Gravity waves travel faster than light, quantum mechanics/physics have things happening faster than light (ie, something affects particle A, it's clone, particle B, far away, is also affected). I may not have the terminology right, so don't jump on that.
Gravity waves are something some string theorists would like to observe so their pet theories don't get flushed down the toilet, but which have yet to actually be observed, despite the building of expensive observatories to try and find them. When someone disproves Lorentz covariance with an actual experiment, we can perhaps talk.
The only experimental setup that would seem to work would be a tetrahedral mass array with laser interferometry between the masses out in space somewhere (i.e. instruments like LIGO are not sufficient), and then slingshot a projectile mass to accelerate it to a significant fraction of the speed of light (e.g. 0.1C) and aim it through the tetrahedron on a non-face-normal trajectory at a rough offset. This would have the net effect of having the mass apparently "be not there"/"appear"/"disappear again" from the point of view of the instrument, thus establishing, once and for all, the propagation rate of gravitation. If it's actually an artifact of a curvature of space time rather than something with a particulate carrier, the "instantaneous" appearance and disappearance of the mass will be seen by the detector symmetrically, otherwise not.
It would cost quite a bundle to run the experiment, just to make some string theorists and other non-relativistic model believers very happy (or very unhappy). Then they can all go looking for their Goldstone bosons and loop quantum gravity and privileged local inertial frames.
Why don't they just license The Great Firewall of China.
We all know this is where Europe is heading with this; the only difference is they're asking Google to implement it for them, rather than having to implement it themselves, as China has done.
Why don't they just license The Great Firewall of China.
We all know this is where Europe is heading with this; the only difference is they're asking Google to implement it for them, rather than having to implement it themselves, as China has done.
Why don't they just license The Great Firewall of China.
We all know this is where Europe is heading with this; the only difference is they're asking Google to implement it for them, rather than having to implement it themselves, as China has done.
Why don't they just license The Great Firewall of China.
We all know this is where Europe is heading with this; the only difference is they're asking Google to implement it for them, rather than having to implement it themselves, as China has done.
Oppressive fucktards should have to out themselves as fucktards rather than hiding behind skirts. Just saying.
The EU and the US need to clue in to the fact that their local laws don't apply globally, no matter how much it pisses them off that other nations do things differently.
The EU needs to clue to the fact that DNS data != geolocation, and if they want to piss in their own pool, they need the equivalent of the Great Firewall of China to do so, and then they need to decide if they are going to piss or not.
The power supplies were their bad. Not Apple's. Apple contracted for finished product, and didn't care about how it was made.
The easy thing to do would have been to contract with Samsung if Apple wouldn't agree to buy; nothing gets Apple to lock up a supply chain vendor's entire production of something faster than offering to sell it to an Apple competitor in roughly the same market.
They also should have incorporated the production company separately from the furnace company to provide fusable links so that they could jettison the production company without jettisoning the profits that selling the furnaces to the production company got them.
This was just basically a company that couldn't do what it promised, and was bad at business to boot, and is now trying to get out from under its creditors by spreading liability to a third party with deep pockets.
Why don't they just license The Great Firewall of China.
We all know this is where Europe is heading with this; the only difference is they're asking Google to implement it for them, rather than having to implement it themselves, as China has done.
The only issue is the paper waste and that can be alleviated by recycling the paper ballots after a set amount of time (I hope they keep them for at least two years but I don't know how long they do).
(1) Paper *DOES* "grow on trees"...
(2) There's no problem farming quick-growth trees to supply the pulp, even if you needed to, which you typically don't
(3) Paper recycles into methanol relatively easily, if you aren't interested in recycling it into paper. Yes, I know, this makes ADM sad, since they want us all using ethanol instead of methanol, so they can sell more corn
(4) Making ADM sad should be a long term goal anyway
It's worse now that the other USVI Golden Goose (HOVENSA) has shut down. I've seen up-close-and-personal the graft that exists on St Croix...
Yes, that was a big factor; 90% of the USVI fuel came out of HOVENSA, which was the 10th largest crude oil refinery in the world, and most of the energy production is still diesel. So is most of the desalination infrastructure, from which the USVI derives most of its potable and non-potable fresh water (the rest is from rain from the cisterns, which occasionally have to be refilled).
Not to mention they lost most of their higher paying jobs, and $100M in tax revenue in the closure.
Part of the problem is the sunsetting on the Federal Economic Development District status, making it much harder to get an EDC registration, which bumped the tax rate in the area considerably. This mostly has to do with the necessity of working in the context of the university in order to obtain status these days, since the federal government is really wanting to get their hands on Ocwen (William C. Erby's company) and other companies monies, despite previous federal approval.
