Drug companies aren't getting any special subsidies
Even if they did, prescription drug costs are only 10% of health care costs. Most of your health care dollar goes to US doctors and nurses who make 50%-100% more than the OECD average.
The Supreme Court just ruled that U.S. states can now pretty much ignore international law at will.
The Supreme Court ruled that compliance by a state court with the international legal obligation in this case requires specific enabling action of a legislature (state or Federal), rather than executive orders from the President or the IJC.
Traditional Notions puts it best when he says: For those concerned with constitutional overstepping of the President and/or the judiciary, this is a superb result.
"Stephen Harper's Conservatives are currently being investigated "by Elections Canada for allegedly orchestrating an elaborate money-laundering scheme that allowed them to spend more on national advertising than the law permits during the last election while attempting to get rebates for monies the national party hid by funnelling through Conservative candidate campaigns."
If a politician were known to be taking Archer-Daniels money, and that politician then voted for more ethanol subsidies, I might be less likely to vote for him next time.
If a politician voted for ethanol subsidies, I would be less likely to vote for him or her regardless of where they got their campaign money from, because ethanol subsidies are stupid.
3) support reform to increase transparency in Congress.
What the heck does this mean? This is typical political BS, it sounds good but has no meaning.
4) support public financing of public elections.
This will mean that those who are currently in power will control the purse-strings of elections. Is this really a good idea? Do you imagine that the Democrats and Republicans would allow say Greens or Libertarians to get any public financing? If you look at the history of ballot access, you will see that the major parties try to stifle independents and third-parties on a continuous basis. This would only give them another way to keep non-Demopublicans out of office.
Look, we've already had a range of quasi-unconstitutional "campaign finance reform" laws, and while they may limit your freedom of speech, they don't actually work.
What works is people not being idiots when they vote. No amount of "reform" from government is going to fix that problem.
I highly suggest The Myth of the Rational Voter to understand that most voters are misinformed on basic economic points, and thus rather than think more democracy (or "more open","reformed", etc.) can help us, we should understand that the best use of democracy is not micro-managing the country, but simply throwing out the clearly incompetent.
Here is an optimal carbon tax which costs $128 trillion and provides an estimated $271 trillion reduction in damage by limiting temp rise to 5.4 C by 2300 rather than 7.3 C.
Another paper suggests "Overall, benefits of global warming are likely to outweigh damage until the rise is greater than 2.5C, and even then the net damage would be far smaller than originally thought."
There also is the Stern Review, with the executive summary here. This report looked at stabilizing at 550ppm CO2 and a 2 C warming with costs around 1% of global GDP by 2050, with a range from -1% (net gains) to +3.5% of GDP.
Probably the LEAST explored issue is how exactly carbon taxes or emission targets are going to be effectively enforced globally. Certainly if they are as "effective" as the current global War on Drugs, it will be costly while not significantly reducing carbon emissions. The political science question is much tougher than the scientific or economic question.
My personal viewpoint is that I doubt global carbon (and methane) emission controls can truly be effective. I think, however, that most countries with well functioning economies will be able to cope with the challenges (desalination, irrigation, moving away from coasts, etc.) If we encourage the rest of the world to adopt policies that enhance wealth (such as enhancing economic freedom), then people will be able to buy their way out of many global warming challenges on a local scale, but it is really unclear if on a global basis we are ready for a Carbon Military Police state.
Once we figure out how to communicate physical science to people blinded by religion or politics, can we then figure out how to communicate economics to people blinded by religion and politics?
In particular, why are so many scientists and technologists typically ignorant of the basics of economics?
PBS has had documentary downloads available forever. PBS Frontline.
As PBS produces no content, they are dependent on obtaining streaming rights from the producers in addition to the limited broadcast rights they negotiate for terrestrial broadcast by public television stations. But most public television stations are not enthusiastic about paying PBS more to obtain streaming rights from producers just so those shows can be streamed from PBS.org rather than viewed on the local public television stations (cutting into ratings which hurt future underwriting deals and breaking up the donor/local station relationship).
Thus there are few shows besides Frontline that PBS streams in full-length.
1) We've hit the "Power Wall", power is expensive, but transistors are "free". That is, we can put more transistors on a chip than we have the power to turn on.
2) We also have hit the "Memory Wall", modern microprocessors can take 200 clocks to access DRAM, but even floating-point multiplies may take only four clock cycles.
3) Because of this, processor performance gain has slowed dramatically. In 2006, performance is a factor of three below the traditional doubling every 18 months that occurred between 1986 and 2002.
