Thought of another- Star Trek style communicator, i.e. cell/sat phones.
Space Cadet and Between Planets, both by RAH in the '50s, included personal phones that looked a lot like a cell-phone as envisioned in the '50s - portable, capable of sending and receiving anywhere within range of a tower, fit in a pocket, etc...
While it is not impossible that an extinction level event almost happened, I'd like to see a bit more evidence before panicking.
Why would you bother panicking in any case?
Sure, if it might happen in the next couple years, might be worth some panic. Last year's near miss? Not even worth a "whew, we dodged that bullet!"....
Note also that it's unlikely that there will EVER be more evidence. This was a sighting from one observatory over 100 years ago. It's moderately unlikely that anyone else noticed it at the time, and even more unlikely that we'll ever find any of these rocks and positively identify them as part of that swarm (after all, if they passed within a few hundred miles of Earth, the entire swarm would've been scattered upon departure).
If rich corporations and individuals didn't spend so much time and money on tax avoidance measures, the tax laws could be dramatically reduced in complexity.
If the tax laws were dramatically reduced in complexity, rich corporations and individuals would be UNABLE to spend time and money on tax avoidance.
Face it, no loopholes means no avoidance. "You earned $50 million this year - send us $10 million" is pretty hard to argue with.
On the other hand, seven million pages of laws including 14 million exceptions to "you earned" and/or "send us" leaves a lot of room for paying tax lawyers lots to save lots.
While a flat tax is an impossible ideal, simplifying the tax codes to the point where the average American could read the entire tax code of the USA in a weekend would eliminate virtually the entire "tax avoidance" issue, as well we put a lot of creative tax lawyers/accountants out of business.
And end up saving everyone money, while giving the government more to play with - after all, they'd not need so many IRS people to handle a 50-page tax code as they do to investigate the people who snake around in the seven million page tax code....
It can be argued it wasn't murder as it is war time.
Wrong guess,minus five.
No declaration of war, so no war.
The Constitution and the laws of the USA give the government a certain amount of latitude during time of declared war. Alas, that latitude doesn't apply just because we're fighting someone - it has to have the declaration of war to go with it.
And no, we don't have one with Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Al-Qaeda in general.
In any case, whatsisname was a US citizen, and absent him actually shooting at our guys at the moment, isn't considered fair game for an assassination. A trial (in absentia, even) for treason, followed by assassination, maybe. A drone-strike out of the blue, no.
I'm surprised space solar power doesn't get pushed more heavily, though I'll give you 1 guess as to why: no one in coal, oil or gas would want to hear about it.
Nothing to do with oil/coal/gas industries, your favorite conspiracy theory aside. The economics just don't work. And won't until we can bring in the major structural components for same from asteroids or the moon.
I mean, a 100 ton launch payload sounds very much like the amounts one might want to launch to put collectors into geostationary (or I guess maybe even Earth-Sun Lagrangian) orbits.
A 100 ton launchh payload will put about 50 tons into geosynch, a bit less into a lagrange point. At a cost of about $500 million, give or take (SpaceX is threatening to bring that cost down by a lot, but they're not capable of doing it yet, noone else is even in the timezone).
Assuming ~ 5 kg per square meter for solar cells plus structure (which is really quite a lowball figure), and 400W / m^2 for same (which is rather high right now), your launch (at a cost of ~$500 million) will put a 4MW power plant into orbit at a cost of ~$125 per Watt.
Since diesel generators plus fuel tankage for same come to under $1 per watt, I don't think coal/oil/gas will feel threatened by SPS's anytime soon.
Seriously, you want SPS's, you need factories on the moon to manufacture the majority of the components (like, 99.9%+ by mass of them), plus the ability to do large-scale launches from the moon to earth.
Which translates to a major industrial infrastructure in Earth orbit, on the moon, possibly at L4 and L5, possibly out into the asteroid belts.
Which, alas, we'll never have, since that requires a degree of longterm planning that is impractical in a modern society.
Spending tens of trillions of dollars for the benefit of our great-grandchildren isn't something we're prepared to do - we'd rather rob them of tens of trillions for our own benefit and let them inherit the cost of paying our benefits off.