Practically speaking, I don't know how to reasonably deal with the corruption there (or , any more than I do with the corruption present in Mexico), short of them electing statehood. I think that would only help some, look at the education system in California, and the parks department hiding money trying to pretend it needed more or would shut down the parks, etc., for examples where states have similar problems, despite being under the statehood umbrella.
It changes the user space sufficiently that the historical text configuration files for logging and other facilities no longer function compatibly with the VSC test suite. If those were changed back, or the test suite was somehow made independent of configuration variances for the purposes of testing, I might agree with you, but as it is, there is no way a systemd based system would pass VSC, and would also likely fail VSX, and the parts of the VSTH and VSRT testing, based on the posix_spawn implementation and XPG/4 compliance.
Is it a system based on AT&T code? If so, how much AT&T code has to still be in it.
Yes. Legally, all AT&T derived systems are grandfathered in as part of the License agreement which exclusively licensed the trademark to The Open Group for relicensing to third parties. For example, the transferrable SVR3 and SVR4 source licenses I own as a result of being sold surplus Class C computing equipment by Weber State University under their blanket source licenses mean my port of SVR3 to the Amiga I did for giggles, is legally UNIX.
Is it a system that passes the Single UNIX Specification test suite and whose supplier is thus allowed to license the "Unix" trademark?
Only if they subsequently license the trademark. If so, then it's UNIX. If they don't license the trademark, even if it passes the tests (which must also be licensed from The Open Group), or if they fail to register a compliance statement, and have it certified, it's not UNIX. Mac OS X, for example, is UNIX. iOS on the iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone isn't UNIX -- and can't be; certain required interfaces are conditionally compiled out, as a space saving measure, and additional user space commands are not compiled for the publicly released versions.
Is it a system with a Unix-compatible API?
No. A system with a Unix-compatible API can pass the VSX, VSTH, and VSRT test suites, but unless the user space is there, it can't pass the VSC test suite, nor can it pass the compilation environment test suite, which include ISO C certification of the compiler and libraries, as well as passing negative assertion tests for namespace pollution on the header files (Linux/glibc/glibc2 have serious header file problems; so do the *BSDs). Android can't pass because it fails on threading API compliance with the VSTH test, partly because of the "Bionic" libc implementation having deficiencies (it would take a small amount of work to pass the VSX tests in that regard, but threads are the biggie).
No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.
Quote correct. Thing is someone has to pay for the upfront cost of burying the cables and it is much more expensive. Where I live stringing wires on poles costs in rough numbers something like $1 per linear foot. Burying the cable costs about $8 per linear foot. (this is semi-reliable info from family who worked in the business and would know) Getting the funds to do any sort of meaningful program of burying wires would likely involve a rate increase which tends to be as popular as a lead filled life preserver.
In the U.S. Virgin Islands, every hurricane season, the U.S. federal government provides funds to bury the power lines that were knocked down, so it doesn't happen again. And every year, the local government official put 7/8 of the $ in their pockets, and balance the wires back up on the poles again in preparation for the same payday the next year. Locally it's a really well known scam.
Practically speaking, we should have utility tunnels under the roadways, to solve the problem, once and for all. The major cost in burying is digging and repair, which you can deal with exactly once, and not have to dig ever again, if you have room in the tunnels for the next water main, gas main, or sewer line you want to run, and an access in the tunnel side through a shunt to get longer replacement/new pipes down there. That's just a big hole adjacent to a small section of the tunnel, with access doors up top. The costs for burying then drastically drop.
I've seen this from various nutballs like yourself and I'm curious. Why do you think he ran for President? Because he was actively trying to sabotage the country? With what motive?
He answered this question on August 6, 2008 in Elkhart, Indiana during the 2008 campaign, when he was asked the question by a 7 year old girl, and couldn't deflect her into talking about oil prices. He said: “America is , uh, is no longer, uh what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children.”
He failed to indicate what date "what it once was" applied to.
I would say that he's been about as successful at this as he has been in keeping his campaign promises to get us out of the two foreign wars, start no new foreign wars, and close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which he promised to do in the first 90 days of his presidency. In other words, not very successful.
Not that anyone is actually keeping score, but...
