If Joe User can call a real phone, then why shouldn't Joe User expect 911 when they dial 911?
Because Joe User was explicitly told not to expect it when he signed up for the service.
I suspect that the final solution will be that 911 centers will start working together, and VoIP providers will provide a meta-911 service that accepts a "roaming" user's call, gets information about that user, and their location, whats wrong, and then forwards the user information and call to the correct 911 call center for whatever city the user is in at the moment.
I think that's the best idea, but it seems the FCC is pushing for something different, which is much harder to implement. They want VoIP to work with the regular 911 system, and that's simply unreasonable. The regular 911 system is run by local governments, and VoIP is inherently national (really global) in scope. If the government wants to provide 911 service for VoIP users, then they should create a national center which can then either transfer a call or relay the information, anywhere in the country. Local 911 operators aren't really trained in handling calls that are coming from people in far away places, and making them handle this would be too confusing. Maybe you could route to the local 911 operator when you're absolutely sure of the location of the call's origination, but with VoIP there will be many situations where you just can't be 100% sure, and then it's best to have your call sent somewhere where people are trained to take calls from all over the world (I say the world, not the country, because even if you're not going to handle calls from other countries you need to at least train people how to take them).
GPS doesn't resolve this, as GPS doesn't work in all locations, especially indoors. With a cell phone this isn't as big of a problem - a cell tower is at least close enough where you can train nearby counties to handle calls for each other. So yes, having the GPS location is nice, but at least you can get close enough even without GPS.
What happens when you call 911 from a land line thats 50-60 miles away from the nearest real city?
I don't know what happens in Missouri, but in New Jersey 911 service is handled on a county by county basis. Everyone in the county goes to the same 911 dispatch center, and dispatch then contacts your local police/fire/ambulance. For fire and ambulance, the dispatch is done via radio. Emergency workers have pagers which are set to listen to the dispatch freqency. A call is proceeded by a special tone which activates the pager. The pager is then set to listen to the channel where the dispatch comes - "Station 1501, 1300 Main Street, a motor vehicle accident". Originally, and still in some locations, the tone also sets off the siren at the fire house. If a station is recalled (maybe it turns out not to be an emergency in the first place), this will also go out on the dispatch channel. Emergency responders who have two-way radios (generally just the officers) can then talk to dispatch through another freqency, to get more detailed information, to report when they are responding, arriving, etc. There is also a two-way radio in all the emergency vehicles. In theory you could call dispatch directly to get information, there are "red phones" in the stations which provide a direct line.
So what exactly are you proposing? That the FCC require VoIP providers support transmission of location information? That the FCC require VoIP providers to properly route you to the local 911 center? That the FCC require the VoIP providers mandate that all VoIP services be location enabled?
Don't act so shocked. They already do this with cell phones.
If you've ever dealt with 911, then you know that they could never handle rerouting calls. Often it seems that they are barely able to properly dispatch local officers and emergency medical services.
Actually, I heard a story from a 911 operator who once had a deaf person call 911 through his TDD because the pizza place didn't have a TDD, and the 911 operator actually ordered the pizza for him. So please, don't give me "they could never handle rerouting calls." They might not be able to patch the call through, but they could certainly relay the information.
Do you really want GPS tracking of your location--mandated by the government?
I don't, but there are a lot of people that do. That's why every new cell phone has a GPS device in it.
Which means the founders screwed up and chose a VC because they would fund them, not because the VC agreed with their business goals.
Pretty much. When you've been out of college for a little over a year and someone offers to invest 4 million dollars in your idea, it's hard to refuse. In hindsight, we probably should have. Of course, that probably would have meant going it alone.
So while getting 10M$ on a silver plate would of course be a cause for celebration for the recipient, it would normally be very difficult for a software company in its early stages to find ways of spending it productively, so that you can actually get any return on the investment.
Yeah, that's exactly what we saw, and I've read some really insightful things lately and the whole experience finally makes a little bit of sense. I was forced to chalk it all up to incompetence, and that didn't sit right, because it seemed too hard for someone to be that incompetent. The mystery probably lies on the pressures which were coming from places even higher than our CEO (the board, and the outside investors, who I didn't get to interact with at all, it was my friend who was on the board and dealt with them, though he didn't have any real power either). This is not to say that our CEO wasn't at all incompetant, of course, but I now see how the outside investors were arguably even making rational decisions.
