Washington Beltway on the north side of town there is this odd interchange with a lot of empty space, that is where I-95 would have continued in to the city.
They learned from the USA that if you keep the populace fat-dumb-and happy by getting them TV then they are "happy"
In the 1950's, China starved around 30 million people to death during the "Great Leap Forward" farm collectivizations. I guess they learned that fat-happy is better than starving-to-death happy.
I suspect that local subsidence and/or erosion is responsible.
Subsidence is typical in deltas if there has been any kind of civil engineering projects such as diversion of freshwater for human use, dykes, or other flood control projects. And indeed, this has occurred in the Ganges delta.
This link claims that subsidence in the Ganges delta is 4mm/year, while sea level rise is only 1.4mm/year.
They're one of the main reasons there is such a thing as a middle class.
What is the definition of the middle class? People keep using this term, but no one appears intellectually honest enough to define it. People aren't object oriented constructs.
Here is a rumor that the 3DS will use the 3M film 3D LCD screen.
The screen is a frame-sequential two-view autostereoscopic system based on directional backlight. The left eye frame is displayed with the backlight applied on one side of the 3M film that directs the light into your left eye, the right eye frame is then displayed with the backlight applied to the other side of the 3M file to direct the light into your right eye.
I have one on the viewfinder of my Fuji FinePix Real 3D stereoscopic digital camera, and it works pretty well. You do have to position yourself fairly precisely in front of the screen to get the stereoscopic effect, but that is not too hard with a portable device.
720p30 or 720p60?
(or 720p 30/1.001 720p 60/1.001 ? :)
Read up on the labor movement of the early 1900's, or the era of the robber baron, and tell me that capitalists have a good track record with civil rights.
I don't think anyone (including the labor movement) was particularly interested in anyone else's rights - except their own - in the early 1900's. For that matter, it may still be the case. Here is another example.
Capitalists, as a class, aren't particularly known for being supporters of workers rights, free speech, or a fair marketplace.
Slashdot posters, as a class, are particularly known for making sweeping abstract generalizations with no data to support them.