Other campaign promises not kept:
- end tax deductions for companies that offshore - Introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill in my first year in office - No signing statements to nullify instructions from Congress - No family making less than $250K will see "any form of tax increase" (ACA, we're looking at you...) - term limit the DNI (Director National Intelligence) - call for and support a human mission to the moon by 2020 - tax deduction for artists - tax incentive for new farmers - windfall profits tax on oil comanies (we could use this one about right now...) - limit subsidies for agribusiness - antimonopoly laws strengthened to favor independent farmers - Scholarships to recruit new teachers - Restrict warrantless wiretaps - public option for the National Health Insurance Exchange - Restore superfund so polluters have to pay to clean up their messes - Same sex adoption equality (still state by state, and not in most states) - require companies to disclose personal information breaches - ban racial profiling by federal agencies - roll back earmarks to 1994 levels - national catastrophe insurance reserve for things like a future Katrina - allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms (sister is losing her house over this one) - work with Russia to step down nuclear defense postures (har har - that's working out) - double federal funding for cancer research - strengthen ADEA (Age Discrimination in Employment Act) - low carbon fuel standard - require 25% reneable by 2025 (guess it was based on Solyndra not being a scam) - reinstate special envoy for the Americas - global fissile materials production for weapons treaty - global education fund to offer alternatives to jihadi schools - international group to aid Iraqi refugees, including providing $2B in funding - help resolve the Cyprus situation - Sign Freedom Of Choice Act - penalty free "hardship withdrawls" from retirement accounts - annual "State of the Word" address - all new vehicles to support flex-fuels by 2012 - health care reform to be negotiated in public, on CSPAN - cap and trade system for carbon emissions to reduce global warming - use revenue from above to support clean energy, environmental restoration (hard to do if there's no system, isn't it?) - call for congressional leader consulting group on national security, and consult with them prior to major military action - reduce the number of federal middle managers - increase supply of affordable housing (Hi, San Francisco! Allow buildings over 4 stories without a zoning variance yet?) - UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - pay for national service plan without increasing deficit - Increase federal minimum wage to $9.50/hour - re
Most of the interesting problems are no longer "embarrassingly parallel". All the rest of them, if we care about getting them solved faster, we'll throw hardware at them to the degree we care about getting the result faster.
You yeard it here first! Predicting the weather is no longer interesting.
Predicting the weather is interesting, it's just substantially less interesting than it used to be back when all we had was The Farmer's Almanac. The incremental value in funding a much larger supercomputer *now*, rather than having you slowly expand an existing one over time, and as budget allows, is fairly negligible.
Can you point to a paper where a new, much faster system (one that requires putting the U.S. back in the "#1 super computer" position) is needed?
How about you find out who the top 5 systems are, and run that model on their systems instead, to see whether it's going to be sufficiently better than the current system to merit investing in the equipment in a U.S. facility, because it will have that much value to have a U.S. facility dedicated to the task?
If not, then who the hell cares who has the most hardware to throw at a "throw hardware at it problem"?
Most of the interesting problems are no longer "embarrassingly parallel". All the rest of them, if we care about getting them solved faster, we'll throw hardware at them to the degree we care about getting the result faster.
If you put in some amount of hardware, and then putting in 10x that much hardware doesn't solve the problem faster, then you computer is not "more super".
Most of the information they want in the first place is "who is talking to who when and for how long", which is still in the clear, even if there is end to end encryption. So most of the important data, what government agencies in the news have called "Just Metadata", is still capable of being intercepted (and is).
Once they have an associative pattern that they think indicates a crony in an illegal activity, *THEN* they target the content of the conversation. In this particular case, it should be possible to MITM the conversation as well, with a combined order for keys and gag order, the same as is done to compromise SSL conversations right now, by forcing the CA to sign new certs for the requesting agency, and using them to proxy the conversation.
In other words, this is not a magic "big win" for privacy.
Maybe they determined that "taxing" you for an annual inspection for personal cars went to far and stopped it, more then 20 years ago? (i don't recall ever having to have the cars inspected and i have been driving for 25 years in ontario).
Please come back and post some more information on Ontario, a place you clearly don't know anything about.
PS.
This map indicates that a large number of states don't have annual inspections as well, does that mean they don't care about you as well?
It means all they care about is collecting registration fees, and they smog test fees, and while they are generally named "The Department of Public Safety", they really don't give a crap about public safety, if they let you drive around with worn-out brakes, misaligned headlights, cracked windshields within the drivers field of view, and all the other things they wouldn't let you get away with in 17 U.S. states.
