This is part of the "nervous Nellie" reactions that have developed over the past few years. We should be encouraging inquisitiveness, exploration and learning in our children or we will just produce more mediocre administrators. Kids do things at home, bring them to school and show their friends. As long as it was not clearly a weapon or some other prohibited device there should not be a problem with it.
We are applying the same "sterile area" rules that supposedly exist in our airports to our schools. Will TSA be staffing the schools to keep out prohibited items?
Unless the child lied about what the device was it appears that the principal overreacted and did not apply too much common sense. It sounds like a pretty cool idea to use a Gatoraide bottle as a focusing point for a sonic device. Smart kid to think that through and to try something with it.
How many people who read/. have tried out other things like this in their childhood? Most of us have.
This is another attempt by the RIAA to dilute their highly unpopular (and unconstitutional) warfare on anyone who exchanges music. If they can "get" the ISP's to do the filtering for them then the next step would be for the RIAA to "require" the ISP's to be the bad guys.
Net Neutrality is something worth fighting for. This RIAA attempt is a sideways attempt to undermine the free access to most information.
Quote; “Sen. Gorton,” I asked, “I don’t quite understand all this talk alleging that ‘No one is in charge of the intelligence community.’ You are surely aware that, by act of Congress, there is such a person, and right now that happens to be Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet.”
The avuncular Gorton tiptoed up to me, put his right hand around my shoulder, and with a conspiratorial whisper said, “Yes, Ray, of course I know that. We all know that. But George would not take charge; he would not do what he was supposed to.” EndQuote
Exactly, if you put political wieners in charge of any department you are going to cut the professionals off at the knees.
It used to be the deputy directors that were the real operational control of the organization. This is true of nearly every federal agency, you want very talented people in the #2 slots (several deputies, for different departments). The "talent" that reports up to the Deputy Directors need to have confidence that someone above them is going to be able to pull the pieces together and make a friggen decision. What has been happening is you get a new director at every political cycle and they do a wholesale swapout of administration 3-4 levels down in the organization. Then all you have are political hacks who are not smart enough (or experienced) to champion a course of action. IE... put a bomb in someone's smoke-stack.
We do not want the decades of Hoover style FBI. That was a man who clearly had delusions of his own grandeur and was so powerful that presidents were afraid to kick him out. It took Hoover dying before change could happen.
Having the top slot filled by a political appointee is fine if they know that the strength of the organization is THE LAYERS BENEATH them. Too many sit in their big comfy offices and think that suddenly they have the wisdom of the seven sages at their disposal.
I do not care what party, what president, what administration... they all do this game.
I have been a paying member of the group for a few years now and I am distressed that they are constantly re-defining what doomsday is. Now it includes global warming, overpopulation, unstable governments, the building of any sort of nuclear power system, etc...
It really diminishes from the message when they add in all of these other things. There have always been threats to our existence and there always will be.
Asteroid impacts, genetically engineered plants or the eventual supernovae that will happen when Eta Carinae self-destructs are all threats as well.
People claiming to be suffering from ill effects from power lines, radio towers and signals from the martians has been cause célèbre for several decades now. I frequently run across these groups as a communications consultant working with utilities. Sometimes what I want to say is "if you are so concerned about power lines why don't you disconnect the power to your house?".
Right now since you are sitting in front a computer to read this, you are exposed to a great deal more RF energy than a microwave dish that is 100 feet up in the air is putting out.
It is like the hysteria surrounding cadmium in children's toys that is also this weeks latest worry. People will cite cancer clusters and anecdotal evidence yet when confronted with the facts they will jump to some other reason. After going through a long process with community groups and concerned citizens it ended up being an issue about what color the antenna was.
One point as well is that many of these folks who would download a bunch of pirated apps for their phone would not purchase them in the first place. I think it is more accurate to say that the income was unrealized and not lost.
If you put something on the market for $1000 and only two people think it is worth the price to pay for it but six hundred people would have purchased it for $100 then you have significantly overvalued your product and lose money. I think that the prices on the app store are all inflated. This is a similar model to the entire music and movie industry. Most people steal your product because they do not believe that what you are asking for it is reasonable, not because they would not pay anything at all for it.
It is interesting to read the opinion. Conspiracy to fix prices, agreements to not compete against each other, all record companies refusing to do any business with certain companies.