I previously worked in an all-Microsoft IT operation where users did not have Admin and things were pretty well locked down, anti-virus was standard, etc. (this was after a particularly nasty and business-threatening virus event).
The "advanced users" who chafed under the inability to install anything were given the Microsoft Virtual PC, where you could have a safer place to run software you downloaded, and heck even run Linux if needed.
In a perfect world, I'd like to see the Virtual PC locked down to a specific IP that would be firewalled outside the standard business LAN.
Unfortunately, NTSC isnt going anywhere. Its just the analog transmissions which are going away. Why you Americans dont use PAL, I'll never know.:)
North Americans (US, Canada, Mexico) use NTSC color because NTSC monochrome was developed in 1941, and a compatible-color NTSC was developed in the 1950's. PAL didn't come along until the 1960's and used 8 MHz, rather than the 6 MHz of NTSC, so post-WWII Americans who bought television sets were not about to throw them out and have to re-channelize spectrum just because Europe came up with a slightly higher resolution standard. Not to mention PAL is pretty dependent on 50 Hz, whereas the US operates on 60 Hz power, so it would be tough to have pulled off.
The first NTSC color show was in 1953, and US networks were broadcasting all color by 1966. On the other hand, the first PAL transmission was not until 1967.
On the other hand, on February 17, 2008, NTSC broadcast in the US will end, and the only remaining US terrestrial television signals will be the ATSC digital standard, which still uses 6 MHz channels. You will need a digital to analog set-top-box to continue to use NTSC televisions.
Ironically the folks in ParLab (*ahem*) just arranged a field trip to meet with some of the people who do that kind of work.
Super...I'm hoping that GPUs can provide a cheap way for newcomers to learn parallel programming, and it appears that the GPU makers are really waking up to general purpose uses of GPUs.
(I learned parallel programming on a Connection Machine:)
To get an idea of recent R&D spending, see this graph.
While amounts have flattened out recently, the levels are much higher than during the 1990.
US public R&D is higher than EU-25 or OECD average levels as a percent of GDP (and US business R&D is much higher than EU-25 or OECD average levels as a percent of GDP, with the notable exception of Japan...More details here)
The big Federal funds go to NIH (~$30 billion), NSF (~$6 billion), NASA science ($~5.5 billion)
If you want viewing angle, you're distorting the picture significantly in space, so losing a little luminance or color fidelity shouldn't be too big a deal
In the broadcast engineering world, we like to have two people looking at a monitor at the same time to be able to see the same color & luminance on a pixel. Plus in a broadcast control room, you aren't sitting on a sofa, you may be moving around the room but needing to occasionally look back and need to be able to see what is going over the air to millions of people.
Some of the LCD monitors I've seen have good horizontal and vertical viewing angles, but it turns out that any offset in a diagonal direction is unusable for critical viewing.
You are right about CRTs. Professional-quality HD CRTs are basically no longer made. You plopped down $50,000 for one five years ago, but now there are none except in the used market.
I should add that plasmas in particular have really truncated color gamuts. They cannot represent all the Rec. 709 colors at any reasonable brightness, thus they tend to "stretch the greens" which the eye is more sensitive to in order to look bright. Many plasmas also have a "turn-on jump" from a totally black pixel to one that has any light output that tends to accentuate noise in dark areas.
One of the things we've found out is that no HD LCD, plasma, or rear-projection DLP displays are as good as a broadcast reference CRT monitor in terms of luminance dynamic range, viewing angle, or color gamut. Only front-projection DLPs seem to be able to match good quality CRTs, but then you need all that space for the projection.
OLEDs have a real chance of matching or even beating CRTs in a true "flat panel" form factor.
And I also like the idea of using OLED rolls as wallpaper so we can have 7,680 × 4,320 pixel video on the wall (which will, of course, need 22.2 surround sound (UHDTV).
Fast Track was intended as a way to give existing and de-facto standards more interoperability. The part that most people are confused about is that OOXML is *NOT* a new format. It's merely a different implementation of the legacy binary documents. In that respect, it's effectively a de-facto standard that fits well with ISO Fast Track's intended purpose.
A "standard" is a public document which provides the information required to create interoperable implementations. Standards can reference other standards normatively. If the legacy binary documents were not themselves standards, and OOXML requires knowledge of them to create interoperable implementations, then OOXML is not a standard.
