Hmm... The link doesn't seem to work. Something about query timeouts. Below is the Bill text:
-- -- -- -- --
S 786 IS1S
(Star Print)
109th CONGRESS
1st Session
S. 786
To clarify the duties and responsibilities of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National
Weather Service, and for other purposes.
IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
April 14, 2005
Mr. SANTORUM introduced the following bill; which was read twice and
referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
A BILL
To clarify the duties and responsibilities of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National
Weather Service, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005'.
SEC. 2. DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION AND NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE.
(a) NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE- To protect life and property,
the Secretary of Commerce shall, through the National Weather Service,
be responsible for the following:
(1) The preparation and issuance of severe weather
forecasts and warnings designed for the protection of life and property
of the general public.
(2) The preparation and issuance of hydrometeorological guidance and core forecast information.
(3) The collection and exchange of meteorological, hydrological, climatic, and oceanographic data and information.
(4) The provision of reports, forecasts, warnings, and
other advice to the Secretary of Transportation and other persons
pursuant to section 44720 of title 49, United States Code.
(5) Such other duties and responsibilities as the Secretary shall specify.
(b) COMPETITION WITH PRIVATE SECTOR- The Secretary of
Commerce shall not provide, or assist other entities in providing, a
product or service (other than a product or service described in
subsection (a)(1)) that is or could be provided by the private sector
unless--
(1) the Secretary determines that the private sector is unwilling or unable to provide such product or service; or
(2) the United States Government is obligated to
provide such product or service under international aviation agreements
to provide meteorological services and exchange meteorological
information.
(c) ISSUANCE OF DATA, FORECASTS, AND WARNINGS-
(1) IN GENERAL- All data, information, guidance,
forecasts, and warnings received, collected, created, or prepared by
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the National
Weather Service shall, to the maximum extent practicable, be issued in
real time, and without delay for internal use, in a manner that ensures
that all members of the public have the opportunity for simultaneous
and equal access to such data, information, guidance, forecasts, and
warnings.
(2) MODE OF ISSUANCE- Data, information, guidance,
forecasts, and warnings shall be issued under paragraph (1) through a
set of data portals designed for volume access by commercial providers
of products or services and by such other mechanisms as the Secretary
of Commerce considers appropriate for purposes of that paragraph.
(d) PROHIBITION ON CERTAIN DISCLOSURES- An officer,
employee, or agent of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, the National Weather Service, or any other department
or agency of the United States who by reason of that status comes into
possession of any weather data, information, guida
Go with what works in the workplace not what some smelly zealot who has never even worked in IT thinks is the cool distro.
Gentoo or most any other distro -- given a good admin -- can function well doing just about any type of normal "business" task. But as we are all beginning (at varying rates) to realize is that the distro itself doesn't really matter. More and more the various configuration tools are being ported to many/all distros and what we are left with are basically just different choices of filesystem (and a few other small things;-)) that many users wouldn't notice.
The key thing, as you sort of note yourself, is make management happy. This is where Redhat/SuSE provide most of their value -- having someone to blame. Additionally, they do provide a sort of standard so that management can go hire someone who is an RHCE and be reasonably sure that that person can take care of the machines after their current admin decides to leave.
1. Give students mobile access to our databases of tens of thousands of vocabulary audio files while using the rating system to sort known versus unknown vocabulary.
2. Allow students to record and hear themselves speaking vocabulary and other exercises.
From TFA: WHEN you really stop to think about it, memory cards are a pretty delicate storage format for something as important as your digital photos.
I couldn't find it on their website, but I recently read an article in (I think) Popular Photography where they did some "stress testing" of memory cards. The results? most of the cards withstood submersion in water, drops, baked, frozen, and being run over by cars. As long as they could still be connected to a reader, the data was usually OK.
Contrast this with a hard-drive-based storage solutions which are comparatively extremely fragile. Now, this isn't to say that I'm not going to purchase a HD-based device for a month-long trip this summer, but the cards are vastly more durable, just not as big or as cheap/GB.
Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video
on
New Mac System Specs
·
· Score: 1
Heat Transfer Fluid which is mostly propylene glycol
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined propylene glycol to be "generally recognized as safe" for use in food, cosmetics, and medicines. Similar to ethylene glycol, propylene glycol affects the body's chemistry by increasing the amount of acid, potentially resulting in metabolic problems. However, larger amounts of the substance are needed to cause this effect. Eating or drinking very large amounts can result in death, while large amounts can result in nausea, convulsions, slurred speech, disorientation, and heart and kidney problems. Propylene glycol is considerably less toxic than ethylene glycol.
So, I wouldn't try to drain the cooling system by drinking it, but it shouldn't be that bad in comparison antifreeze.