In point of fact, they are doing the minimum necessary work to be able to collect the maximum amount of fees,
Here's the Utah version of the Vehicle inspection manual for "PASSENGER VEHICLE AND LIGHT DUTY TRUCK"; notice that you must pass a 78 point inspection (minimum; some vehicles require more points of inspection). Inspections can take several hours, as they examine your gearbox and motor mounts, and run alignment leveling tests, rocker arm tests, and so on:
The point of this is to make sure that your vehicle is safe to be on the road, and you aren't going to kill someone due to an equipment failure.
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Personally, I don't see *why*, if an inspection *should* be required in Toronto for someone to operate their private vehicle on behalf of Uber, that some dumb-ass felt that as long as Uber wasn't involved, it's perfectly fine for you to pack your grandmother and three kids into a car that *wasn't* inspected.
This dual standard for "passengers" vs. "passengers" speaks volumes about them not actually giving a damn about actual safety as they do about revenue collection.
Yearly vehicle safety inspections are required in Ontario for regular cars
So, I'll flat out say to you: bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
I was mistaken; it's been a long time since I was up there. It appears that the laws have been relaxed in most Canadian provinces, other than New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, which still have hard requirements on safety inspections because they care about their citizens safety. I'm sorry your government in Ontario no longer cares.
"increased risk to passenger safety – no mechanical vehicle inspections, lack of driver training"
This claim is at least specious.
Yearly vehicle safety inspections are required in Ontario for regular cars, just like in Utah. Pretty much every snow state has similar requirements (except California, because what they care about is revenue, not actual public safety).
Is this price parity before or after absorbing massive subsidies from taxpayers and electricty consumers? If it is after, then the idea is not scalable.
After. Yes, it includes the subsidies being renewed.
The Deutsche Bank's projection assumes that there will be three things happening, which are unlikely:
(1) It assumes that the door-to-door sales model of whatever solar technology happens to be cheapest on the Thursday they ring your doorbell will result in substantial cost savings which can then be kept back from the consumer as additional profit
(2) It assumes that the utility companies aren't installing all those "smart meters" so that they can tariff at differential metering rates - in other words, pay you less for the electricity than what they sell it to you at - as they are already doing in some markets (i.e. they pay you the wholesale spot market price, but charge you the retail peak price already in some markets
(3) It assumes the ITC (Investment Tax Credit), which is set to phase from 30% to 10% by the end of 2016, will be renewed so that you are paying a subsidized price for the hardware (actually, that money would go to Vivint, not the home owner, since Vivint continues to own the solar system themselves, and merely sells the electricity to the customer on a monthly basis; as soon as the phase out hits, look for a price hike)
So Deutsche Bank gave them a buy rating, but Citigroup gave them a neutral rating, and while the stock at IPO opened at $17.01 on initial trading on October first, it's now mid-November, and they're down to $11.25 a share, which is a drop in investment value of just under 34%; call it losing a third of its value.
I think I'm with Citigroup on this one; I think Deutsche Bank is overly optimistic in assuming that the ITC won't sunset on schedule, and I think they are optimistic about people being OK effectively just switching power companies, and not owning - or getting the tax benefits from - the solar themselves.
Not it was not. No one claimed Google broke any law, and the government was not on either side of the case. This was a civil case, where someone thought Google was treating them unfairly.
Are you kidding?!? It was specifically a claim that Google broke a law - 15 U.S.C. 1–7 by not ranking using the same criteria as Bing and Yahoo (which is ridiculous anyway, since Yahoo is "powered by Bing!" so of course it has the same rankings).
the US has the worst healthcare system of any developed nation, and it is privately run.
And yet, where do people want to be treated when they contract Ebola? What nations have active R&D for an Ebola vaccine? A Malaria vaccine? And in India, who actually uses the state run healthcare when private is an option? And in the U.K., how do you skip the NHS wait queue for something like hernia surgery? And in Canada, where do you go when the government health care system refuses to fix your knee because you're a computer programmer, and having a working knee is not necessary to your job function?
I guess there is room for a *little* privatization...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you're wrong with #2
Gravity waves travel faster than light, quantum mechanics/physics have things happening faster than light (ie, something affects particle A, it's clone, particle B, far away, is also affected). I may not have the terminology right, so don't jump on that.
Gravity waves are something some string theorists would like to observe so their pet theories don't get flushed down the toilet, but which have yet to actually be observed, despite the building of expensive observatories to try and find them. When someone disproves Lorentz covariance with an actual experiment, we can perhaps talk.