The sad thing is in our case there was probably no solution other than earning the money ourselves, maybe through years of consulting. That probably would have been the way to go, especially as the consulting market was doing very well back then. We could have made some money to pay for a few developers, and done some initial prototyping and high level design in our spare time.
Here I've always thought the solution was to have "found a better CEO", or "insisted upon retaining control of the company". But really our biggest problems were in the nature of the game more than the cards we happened to be dealt.
According to the former chairman of ArsDigita, VC basically pushed him out and run the business with their own man as CEO and killed ArsDigita. At first I was surprised by this but it seems that's the way VC operates.
Heh, that's pretty much exactly what happened to the company that I co-founded. Not in the same way as ArsDigita, of course. Our investor insisted on being CEO from the very beginning.
It's interesting that you mention VCs only caring about maximizing their return in a short time. I never really thought about it that way, but that does explain the behaviors of our CEO pretty well. I guess it makes sense from a VC perspective. You throw lots of money trying for fast growth, and IPO as an exit strategy. If you fail, so what, you've got 10, 50, 100 other investments. It sucks from the POV of the founders, because we're relying solely on this one company and would prefer a less risky slow growth approach. But from the POV of the investors, it's just money and you reduce risk through diversification.
Well, they're not a company which builds open source products any more. But you do know what OSDN stands for, right (actually nowadays it's called OSTG)?
Anyway, they certainly were an open source company at the time they received venture capital, so they're probably counted in the 71 companies of the story.
You'd be surprised. I was involved with a dot com startup that got $4 million in initial funding and after all was said and done probably wasted $10 million total.
Our investor gave us the money on the condition that he be our CEO. Biggest mistake we ever made. This guy proceeded to throw away money on all sorts of things. We didn't yet have any users, but the sales guys at Foundry Networks convinced him to buy not one, but two BigIron 8000s complete with fibre ports. All in all we probably spent half a million dollars just on switches and load balancers and the like. Our CEO suffered from the delusion that if you're spending more money you must be getting something better.
And best of all, none of it even worked! As I told the big boss man from the very beginning, the failover is useless when you've only got a single incoming connection, in order to do things properly you'd need two incoming connections with different IP addresses and the ability to send rerouting information to the upstream routers. But when we got to the hosting place, we didn't have any of that.
I only wish I was a few years older or had better persuasion/politician skills. We had a good idea, and only needed a couple million to design the software right so that it could scale as the idea got more popular. But instead I and the other co-founders got pushed to the side by others who promised infinite growth in no time at all and instead provided us with a half-assed product way late. I got to see the mythical man month up close and personal as we added more and more developers only to get further and further behind on our schedule. When we finally came out with a product, it was mid-2001, I had already quit, and another co-founder took a leave of absense which turned out to be permanent. In September of 2001 one of our big contracts, with the Republican National Committee, was pulled, due to the RNC having more important issues to focus on. That was pretty much the end of the end. I think there were 5 or 6 employees left, down from the peak of 40-50.
Honestly, I think that PC's would've remained a geek hobby until a big company (in this case, Intel, MS, IBM, etc.) made them cheap and easy to get.
I don't think it would have to be a big company. I guess chip manufacturing is costly and benefits greatly from economies of scale, but the rest can and is being done by smaller companies (a good OS maybe isn't being made by small companies, but it is being made by a large group of volunteers). And maybe even making chips could be done by smaller companies, albeit less powerful chips. That'd be OK - there isn't that much power necessary to run a few internet applications, a word processor, and the few other apps that people regularly use today.
But yeah, a big company like those are also inevitable considering the usefulness of PC's.
A big company is probably inevitable for something like chip manufacturing, because the startup costs are extremely high relative to the incremental costs once you're started up. And unlike with software, the startup costs are not purely intellectual property costs, and can't be easily duplicated (who knows though, maybe if it wasn't for intel making such cheap chips we'd come up with better technologies for manufacturing, I don't know enough about chip manufacturing to say for sure).