4. No Endorsement and No derogatory use The Creative Archive content is provided to allow you to get creative with content, not for campaigning, soapboxing or to defame others! So don't use it to promote political, charitable, or other campaigning purposes and remember to treat others and their work in the way that you'd expect them to treat you and your work...with respect!
This license seems pretty decent except for this part. Who gets to decide what is derogatory or an endorsement?
For instance, lets say I am trying to raise money for a nonprofit program to get health care workers to poor women in rural Africa. As part of my fund-raising campaigning I do a screening of some BBC documentary from the archive on health care in rural Africa and ask people for donations. This seems like a pretty legitimate use of the material, but may prohibited by section #4.
Now, what if I had a link to this supposed documentary from my example organizations website. Would that be endorsement? I view it as public education of the plight of a certain people that I wish to help. It would aid my position for getting donations though.
As long as we can all still use Linux or other open-source software, what does it matter what the rest of the world does?
I for one want it to become common enough that it is shipped on most new computers. That way when my mother, aunt, friends, etc ask for tech support I can ssh in, do what needs to be done (including writing a script/patch/etc if needed), exit out and be on my merry way without having to fsck around with getting windows to "not crash randomly".
Id be even more happy having my family running remote thin-clients, but that just wouldn't work over their dial-up connections...
No biggie really. I love my 105 year old house on 2 acres in northern New Jersey. I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite.
Note 1: I said post 1940.
Note 2: I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite. That doesn't sound like suburbia
The suburban life that I have witnessed (growing up in south-central Pennsylvania) was a soul-sucking existence that had many features that didn't make sense. For example, there is the characature of a "porch" and "front door" that all of the suburban houses have, but are functionally useless since the porch is only 18 inches wide and the "porch/front door" complex is centered on a large lawn with no walkway to it. The real entrance is through the kitchen/garage side-door. So why does the "porch/front door" even exist? I suggest that its function is to make a not so nice house LOOK like a nice house, since they aren't even usable.
I currently choose to live in a modest apartment in an old building right at the center of a small town. Yeah, I hear trucks on the street all night, but I also can walk across the street to the grocery store, the hardware store, and the bank. 10 restaurants and bars are with 3 blocks (8min) walk, and I can walk 15min to work. The other benefit is that I see the same people every day on my walks to and from work and the various stores. In the 8 months I've been in my current location I've met (and chatted with) more people in my community than in my previous 25 years combined.
Having a truly rural life would be great too. Some gardening, raise some chickens, do some consulting over the net from home, etc. Its the bastardization of human life that suburbia entails that I have a problem with. I'm not saying that anyone is wrong to want the things that suburbia purports to offer (large house, good schools, relative quiet, two-car garage, etc). Those things are honest, basic desires.
I do however feel sorry for those who have to live in suburbia because of the additional consequences involved with fulfilling those honest desires; reliance on a car to get anywhere, having to cumulatively waste years of one's life sitting in traffic while commuting, having to play "soccer mom/dad" and drive the kids everywhere since they can't walk home from school/practice/etc, having to drive drunk or find a DD instead of just walking/taxi home from the bar, etc, etc, etc.
How many people lived in shitty apartments before they got a nice house?
While I agree with your point in general, I take contention at your use of the above analogy, at least in respect to American architecture post 1940.
Apartments, by their nature, are most commonly found in urban (regardless of size, village-->town-->city) settings. As such, they exist in densely populated spots and were usually built pre 1940 at a point when the general public cared about quality (both sturdiness and look) of buildings. The apartment's interiors may be lacking, but the building itself has very likely stood for the better part of a century, possibly through several retrofits and extensions that enable it to be a viable living space for people for years to come. Additionally, it is probably located within walking distance of other urban amenities such as food, shopping, and employment.
Contrast this with the average American house. This house was most likely built post 1940 in the desolate sprawl known as suburbia. Like the territories conquered at the end of the expansionist Roman empire, suburbia was not planned and built with a future in mind. Instead, it is the product of supplying product for an immediate desire, in this case for "spacious country living". As a result most suburban houses are constructed of generally low quality -- with some infamous "green lumber" fiascoes -- by developers who have no interest in what the place will be like in 100 years. Even the nicest of these are simple scaled up versions of the same cheap construction with shiny fittings added; the McMansions.
Not only are the physical quality of these buildings significantly lower than those of say, most European cities, but their positioning far from all commercial and social centers forces residents of them to get in a car EVERY time they leave their home. Not only does this increase traffic and pollution, but it also creates noticeable emotional tension in residents, especially those such as teenagers who can't drive and can't therefore get out of the house.
I'm not saying that any given apartment is better than any given house, but the American dream of a "rural house with urban lifestyle"=>suburbia is more like a nightmare.
P.S. - Check out anything on urban planning by James Kunstler. He is a great lover of hyperbole, but manages to squeeze some insight into his works none the less.
If I'm not mistaken, they've been doing this with CPUs for a while too. They clock them down and remark them as the slower model.