Microsoft went through a rigorous & painful standardization process of Windows Media to become SMPTE VC-1, and ended up with a fairly good standard at the end. They can do the same for OOXML.
I would literally hate life if carry-ons were banned.
So I think we all agree that people trying to get carry-ons into the upper storage compartments is the major limiting factor on modern boarding, but we don't want to ban it.
So how about ASSIGNED & RESERVED CARRY-ON SPACE. Everyone gets one carry-on per seat, and a location in the upper compartment is labeled as reserved for your seat.
NASA, the FBI, etc. all seem to follow the same pattern. They get the idea in their head for something big (usually as the result of politicians putting it there or the need to make it look like they're doing something about some big problem). Then they contract the technical stuff out to some contractor who feeds them a line of bullshit
I'd argue that most large public-sector software development failures reflect more upon the public-sector organization than the contractors.
For example, the FBI Virtual Case File system was mostly done in by weak blueprints (because no one in the FBI was willing to make a decision because that could be a problem for internal politics), then the requirements kept changing (again, because the interlocking politics makes it difficult for anyone to actually specify something).
Now it is true that many contractors love to eat up the money for over-runs due to bad and changing requirements...
In truth, most private-sector large software projects also fail because of badly defined system requirements, but there is more hope in the private sector for a single "neck wringer" to make actual decisions.
there may be some politicians wanting to really represent the people, really improve things beyond simply corporate wealth and that the system prevents them from doing exactly that.
Politicians only want power. They will say whatever is needed to get the votes of the majority, and do whatever is needed to not get voted out.
"the large and rapid build-up of additional Xenon reactivity load following a reactor trip can cause an extended (approximately 40 hours) reactor shutdown"
Slashdot Mirror
Drug companies aren't getting any special subsidies
Even if they did, prescription drug costs are only 10% of health care costs. Most of your health care dollar goes to US doctors and nurses who make 50%-100% more than the OECD average.
The Supreme Court just ruled that U.S. states can now pretty much ignore international law at will.
The Supreme Court ruled that compliance by a state court with the international legal obligation in this case requires specific enabling action of a legislature (state or Federal), rather than executive orders from the President or the IJC.
Traditional Notions puts it best when he says: For those concerned with constitutional overstepping of the President and/or the judiciary, this is a superb result.
The funding of New Zealand's elections: Current problems and prospects for change
Alleged Tory Internet scheme sparks call for probe - making political blogging illegal.
"Stephen Harper's Conservatives are currently being investigated "by Elections Canada for allegedly orchestrating an elaborate money-laundering scheme that allowed them to spend more on national advertising than the law permits during the last election while attempting to get rebates for monies the national party hid by funnelling through Conservative candidate campaigns."
And our politicians actually do real work
Some would argue that is not a desirable outcome.
If a politician were known to be taking Archer-Daniels money, and that politician then voted for more ethanol subsidies, I might be less likely to vote for him next time.
If a politician voted for ethanol subsidies, I would be less likely to vote for him or her regardless of where they got their campaign money from, because ethanol subsidies are stupid.
3) support reform to increase transparency in Congress.
What the heck does this mean? This is typical political BS, it sounds good but has no meaning.
4) support public financing of public elections.
This will mean that those who are currently in power will control the purse-strings of elections. Is this really a good idea? Do you imagine that the Democrats and Republicans would allow say Greens or Libertarians to get any public financing? If you look at the history of ballot access, you will see that the major parties try to stifle independents and third-parties on a continuous basis. This would only give them another way to keep non-Demopublicans out of office.
Look, we've already had a range of quasi-unconstitutional "campaign finance reform" laws, and while they may limit your freedom of speech, they don't actually work.
What works is people not being idiots when they vote. No amount of "reform" from government is going to fix that problem.
I highly suggest The Myth of the Rational Voter to understand that most voters are misinformed on basic economic points, and thus rather than think more democracy (or "more open","reformed", etc.) can help us, we should understand that the best use of democracy is not micro-managing the country, but simply throwing out the clearly incompetent.
I think it is still early in the game regarding economic analysis of global warming prevention versus mitigation.
A good start is the Copenhagen Consensus.
Here is an optimal carbon tax which costs $128 trillion and provides an estimated $271 trillion reduction in damage by limiting temp rise to 5.4 C by 2300 rather than 7.3 C.
Another paper suggests "Overall, benefits of global warming are likely to outweigh damage until the rise is greater than 2.5C, and even then the net damage would be far smaller than originally thought."