HAM radio, fox example, hasn't produced any giant, world-altering corporations.
Maybe if you didn't need a license to operate a HAM radio this would be a different story. Imagine if you needed a license to run a PC. How many of us would have still gotten into it? And then of course there's the fact that a HAM license is for non-commercial use only. Remember when the internet boom started? Not too long after they made it legal to use it for commercial purposes.
Drop the licensing requirement, and drop the restriction of use for commercial purposes, and maybe you'll see HAM radio producing giant, world-altering corporations.
Because I still want to see the numbers when you control for being African-American. They are the most overwhelmingly pro-Democrat group (except perhaps gays, but I don't think exit polls go into that detail) and they are also poorer than average, so that's what I want to see.
I don't think that has to be controlled for. It's an explaination, which I think explains some of the discrepancy, but I explicitly left out the explanation from my posts.
If you really want an explanation, I think it's pretty simple. Republicans tend to favor flatter taxes and less government spending on welfare programs. Alternatively stated (take your pick), Democrats tend to favor more progressive taxes and more government spending on welfare programs.
The 36% of poor people that voted for bush are not evenly distributed around the country. They are likely concentrated in red states.
Let's see, under $15,000 in Georgia: 28% for Bush, California, 29% for Bush, Florida, 40%, Ohio, 29%, Pennsylvania, 40%... Nope, the majority of the poor seem to vote for Kerry no matter what state you're talking about.
So the poor may have actually been a significant factor in electing him.
Well, any group of more than a few hundred thousand people were a significant factor in electing Bush, but I was responding to the statement that cutting advertising from both parties to the poor would hurt Bush. It wouldn't, in fact, it likely would help him, by reducing turnout among a group which has a majority of people voting against Bush.
(Of course, Bush isn't running again anyway, but it's very unlikely any modern-day Republican is going to get a majority of the votes of the poor.)
The consequences of the discovery are immediately apparent
Umm, yeah, immediately apparent...
Anyway, according to the article, this can be used to make a better microscope, but what about making a better telescope, or laser? Both telescopes and lasers are inherently limited by diffraction, could some of this negative refraction be used to cancel it out?
Well, obviously I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I haven't seen much of an explanation as to what this whole discovery actually means.
Thank you for quoting the least reliable exit polls in the HISTORY of the presidential election.
You're welcome. Now try to explain away that nice direct relationship curve between income and votes for Bush based on the very small errors in the poll itself.
To review, the polls indicated that Kerry won.
No they didn't. I'm looking at the polls right now, and they clearly indicate that Bush got more votes overall.
However, you did a lot better than 99% of the knee-jerk liberal posts on this website by pointing out that the legislation was started under Clinton, and that the FCC is the authority on the matter.
My comment is not meant to be liberal or conservative. It's a well known fact that the poor tend to vote for Democrats and the rich tend to vote for Republicans. You can interpret that fact however you want, but it's a fact, and it's absolutely true.
Rich people did. HDTV companies did. But they're a small minority compared to the poorer masses.
But do you really think the poorer masses went more for Bush? Actually, forget the speculation, let's look at the exit polls. 36% of people with income under $15,000 voted for Bush. 42% from $15-30,000. Even the majority of people making $30-50,000 voted for Kerry. Bush won because of the people making $50,000 and up. Surely most of these people have cable television.
Lets face it, no politician wants a voting public that won't be able to see their TV commercials.
If that cuts out a group of people who overwhelmingly tend to vote for your opponent and not you, and it cuts out the TV commercials from both parties, then I don't see why not.
Besides, in the end, those who really care about TV will just buy a converter. And I seriously doubt the blame will get put on Bush anyway. The FCC is who makes the decision, not Bush, and the mandate was put in place by Clinton, not Bush.
For now, at least, I don't think the search engine is going to be switching. This is talking about Google's Adsense program, which is the text ads it puts on affiliate sites. As an affiliate, one can choose to display text or graphical ads. Some affiliates will switch to the graphical ads, others will remain with the text ads.
