Someone posted that the Austrians don't have a rule against wearing hats in license photos - the hold up was they wanted a psych evaluation on the guy to determine he wasn't nuts.
If wearing a hat is against the rules it should be against the rules for everyone. If it's a stupid rule, then it can be changed, but it shouldn't be applied arbitrarily. If yo've got a mental illness that prevents you from taking off your hat, and you find yourself in situations where you need to take off your hat, then you need to be treated for it. And yes, that includes the mental illness of religion.
There was a case here where muslim women didn't want to take off their head scarves so they could be identified at government offices (registry, health card, whatever). These aren't the hair covering kind, but the looking-out-a-little-slit kind. The government announced a policy that anyone wishing to receive government services would have to make his or her face visible for identification, including muslim women.
Brain to body size ratio does correlate with intelligence, just not particularly well for the relatively small variations seen in humans. Surface area does too, with certain constraints.
"2) money you transfer to anyone in the world is instantaneous, in as little as an hour you can be 100% sure that you have received bitcoins that can never be taken away from you or reversed in any way."
As a buyer, THAT sounds just fantastic. Count ME in.
Hm. I wonder if you could pay for an FPGA dev kit by putting it to work mining bit coins, before the bottom fell out? You'd wind up with a nice toy for free.
A country's currency is backed by the country itself. There is something real behind it.
Gold is a shiny metal. If you like shiny metal, by all means, buy it up. You'd be insane to buy significant quantities of gold at the current price, which is far above the level at which shiny metal is normally valued.
Why do Blackberries need to be rebooted so often anyway? Apple seems to have figured out that people want their phones to NOT act like a poorly maintained Windows computer. My iPhone gets rebooted when there's an OS update. Most of the people I know with Android phones look at you blankly when you ask if they've ever rebooted their phones.
Message indicator light.
- pop ups are annoying, why Apple hasn't realized this, I don't know.
They have. The next version of the OS adresses it. Free update to everybody with an iPhone newer than about two years.
Blackberry messenger. - as long as your contacts also use it, it's great.
Fantastic. Texting-type apps on iOS or Android do the same thing but anybody can use them. Even Blackberry users. Or there are MSN/Yahoo/Whatever IM clients that you can even talk to people without phones on!
Well, to start with we have a population that's half of the smallest of those, and even smaller than that for most of them. Spain is quite a bit bigger than Canada, and an industrialized country, but it doesn't have a synonymous car brand either. Also, we made an agreement with the US not to compete on cars, but instead to share Ford, GM and Chrysler.
I guess a better question would be why a country with such a tiny population seems to so consistently play ball with such bigger countries?
Sure you can. You just have to be competent with a screwdriver.
Of course, of the tens of millions of iPhones sold, none of them seems to ever NEED it's battery pulled.
I once heard a Blackberry user say he'd never get an iPhone because you couldn't even pull the battery. He got mad and walked away before I finished laughing.
What you linked to isn't exactly a five gallon bucked. And what do you do about it when it's full? And remember that in the space of your 32 foot boat a third world poor urban apartment dweller would probably be living with his family of... 10 maybe? With constant use of the facilities. Now multiply that by however many apartments you have in the building, and however many buildings you have in a neighborhood, etc. And then there's compliance - my PhD candidate in Physics housemate in grad school was too lazy to compost properly (even though she was really excited about it) to the point where I had to forbid composting. SOMEONE's neighbour is going to screw it up, with nasty results.
Another problem few people think of - my city started a great initiative to get compost bins into everyone's hands. Great! But what do you do with the compost? If you're just composting kitchen waste you might be okay but if you're composting ALL your organic waste you're going to have a problem - most city dwellers use far more organic material than they have the space to produce, which means you're going to have excess compost. It has to be collected. It's valuable fertilizer, but you have to have a transport plan in place to get it to where it's needed.