There also is the Stern Review, with the executive summary here. This report looked at stabilizing at 550ppm CO2 and a 2 C warming with costs around
1% of global GDP by 2050, with a range from -1% (net gains) to +3.5% of GDP.
Probably the LEAST explored issue is how exactly carbon taxes or emission targets are going to be effectively enforced globally. Certainly if they are as "effective" as the current global War on Drugs, it will be costly while not significantly reducing carbon emissions. The political science question is much tougher than the scientific or economic question.
My personal viewpoint is that I doubt global carbon (and methane) emission controls can truly be effective. I think, however, that most countries with well functioning economies will be able to cope with the challenges (desalination, irrigation, moving away from coasts, etc.) If we encourage the rest of the world to adopt policies that enhance wealth (such as enhancing economic freedom), then people will be able to buy their way out of many global warming challenges on a local scale, but it is really unclear if on a global basis we are ready for a Carbon Military Police state.
Once we figure out how to communicate physical science to people blinded by religion or politics, can we then figure out how to communicate economics to people blinded by religion and politics?
In particular, why are so many scientists and technologists typically ignorant of the basics of economics?
PBS has had documentary downloads available forever. PBS Frontline.
As PBS produces no content, they are dependent on obtaining streaming rights from the producers in addition to the limited broadcast rights they negotiate for terrestrial broadcast by public television stations. But most public television stations are not enthusiastic about paying PBS more to obtain streaming rights from producers just so those shows can be streamed from PBS.org rather than viewed on the local public television stations (cutting into ratings which hurt future underwriting deals and breaking up the donor/local station relationship).
Thus there are few shows besides Frontline that PBS streams in full-length.
1) We've hit the "Power Wall", power is expensive, but transistors are "free". That is, we can put more transistors on a chip than we have the power to turn on.
2) We also have hit the "Memory Wall", modern microprocessors can take 200 clocks to access DRAM, but even floating-point multiplies may take only four clock cycles.
3) Because of this, processor performance gain has slowed dramatically. In 2006, performance is a factor of three below the traditional doubling every 18 months that occurred between 1986 and 2002.
To understand where we are, and why the only way to go now is parallelism versus clock speed increase, see The Landscape of Parallel Computing ReseView from Berkeley.
I previously worked in an all-Microsoft IT operation where users did not have Admin and things were pretty well locked down, anti-virus was standard, etc. (this was after a particularly nasty and business-threatening virus event).
The "advanced users" who chafed under the inability to install anything were given the Microsoft Virtual PC, where you could have a safer place to run software you downloaded, and heck even run Linux if needed.
In a perfect world, I'd like to see the Virtual PC locked down to a specific IP that would be firewalled outside the standard business LAN.
Unfortunately, NTSC isnt going anywhere. Its just the analog transmissions which are going away. :)
Why you Americans dont use PAL, I'll never know.
North Americans (US, Canada, Mexico) use NTSC color because NTSC monochrome was developed in 1941, and a compatible-color NTSC was developed in the 1950's. PAL didn't come along until the 1960's and used 8 MHz, rather than the 6 MHz of NTSC, so post-WWII Americans who bought television sets were not about to throw them out and have to re-channelize spectrum just because Europe came up with a slightly higher resolution standard. Not to mention PAL is pretty dependent on 50 Hz, whereas the US operates on 60 Hz power, so it would be tough to have pulled off.
The first NTSC color show was in 1953, and US networks were broadcasting all color by 1966. On the other hand, the first PAL transmission was not until 1967.
On the other hand, on February 17, 2008, NTSC broadcast in the US will end, and the only remaining US terrestrial television signals will be the ATSC digital standard, which still uses 6 MHz channels. You will need a digital to analog set-top-box to continue to use NTSC televisions.
Ironically the folks in ParLab (*ahem*) just arranged a field trip to meet with some of the people who do that kind of work.
:)
Super...I'm hoping that GPUs can provide a cheap way for newcomers to learn parallel programming, and it appears that the GPU makers are really waking up to general purpose uses of GPUs.
(I learned parallel programming on a Connection Machine
If you have a GeForce 8800 GT, you already have a 112 processor parallel computer that you can program using CUDA.
To get an idea of recent R&D spending, see this graph.
While amounts have flattened out recently, the levels are much higher than during the 1990.