The only experimental setup that would seem to work would be a tetrahedral mass array with laser interferometry between the masses out in space somewhere (i.e. instruments like LIGO are not sufficient), and then slingshot a projectile mass to accelerate it to a significant fraction of the speed of light (e.g. 0.1C) and aim it through the tetrahedron on a non-face-normal trajectory at a rough offset. This would have the net effect of having the mass apparently "be not there"/"appear"/"disappear again" from the point of view of the instrument, thus establishing, once and for all, the propagation rate of gravitation. If it's actually an artifact of a curvature of space time rather than something with a particulate carrier, the "instantaneous" appearance and disappearance of the mass will be seen by the detector symmetrically, otherwise not.
It would cost quite a bundle to run the experiment, just to make some string theorists and other non-relativistic model believers very happy (or very unhappy). Then they can all go looking for their Goldstone bosons and loop quantum gravity and privileged local inertial frames.
Why don't they just license The Great Firewall of China.
We all know this is where Europe is heading with this; the only difference is they're asking Google to implement it for them, rather than having to implement it themselves, as China has done.
Why don't they just license The Great Firewall of China.
We all know this is where Europe is heading with this; the only difference is they're asking Google to implement it for them, rather than having to implement it themselves, as China has done.
Why don't they just license The Great Firewall of China.
We all know this is where Europe is heading with this; the only difference is they're asking Google to implement it for them, rather than having to implement it themselves, as China has done.
Why don't they just license The Great Firewall of China.
We all know this is where Europe is heading with this; the only difference is they're asking Google to implement it for them, rather than having to implement it themselves, as China has done.
Oppressive fucktards should have to out themselves as fucktards rather than hiding behind skirts. Just saying.
The EU and the US need to clue in to the fact that their local laws don't apply globally, no matter how much it pisses them off that other nations do things differently.
The EU needs to clue to the fact that DNS data != geolocation, and if they want to piss in their own pool, they need the equivalent of the Great Firewall of China to do so, and then they need to decide if they are going to piss or not.
Did you even read the court filings?
The power supplies were their bad. Not Apple's. Apple contracted for finished product, and didn't care about how it was made.
The easy thing to do would have been to contract with Samsung if Apple wouldn't agree to buy; nothing gets Apple to lock up a supply chain vendor's entire production of something faster than offering to sell it to an Apple competitor in roughly the same market.
They also should have incorporated the production company separately from the furnace company to provide fusable links so that they could jettison the production company without jettisoning the profits that selling the furnaces to the production company got them.
This was just basically a company that couldn't do what it promised, and was bad at business to boot, and is now trying to get out from under its creditors by spreading liability to a third party with deep pockets.
Why don't they just license The Great Firewall of China.
We all know this is where Europe is heading with this; the only difference is they're asking Google to implement it for them, rather than having to implement it themselves, as China has done.
The only issue is the paper waste and that can be alleviated by recycling the paper ballots after a set amount of time (I hope they keep them for at least two years but I don't know how long they do).
(1) Paper *DOES* "grow on trees"...
(2) There's no problem farming quick-growth trees to supply the pulp, even if you needed to, which you typically don't
(3) Paper recycles into methanol relatively easily, if you aren't interested in recycling it into paper. Yes, I know, this makes ADM sad, since they want us all using ethanol instead of methanol, so they can sell more corn
(4) Making ADM sad should be a long term goal anyway
It's worse now that the other USVI Golden Goose (HOVENSA) has shut down. I've seen up-close-and-personal the graft that exists on St Croix...
Yes, that was a big factor; 90% of the USVI fuel came out of HOVENSA, which was the 10th largest crude oil refinery in the world, and most of the energy production is still diesel. So is most of the desalination infrastructure, from which the USVI derives most of its potable and non-potable fresh water (the rest is from rain from the cisterns, which occasionally have to be refilled).
Not to mention they lost most of their higher paying jobs, and $100M in tax revenue in the closure.
Part of the problem is the sunsetting on the Federal Economic Development District status, making it much harder to get an EDC registration, which bumped the tax rate in the area considerably. This mostly has to do with the necessity of working in the context of the university in order to obtain status these days, since the federal government is really wanting to get their hands on Ocwen (William C. Erby's company) and other companies monies, despite previous federal approval.
Practically speaking, I don't know how to reasonably deal with the corruption there (or , any more than I do with the corruption present in Mexico), short of them electing statehood. I think that would only help some, look at the education system in California, and the parks department hiding money trying to pretend it needed more or would shut down the parks, etc., for examples where states have similar problems, despite being under the statehood umbrella.
Hey, now that the systemd nutters have broken Linux we can go back to calling Unix Unix instead of *nix.