Personally I've clicked on a lot more text ads than banner ads, and I think text ads work better. If this is true, then there probably won't be much incentive for any affiliate sites to switch - if they work best with text ads (google certainly does), then they can use text ads, if their content works better with banner ads, then they can use them.
But if banner ads really do get better results, in addition to being annoying as hell, then you might see the price being offered for them reach levels which are hard to ignore. If so, maybe you'll even see google make the switch for its search engine. I doubt any of this will happen, but maybe it will.
Fortunately it is only a pilot project, so presumably Google hasn't invested that much in it just yet.
I don't think this strategy is going to work, not at all. Google is a technology company. What makes adsense so great is the technology behind it, the code which matches up ads to ad space automatically, with minimal human interaction.
What is google going to try next, changing its search engine so that people can pick what websites to display in the search results?
if they need to phase it in slowly not have a termination date
They've been phasing it in slowly. They still have to have a termination date. It's just, the termination date they picked needs to be pushed back.
Obviously 10 year was far from enough as you still have a good ?(half)ammount of the homes in the US with analog TVs
If tuners (converters) could be had cheaply it wouldn't be such a big deal, but apparently they just didn't make a technology that is easy to build products for. Granted, the HDTV/analog dichotomy is a good excuse for price discrimination, but by now you've gotta expect that the supply side would have caught up and we'd
They will need to extend the date till the numbers are well under 10 million(at-least,preferably alot lower) other-wise several million people going out at once to get TV add-ons may cause a few problems(along with a few boosts in revenue )
Hopefully they'll just go through with the deadline and over-the-air television will just continue its death. I'll gladly trade in my TVs for access to my fair share of the radio spectrum.
And here I thought it was the rich people who voted for Bush. I guess whatever argument is convenient for the situation.
Anyway, I would think the post was modded funny instead of insightful because there are an awful lot of people out there still using analog television. I'm one of them, I work in an office, and I voted for Kerry. I'd buy a converter if there was one available at a reasonable price, of course most shows I watch probably aren't in HDTV anyway. What happens then? Do I get a little square (yeah yeah, it's not actually square) inside a little rectangle on my little TV? I sure hope not.
Environmental engineers at Penn State University and a research scientist at Ion Power Inc. have created an electrically-assisted microbial fuel cell that can be used to produce hydrogen from organic material.
Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need.
You can not match the cleaniness and performance of C++ in regular C. To do the same things you do in C++ in C while maintaining the same performance looks ugly and complex. C just doesn't have enough functionality.
Is that supposed to be a joke? Because, if anything, it's the opposite that is true.
True, there may be complex parts hidden away in libraries to handle some things like memory allocation, but once those are written the features of the program itself are no more complex.
Well, this is completely tangential to the question of whether or not there are too many people in the world, but it's also a question which is based on far too many factors to have a reasonable answer. Most infrastructure is unnecessary for life, and how much infrastructure is necessary really depends a lot on how you'd design things and what technologies you'd use. It's just a question with too many variables, which is really pointless anyway, because there's no need to pack all people into the smallest possible place.
The main problems have to do with human selfishness which leads to some wanting what others have.
That's certainly a factor. Distributing food to third world countries is expensive. But that problem would be solved if we just had completely open borders. Of course, that'd mean higher taxes or a lower standard of living for us.
On the other hand, technology is resolving the problem from the other end. People sharing all the world might never happen, but I would think technology will eventually reach the point where starvation is a thing of the past.
That's just a problem of technology. And the point isn't that we'd actually want to fit everyone inside of Texas. The point is that Texas takes up a very small portion of the earth's surface. So lack of physical space on the earth is not the problem.
Aren't we already saving too many people who should be dead and thereby contributing greatly to world problems like overcrowding and world hunger and fun stuff?
No, the problems of world overcrowding and hunger are not problems of supply, they're problems of distribution. The world's food supply is perfectly adequate to feed everyone, and global food production has kept up with population growth. As for overcrowding, the entire population of the world could be housed in an area the size of Texas. This would give every family (or group) of four 5000 square feet of living space.
The problems of world hunger and overcrowding are not problems inherent with having too many people.
Slashdot Mirror
If Joe User can call a real phone, then why shouldn't Joe User expect 911 when they dial 911?