I'm not saying composting toilets are the wrong way to go, but for a dense urban environment the 5 gallon bucket probably isn't the ideal approach. A community toilet might be better, with a plan including storage while the stuff is composting, and distribution and/or transport of the end product. There are lots of details there to be hammered out, and some trials to run. Slightly more complicated than "here's a bucket."
The summary specifically mentions urban areas. Downstream of your water supply probably isn't downstream of your neighbour's in a city. So you need some innovation to make sure it doesn't leak. Just digging a hole and covering it up when it's full isn't sustainable in a city. You need some way of getting the waste outside city limits where there's more space for storage or to a central location for treatment. Either of those solutions could use some development to make a system that's efficient and reasonably priced.
A better question: who's better, the rich man who gives money to charity, takes tax breaks because of it, and makes sure everyone knows so he gets PR for himself and his company, increasing sales (i.e. the usual corporate "sponsorship" style charity) or the guy who gives money or volunteers and doesn't tell anyone?
It seems to have become fashionable to put your volunteer experience on your resume, whether it's relevant to the job you're applying to or not. Or rather, it's become fashionable to volunteer SO you can put it on your resume (see? I'm a good person!). I volunteer, but I never put it on my resume unless it's relevant.
You know taxes have to be paid right? As online commerce increases it will have to be taxed, one way or another. So there are three choices - online sellers collect the appropriate state sales taxes, state sales taxes are replaced by something else (income tax increases maybe) or the federal government implements a federal sales tax.
Federal sales taxes work just fine in most of the western world, but I can see Americans (not to mention individual states) getting pretty upset over that idea.
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Heretic! Burn him! I mean, boil him!
Pastafarianism is the most fun... um, most enlightening and truthful religion I have ever encountered.
Someone posted that the Austrians don't have a rule against wearing hats in license photos - the hold up was they wanted a psych evaluation on the guy to determine he wasn't nuts.
If wearing a hat is against the rules it should be against the rules for everyone. If it's a stupid rule, then it can be changed, but it shouldn't be applied arbitrarily. If yo've got a mental illness that prevents you from taking off your hat, and you find yourself in situations where you need to take off your hat, then you need to be treated for it. And yes, that includes the mental illness of religion.
There was a case here where muslim women didn't want to take off their head scarves so they could be identified at government offices (registry, health card, whatever). These aren't the hair covering kind, but the looking-out-a-little-slit kind. The government announced a policy that anyone wishing to receive government services would have to make his or her face visible for identification, including muslim women.
Brain to body size ratio does correlate with intelligence, just not particularly well for the relatively small variations seen in humans. Surface area does too, with certain constraints.
I wonder how much cheering the huge line of people behind her did when the cop finally arrested her?
"2) money you transfer to anyone in the world is instantaneous, in as little as an hour you can be 100% sure that you have received bitcoins that can never be taken away from you or reversed in any way."
As a buyer, THAT sounds just fantastic. Count ME in.
Hm. I wonder if you could pay for an FPGA dev kit by putting it to work mining bit coins, before the bottom fell out? You'd wind up with a nice toy for free.
A country's currency is backed by the country itself. There is something real behind it.
Gold is a shiny metal. If you like shiny metal, by all means, buy it up. You'd be insane to buy significant quantities of gold at the current price, which is far above the level at which shiny metal is normally valued.
I'm so glad I chose a profession where I'm treated like a professional.
Why do Blackberries need to be rebooted so often anyway? Apple seems to have figured out that people want their phones to NOT act like a poorly maintained Windows computer. My iPhone gets rebooted when there's an OS update. Most of the people I know with Android phones look at you blankly when you ask if they've ever rebooted their phones.
They have. The next version of the OS adresses it. Free update to everybody with an iPhone newer than about two years.
Fantastic. Texting-type apps on iOS or Android do the same thing but anybody can use them. Even Blackberry users. Or there are MSN/Yahoo/Whatever IM clients that you can even talk to people without phones on!
Very true. The only major corporations we bail out are the ones "synonymous" with the US... like GM.