As far as I know, the way that it works is that a fabrication line will produce many many batches of chips all of the same design. After they are produced, each batch will have a few chips tested to see how fast they will run. The whole batch then gets their clock-speed designation based on the samples. Some in the batch may run better than the samples and therefore ripe for over-clocking, others might not.
There is also the possibility that all of the batches perform very well, and very consistently (a.k.a. "very good yields"). In order to keep a broad lineup of speeds and not swamp the market with top-of-the-line chips the manufacturer may set some of the chips to lower speeds (that they were expecting as a manufacturing consequence). I seem to remember hearing about AMD doing this a lot in the past, part of the reason why AMD chips could often be over-clocked so much.
Any speculation what they're going to start calling the releases after they run through all the big cat names?
Used already:
* Jaguar
* Panther
* Tiger
I they have at least a decade's worth of names for Puma concolor They've already used up Panther, but there are still a few more to go:
- Puma
- Cougar
- Catamount
- Mountain Lion
Other big cat names still up for grabs:
- Leopard
- Lion
- Cheetah
- Smilondon
I'm sure that they be able to figure out a new naming scheme by the time they run out...
Actually, DDR experience came quite handy when later on I started learning things like swing dancing.
Speaking of swing dancing and DDR, Manu Smith has apparently reprogrammed his DDR to do Lindy/Charleston/etc steps. I've not seen it personally as my legs have always been too dead, but he brought it to Swing Out New Hampshire the past few years.
So the chicken and the egg are in bed, quite lathered up and breathing heavily. The chicken flops on its back and says to the egg, "Well now we know which came first."
I'm sure there's legacy stuff out there, but it's just that I've never heard anybody talk about their legacy gear like it's the state of the art, as you have here.
Just a few weeks ago I had a faculty member at the college I work for come to me looking for a Mac with a floppy drive. Apparently the publisher of his book insisted on receiving his text on Mac-formatted 3 1/4" disks, one chapter per file. The prof said that he had asked about email or a CD but was instructed to use floppies and only floppies.
Needless to say, I wasn't able to help him as we haven't had Macs with floppy drives for years. I think the publishing world moves pretty slowly on technology.
you are going to have a hellishly dangerous amount of current flowing in order to get a charge in a minute (or time similar to a gas station)
My guess is that this super-rapid charging will not be maxed out at a "filling station", but rather during something like regenerative breaking. Having a battery that can suck up current that fast would allow for much greater reclamation of kinetic energy into chemical-potential energy than is currently possible in hybrid/electric cars. Any energy that isn't absorbed in the battery is just dissipated as heat by either resisters or break pads.
This fast-charging battery could help make hybrid vehicles vastly more efficient as deceleration would more closely cancel out acceleration. Today, the batteries in hybrids primarily serve to even out the energy demands on the engine and recoup a little bit of energy when braking. With these new batteries the engine would only have to overcome air/rolling friction or make up for prolonged acceleration.
It seems to me this is a very demand-driven product. Or rather, it's an attempt to get a dormant market to bloom, and the success of the attempt is heavily dependent on the price point. At the price point they're looking to hit, they are required to make tradeoffs on cost.
Its not just price-point, but social value as well. Any government-sponsored program has a responsibility to its citizens to deliver value for their tax money.
Using FOSS will give thousands (even if they are a small percent of the total users) of low-income Brazilians the chance to tinker with their software and learn about programming and how computers work. The vast majority of users will just use the computers for other things, but the benefit of having an easily programmable computer readily accessible will be a huge boon to those whose interest is sparked. The resulting free (to the government) self-education and growth in the tech-skills in Brazil's population are social benefits that won't be found with proprietary software at any cost.
Just think of the number of kids who would learn how to program if their family's home computer ran FOSS.
In response to the cynical, I for one was interested in learning how to program since middle-school (~1991-1994) but didn't get around to learning till most of the way through college ~2001. Why the delay? Well, I tried installing various programming tools on Windows over the years but never really knew where to start. In my experience "Hello World" on Windows involved setting up an IDE, trying to figure out where to put things, learning the IDE and all sorts of other fluff that obscured the process and resulting in me never actually succeeding in getting a "Hello World" to run until I tried Linux in ~2001.
Now, I'm sure that there are simpler ways to program things on Windows, but I never found them. Contrast this with Linux:
Make a text file called helloworld.sh with one line: echo "Hello World";
Open a terminal and make the file executable: chmod u+x helloworld.sh
Run the program in the terminal:./helloworld.sh
Yeah, this is just bash, and yadda yadda yadda, but its a starting point. Give people such an easily accessible starting point and some of them are bound to make use of it. The tech economy of Brazil can only but be helped by such increases in domestic talent
It has been changed, no company can require that you give them your social security number since about 1999, I don't remember the exact year but I remember when they enacted it. It is for security purposes and also because the number belongs to the government (just as a tax ID) and not the individual. SSN FAQ
I read the FAQ that you pointed to, but it said that while no company can REQUIRE that you give them your SSN, they don't have to provide you with goods and services if you don't give it to them. As purchases are contractual agreements, the parties involved get to set the terms. If one party's terms state that they want an SSN then its up to them whether they deal with you or not if you don't provide it.