Because Joe User was explicitly told not to expect it when he signed up for the service.
I suspect that the final solution will be that 911 centers will start working together, and VoIP providers will provide a meta-911 service that accepts a "roaming" user's call, gets information about that user, and their location, whats wrong, and then forwards the user information and call to the correct 911 call center for whatever city the user is in at the moment.
I think that's the best idea, but it seems the FCC is pushing for something different, which is much harder to implement. They want VoIP to work with the regular 911 system, and that's simply unreasonable. The regular 911 system is run by local governments, and VoIP is inherently national (really global) in scope. If the government wants to provide 911 service for VoIP users, then they should create a national center which can then either transfer a call or relay the information, anywhere in the country. Local 911 operators aren't really trained in handling calls that are coming from people in far away places, and making them handle this would be too confusing. Maybe you could route to the local 911 operator when you're absolutely sure of the location of the call's origination, but with VoIP there will be many situations where you just can't be 100% sure, and then it's best to have your call sent somewhere where people are trained to take calls from all over the world (I say the world, not the country, because even if you're not going to handle calls from other countries you need to at least train people how to take them).
GPS doesn't resolve this, as GPS doesn't work in all locations, especially indoors. With a cell phone this isn't as big of a problem - a cell tower is at least close enough where you can train nearby counties to handle calls for each other. So yes, having the GPS location is nice, but at least you can get close enough even without GPS.
What happens when you call 911 from a land line thats 50-60 miles away from the nearest real city?
I don't know what happens in Missouri, but in New Jersey 911 service is handled on a county by county basis. Everyone in the county goes to the same 911 dispatch center, and dispatch then contacts your local police/fire/ambulance. For fire and ambulance, the dispatch is done via radio. Emergency workers have pagers which are set to listen to the dispatch freqency. A call is proceeded by a special tone which activates the pager. The pager is then set to listen to the channel where the dispatch comes - "Station 1501, 1300 Main Street, a motor vehicle accident". Originally, and still in some locations, the tone also sets off the siren at the fire house. If a station is recalled (maybe it turns out not to be an emergency in the first place), this will also go out on the dispatch channel. Emergency responders who have two-way radios (generally just the officers) can then talk to dispatch through another freqency, to get more detailed information, to report when they are responding, arriving, etc. There is also a two-way radio in all the emergency vehicles. In theory you could call dispatch directly to get information, there are "red phones" in the stations which provide a direct line.
So what exactly are you proposing? That the FCC require VoIP providers support transmission of location information? That the FCC require VoIP providers to properly route you to the local 911 center? That the FCC require the VoIP providers mandate that all VoIP services be location enabled?
Don't act so shocked. They already do this with cell phones.
If you've ever dealt with 911, then you know that they could never handle rerouting calls. Often it seems that they are barely able to properly dispatch local officers and emergency medical services.
Actually, I heard a story from a 911 operator who once had a deaf person call 911 through his TDD because the pizza place didn't have a TDD, and the 911 operator actually ordered the pizza for him. So please, don't give me "they could never handle rerouting calls." They might not be able to patch the call through, but they could certainly relay the information.
Do you really want GPS tracking of your location--mandated by the government?
I don't, but there are a lot of people that do. That's why every new cell phone has a GPS device in it.
Which means the founders screwed up and chose a VC because they would fund them, not because the VC agreed with their business goals.
Pretty much. When you've been out of college for a little over a year and someone offers to invest 4 million dollars in your idea, it's hard to refuse. In hindsight, we probably should have. Of course, that probably would have meant going it alone.
So while getting 10M$ on a silver plate would of course be a cause for celebration for the recipient, it would normally be very difficult for a software company in its early stages to find ways of spending it productively, so that you can actually get any return on the investment.
Yeah, that's exactly what we saw, and I've read some really insightful things lately and the whole experience finally makes a little bit of sense. I was forced to chalk it all up to incompetence, and that didn't sit right, because it seemed too hard for someone to be that incompetent. The mystery probably lies on the pressures which were coming from places even higher than our CEO (the board, and the outside investors, who I didn't get to interact with at all, it was my friend who was on the board and dealt with them, though he didn't have any real power either). This is not to say that our CEO wasn't at all incompetant, of course, but I now see how the outside investors were arguably even making rational decisions.
