The US leads the world in absolute levels of teacher salaries, and is about even with most other large economies if you measure by percent of GDP per capita in a country (though maximum teacher pay as measured as percent GDP per capita is a bit higher in Japan and Germany).
What's more, Japan averages 35.5 students per class, compared to 18.3 in the US, so their teachers are teaching twice the number of students.
Most video archivists I have talked to are behind LTO tape.
Magnetic tape is something that archivists have a pretty long record with, and they feel fairly confident about its ability to survive long periods of time in climate-controlled conditions.
LTO is being used at the Library of Congress National Audio-Video Conservation Center (NAVCC).
LTO is being used by most Hollywood studios and a large number of television stations for digitizing their archives.
Digital tape hard error rate for tape is about 2 orders of magnitude better than disk.
There is an expectation that there will need to be LTO tape migration every 2 generations or so.
Either they are selling games at too high a price to sell enough, or they are not charging enough for the games they are selling, because they aren't making a profit!
The pollen from sugar beets does travel a very long distance
Indeed, forget GM, what if I don't want to grow or eat sugar from a beet with a specific gene that was placed there through mutation and breeding? Mutation is dangerous, I mean cosmic rays or ultraviolet light damaging DNA. Who knows what crazy genes that could make?
There is NO WAY I am going to eat sugar from a beet that has 154 BvCK2 (a specific casein kinase alpha catalytic subunit). I don't care whether it provides salt resistance, no way I am eating it, NO WAY!
You know, someone down the street breeds a beet with 154 BvCK2, then the pollen gets into the wind, and we're all eating beets with 154 BvCK2.
In addition, the constitution stipulates you need a 2/3 majority in the legislature to raise taxes. Hence, the budget is impossible to pass and taxes are not raised.
Regarding the last point, California taxes have already been raised...the state individual income tax rate is 9.3% for people making $44k or more. Only Rhode Island and Vermont has a higher tax rate (9.5%), but that doesn't kick in until $357k.
California corporate tax rate is 8.84% (fixed). There are a handful of other states with such high corporate taxes, but most tax much less.
In Los Angeles, the sales tax is 9.75%, and the minimum sales tax anywhere is California is 8.25%.
California property taxes are the 10th highest of the states, at 0.48% of home value.
"Real" television stations use LTO tape for video backup, along with a robot tape library like the Quantum Scalar series or the Sun StorageTek system. This is generally operated by a broadcast archive management system such as MassTech MassStore, Gorilla, or Front Porch Digital.
The broadcast archive management system is connected with your television station automation system, so when your automation system needs a certain video file to play back from your server, the archive system begins a transfer from the tape library ahead of time, so the file is on your video play back server before play back begins.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for Times not to exceed 14 years to Authors, or 25 years for Inventors, the limited Privilege to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
I'd argue that patent protection should have a more limited period than copyright. If you invent the next super computer system, that is something we want in the public domain so we can all benefit from it after a period of time.
On the other hand, if someone writes a murder mystery, who the heck cares? Someone else can write another murder mystery. No one has ever died because they didn't get to watch "Miami Vice", as opposed to not being able to get a anti-retroviral drug.
While I realise you want to suggest that he kills himself, his personal best isn't killing one person, it's killing off a few dozen. Nothing like a trailer park or high school massacre to reduce the local populace.
You aim so low! Mao starved 30 million people to death during the Great Leap Forward farm collectivization. Think about how many people you can kill if you are a politician!
Interestingly, world fertilizer use went up from 69 million tons in 1970 to 145 million tons in 1988, more than doubling while population only went up 30%.
Since then, we've leveled out around 140 million tons with nearly twice the population of 1970, so we are about at the same amount of fertilizer per capita.
Sooner or later you hit a limiting resource. Land, water, energy etc.
Energy can be used to trade-off for chemical limiations. It can aid chemical reactions (such as needed for food), desalinate water, etc. And there is a lot of energy on Earth between solar insolation and fissioning all the uranium and bred thorium.
A better investment would have birth control and birth control education.
Birth control is not used if you need to raise children to do your agriculture work and support you in old age.
Reduction of fertility rates only comes with economic development, when children no longer have a positive economic return.
People around the planet know about birth control, they simply choose not to use it.
Borlaug's work gave the developing world time to push off the chains of socialism and low levels of economic freedom that kept them from growing before 1980. Unfortunately, while south and east Asia are doing this and are creating growing economies, many countries in Africa still have exceedingly low levels of education.
Whatever became of those autostereoscopy displays?