The FAQ also had infomation about an employment case where a man refused to use or give an SSN to his employer for religious reasons. The court found for him, but because of the religious descrimination part rather than the "requiring an SSN" part.
If you implemented a tax exemption whereby any parent who did not have a student in public school did not have to pay the school tax......Because if they didn't [offer a better education], parents would put their kids back into public school and the new private schools would go out of business. That means there's nothing to lose, yet everything to gain. (emphasis mine)
Ah, but there are several problems with this, first of all, public schools are in general operating on very tight budgets. As well, in most states funding is pulled mostly from the local community, not state-wide or nationally, so any tax credits are going to directly impact a single district. Giving a tax exemption to say, 3 students, would remove the input of one teacher's salary into the school while only lightening the effective load on the school by a fraction of that amount. Once the operating budget of a public school falls below a certain level, they will have to close and/or cease to provide a quality education for the children still there.
Yeah, maybe in an ideal world 'the all-glorious' market could eventually provide for some slight cost-efficiencies; but in the years between lack of funding would close public schools long before the replacement private institutions opened and became affordable, leaving at least tens of thousands of children without ANY schools. Likewise, as shown in GOP's miserably failed school-voucher programs, the amount of money spent by schools, even if fully given as a voucher to those who wish to go to a private school, covers less than half of the cost of a private school. This means that it is still only the wealthy who can afford private schools, but now at the same time the public institutions are being bankrupted.
There are several other problems with privatization of schools that have come up since the stupid voucher program was attempted:
- Public schools are legally bound to provide education to ALL people. Private schools can expel anyone they want.
- Many private schools give an education of stellar quality. The vast majority of these are not-for-profit institutions funded by tuition and/or donations. For-profit educational institutions as a rule do NOT provide the caliber of education found at not-for-profit institutions private or public.
The problem is motivation. Because corporations are responsible to their share-holder's profits alone, they will always choose profit over anything else that they are not legally required to do. How is one to ensure that these new 'market-driven private schools' that will supposedly be better at education are providing a quality education? Testing you say? Well, everything other than passing tests and profit will then be ruled out.
Heck, we even see this in elite Universities. At Columbia University for instance the Spanish department resides in a moldy, awful building while the sciences (especially departments related to biotech and pharmaceuticals) are swimming in funds due to the 1986 law which allowed Universities that receive public research funds (basically all of them) to patent their research. While Columbia and others institutions are swimming in money from patents, they are at the same time drawn away from goals of general education to focusing just on the profitable areas.
Markets are great for things that aren't necessities, where a lack of something at a particular point in time will not cause undue harm. It must be remembered though that the ability of markets to find local maxima is precisely because of their volatility. As you say, if they don't work, they go out of business. For basic services such as education and healthcare though, having the service 'go out of business' is not an option that can be allowed to happen. If there are no schools for more than a year thousands of children will rapidly become hampered and miss out on much-needed education. Such a disaster would lead to vastly greater costs to society in terms of remedial education, crime
I'm waiting for the tsunami of examples demonstrating that socialism can provide services and products more efficiently than capitalism and the market...
The USA's Medicare program, health coverage for elderly and (I believe) poor, is significantly more efficient that the private sector. There are lots of numbers out there, but most of them show that the amount of money spent on administrative overhead by HMOs and other private health insurance corporations is 5 to 10 times higher than that spent on administrative overhead in Medicare.
If you think about it, it makes sense that Medicare is a lot more efficient. HMOs and the like have complicated payment structures, require several authorizations for treatments, have various methods for billing individuals versus employers, have marketing costs, maintain lists of 'in-plan' doctors and facilities, etc. Medicare on the other hand has a list of who is registered and another list of how much they will pay for each category of care. Since there is only one pricing structure and one entity to send and receive bills, the whole operation is simplified and thereby cheaper to run than having many companies all looking out for their own profits.
Likewise, having a single large buyer allows for better negotiation with pharmaceutical companies. Why are drugs cheap in Canada? Its because the entire country buys them as a whole and refuses to pay the outlandish prices the pharmaceutical industry tries to push.
Want more examples?
Try education for instance. As a graduate of an elite private college I can attest that such institutions provide excellent (maybe even 'the best' possible, if there is such a thing) education. But efficiently? Charging $40,000+/year to give 2500 students an education is a hell of a lot less efficient than charging $15,000(or less)/year to give 30,000+ students an education that can be every bit as good (or at least pretty close) as one at a private institution. Whether or not the margin of difference in quality (and style) is worth $100,000 is up to the student (and their parents), but in terms of efficiency the public universities are the clear winners.