At least one trademarked Unix uses a launch-on-demand-based init daemon, so it's not clear that the use of systemd-the-daemon is sufficient to make Linux not be a Un*x. Maybe systemd-the-software-bundle is sufficient.
It changes the user space sufficiently that the historical text configuration files for logging and other facilities no longer function compatibly with the VSC test suite. If those were changed back, or the test suite was somehow made independent of configuration variances for the purposes of testing, I might agree with you, but as it is, there is no way a systemd based system would pass VSC, and would also likely fail VSX, and the parts of the VSTH and VSRT testing, based on the posix_spawn implementation and XPG/4 compliance.
What's a "Unix"?
Is it a system based on AT&T code? If so, how much AT&T code has to still be in it.
Yes. Legally, all AT&T derived systems are grandfathered in as part of the License agreement which exclusively licensed the trademark to The Open Group for relicensing to third parties. For example, the transferrable SVR3 and SVR4 source licenses I own as a result of being sold surplus Class C computing equipment by Weber State University under their blanket source licenses mean my port of SVR3 to the Amiga I did for giggles, is legally UNIX.
Is it a system that passes the Single UNIX Specification test suite and whose supplier is thus allowed to license the "Unix" trademark?
Only if they subsequently license the trademark. If so, then it's UNIX. If they don't license the trademark, even if it passes the tests (which must also be licensed from The Open Group), or if they fail to register a compliance statement, and have it certified, it's not UNIX. Mac OS X, for example, is UNIX. iOS on the iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone isn't UNIX -- and can't be; certain required interfaces are conditionally compiled out, as a space saving measure, and additional user space commands are not compiled for the publicly released versions.
Is it a system with a Unix-compatible API?
No. A system with a Unix-compatible API can pass the VSX, VSTH, and VSRT test suites, but unless the user space is there, it can't pass the VSC test suite, nor can it pass the compilation environment test suite, which include ISO C certification of the compiler and libraries, as well as passing negative assertion tests for namespace pollution on the header files (Linux/glibc/glibc2 have serious header file problems; so do the *BSDs). Android can't pass because it fails on threading API compliance with the VSTH test, partly because of the "Bionic" libc implementation having deficiencies (it would take a small amount of work to pass the VSX tests in that regard, but threads are the biggie).
No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.
Quote correct. Thing is someone has to pay for the upfront cost of burying the cables and it is much more expensive. Where I live stringing wires on poles costs in rough numbers something like $1 per linear foot. Burying the cable costs about $8 per linear foot. (this is semi-reliable info from family who worked in the business and would know) Getting the funds to do any sort of meaningful program of burying wires would likely involve a rate increase which tends to be as popular as a lead filled life preserver.
In the U.S. Virgin Islands, every hurricane season, the U.S. federal government provides funds to bury the power lines that were knocked down, so it doesn't happen again. And every year, the local government official put 7/8 of the $ in their pockets, and balance the wires back up on the poles again in preparation for the same payday the next year. Locally it's a really well known scam.
Practically speaking, we should have utility tunnels under the roadways, to solve the problem, once and for all. The major cost in burying is digging and repair, which you can deal with exactly once, and not have to dig ever again, if you have room in the tunnels for the next water main, gas main, or sewer line you want to run, and an access in the tunnel side through a shunt to get longer replacement/new pipes down there. That's just a big hole adjacent to a small section of the tunnel, with access doors up top. The costs for burying then drastically drop.
How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefox?
I mean, seriously, help me out here?
And, given his dislike for America
I've seen this from various nutballs like yourself and I'm curious. Why do you think he ran for President? Because he was actively trying to sabotage the country? With what motive?
He answered this question on August 6, 2008 in Elkhart, Indiana during the 2008 campaign, when he was asked the question by a 7 year old girl, and couldn't deflect her into talking about oil prices. He said: “America is , uh, is no longer, uh what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children.”
He failed to indicate what date "what it once was" applied to.
Here's the youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I would say that he's been about as successful at this as he has been in keeping his campaign promises to get us out of the two foreign wars, start no new foreign wars, and close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which he promised to do in the first 90 days of his presidency. In other words, not very successful.
Not that anyone is actually keeping score, but...
Other campaign promises not kept:
- end tax deductions for companies that offshore
- Introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill in my first year in office
- No signing statements to nullify instructions from Congress
- No family making less than $250K will see "any form of tax increase" (ACA, we're looking at you...)
- term limit the DNI (Director National Intelligence)
- call for and support a human mission to the moon by 2020
- tax deduction for artists
- tax incentive for new farmers
- windfall profits tax on oil comanies (we could use this one about right now...)