A nuclear bomb is a weapon specifically designed to blow up entire cities. There is no imaginable military target for which such a device could be considered effective or even suitable. US invested billions of dollars employing more than 150.000 people for 7 years, to design and implement such an atrocity. And then they used it. Against civilians, of course, as was intended. Twice.
1) Both Nagasaki and Hiroshima had military industries, which were legitimate targets.
2) It's probably still not widely known that both Nagasaki and Hiroshima were removed from conventional bombing target lists at the beginning of the war (among other cities) specifically because they were suitable for evaluating the funtionality of atomic bombs, assuming such weapons could be built. So both those cities (and several others) were NOT bombed into ruin for four years.
3) And it's also not terribly widely known that BOTH atomic bombings combined caused fewer casualties than the conventional bombings of Tokyo did. In point of fact, there were individual fire-bombing raids on Tokyo that caused more casualties than either atomic bombing. And Tokyo suffered through rather more than two fire-bombing raids, as well as numerous conventional HE bombing raids.
4) Finally, it should be pointed out that the alternative to the atomic bombings of Japan was an invasion of Japan. Which was tentatively scheduled for later in 1945. Which was expected to cause rather more American casualties than we suffered in the rest of WW2 combined, as well as millions of Japanese casualties. Note that there were not millions of Japanese killed by the atomic bombings.
Again, when engaged in interstate commerce, it is a requirement of the seller to collect such sales taxes and remit them to the state.
Umm, no.
Actually, the seller isn't required to collect sales taxes on behalf of a State unless they have a physical presence in the State (a brick and mortar store, for instance).
This was settled by the Supremes quite a while back when States tried to get Sears to charge sales taxes on catalog orders.
I've heard that the Dutch wear clogs, the French eat snails, the Iris are drunk all the time, Swedish girls sleep with everyone, the Japanese likes schoolgirls and the Americans are very fat. Does anyone know anything about this?
(sorry, your question is kind of interesting, I just couldn't resist. "The Chinese" are not the same as some individuals or some organisation based in China who might or might not have done something at some point.)
Presumably, if you see a post saying something like "the Americans have the death penalty", you'll produce a similar response?
Yes, the context of the OP was very clearly the Chinese government (though it's true he didn't bother to identify which bureau in the Chinese government he was talking about).
That said, some Dutch do wear clogs, the French do eat snails, the Iris[h] are drunk all the time (except when they're fighting - they're only drunk some of the time when they fight), etc, etc, etc...
They haven't net created job but have assuredly reduced job losses. The best estimate, is
If they've "assuredly" reduced job losses, perhaps we wouldn't have to "estimate" how many were so saved.
Alas, we can't do reproducable science here to find out - there's no way to "stimulate" the economy and "not stimulate" the same economy to see what really happens.
That said, last I looked at the estimates for "jobs saved", almost all of them were state government jobs that wouldn't have been downsized anyway - the States would have just raised taxes or borrowed more to pay for them.
U.S. carriers have 538 MHz of spectrum dedicated to mobile data and voice and are only using 192 MHz, the two analysts said in a report released Sept. 22.
That strikes me as roughly 2.5x, not 24.
It would strike me that way if that's what the article said. Alas, it doesn't.
What the article said is that smartphones USE 24 times as much as dumbphones. And tablets USE 120 times as much as dumbphones.
TFA doesn't discuss how much more is needed, really. It implies we need a great deal more, but we'd really need to know the fraction of the users that have smartphones and tablets already to be able to estimate exactly how much more bandwidth might be needed.
It will almost certainly be more than 2.5x, since TFA said we have enough, but it's misallocated.
It will also almost certainly be less than 24x, since a significant fraction are already using smartphones.
It is faintly possible it will be as much as 120x, since tablet takeup isn't nearly as high as smartphone, but, on the other hand, fewer of us actually want/need tablets....
They sound about right. For reference, the total population of the U.S. is ~300 million. Despite decades of social programs we have not been able to get the poverty rate below about 15%.
Umm, we haven't gotten the poverty rate below 15% because we redefine poverty upwards fairly regularly. Today's poverty isn't the poverty of 1940. Or even of 1980.