US public R&D is higher than EU-25 or OECD average levels as a percent of GDP (and US business R&D is much higher than EU-25 or OECD average levels as a percent of GDP, with the notable exception of Japan...More details here)
The big Federal funds go to NIH (~$30 billion), NSF (~$6 billion), NASA science ($~5.5 billion)
If you want viewing angle, you're distorting the picture significantly in space, so losing a little luminance or color fidelity shouldn't be too big a deal
In the broadcast engineering world, we like to have two people looking at a monitor at the same time to be able to see the same color & luminance on a pixel. Plus in a broadcast control room, you aren't sitting on a sofa, you may be moving around the room but needing to occasionally look back and need to be able to see what is going over the air to millions of people.
Some of the LCD monitors I've seen have good horizontal and vertical viewing angles, but it turns out that any offset in a diagonal direction is unusable for critical viewing.
You are right about CRTs. Professional-quality HD CRTs are basically no longer made. You plopped down $50,000 for one five years ago, but now there are none except in the used market.
Here are the user requirements for reference monitors from the EBU.
I should add that plasmas in particular have really truncated color gamuts. They cannot represent all the Rec. 709 colors at any reasonable brightness, thus they tend to
"stretch the greens" which the eye is more sensitive to in order to look bright. Many plasmas also have a "turn-on jump" from a totally black pixel to one that has any light output that tends to accentuate noise in dark areas.
One of the things we've found out is that no HD LCD, plasma, or rear-projection DLP displays are as good as a broadcast reference CRT monitor in terms of luminance dynamic range, viewing angle, or color gamut. Only front-projection DLPs seem to be able to match good quality CRTs, but then you need all that space for the projection.
OLEDs have a real chance of matching or even beating CRTs in a true "flat panel" form factor.
And I also like the idea of using OLED rolls as wallpaper so we can have 7,680 × 4,320 pixel video on the wall (which will, of course, need 22.2 surround sound (UHDTV).
Try these:
Teleport my Job
Tecoloco the weather is better in Central America.
Fast Track was intended as a way to give existing and de-facto standards more interoperability. The part that most people are confused about is that OOXML is *NOT* a new format. It's merely a different implementation of the legacy binary documents. In that respect, it's effectively a de-facto standard that fits well with ISO Fast Track's intended purpose.
A "standard" is a public document which provides the information required to create interoperable implementations. Standards can reference other standards normatively. If the legacy binary documents were not themselves standards, and OOXML requires knowledge of them to create interoperable implementations, then OOXML is not a standard.
Microsoft went through a rigorous & painful standardization process of Windows Media to become SMPTE VC-1, and ended up with a fairly good standard at the end. They can do the same for OOXML.
Physical to Physical interactions over IP using cheap and easy systems.
For example, Touch someone over IP.
I would literally hate life if carry-ons were banned.
So I think we all agree that people trying to get carry-ons into the upper storage compartments is the major limiting factor on modern boarding, but we don't want to ban it.
So how about ASSIGNED & RESERVED CARRY-ON SPACE. Everyone gets one carry-on per seat, and a location in the upper compartment is labeled as reserved for your seat.
NASA, the FBI, etc. all seem to follow the same pattern. They get the idea in their head for something big (usually as the result of politicians putting it there or the need to make it look like they're doing something about some big problem). Then they contract the technical stuff out to some contractor who feeds them a line of bullshit
I'd argue that most large public-sector software development failures reflect more upon the public-sector organization than the contractors.
For example, the FBI Virtual Case File system was mostly done in by weak blueprints (because no one in the FBI was willing to make a decision because that could be a problem for internal politics), then the requirements kept changing (again, because the interlocking politics makes it difficult for anyone to actually specify something).
Now it is true that many contractors love to eat up the money for over-runs due to bad and changing requirements...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File
In truth, most private-sector large software projects also fail because of badly defined system requirements, but there is more hope in the private sector for a single "neck wringer" to make actual decisions.
Why software projects fail:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1685
http://www.stylusinc.com/Common/Concerns/SoftwareProjectsFailure.php
there may be some politicians wanting to really represent the people, really improve things beyond simply corporate wealth and that the system prevents them from doing exactly that.
Politicians only want power. They will say whatever is needed to get the votes of the majority, and do whatever is needed to not get voted out.
some form of public financing of campaigns would go a long way to improving the "money in politics" problem.
Then the government will get to choose who gets money to run for the government, consolidating power 100%.
"the large and rapid build-up of additional Xenon reactivity load following a reactor trip can cause an extended (approximately 40 hours) reactor shutdown"
http://www.nuceng.ca/ep6p3/class/Module3D_XenonJun21.pdf
The Xport Direct is cheaper, only $28. A full Xport is overkill.