- limit subsidies for agribusiness
- antimonopoly laws strengthened to favor independent farmers
- Scholarships to recruit new teachers
- Restrict warrantless wiretaps
- public option for the National Health Insurance Exchange
- Restore superfund so polluters have to pay to clean up their messes
- Same sex adoption equality (still state by state, and not in most states)
- require companies to disclose personal information breaches
- ban racial profiling by federal agencies
- roll back earmarks to 1994 levels
- national catastrophe insurance reserve for things like a future Katrina
- allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms (sister is losing her house over this one)
- work with Russia to step down nuclear defense postures (har har - that's working out)
- double federal funding for cancer research
- strengthen ADEA (Age Discrimination in Employment Act)
- low carbon fuel standard
- require 25% reneable by 2025 (guess it was based on Solyndra not being a scam)
- reinstate special envoy for the Americas
- global fissile materials production for weapons treaty
- global education fund to offer alternatives to jihadi schools
- international group to aid Iraqi refugees, including providing $2B in funding
- help resolve the Cyprus situation
- Sign Freedom Of Choice Act
- penalty free "hardship withdrawls" from retirement accounts
- annual "State of the Word" address
- all new vehicles to support flex-fuels by 2012
- health care reform to be negotiated in public, on CSPAN
- cap and trade system for carbon emissions to reduce global warming
- use revenue from above to support clean energy, environmental restoration (hard to do if there's no system, isn't it?)
- call for congressional leader consulting group on national security, and consult with them prior to major military action
- reduce the number of federal middle managers
- increase supply of affordable housing (Hi, San Francisco! Allow buildings over 4 stories without a zoning variance yet?)
- UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
- pay for national service plan without increasing deficit
- Increase federal minimum wage to $9.50/hour
- re
Most of the interesting problems are no longer "embarrassingly parallel". All the rest of them, if we care about getting them solved faster, we'll throw hardware at them to the degree we care about getting the result faster.
You yeard it here first! Predicting the weather is no longer interesting.
Predicting the weather is interesting, it's just substantially less interesting than it used to be back when all we had was The Farmer's Almanac. The incremental value in funding a much larger supercomputer *now*, rather than having you slowly expand an existing one over time, and as budget allows, is fairly negligible.
Can you point to a paper where a new, much faster system (one that requires putting the U.S. back in the "#1 super computer" position) is needed?
How about you find out who the top 5 systems are, and run that model on their systems instead, to see whether it's going to be sufficiently better than the current system to merit investing in the equipment in a U.S. facility, because it will have that much value to have a U.S. facility dedicated to the task?
Does it calculate the Fibbonaci sequence faster?
If not, then who the hell cares who has the most hardware to throw at a "throw hardware at it problem"?
Most of the interesting problems are no longer "embarrassingly parallel". All the rest of them, if we care about getting them solved faster, we'll throw hardware at them to the degree we care about getting the result faster.
If you put in some amount of hardware, and then putting in 10x that much hardware doesn't solve the problem faster, then you computer is not "more super".
Still subject to traffic analysis.
Most of the information they want in the first place is "who is talking to who when and for how long", which is still in the clear, even if there is end to end encryption. So most of the important data, what government agencies in the news have called "Just Metadata", is still capable of being intercepted (and is).
Once they have an associative pattern that they think indicates a crony in an illegal activity, *THEN* they target the content of the conversation. In this particular case, it should be possible to MITM the conversation as well, with a combined order for keys and gag order, the same as is done to compromise SSL conversations right now, by forcing the CA to sign new certs for the requesting agency, and using them to proxy the conversation.
In other words, this is not a magic "big win" for privacy.
apples and oranges my friend, apples and oranges. your comparing mass scale systems, vs small scale systems.
Enviromental damage does happen from one coal burning stove, but millions.
Special Exceptions for Special Cases, and Edge uses that can't be properly addressed, but they are so small in scope they don't make a diffrence.
Even millions of stoves are nothing, compared to this: http://rsta.royalsocietypublis...
Maybe they determined that "taxing" you for an annual inspection for personal cars went to far and stopped it, more then 20 years ago? (i don't recall ever having to have the cars inspected and i have been driving for 25 years in ontario).
Please come back and post some more information on Ontario, a place you clearly don't know anything about.
PS.
This map indicates that a large number of states don't have annual inspections as well, does that mean they don't care about you as well?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_United_States
Yes. It does.