They sound fairly reasonable. Note that the definition of "poverty" varies from country to country. and even from State to State in the USA. In the USA, in general, the poverty line is 300% of the cost of food for a family (with government assistance such as Food Stamps NOT counted as part of the income).
Note that if you are in poverty in the USA, the whole health insurance issue is meaningless sound, since you're covered by Medicaid (assuming you're under 65 - if you're over 65, you're covered by Medicare), not by private insurance.
Do you have cancer and don't have insurance? You're screwed.
MY cancer was diagnosed during a period when I was uninsured.
When it reached the point that treatment was required, my doctor told me to go to the Emergency Room RIGHT NOW, then called the ER, told them I was coming, and told them to check me in immediately.
Long story short, my cancer was treated. The hospital sent me bills. I paid what I could, and they continued sending them (and I continued paying) until they stopped - I don't know why they stopped, since by my calculations, I'd not yet paid the full amount owed.
So, no, having no insurance doesn't mean you automatically don't get treated for things that aren't immediate problems.
Speaking of pipe dreams, explain why no one in France loses their house due to medical bankruptcies.
Alas for your argument, no one in the USA loses their house due to medical bankruptcies (or any other kind of bankruptcy), since homes are one of the protected assets (along with a man's tools - yes, a bankruptcy court can't take your tools away from you) in a bankruptcy.
That number is manufactured by assuming all sorts of impossible things, such as zero economic growth, etcetera.
Actually, last I checked, that number is manufactured by assuming that Medicare must meet the same standards as a private pension does in terms of money set aside to pay for the eventual payout.
Medicare, if it were a private pension, would have most of its upper management under indictment by the Federal Government for flouting laws governing that sort of thing.
Fortunately for Medicare, the government can ignore its own rules, and just increase taxes as needed to make things work out in the end....
There are absolutely general-access Federal highways which are patrolled by Federal law enforcement. A few in particular around Washington, D.C. (e.g., the Baltimore/Washington Parkway and the George Washington Parkway) When you get a ticket one one of those, it's issued by the US Park Police, and you go to Federal court. (I know from personal experience).
This is a special case necessitated by the fact that the District of Columbia is not part of any State.
We need to implement separation between church and state, between corporation and state and between organized affiliation and state.
How can you have separation between corporation and state when corporations are inventions of the state?
Before governments started giving special privileges to businesses it wished to encourage, there was no such thing as a corporation.
And since a corporation is an entity that was granted special privileges by the government, how can you reasonably expect it to be "separated" from the government?
Good! Great! We need more people to opt out of the system.
Especially when they think they're proving how smart they are by doing so.
Note, by the by, that equating "intelligence" with "responsibility" isn't necessarily valid. And Responsibility is far more important than intelligence in voting
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I went to a "quality local bookstore" instead of B&N or BAM, they didn't have the book I was looking for.
So I asked them if they could order it for me. They said yes...
Just as soon as they had orders for 30 copies, they'd get the book, and let me know....
Since then, I deal with bookstores that can sell me what I want, when I want it. B&N, BAM, Amazon, whichever is closest to hand when I need a book.
Space Cadet and Between Planets, both by RAH in the '50s, included personal phones that looked a lot like a cell-phone as envisioned in the '50s - portable, capable of sending and receiving anywhere within range of a tower, fit in a pocket, etc...
Why would you bother panicking in any case?
Sure, if it might happen in the next couple years, might be worth some panic. Last year's near miss? Not even worth a "whew, we dodged that bullet!"....
Note also that it's unlikely that there will EVER be more evidence. This was a sighting from one observatory over 100 years ago. It's moderately unlikely that anyone else noticed it at the time, and even more unlikely that we'll ever find any of these rocks and positively identify them as part of that swarm (after all, if they passed within a few hundred miles of Earth, the entire swarm would've been scattered upon departure).
If the tax laws were dramatically reduced in complexity, rich corporations and individuals would be UNABLE to spend time and money on tax avoidance.
Face it, no loopholes means no avoidance. "You earned $50 million this year - send us $10 million" is pretty hard to argue with.