The most mature non-glassed 3D technology is lenticular lenses (same as the post cards), but unfortunately you get a resolution reduction for every additional "view" you provide, and you need to provide about 45 views before it starts to look really good and not have very large "un-sweet spots" where you get an image with the wrong parallax in your eyes.
I saw a nice autostereo display based on a Quad-HD 2D LCD screen with a lenticular lens array, but these are not really commercially viable yet.
Acousto-optical wave computer-generated holography is advancing as well, but still needs a few years.
The land used for a power-receiving rectenna can still be used for raising cattle, without the cattle becoming super-powered mutants or getting cooked.
Are you kidding? Now there will be "solar Kobe" beef, the tenderest you can get since they were raised from birth in constant microwave radiation!
A destructive device (26 U.S.C. 5845) includes "Any weapon by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, the barrel or barrels of which have a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter, except a shotgun or shotgun shell which the Secretary finds is generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes;"
But it does exclude "any other device the Secretary finds is not likely to be used as a weapon, or is an antique or is a rifle which the owner intends to use solely for sporting purposes."
So if you have the signature of the Secretary (of the BATF), maybe you're OK.
Speaking of CRT TVs, they cut holes in the TV cabinet with leads from that box; these leads were wired to the V sync of the TV (don't know why, maybe verify the TV is on?) and the speakers (presumably to monitor volume and muting habits) and other places I can't remember....
Nielsen sends out data in analog NTSC in the vertical blanking interval (called Automated Measurement of Lineups - AMOL) on lines 20 & 22. It is possible that the CRT sense coils were picking it up. It is pretty easy to make out AMOL, it looks like a line of static in the vertical interval, as opposed to the Closed Captioning on line 21 that sends at a lower data rate. You will often see it at the top of the picture on PBS stations that multicast an SD channel on their DTV signal that they also put on analog cable.
Nielsen also inserts an inaudible watermark in the audio, which is handy since digital television does not have a vertical blanking interval to insert the AMOL. Thus the audio tap.
Digital cable companies do not need Neilsen statistics to estimate who may or may be watching a particular show - they have exact, concrete numbers.
I'm not sure this is actually done for most base-tier digital channels, but clearly with a bi-directional DOCSIS pipe you could do this. However keep in mind that advertisers may not consider a cable MSO a non-interested party, as they sell their own advertising.
Moreover, there are still plenty of analog cable STBs out here, and since no one has the capital to replace them with digital boxes, I suspect they will be around for a while.
A lot of highly-dexterous manual labor has been moved out of developed countries to developing ones because of the high level of developing country wages.
Where possible, developed country manufacturing companies have eradicated manual operations with machines, to the extent that despite manufacturing output rising, manufacturing employment is falling in the developed world. But some things (such as shirt sewing and shoe assembly) are still impossible to automate currently.
Should developed countries become able to replace developing country dextrous labor with dextrous robots, it would be a major world economic game-changer.
We can only hope that the developing world will expand into higher value-add jobs before this occurs.
In Avatar, mankind has the ability to cross the voids of space in an effort to mine a mineral rich alien world. Bring these minerals back for refinemant and use.... And yet we can't repair a paralyzed human body?
Putting in a tarrif would first prevent the erosion of more jobs,
How did those steel tariffs work in 2002? Let's see, it raised steel costs for other US companies, they lost jobs, and was so bad that Bush ended them after one year.
Canada already turns a blind eye to small time Pot.
Here in LA, there are five prescription marijuana dispensaries within walking distance of my apartment. Marijuana is basically legalized in many parts of California, and here in LA gang violence is down.
Because the cost of health insurance has so skyrocketed, but the level of service has not,
I'd like to see you data that backs up the fact that "the level of service" has not increased.
The cost of health insurance has risen in the US, but my impression from looking at cost breakdowns is that it is mostly due to access to newer drugs, new imaging technology, and increasing state mandates on minimum insurance coverage.
Whether any of these actually enhance average health or not remains to be seen, but anecdotally I am aware of at least one person I know who benefits greatly from a drug that has been on the market for under two years.
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low teacher salaries
The US leads the world in absolute levels of teacher salaries, and is about even with most other large economies if you measure by percent of GDP per capita in a country (though maximum teacher pay as measured as percent GDP per capita is a bit higher in Japan and Germany).
What's more, Japan averages 35.5 students per class, compared to 18.3 in the US, so their teachers are teaching twice the number of students.
Most video archivists I have talked to are behind LTO tape.