How about elementary/secondary education? Public schools routinely educate students on less than $10,000/year/student and educate millions of children. Private schools typically cost at least twice as much and educate only a tiny fraction of the number. Maybe their quality is a little higher, maybe not. My public high-school in rural PA was pretty crappy due to a lack of local tax base and PA not pooling education funds state-wide. The teachers did the best with what they had though and the district gave everyone a basic education at a very cheap rate. Quite efficient.
If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.
-- Karl Popper
Great doubt: great awakening. Little doubt: little awakening. No doubt: no awakening.
-- Zen koan
Slashdot Mirror
protected by an electronic force field
1. What's that about?
I'm guessing its some sort of boat-based shark repellent.
2. Where can I get one?
Your guess is as good as mine.
Hmm... The link doesn't seem to work. Something about query timeouts. Below is the Bill text:
-- -- -- -- --
S 786 IS1S
(Star Print)
109th CONGRESS 1st Session
S. 786
To clarify the duties and responsibilities of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, and for other purposes.
IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
April 14, 2005
Mr. SANTORUM introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
A BILL
To clarify the duties and responsibilities of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, and for other purposes.
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
SEC. 2. DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION AND NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE.
Go with what works in the workplace not what some smelly zealot who has never even worked in IT thinks is the cool distro.
;-)) that many users wouldn't notice.
Gentoo or most any other distro -- given a good admin -- can function well doing just about any type of normal "business" task. But as we are all beginning (at varying rates) to realize is that the distro itself doesn't really matter. More and more the various configuration tools are being ported to many/all distros and what we are left with are basically just different choices of filesystem (and a few other small things
The key thing, as you sort of note yourself, is make management happy. This is where Redhat/SuSE provide most of their value -- having someone to blame. Additionally, they do provide a sort of standard so that management can go hire someone who is an RHCE and be reasonably sure that that person can take care of the machines after their current admin decides to leave.
Here at Middlebury College we are working on projects to use iPods as study aids in foreign-language courses:
http://segue.middlebury.edu/sites/achapin-ipod
The two uses are as follows:
1. Give students mobile access to our databases of tens of thousands of vocabulary audio files while using the rating system to sort known versus unknown vocabulary.
2. Allow students to record and hear themselves speaking vocabulary and other exercises.
From TFA: WHEN you really stop to think about it, memory cards are a pretty delicate storage format for something as important as your digital photos.
I couldn't find it on their website, but I recently read an article in (I think) Popular Photography where they did some "stress testing" of memory cards. The results? most of the cards withstood submersion in water, drops, baked, frozen, and being run over by cars. As long as they could still be connected to a reader, the data was usually OK.
Contrast this with a hard-drive-based storage solutions which are comparatively extremely fragile. Now, this isn't to say that I'm not going to purchase a HD-based device for a month-long trip this summer, but the cards are vastly more durable, just not as big or as cheap/GB.
Heat Transfer Fluid which is mostly propylene glycol
Ah.. so this means no drinkey?
From Wikipedia:
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined propylene glycol to be "generally recognized as safe" for use in food, cosmetics, and medicines. Similar to ethylene glycol, propylene glycol affects the body's chemistry by increasing the amount of acid, potentially resulting in metabolic problems. However, larger amounts of the substance are needed to cause this effect. Eating or drinking very large amounts can result in death, while large amounts can result in nausea, convulsions, slurred speech, disorientation, and heart and kidney problems. Propylene glycol is considerably less toxic than ethylene glycol.
So, I wouldn't try to drain the cooling system by drinking it, but it shouldn't be that bad in comparison antifreeze.
4. No Endorsement and No derogatory use
The Creative Archive content is provided to allow you to get creative with content, not for campaigning, soapboxing or to defame others! So don't use it to promote political, charitable, or other campaigning purposes and remember to treat others and their work in the way that you'd expect them to treat you and your work...with respect!
This license seems pretty decent except for this part. Who gets to decide what is derogatory or an endorsement?
For instance, lets say I am trying to raise money for a nonprofit program to get health care workers to poor women in rural Africa. As part of my fund-raising campaigning I do a screening of some BBC documentary from the archive on health care in rural Africa and ask people for donations. This seems like a pretty legitimate use of the material, but may prohibited by section #4.
Now, what if I had a link to this supposed documentary from my example organizations website. Would that be endorsement? I view it as public education of the plight of a certain people that I wish to help. It would aid my position for getting donations though.
As long as we can all still use Linux or other open-source software, what does it matter what the rest of the world does?
I for one want it to become common enough that it is shipped on most new computers. That way when my mother, aunt, friends, etc ask for tech support I can ssh in, do what needs to be done (including writing a script/patch/etc if needed), exit out and be on my merry way without having to fsck around with getting windows to "not crash randomly".