The sad thing is in our case there was probably no solution other than earning the money ourselves, maybe through years of consulting. That probably would have been the way to go, especially as the consulting market was doing very well back then. We could have made some money to pay for a few developers, and done some initial prototyping and high level design in our spare time.
Here I've always thought the solution was to have "found a better CEO", or "insisted upon retaining control of the company". But really our biggest problems were in the nature of the game more than the cards we happened to be dealt.
According to the former chairman of ArsDigita, VC basically pushed him out and run the business with their own man as CEO and killed ArsDigita. At first I was surprised by this but it seems that's the way VC operates.
Heh, that's pretty much exactly what happened to the company that I co-founded. Not in the same way as ArsDigita, of course. Our investor insisted on being CEO from the very beginning.
It's interesting that you mention VCs only caring about maximizing their return in a short time. I never really thought about it that way, but that does explain the behaviors of our CEO pretty well. I guess it makes sense from a VC perspective. You throw lots of money trying for fast growth, and IPO as an exit strategy. If you fail, so what, you've got 10, 50, 100 other investments. It sucks from the POV of the founders, because we're relying solely on this one company and would prefer a less risky slow growth approach. But from the POV of the investors, it's just money and you reduce risk through diversification.
Well, they're not a company which builds open source products any more. But you do know what OSDN stands for, right (actually nowadays it's called OSTG)?
Anyway, they certainly were an open source company at the time they received venture capital, so they're probably counted in the 71 companies of the story.
You'd be surprised. I was involved with a dot com startup that got $4 million in initial funding and after all was said and done probably wasted $10 million total.
Our investor gave us the money on the condition that he be our CEO. Biggest mistake we ever made. This guy proceeded to throw away money on all sorts of things. We didn't yet have any users, but the sales guys at Foundry Networks convinced him to buy not one, but two BigIron 8000s complete with fibre ports. All in all we probably spent half a million dollars just on switches and load balancers and the like. Our CEO suffered from the delusion that if you're spending more money you must be getting something better.
And best of all, none of it even worked! As I told the big boss man from the very beginning, the failover is useless when you've only got a single incoming connection, in order to do things properly you'd need two incoming connections with different IP addresses and the ability to send rerouting information to the upstream routers. But when we got to the hosting place, we didn't have any of that.
I only wish I was a few years older or had better persuasion/politician skills. We had a good idea, and only needed a couple million to design the software right so that it could scale as the idea got more popular. But instead I and the other co-founders got pushed to the side by others who promised infinite growth in no time at all and instead provided us with a half-assed product way late. I got to see the mythical man month up close and personal as we added more and more developers only to get further and further behind on our schedule. When we finally came out with a product, it was mid-2001, I had already quit, and another co-founder took a leave of absense which turned out to be permanent. In September of 2001 one of our big contracts, with the Republican National Committee, was pulled, due to the RNC having more important issues to focus on. That was pretty much the end of the end. I think there were 5 or 6 employees left, down from the peak of 40-50.
Now there's an open source company with a stock chart to be proud of.
Honestly, I think that PC's would've remained a geek hobby until a big company (in this case, Intel, MS, IBM, etc.) made them cheap and easy to get.
I don't think it would have to be a big company. I guess chip manufacturing is costly and benefits greatly from economies of scale, but the rest can and is being done by smaller companies (a good OS maybe isn't being made by small companies, but it is being made by a large group of volunteers). And maybe even making chips could be done by smaller companies, albeit less powerful chips. That'd be OK - there isn't that much power necessary to run a few internet applications, a word processor, and the few other apps that people regularly use today.
But yeah, a big company like those are also inevitable considering the usefulness of PC's.
A big company is probably inevitable for something like chip manufacturing, because the startup costs are extremely high relative to the incremental costs once you're started up. And unlike with software, the startup costs are not purely intellectual property costs, and can't be easily duplicated (who knows though, maybe if it wasn't for intel making such cheap chips we'd come up with better technologies for manufacturing, I don't know enough about chip manufacturing to say for sure).