Magnetic tape is something that archivists have a pretty long record with, and they feel fairly confident about its ability to survive long periods of time in climate-controlled conditions.
LTO is being used at the Library of Congress National Audio-Video Conservation Center (NAVCC).
LTO is being used by most Hollywood studios and a large number of television stations for digitizing their archives.
Digital tape hard error rate for tape is about 2 orders of magnitude better than disk.
There is an expectation that there will need to be LTO tape migration every 2 generations or so.
Electronic Arts pre-tax profit margin -25.2%
Either they are selling games at too high a price to sell enough, or they are not charging enough for the games they are selling, because they aren't making a profit!
Ubisoft net profit margin 6.5%
Not much profit...
Nintendo net profit margin 15%.
Of course, they actually make physical things as well (Wii).
The pollen from sugar beets does travel a very long distance
Indeed, forget GM, what if I don't want to grow or eat sugar from a beet with a specific gene that was placed there through mutation and breeding? Mutation is dangerous, I mean cosmic rays or ultraviolet light damaging DNA. Who knows what crazy genes that could make?
There is NO WAY I am going to eat sugar from a beet that has 154 BvCK2 (a specific casein kinase alpha catalytic subunit). I don't care whether it provides salt resistance, no way I am eating it, NO WAY!
You know, someone down the street breeds a beet with 154 BvCK2, then the pollen gets into the wind, and we're all eating beets with 154 BvCK2.
WHY AREN'T MY RIGHTS PROTECTED!
In addition, the constitution stipulates you need a 2/3 majority in the legislature to raise taxes. Hence, the budget is impossible to pass and taxes are not raised.
Regarding the last point, California taxes have already been raised...the state individual income tax rate is 9.3% for people making $44k or more. Only Rhode Island and Vermont has a higher tax rate (9.5%), but that doesn't kick in until $357k.
California corporate tax rate is 8.84% (fixed). There are a handful of other states with such high corporate taxes, but most tax much less.
In Los Angeles, the sales tax is 9.75%, and the minimum sales tax anywhere is California is 8.25%.
California property taxes are the 10th highest of the states, at 0.48% of home value.
"Real" television stations use LTO tape for video backup, along with a robot tape library like the Quantum Scalar series or the Sun StorageTek system. This is generally operated by a broadcast archive management system such as MassTech MassStore, Gorilla, or Front Porch Digital.
The broadcast archive management system is connected with your television station automation system, so when your automation system needs a certain video file to play back from your server, the archive system begins a transfer from the tape library ahead of time, so the file is on your video play back server before play back begins.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for Times not to exceed 14 years to Authors, or 25 years for Inventors, the limited Privilege to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
I'd argue that patent protection should have a more limited period than copyright. If you invent the next super computer system, that is something we want in the public domain so we can all benefit from it after a period of time.
On the other hand, if someone writes a murder mystery, who the heck cares? Someone else can write another murder mystery. No one has ever died because they didn't get to watch "Miami Vice", as opposed to not being able to get a anti-retroviral drug.
While I realise you want to suggest that he kills himself, his personal best isn't killing one person, it's killing off a few dozen. Nothing like a trailer park or high school massacre to reduce the local populace.
You aim so low! Mao starved 30 million people to death during the Great Leap Forward farm collectivization. Think about how many people you can kill if you are a politician!
Actually reduced fertilizer use is one of them
Interestingly, world fertilizer use went up from 69 million tons in 1970 to 145 million tons in 1988, more than doubling while population only went up 30%.
Since then, we've leveled out around 140 million tons with nearly twice the population of 1970, so we are about at the same amount of fertilizer per capita.
Sooner or later you hit a limiting resource. Land, water, energy etc.
Energy can be used to trade-off for chemical limiations. It can aid chemical reactions (such as needed for food), desalinate water, etc. And there is a lot of energy on Earth between solar insolation and fissioning all the uranium and bred thorium.
A better investment would have birth control and birth control education.
Birth control is not used if you need to raise children to do your agriculture work and support you in old age.
Reduction of fertility rates only comes with economic development, when children no longer have a positive economic return.
People around the planet know about birth control, they simply choose not to use it.
Borlaug's work gave the developing world time to push off the chains of socialism and low levels of economic freedom that kept them from growing before 1980. Unfortunately, while south and east Asia are doing this and are creating growing economies, many countries in Africa still have exceedingly low levels of education.
Whatever became of those autostereoscopy displays?
The most mature non-glassed 3D technology is lenticular lenses (same as the post cards), but unfortunately you get a resolution reduction for every additional "view" you provide, and you need to provide about 45 views before it starts to look really good and not have very large "un-sweet spots" where you get an image with the wrong parallax in your eyes.