They are acting like a monopoly. This is what led to the breakup of Standard Oil back in the early part of the 20th century and the breakup of the Bell System into Baby Bells.
This most favored nation (MFN) deal they have going and how all prices change in lockstep.
Wow, it reminds me of how they eventually caught Al Capone. Not on running a crime syndicate but on tax evasion.
They probably tried to patent the design of the human eye and God (big JuJu, whatever you call it) sued as prior art.
I am in a quandary over the entire patent vs. copyright issue. If you could patent a book then you could lock out all of your competition from writing about "Westerns involving horses and indians". In a patent you are going after an idea or design.
To me, software is a creative work more akin to a copyright. If someone wants to mimic your idea using a different software platform and uniquely created code they are free to do so. I know that is a contestable issue amongst this crowd but I am adverse to the pressures moving prior art into patentable works where you can sue the asses off of anyone who has deployed it in the past 20 years.
There is a movement afoot amongst many companies to patent the obvious. It may just be my sensitivity to the issue but it seems to come from companies that feel beset upon by all sides and are languishing.
Evolution is not always a beneficial change. There are plenty of evolutionary traits that resulted in dead ends for some species.
The related articles off of the MIT site point out that the Y chromosome has areas of replication that can make the entire chromosome or parts of it fold back upon themselves, creating non-viable offspring.
The idea of the article points out that there is much changing in the Y chromosome and it does not have the mechanisms in place to prevent some of the gross errors in duplication.
I was careful to not use the word improvement in the title. Maybe some folks cannot make the distinction between an evolutionary change and an improvement but I can.
In some ways cro-mag was superior in design to modern h-sap. A shorter body build, better musculature, larger brain case, improved sinus design, etc.. But they still died out or were out-competed by h-sap.
We do not know what the relationship is between genetics and autism. Maybe (my speculation here) autism results from the human brain being turned up way too much.
It was kinda early 70's funkadelic (groovy baby) but it had a great deal of potential.
A multi-generation colony ship where the crew dies, leaving only the colonists living in domes. The domes looked exactly like the structures used in the movie Silent Running but much larger.
The colonists are locked off from each other, hundreds of years have passed and everyone has forgotten that they are on a ship. The ship is damaged and heading for certain destruction.
There are hundreds of domes, this ship contains the last survivors of the human race. The ship is thousands of miles across. Each dome contains a different culture and some have diverged wildly from what they may have started as.
Imagine a dome, 50 miles across that is nothing but wacked-out Islam, a Amazonian dome with jungles....
The potential varieties are amazing. All of this without even leaving the ship.
Three people have accidentally gotten out of their dome. Think of their culture as 19th century Amish. They gradually
I agree, seven years ago I suddenly found myself laid-off during the collapse of the telcos. That same day I had put my resume up on a half-dozen different job sites similar to headhunter.com. My normally stealthy email address that would only get spam a few times a week was suddenly taking 20-30 spam emails a day. If I had known that would be the consequence I would have created a temporary email address and had all of my job-seeking contacts (and the spammers) send emails there.
Right now I get 40+ pieces of spam today to my new account. Fortunately the gmail filter works pretty darned good and eliminates 95% of them.
I have taught classes to an InfraGuard chapter in my area, it is quite different than the scary statements that have been made by many.
It is about being aware of your vulnerabilities and developing contingency plans and fairly basic security procedures to make it less easy for someone to mess with your infrastructure. Most of the folks who attend the InfraGuard monthly meetings are already in middle management and have been tasked with the chore of improving security. While pretty much anyone can participate there are levels to it. Some information is compartmentalized on a need to know basis when it comes to specific incidents or threats.
If it was only the FBI who had access to the genetic material than I would say that this is a major problem during a trial.
I would hope that my defense team would have access to a sample of the DNA taken at a crime scene and my DNA and they would run a more complete comparison. If they went into court with a more thorough DNA comparison that completely blew-away the CODIS matchup then this would turn the prosecutors case on it's ear.
If it is only 15 markers out of 580,000 that is used to determine your guilt or innocence then there is a major concern that the wrong person could be hanged for the crime.
I do believe that they should be using more than 15 markers, as you indicated, this is 1990's technology.