On the other hand, seven million pages of laws including 14 million exceptions to "you earned" and/or "send us" leaves a lot of room for paying tax lawyers lots to save lots.
While a flat tax is an impossible ideal, simplifying the tax codes to the point where the average American could read the entire tax code of the USA in a weekend would eliminate virtually the entire "tax avoidance" issue, as well we put a lot of creative tax lawyers/accountants out of business.
And end up saving everyone money, while giving the government more to play with - after all, they'd not need so many IRS people to handle a 50-page tax code as they do to investigate the people who snake around in the seven million page tax code....
Wrong guess,minus five.
No declaration of war, so no war.
The Constitution and the laws of the USA give the government a certain amount of latitude during time of declared war. Alas, that latitude doesn't apply just because we're fighting someone - it has to have the declaration of war to go with it.
And no, we don't have one with Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Al-Qaeda in general.
In any case, whatsisname was a US citizen, and absent him actually shooting at our guys at the moment, isn't considered fair game for an assassination. A trial (in absentia, even) for treason, followed by assassination, maybe. A drone-strike out of the blue, no.
Might want to read a bit more history. Specifically, the parts about Andrew Jackson's Presidency and interaction with the Supremes.
Nothing to do with oil/coal/gas industries, your favorite conspiracy theory aside. The economics just don't work. And won't until we can bring in the major structural components for same from asteroids or the moon.
A 100 ton launchh payload will put about 50 tons into geosynch, a bit less into a lagrange point. At a cost of about $500 million, give or take (SpaceX is threatening to bring that cost down by a lot, but they're not capable of doing it yet, noone else is even in the timezone).
Assuming ~ 5 kg per square meter for solar cells plus structure (which is really quite a lowball figure), and 400W / m^2 for same (which is rather high right now), your launch (at a cost of ~$500 million) will put a 4MW power plant into orbit at a cost of ~$125 per Watt.
Since diesel generators plus fuel tankage for same come to under $1 per watt, I don't think coal/oil/gas will feel threatened by SPS's anytime soon.
Seriously, you want SPS's, you need factories on the moon to manufacture the majority of the components (like, 99.9%+ by mass of them), plus the ability to do large-scale launches from the moon to earth.
Which translates to a major industrial infrastructure in Earth orbit, on the moon, possibly at L4 and L5, possibly out into the asteroid belts.
Which, alas, we'll never have, since that requires a degree of longterm planning that is impractical in a modern society.
Spending tens of trillions of dollars for the benefit of our great-grandchildren isn't something we're prepared to do - we'd rather rob them of tens of trillions for our own benefit and let them inherit the cost of paying our benefits off.
A complete lack of [enforced] environmental protection laws?
A complete disregard for the value of any particular individual life (other than the aristocracy, of course)?
Oh, and slave labour as an expendable workforce....
1) Both Nagasaki and Hiroshima had military industries, which were legitimate targets.
2) It's probably still not widely known that both Nagasaki and Hiroshima were removed from conventional bombing target lists at the beginning of the war (among other cities) specifically because they were suitable for evaluating the funtionality of atomic bombs, assuming such weapons could be built. So both those cities (and several others) were NOT bombed into ruin for four years.
3) And it's also not terribly widely known that BOTH atomic bombings combined caused fewer casualties than the conventional bombings of Tokyo did. In point of fact, there were individual fire-bombing raids on Tokyo that caused more casualties than either atomic bombing. And Tokyo suffered through rather more than two fire-bombing raids, as well as numerous conventional HE bombing raids.
4) Finally, it should be pointed out that the alternative to the atomic bombings of Japan was an invasion of Japan. Which was tentatively scheduled for later in 1945. Which was expected to cause rather more American casualties than we suffered in the rest of WW2 combined, as well as millions of Japanese casualties. Note that there were not millions of Japanese killed by the atomic bombings.
Umm, no.
Actually, the seller isn't required to collect sales taxes on behalf of a State unless they have a physical presence in the State (a brick and mortar store, for instance).
This was settled by the Supremes quite a while back when States tried to get Sears to charge sales taxes on catalog orders.
Presumably, if you see a post saying something like "the Americans have the death penalty", you'll produce a similar response?