I saw a nice autostereo display based on a Quad-HD 2D LCD screen with a lenticular lens array, but these are not really commercially viable yet.
Acousto-optical wave computer-generated holography is advancing as well, but still needs a few years.
If you have to do it in space: The same thing works there too. You just have even more problems getting the power here. But what's the point?
No clouds or night to vary output, no dust on the panels to clean.
The land used for a power-receiving rectenna can still be used for raising cattle, without the cattle becoming super-powered mutants or getting cooked.
Are you kidding? Now there will be "solar Kobe" beef, the tenderest you can get since they were raised from birth in constant microwave radiation!
Sure there are some isolated conflicts, but consider what the world was like 25 years ago: a couple different wars in Central American countries, a
The number of armed conflicts has decreased by almost 50% between 1990 and 2002.
A destructive device (26 U.S.C. 5845) includes "Any weapon by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, the barrel or barrels of which have a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter, except a shotgun or shotgun shell which the Secretary finds is generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes;"
But it does exclude "any other device the Secretary finds is not likely to be used as a weapon, or is an antique or is a rifle which the owner intends to use solely for sporting purposes."
So if you have the signature of the Secretary (of the BATF), maybe you're OK.
Speaking of CRT TVs, they cut holes in the TV cabinet with leads from that box; these leads were wired to the V sync of the TV (don't know why, maybe verify the TV is on?) and the speakers (presumably to monitor volume and muting habits) and other places I can't remember....
Nielsen sends out data in analog NTSC in the vertical blanking interval (called Automated Measurement of Lineups - AMOL) on lines 20 & 22. It is possible that the CRT sense coils were picking it up. It is pretty easy to make out AMOL, it looks like a line of static in the vertical interval, as opposed to the Closed Captioning on line 21 that sends at a lower data rate. You will often see it at the top of the picture on PBS stations that multicast an SD channel on their DTV signal that they also put on analog cable.
Nielsen also inserts an inaudible watermark in the audio, which is handy since digital television does not have a vertical blanking interval to insert the AMOL. Thus the audio tap.
Digital cable companies do not need Neilsen statistics to estimate who may or may be watching a particular show - they have exact, concrete numbers.
I'm not sure this is actually done for most base-tier digital channels, but clearly with a bi-directional DOCSIS pipe you could do this. However keep in mind that advertisers may not consider a cable MSO a non-interested party, as they sell their own advertising.
Moreover, there are still plenty of analog cable STBs out here, and since no one has the capital to replace them with digital boxes, I suspect they will be around for a while.
A lot of highly-dexterous manual labor has been moved out of developed countries to developing ones because of the high level of developing country wages.
Where possible, developed country manufacturing companies have eradicated manual operations with machines, to the extent that despite manufacturing output rising, manufacturing employment is falling in the developed world. But some things (such as shirt sewing and shoe assembly) are still impossible to automate currently.
Should developed countries become able to replace developing country dextrous labor with dextrous robots, it would be a major world economic game-changer.
We can only hope that the developing world will expand into higher value-add jobs before this occurs.
In Avatar, mankind has the ability to cross the voids of space in an effort to mine a mineral rich alien world. Bring these minerals back for refinemant and use.... And yet we can't repair a paralyzed human body?
I told you guys not to socialize medicine! ;)
Putting in a tarrif would first prevent the erosion of more jobs,
How did those steel tariffs work in 2002? Let's see, it raised steel costs for other US companies, they lost jobs, and was so bad that Bush ended them after one year.
Canada already turns a blind eye to small time Pot.
Here in LA, there are five prescription marijuana dispensaries within walking distance of my apartment. Marijuana is basically legalized in many parts of California, and here in LA gang violence is down.
Because the cost of health insurance has so skyrocketed, but the level of service has not,
I'd like to see you data that backs up the fact that "the level of service" has not increased.
The cost of health insurance has risen in the US, but my impression from looking at cost breakdowns is that it is mostly due to access to newer drugs, new imaging technology, and increasing state mandates on minimum insurance coverage.
Whether any of these actually enhance average health or not remains to be seen, but anecdotally I am aware of at least one person I know who benefits greatly from a drug that has been on the market for under two years.
for most of the trailer, it's hard to believe it's not live action.
That's because Avatar has a (well-composited) mix of live-action and CGI...so yes, the humans look human because they are human.
And while I like Fantasia very much, that's already been done.
Not in 3D...