A hit on a 15 marker test should be a reason to narrow the pool of prospective folks down some. Further testing and evidence must be necessary to gain a conviction. We have seen where folks have been convicted off of partial evidence before.
Do they need to test for all 580,000? No, but a sampling greater than 15 is probably called for.
Back in the 80's I was working for an oil company and had to catch a flight to a different city to make a determination on a potentially contaminated batch of jet fuel. This was to a very small fuel terminal that did not necessarily have the right equipment to capture a sample of fuel. What I was dragging along with me was some sampling and analysis gear. Being in a hurry, since this was going to be a flight to an airport, to do work on airport property, catch a flight back the same day, I hand-carried my gear along.
Here is how the conversation went at security screening;
"Miss, what is this thing in the box?"
"Oh, that's a test bomb"
-- you can imagine what happened next, needless to say I was NOT catching that flight and United would not reschedule me on ANY flights for several days. ---
What I had was a "bacon test bomb" http://www.koehlerinstrument.com/products/K27700.html it was packed in a wooden crate that I was hand-carrying on-board the aircraft. It is just a shiny steel cylinder, about the size of a thermos container but has a funky plunger assembly inside and a length of coiled up line to lower it into the tank.
It is used to grab a sample off of the bottom of a storage tank so I could in turn, run flash-point tests on a 50,000 BBL tank of aviation fuel. The airline was rejecting the batch, claiming that it was contaminated with gasoline (bad, bad thing for jet aircraft).
Since then I have learned to give pause when speaking to security screeners
One of the problems is that these terrorists want to remove our civilization and return to their 12th century version of it. They have no problems with inflicting casualties and it is much easier to do this in a free society.
That is sheer insanity. So we grant a foreign agency extra-legal protections to operate within our borders. There must be some sort of protections for American citizens to prevent us from being subject to tyranny. We put limitations (with damned good reasons) on our own law enforcement agencies but we turn around and grant Interpol (not even responsible to any one particular government) near unlimited authority within our country.
The long espoused fears of a world government (something that has been claimed as a threat by right-wingers) suddenly looms much larger in the rear-view mirror.
Wow, AT&T with it's lock-in of the iPhone, now Verizon with a lock-in to Bing. Can it be that this is the only way that Microsoft can get people to use Bing?
I tried Bing, gave it a fair shake and ended up back with Google. To have my choices taken away by my phone carrier in a backroom deal between Microsoft and Verizon would get me looking for a new carrier.
Of course, Microsoft has been in this business for a long time so they can give lessons to Verizon.
Absolutely correct. You see the same thing happen with test equipment that must be periodically calibrated to NIST traceable standards. I had a "deadweight tester" (a very arcane piece of test equipment for accurately measuring pressures) that had to have it's brass weights tested to make sure they weighed "exactly" the right amount. We were even discouraged from polishing the brass weights as the polishing process would remove minute amounts of brass.
When my former employer offered to send my DVM (digital voltmeter) off for NIST calibration I jumped at the opportunity. When they came back and said that it was a Piece of Shit (really old, 1980's vintage) I used that as an excuse to get them buy me a new meter.
I think the pricing of scientific instrumentation is based largely upon the limited number of devices produced. The folks who make sensors really do not care too much about the price and are looking at recovering their development, manufacturing and marketing costs off of very small sales quantities.
A case in point; I work with AMI (SmartGrid) systems for measuring water and electricity consumption. These devices have a surprising level of sophistication, very long battery lives (10-20 years off of a Li-Ion battery) and can store a data-point every fifteen minutes and report it back across a radio network. I "know" the manufacturing costs are down in the $30-60 range for each device. The manufacturers are all anxious to get customers (utilities) to spend their millions on projects to put SmartGrid technologies into cities so the more you buy, the cheaper they get. The data is frequently coming from "absolute encoders" on water meters and less frequently, from pulse encoders that generate a certain number of pulses per 1000's of gallons (the device counts them up, multiplies them by a K factor and gives you a corrected value for gallons of water consumed).
The Nintendo Wi is a good example. How many millions of the Wi devices are made? If they were $250 each there would not be many consumers buying them so they mass-produce and keep the prices low. You see the same effect when you hear about banks of PlayStation 3's being used in clusters for supercomputing.