Id be even more happy having my family running remote thin-clients, but that just wouldn't work over their dial-up connections...
No biggie really. I love my 105 year old house on 2 acres in northern New Jersey. I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite.
Note 1: I said post 1940.
Note 2: I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite. That doesn't sound like suburbia
The suburban life that I have witnessed (growing up in south-central Pennsylvania) was a soul-sucking existence that had many features that didn't make sense. For example, there is the characature of a "porch" and "front door" that all of the suburban houses have, but are functionally useless since the porch is only 18 inches wide and the "porch/front door" complex is centered on a large lawn with no walkway to it. The real entrance is through the kitchen/garage side-door. So why does the "porch/front door" even exist? I suggest that its function is to make a not so nice house LOOK like a nice house, since they aren't even usable.
I currently choose to live in a modest apartment in an old building right at the center of a small town. Yeah, I hear trucks on the street all night, but I also can walk across the street to the grocery store, the hardware store, and the bank. 10 restaurants and bars are with 3 blocks (8min) walk, and I can walk 15min to work. The other benefit is that I see the same people every day on my walks to and from work and the various stores. In the 8 months I've been in my current location I've met (and chatted with) more people in my community than in my previous 25 years combined.
Having a truly rural life would be great too. Some gardening, raise some chickens, do some consulting over the net from home, etc. Its the bastardization of human life that suburbia entails that I have a problem with. I'm not saying that anyone is wrong to want the things that suburbia purports to offer (large house, good schools, relative quiet, two-car garage, etc). Those things are honest, basic desires.
I do however feel sorry for those who have to live in suburbia because of the additional consequences involved with fulfilling those honest desires; reliance on a car to get anywhere, having to cumulatively waste years of one's life sitting in traffic while commuting, having to play "soccer mom/dad" and drive the kids everywhere since they can't walk home from school/practice/etc, having to drive drunk or find a DD instead of just walking/taxi home from the bar, etc, etc, etc.
How many people lived in shitty apartments before they got a nice house?
While I agree with your point in general, I take contention at your use of the above analogy, at least in respect to American architecture post 1940.
Apartments, by their nature, are most commonly found in urban (regardless of size, village-->town-->city) settings. As such, they exist in densely populated spots and were usually built pre 1940 at a point when the general public cared about quality (both sturdiness and look) of buildings. The apartment's interiors may be lacking, but the building itself has very likely stood for the better part of a century, possibly through several retrofits and extensions that enable it to be a viable living space for people for years to come. Additionally, it is probably located within walking distance of other urban amenities such as food, shopping, and employment.
Contrast this with the average American house. This house was most likely built post 1940 in the desolate sprawl known as suburbia. Like the territories conquered at the end of the expansionist Roman empire, suburbia was not planned and built with a future in mind. Instead, it is the product of supplying product for an immediate desire, in this case for "spacious country living". As a result most suburban houses are constructed of generally low quality -- with some infamous "green lumber" fiascoes -- by developers who have no interest in what the place will be like in 100 years. Even the nicest of these are simple scaled up versions of the same cheap construction with shiny fittings added; the McMansions.
Not only are the physical quality of these buildings significantly lower than those of say, most European cities, but their positioning far from all commercial and social centers forces residents of them to get in a car EVERY time they leave their home. Not only does this increase traffic and pollution, but it also creates noticeable emotional tension in residents, especially those such as teenagers who can't drive and can't therefore get out of the house.
I'm not saying that any given apartment is better than any given house, but the American dream of a "rural house with urban lifestyle"=>suburbia is more like a nightmare.
P.S. - Check out anything on urban planning by James Kunstler. He is a great lover of hyperbole, but manages to squeeze some insight into his works none the less.
If I'm not mistaken, they've been doing this with CPUs for a while too. They clock them down and remark them as the slower model.
As far as I know, the way that it works is that a fabrication line will produce many many batches of chips all of the same design. After they are produced, each batch will have a few chips tested to see how fast they will run. The whole batch then gets their clock-speed designation based on the samples. Some in the batch may run better than the samples and therefore ripe for over-clocking, others might not.
There is also the possibility that all of the batches perform very well, and very consistently (a.k.a. "very good yields"). In order to keep a broad lineup of speeds and not swamp the market with top-of-the-line chips the manufacturer may set some of the chips to lower speeds (that they were expecting as a manufacturing consequence). I seem to remember hearing about AMD doing this a lot in the past, part of the reason why AMD chips could often be over-clocked so much.
Any speculation what they're going to start calling the releases after they run through all the big cat names?
Used already:
* Jaguar
* Panther
* Tiger
I they have at least a decade's worth of names for Puma concolor They've already used up Panther, but there are still a few more to go:
- Puma
- Cougar
- Catamount
- Mountain Lion
Other big cat names still up for grabs:
- Leopard
- Lion
- Cheetah
- Smilondon
I'm sure that they be able to figure out a new naming scheme by the time they run out...