HAM radio, fox example, hasn't produced any giant, world-altering corporations.
Maybe if you didn't need a license to operate a HAM radio this would be a different story. Imagine if you needed a license to run a PC. How many of us would have still gotten into it? And then of course there's the fact that a HAM license is for non-commercial use only. Remember when the internet boom started? Not too long after they made it legal to use it for commercial purposes.
Drop the licensing requirement, and drop the restriction of use for commercial purposes, and maybe you'll see HAM radio producing giant, world-altering corporations.
Because I still want to see the numbers when you control for being African-American. They are the most overwhelmingly pro-Democrat group (except perhaps gays, but I don't think exit polls go into that detail) and they are also poorer than average, so that's what I want to see.
I don't think that has to be controlled for. It's an explaination, which I think explains some of the discrepancy, but I explicitly left out the explanation from my posts.
If you really want an explanation, I think it's pretty simple. Republicans tend to favor flatter taxes and less government spending on welfare programs. Alternatively stated (take your pick), Democrats tend to favor more progressive taxes and more government spending on welfare programs.
The 36% of poor people that voted for bush are not evenly distributed around the country. They are likely concentrated in red states.
Let's see, under $15,000 in Georgia: 28% for Bush, California, 29% for Bush, Florida, 40%, Ohio, 29%, Pennsylvania, 40%... Nope, the majority of the poor seem to vote for Kerry no matter what state you're talking about.
So the poor may have actually been a significant factor in electing him.
Well, any group of more than a few hundred thousand people were a significant factor in electing Bush, but I was responding to the statement that cutting advertising from both parties to the poor would hurt Bush. It wouldn't, in fact, it likely would help him, by reducing turnout among a group which has a majority of people voting against Bush.
(Of course, Bush isn't running again anyway, but it's very unlikely any modern-day Republican is going to get a majority of the votes of the poor.)
The consequences of the discovery are immediately apparent
Umm, yeah, immediately apparent...
Anyway, according to the article, this can be used to make a better microscope, but what about making a better telescope, or laser? Both telescopes and lasers are inherently limited by diffraction, could some of this negative refraction be used to cancel it out?
Well, obviously I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I haven't seen much of an explanation as to what this whole discovery actually means.
Thank you for quoting the least reliable exit polls in the HISTORY of the presidential election.
You're welcome. Now try to explain away that nice direct relationship curve between income and votes for Bush based on the very small errors in the poll itself.
To review, the polls indicated that Kerry won.
No they didn't. I'm looking at the polls right now, and they clearly indicate that Bush got more votes overall.
However, you did a lot better than 99% of the knee-jerk liberal posts on this website by pointing out that the legislation was started under Clinton, and that the FCC is the authority on the matter.
My comment is not meant to be liberal or conservative. It's a well known fact that the poor tend to vote for Democrats and the rich tend to vote for Republicans. You can interpret that fact however you want, but it's a fact, and it's absolutely true.
If you thought that it was the rich that voted for Bush you weren't paying attention.
As I said, this is confirmed by the exit polls. Look at them if you'd like. As income increases, so does Bush's percentage vote.
Rich people did. HDTV companies did. But they're a small minority compared to the poorer masses.
But do you really think the poorer masses went more for Bush? Actually, forget the speculation, let's look at the exit polls. 36% of people with income under $15,000 voted for Bush. 42% from $15-30,000. Even the majority of people making $30-50,000 voted for Kerry. Bush won because of the people making $50,000 and up. Surely most of these people have cable television.
Lets face it, no politician wants a voting public that won't be able to see their TV commercials.
If that cuts out a group of people who overwhelmingly tend to vote for your opponent and not you, and it cuts out the TV commercials from both parties, then I don't see why not.
Besides, in the end, those who really care about TV will just buy a converter. And I seriously doubt the blame will get put on Bush anyway. The FCC is who makes the decision, not Bush, and the mandate was put in place by Clinton, not Bush.
For now, at least, I don't think the search engine is going to be switching. This is talking about Google's Adsense program, which is the text ads it puts on affiliate sites. As an affiliate, one can choose to display text or graphical ads. Some affiliates will switch to the graphical ads, others will remain with the text ads.