Yes, the context of the OP was very clearly the Chinese government (though it's true he didn't bother to identify which bureau in the Chinese government he was talking about).
That said, some Dutch do wear clogs, the French do eat snails, the Iris[h] are drunk all the time (except when they're fighting - they're only drunk some of the time when they fight), etc, etc, etc...
If they've "assuredly" reduced job losses, perhaps we wouldn't have to "estimate" how many were so saved.
Alas, we can't do reproducable science here to find out - there's no way to "stimulate" the economy and "not stimulate" the same economy to see what really happens.
That said, last I looked at the estimates for "jobs saved", almost all of them were state government jobs that wouldn't have been downsized anyway - the States would have just raised taxes or borrowed more to pay for them.
I've never driven a car whose gasoline engine crapped out after only seven years.
I don't even own a car that is less than 12 years old now, and all of them have engines that are in fine shape.
It would strike me that way if that's what the article said. Alas, it doesn't.
What the article said is that smartphones USE 24 times as much as dumbphones. And tablets USE 120 times as much as dumbphones.
TFA doesn't discuss how much more is needed, really. It implies we need a great deal more, but we'd really need to know the fraction of the users that have smartphones and tablets already to be able to estimate exactly how much more bandwidth might be needed.
It will almost certainly be more than 2.5x, since TFA said we have enough, but it's misallocated.
It will also almost certainly be less than 24x, since a significant fraction are already using smartphones.
It is faintly possible it will be as much as 120x, since tablet takeup isn't nearly as high as smartphone, but, on the other hand, fewer of us actually want/need tablets....
Where? And when?
Umm, no. The National Debt increased every year Clinton was in office. It hasn't gone down since before I was born.
Umm, we haven't gotten the poverty rate below 15% because we redefine poverty upwards fairly regularly. Today's poverty isn't the poverty of 1940. Or even of 1980.
They sound fairly reasonable. Note that the definition of "poverty" varies from country to country. and even from State to State in the USA. In the USA, in general, the poverty line is 300% of the cost of food for a family (with government assistance such as Food Stamps NOT counted as part of the income).
Note that if you are in poverty in the USA, the whole health insurance issue is meaningless sound, since you're covered by Medicaid (assuming you're under 65 - if you're over 65, you're covered by Medicare), not by private insurance.
MY cancer was diagnosed during a period when I was uninsured.
When it reached the point that treatment was required, my doctor told me to go to the Emergency Room RIGHT NOW, then called the ER, told them I was coming, and told them to check me in immediately.
Long story short, my cancer was treated. The hospital sent me bills. I paid what I could, and they continued sending them (and I continued paying) until they stopped - I don't know why they stopped, since by my calculations, I'd not yet paid the full amount owed.
So, no, having no insurance doesn't mean you automatically don't get treated for things that aren't immediate problems.
Alas for your argument, no one in the USA loses their house due to medical bankruptcies (or any other kind of bankruptcy), since homes are one of the protected assets (along with a man's tools - yes, a bankruptcy court can't take your tools away from you) in a bankruptcy.
Actually, last I checked, that number is manufactured by assuming that Medicare must meet the same standards as a private pension does in terms of money set aside to pay for the eventual payout.
Medicare, if it were a private pension, would have most of its upper management under indictment by the Federal Government for flouting laws governing that sort of thing.
Fortunately for Medicare, the government can ignore its own rules, and just increase taxes as needed to make things work out in the end....
This is a special case necessitated by the fact that the District of Columbia is not part of any State.
When they're ZERO INTEREST intragovernmental T-Bills, they don't count as savings.
This is essentially what they did. Except that they put IOU's under the mattress and spent the money.
How can you have separation between corporation and state when corporations are inventions of the state?
Before governments started giving special privileges to businesses it wished to encourage, there was no such thing as a corporation.
And since a corporation is an entity that was granted special privileges by the government, how can you reasonably expect it to be "separated" from the government?
Good! Great! We need more people to opt out of the system.
Especially when they think they're proving how smart they are by doing so.
Note, by the by, that equating "intelligence" with "responsibility" isn't necessarily valid. And Responsibility is far more important than intelligence in voting