It means all they care about is collecting registration fees, and they smog test fees, and while they are generally named "The Department of Public Safety", they really don't give a crap about public safety, if they let you drive around with worn-out brakes, misaligned headlights, cracked windshields within the drivers field of view, and all the other things they wouldn't let you get away with in 17 U.S. states.
In point of fact, they are doing the minimum necessary work to be able to collect the maximum amount of fees,
Here's the Utah version of the Vehicle inspection manual for "PASSENGER VEHICLE AND LIGHT DUTY TRUCK"; notice that you must pass a 78 point inspection (minimum; some vehicles require more points of inspection). Inspections can take several hours, as they examine your gearbox and motor mounts, and run alignment leveling tests, rocker arm tests, and so on:
http://publicsafety.utah.gov/s...
The point of this is to make sure that your vehicle is safe to be on the road, and you aren't going to kill someone due to an equipment failure.
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Personally, I don't see *why*, if an inspection *should* be required in Toronto for someone to operate their private vehicle on behalf of Uber, that some dumb-ass felt that as long as Uber wasn't involved, it's perfectly fine for you to pack your grandmother and three kids into a car that *wasn't* inspected.
This dual standard for "passengers" vs. "passengers" speaks volumes about them not actually giving a damn about actual safety as they do about revenue collection.
17 states require annual or biennial inspections
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
So, I'll flat out say to you: bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
I was mistaken; it's been a long time since I was up there. It appears that the laws have been relaxed in most Canadian provinces, other than New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, which still have hard requirements on safety inspections because they care about their citizens safety. I'm sorry your government in Ontario no longer cares.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
Inspections?
"increased risk to passenger safety – no mechanical vehicle inspections, lack of driver training"
This claim is at least specious.
Yearly vehicle safety inspections are required in Ontario for regular cars, just like in Utah. Pretty much every snow state has similar requirements (except California, because what they care about is revenue, not actual public safety).
Buy the kid a used Commodore64
http://popular.ebay.com/comput...
Is this price parity before or after absorbing massive subsidies from taxpayers and electricty consumers? If it is after, then the idea is not scalable.
After. Yes, it includes the subsidies being renewed.
The Deutsche Bank's projection assumes that there will be three things happening, which are unlikely:
(1) It assumes that the door-to-door sales model of whatever solar technology happens to be cheapest on the Thursday they ring your doorbell will result in substantial cost savings which can then be kept back from the consumer as additional profit
(2) It assumes that the utility companies aren't installing all those "smart meters" so that they can tariff at differential metering rates - in other words, pay you less for the electricity than what they sell it to you at - as they are already doing in some markets (i.e. they pay you the wholesale spot market price, but charge you the retail peak price already in some markets
(3) It assumes the ITC (Investment Tax Credit), which is set to phase from 30% to 10% by the end of 2016, will be renewed so that you are paying a subsidized price for the hardware (actually, that money would go to Vivint, not the home owner, since Vivint continues to own the solar system themselves, and merely sells the electricity to the customer on a monthly basis; as soon as the phase out hits, look for a price hike)
So Deutsche Bank gave them a buy rating, but Citigroup gave them a neutral rating, and while the stock at IPO opened at $17.01 on initial trading on October first, it's now mid-November, and they're down to $11.25 a share, which is a drop in investment value of just under 34%; call it losing a third of its value.
I think I'm with Citigroup on this one; I think Deutsche Bank is overly optimistic in assuming that the ITC won't sunset on schedule, and I think they are optimistic about people being OK effectively just switching power companies, and not owning - or getting the tax benefits from - the solar themselves.
It was a lawsuit claiming Google broke a law.
Not it was not. No one claimed Google broke any law, and the government was not on either side of the case. This was a civil case, where someone thought Google was treating them unfairly.
Are you kidding?!? It was specifically a claim that Google broke a law - 15 U.S.C. 1–7 by not ranking using the same criteria as Bing and Yahoo (which is ridiculous anyway, since Yahoo is "powered by Bing!" so of course it has the same rankings).
You can read more about the Sherman Antitrust Act here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
the US has the worst healthcare system of any developed nation, and it is privately run.
And yet, where do people want to be treated when they contract Ebola? What nations have active R&D for an Ebola vaccine? A Malaria vaccine? And in India, who actually uses the state run healthcare when private is an option? And in the U.K., how do you skip the NHS wait queue for something like hernia surgery? And in Canada, where do you go when the government health care system refuses to fix your knee because you're a computer programmer, and having a working knee is not necessary to your job function?
I guess there is room for a *little* privatization...