Personally I've clicked on a lot more text ads than banner ads, and I think text ads work better. If this is true, then there probably won't be much incentive for any affiliate sites to switch - if they work best with text ads (google certainly does), then they can use text ads, if their content works better with banner ads, then they can use them.
But if banner ads really do get better results, in addition to being annoying as hell, then you might see the price being offered for them reach levels which are hard to ignore. If so, maybe you'll even see google make the switch for its search engine. I doubt any of this will happen, but maybe it will.
Fortunately it is only a pilot project, so presumably Google hasn't invested that much in it just yet.
I don't think this strategy is going to work, not at all. Google is a technology company. What makes adsense so great is the technology behind it, the code which matches up ads to ad space automatically, with minimal human interaction.
What is google going to try next, changing its search engine so that people can pick what websites to display in the search results?
if they need to phase it in slowly not have a termination date
They've been phasing it in slowly. They still have to have a termination date. It's just, the termination date they picked needs to be pushed back.
Obviously 10 year was far from enough as you still have a good ?(half)ammount of the homes in the US with analog TVs
If tuners (converters) could be had cheaply it wouldn't be such a big deal, but apparently they just didn't make a technology that is easy to build products for. Granted, the HDTV/analog dichotomy is a good excuse for price discrimination, but by now you've gotta expect that the supply side would have caught up and we'd
They will need to extend the date till the numbers are well under 10 million(at-least ,preferably alot lower) other-wise several million people going out at once to get TV add-ons may cause a few problems(along with a few boosts in revenue )
Hopefully they'll just go through with the deadline and over-the-air television will just continue its death. I'll gladly trade in my TVs for access to my fair share of the radio spectrum.
And here I thought it was the rich people who voted for Bush. I guess whatever argument is convenient for the situation.
Anyway, I would think the post was modded funny instead of insightful because there are an awful lot of people out there still using analog television. I'm one of them, I work in an office, and I voted for Kerry. I'd buy a converter if there was one available at a reasonable price, of course most shows I watch probably aren't in HDTV anyway. What happens then? Do I get a little square (yeah yeah, it's not actually square) inside a little rectangle on my little TV? I sure hope not.
Environmental engineers at Penn State University and a research scientist at Ion Power Inc. have created an electrically-assisted microbial fuel cell that can be used to produce hydrogen from organic material.
Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need.
You can not match the cleaniness and performance of C++ in regular C. To do the same things you do in C++ in C while maintaining the same performance looks ugly and complex. C just doesn't have enough functionality.
Is that supposed to be a joke? Because, if anything, it's the opposite that is true.
True, there may be complex parts hidden away in libraries to handle some things like memory allocation, but once those are written the features of the program itself are no more complex.
Well, this is completely tangential to the question of whether or not there are too many people in the world, but it's also a question which is based on far too many factors to have a reasonable answer. Most infrastructure is unnecessary for life, and how much infrastructure is necessary really depends a lot on how you'd design things and what technologies you'd use. It's just a question with too many variables, which is really pointless anyway, because there's no need to pack all people into the smallest possible place.
The main problems have to do with human selfishness which leads to some wanting what others have.
That's certainly a factor. Distributing food to third world countries is expensive. But that problem would be solved if we just had completely open borders. Of course, that'd mean higher taxes or a lower standard of living for us.
On the other hand, technology is resolving the problem from the other end. People sharing all the world might never happen, but I would think technology will eventually reach the point where starvation is a thing of the past.
That's just a problem of technology. And the point isn't that we'd actually want to fit everyone inside of Texas. The point is that Texas takes up a very small portion of the earth's surface. So lack of physical space on the earth is not the problem.
Aren't we already saving too many people who should be dead and thereby contributing greatly to world problems like overcrowding and world hunger and fun stuff?
No, the problems of world overcrowding and hunger are not problems of supply, they're problems of distribution. The world's food supply is perfectly adequate to feed everyone, and global food production has kept up with population growth. As for overcrowding, the entire population of the world could be housed in an area the size of Texas. This would give every family (or group) of four 5000 square feet of living space.
The problems of world hunger and overcrowding are not problems inherent with having too many people.