Actually, DDR experience came quite handy when later on I started learning things like swing dancing.
Speaking of swing dancing and DDR, Manu Smith has apparently reprogrammed his DDR to do Lindy/Charleston/etc steps. I've not seen it personally as my legs have always been too dead, but he brought it to Swing Out New Hampshire the past few years.
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
That actually describes slashdot with 100% accuracy for April 1st.
Bleh. I'm coming back tomorrow.
April 1st!!!
/.
Yeah, I hate this day on
I'm coming back tomorrow when all the bogus crap is over.
So the chicken and the egg are in bed, quite lathered up and breathing heavily. The chicken flops on its back and says to the egg, "Well now we know which came first."
I'm sure there's legacy stuff out there, but it's just that I've never heard anybody talk about their legacy gear like it's the state of the art, as you have here.
Just a few weeks ago I had a faculty member at the college I work for come to me looking for a Mac with a floppy drive. Apparently the publisher of his book insisted on receiving his text on Mac-formatted 3 1/4" disks, one chapter per file. The prof said that he had asked about email or a CD but was instructed to use floppies and only floppies.
Needless to say, I wasn't able to help him as we haven't had Macs with floppy drives for years. I think the publishing world moves pretty slowly on technology.
Seriously? How did he get that in without getting beaten to the first post?
My guess is that he had already written the text as an email or something prior to the story being posted and was able to copy paste.
Or maybe he was a subscriber....
you are going to have a hellishly dangerous amount of current flowing in order to get a charge in a minute (or time similar to a gas station)
My guess is that this super-rapid charging will not be maxed out at a "filling station", but rather during something like regenerative breaking. Having a battery that can suck up current that fast would allow for much greater reclamation of kinetic energy into chemical-potential energy than is currently possible in hybrid/electric cars. Any energy that isn't absorbed in the battery is just dissipated as heat by either resisters or break pads.
This fast-charging battery could help make hybrid vehicles vastly more efficient as deceleration would more closely cancel out acceleration. Today, the batteries in hybrids primarily serve to even out the energy demands on the engine and recoup a little bit of energy when braking. With these new batteries the engine would only have to overcome air/rolling friction or make up for prolonged acceleration.
Its not just price-point, but social value as well. Any government-sponsored program has a responsibility to its citizens to deliver value for their tax money.
Using FOSS will give thousands (even if they are a small percent of the total users) of low-income Brazilians the chance to tinker with their software and learn about programming and how computers work. The vast majority of users will just use the computers for other things, but the benefit of having an easily programmable computer readily accessible will be a huge boon to those whose interest is sparked. The resulting free (to the government) self-education and growth in the tech-skills in Brazil's population are social benefits that won't be found with proprietary software at any cost.
Just think of the number of kids who would learn how to program if their family's home computer ran FOSS.
In response to the cynical, I for one was interested in learning how to program since middle-school (~1991-1994) but didn't get around to learning till most of the way through college ~2001. Why the delay? Well, I tried installing various programming tools on Windows over the years but never really knew where to start. In my experience "Hello World" on Windows involved setting up an IDE, trying to figure out where to put things, learning the IDE and all sorts of other fluff that obscured the process and resulting in me never actually succeeding in getting a "Hello World" to run until I tried Linux in ~2001.
Now, I'm sure that there are simpler ways to program things on Windows, but I never found them. Contrast this with Linux:
echo "Hello World";
chmod u+x helloworld.sh
Yeah, this is just bash, and yadda yadda yadda, but its a starting point. Give people such an easily accessible starting point and some of them are bound to make use of it. The tech economy of Brazil can only but be helped by such increases in domestic talent
It has been changed, no company can require that you give them your social security number since about 1999, I don't remember the exact year but I remember when they enacted it. It is for security purposes and also because the number belongs to the government (just as a tax ID) and not the individual. SSN FAQ
I read the FAQ that you pointed to, but it said that while no company can REQUIRE that you give them your SSN, they don't have to provide you with goods and services if you don't give it to them. As purchases are contractual agreements, the parties involved get to set the terms. If one party's terms state that they want an SSN then its up to them whether they deal with you or not if you don't provide it.
The FAQ also had infomation about an employment case where a man refused to use or give an SSN to his employer for religious reasons. The court found for him, but because of the religious descrimination part rather than the "requiring an SSN" part.
If you implemented a tax exemption whereby any parent who did not have a student in public school did not have to pay the school tax... ...Because if they didn't [offer a better education], parents would put their kids back into public school and the new private schools would go out of business. That means there's nothing to lose, yet everything to gain. (emphasis mine)
Ah, but there are several problems with this, first of all, public schools are in general operating on very tight budgets. As well, in most states funding is pulled mostly from the local community, not state-wide or nationally, so any tax credits are going to directly impact a single district. Giving a tax exemption to say, 3 students, would remove the input of one teacher's salary into the school while only lightening the effective load on the school by a fraction of that amount. Once the operating budget of a public school falls below a certain level, they will have to close and/or cease to provide a quality education for the children still there.