Well, to start with we have a population that's half of the smallest of those, and even smaller than that for most of them. Spain is quite a bit bigger than Canada, and an industrialized country, but it doesn't have a synonymous car brand either. Also, we made an agreement with the US not to compete on cars, but instead to share Ford, GM and Chrysler.
I guess a better question would be why a country with such a tiny population seems to so consistently play ball with such bigger countries?
Hey, they could probably make some actual profit just by making a BBM app for iOS and Android.
How about a tablet with an e-mail client?
Canada is a country in the Americas.
Sure you can. You just have to be competent with a screwdriver.
Of course, of the tens of millions of iPhones sold, none of them seems to ever NEED it's battery pulled.
I once heard a Blackberry user say he'd never get an iPhone because you couldn't even pull the battery. He got mad and walked away before I finished laughing.
What you linked to isn't exactly a five gallon bucked. And what do you do about it when it's full? And remember that in the space of your 32 foot boat a third world poor urban apartment dweller would probably be living with his family of... 10 maybe? With constant use of the facilities. Now multiply that by however many apartments you have in the building, and however many buildings you have in a neighborhood, etc. And then there's compliance - my PhD candidate in Physics housemate in grad school was too lazy to compost properly (even though she was really excited about it) to the point where I had to forbid composting. SOMEONE's neighbour is going to screw it up, with nasty results.
Another problem few people think of - my city started a great initiative to get compost bins into everyone's hands. Great! But what do you do with the compost? If you're just composting kitchen waste you might be okay but if you're composting ALL your organic waste you're going to have a problem - most city dwellers use far more organic material than they have the space to produce, which means you're going to have excess compost. It has to be collected. It's valuable fertilizer, but you have to have a transport plan in place to get it to where it's needed.
I'm not saying composting toilets are the wrong way to go, but for a dense urban environment the 5 gallon bucket probably isn't the ideal approach. A community toilet might be better, with a plan including storage while the stuff is composting, and distribution and/or transport of the end product. There are lots of details there to be hammered out, and some trials to run. Slightly more complicated than "here's a bucket."
Tough to pull off in an apartment.
He probably is. The solution is very likely to be something like that, rather than a completely new idea.
The summary specifically mentions urban areas. Downstream of your water supply probably isn't downstream of your neighbour's in a city. So you need some innovation to make sure it doesn't leak. Just digging a hole and covering it up when it's full isn't sustainable in a city. You need some way of getting the waste outside city limits where there's more space for storage or to a central location for treatment. Either of those solutions could use some development to make a system that's efficient and reasonably priced.
You're sort of conflating two things.
A better question: who's better, the rich man who gives money to charity, takes tax breaks because of it, and makes sure everyone knows so he gets PR for himself and his company, increasing sales (i.e. the usual corporate "sponsorship" style charity) or the guy who gives money or volunteers and doesn't tell anyone?
It seems to have become fashionable to put your volunteer experience on your resume, whether it's relevant to the job you're applying to or not. Or rather, it's become fashionable to volunteer SO you can put it on your resume (see? I'm a good person!). I volunteer, but I never put it on my resume unless it's relevant.
Congratulations, you've just described Canada's harmonized sales tax system, and probably the European VAT system.
Canada's started at 7% and is now at 5%. In Europe it can range as high as 30% (IIRC). Australia has a federal tax too, but I don't know the rate.
Curiously, the federal governments of all of those are smaller on a budget/capita basis than that of the US. Huh.
What? Sales taxes are progressive - the more stuff you buy, the more you pay. Especially so when you exempt necessities like food.
You know taxes have to be paid right? As online commerce increases it will have to be taxed, one way or another. So there are three choices - online sellers collect the appropriate state sales taxes, state sales taxes are replaced by something else (income tax increases maybe) or the federal government implements a federal sales tax.
Federal sales taxes work just fine in most of the western world, but I can see Americans (not to mention individual states) getting pretty upset over that idea.