Yeah, maybe in an ideal world 'the all-glorious' market could eventually provide for some slight cost-efficiencies; but in the years between lack of funding would close public schools long before the replacement private institutions opened and became affordable, leaving at least tens of thousands of children without ANY schools. Likewise, as shown in GOP's miserably failed school-voucher programs, the amount of money spent by schools, even if fully given as a voucher to those who wish to go to a private school, covers less than half of the cost of a private school. This means that it is still only the wealthy who can afford private schools, but now at the same time the public institutions are being bankrupted.
There are several other problems with privatization of schools that have come up since the stupid voucher program was attempted:
- Public schools are legally bound to provide education to ALL people. Private schools can expel anyone they want.
- Many private schools give an education of stellar quality. The vast majority of these are not-for-profit institutions funded by tuition and/or donations. For-profit educational institutions as a rule do NOT provide the caliber of education found at not-for-profit institutions private or public.
The problem is motivation. Because corporations are responsible to their share-holder's profits alone, they will always choose profit over anything else that they are not legally required to do. How is one to ensure that these new 'market-driven private schools' that will supposedly be better at education are providing a quality education? Testing you say? Well, everything other than passing tests and profit will then be ruled out.
Heck, we even see this in elite Universities. At Columbia University for instance the Spanish department resides in a moldy, awful building while the sciences (especially departments related to biotech and pharmaceuticals) are swimming in funds due to the 1986 law which allowed Universities that receive public research funds (basically all of them) to patent their research. While Columbia and others institutions are swimming in money from patents, they are at the same time drawn away from goals of general education to focusing just on the profitable areas.
Markets are great for things that aren't necessities, where a lack of something at a particular point in time will not cause undue harm. It must be remembered though that the ability of markets to find local maxima is precisely because of their volatility. As you say, if they don't work, they go out of business. For basic services such as education and healthcare though, having the service 'go out of business' is not an option that can be allowed to happen. If there are no schools for more than a year thousands of children will rapidly become hampered and miss out on much-needed education. Such a disaster would lead to vastly greater costs to society in terms of remedial education, crime
Sorry to reply to my own post, but Its should be It's in the fourth paragraph.
I'm waiting for the tsunami of examples demonstrating that socialism can provide services and products more efficiently than capitalism and the market...
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The USA's Medicare program, health coverage for elderly and (I believe) poor, is significantly more efficient that the private sector. There are lots of numbers out there, but most of them show that the amount of money spent on administrative overhead by HMOs and other private health insurance corporations is 5 to 10 times higher than that spent on administrative overhead in Medicare.
Here is one of many such references: http://medicare.commission.gov/medicare/robinstes
If you think about it, it makes sense that Medicare is a lot more efficient. HMOs and the like have complicated payment structures, require several authorizations for treatments, have various methods for billing individuals versus employers, have marketing costs, maintain lists of 'in-plan' doctors and facilities, etc. Medicare on the other hand has a list of who is registered and another list of how much they will pay for each category of care. Since there is only one pricing structure and one entity to send and receive bills, the whole operation is simplified and thereby cheaper to run than having many companies all looking out for their own profits.
Likewise, having a single large buyer allows for better negotiation with pharmaceutical companies. Why are drugs cheap in Canada? Its because the entire country buys them as a whole and refuses to pay the outlandish prices the pharmaceutical industry tries to push.
Want more examples?
Try education for instance. As a graduate of an elite private college I can attest that such institutions provide excellent (maybe even 'the best' possible, if there is such a thing) education. But efficiently? Charging $40,000+/year to give 2500 students an education is a hell of a lot less efficient than charging $15,000(or less)/year to give 30,000+ students an education that can be every bit as good (or at least pretty close) as one at a private institution. Whether or not the margin of difference in quality (and style) is worth $100,000 is up to the student (and their parents), but in terms of efficiency the public universities are the clear winners.
How about elementary/secondary education? Public schools routinely educate students on less than $10,000/year/student and educate millions of children. Private schools typically cost at least twice as much and educate only a tiny fraction of the number. Maybe their quality is a little higher, maybe not. My public high-school in rural PA was pretty crappy due to a lack of local tax base and PA not pooling education funds state-wide. The teachers did the best with what they had though and the district gave everyone a basic education at a very cheap rate. Quite efficient.
If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.
-- Karl Popper
Great doubt: great awakening.
Little doubt: little awakening.
No doubt: no awakening.
-- Zen koan
I'm guessing "Air America Radio" http://www.airamericaradio.com/