By causing an "earthquake" the incident relieved built up stresses along the fault line. If faults were able to slide continually and smoothly you would not have earthquakes at all.
It would not be surprising to find out that the earthquake came while they were hydraulically fracturing the rock to allow for water channels to exist between boreholes. If you cannot pump cool water down one shaft and hot water up another you will have no means of recovering the built up heat and generating electricity. Creating these cracks and channels between boreholes is essential for geothermal (oil and gas as well) systems.
In hydro-fracturing they pump a fluid (water and a bunch of other chemicals and little beads to wedge into the cracks to keep them open) at extremely high pressures (>10,000 psi) to open of seams in the rock and to create channels to allow the working fluid (water) to move between the wells. As the water moves through the rock it sucks up the heat and is then used to drive some sort of secondary loop. Since the water is not converted into steam (being cooler than 100 C) they must have planned on using some sort of intermediate process to generate the expanding gas to run a turbine or sterling engine.
I am glad that I dug through the postings to find your intelligent response to the "loudness" of commercials. You are right on the nose with it being related to compression.
I have been toying with the idea of creating a "compression detector" (in hardware because I am a hardware geek) that can detect the sustained amplitude of a signal (indicating compression.. aka commercials) and then automatically pad it down by 20 dB. When the compression goes away, so does the padding. This would have a really cool effect of nearly muting commercials and could be a retrofit device between your receiver and an external amp.
If anyone with an oscilloscope looked at the audio component you can see the effects of compression. All of the signals, irrespective of frequency or natural amplitude are boosted up to a uniform level. This is also why commercials sound so harsh, normal speech has lows and highs of sound level, commercials just ramp it all up to get the maximum effect. I am sure that some marketing wankers have focus groups going that consider it a positive attribute when a commercial causes you to wince and reach for the volume control.
If there was a small circuit (like an op-amp) that could be hacked together with Radio Shack parts by any 14 year old (and the schematic freely available for download off of the internet) you can bet that some enterprising folks would mass-market a box (of course they would have to subtitle their commercials because we will all be on mute).
There can be other things that can cause multiple offspring in a pregnancy. Subtle hormonal changes (or drastic changes like what happens with fertility treatments) can cause multiple ova (eggs) per term.
It would be interesting to see if there is a statistical difference in the age of onset of menopause or other reproductive changes.
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This is part of the "nervous Nellie" reactions that have developed over the past few years. We should be encouraging inquisitiveness, exploration and learning in our children or we will just produce more mediocre administrators. Kids do things at home, bring them to school and show their friends. As long as it was not clearly a weapon or some other prohibited device there should not be a problem with it.
We are applying the same "sterile area" rules that supposedly exist in our airports to our schools. Will TSA be staffing the schools to keep out prohibited items?
Unless the child lied about what the device was it appears that the principal overreacted and did not apply too much common sense. It sounds like a pretty cool idea to use a Gatoraide bottle as a focusing point for a sonic device. Smart kid to think that through and to try something with it.
How many people who read /. have tried out other things like this in their childhood? Most of us have.
This is another attempt by the RIAA to dilute their highly unpopular (and unconstitutional) warfare on anyone who exchanges music. If they can "get" the ISP's to do the filtering for them then the next step would be for the RIAA to "require" the ISP's to be the bad guys.
Net Neutrality is something worth fighting for. This RIAA attempt is a sideways attempt to undermine the free access to most information.
I like this comment:
Quote;
“Sen. Gorton,” I asked, “I don’t quite understand all this talk alleging that ‘No one is in charge of the intelligence community.’ You are surely aware that, by act of Congress, there is such a person, and right now that happens to be Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet.”
The avuncular Gorton tiptoed up to me, put his right hand around my shoulder, and with a conspiratorial whisper said, “Yes, Ray, of course I know that. We all know that. But George would not take charge; he would not do what he was supposed to.”
EndQuote
Exactly, if you put political wieners in charge of any department you are going to cut the professionals off at the knees.
It used to be the deputy directors that were the real operational control of the organization. This is true of nearly every federal agency, you want very talented people in the #2 slots (several deputies, for different departments). The "talent" that reports up to the Deputy Directors need to have confidence that someone above them is going to be able to pull the pieces together and make a friggen decision. What has been happening is you get a new director at every political cycle and they do a wholesale swapout of administration 3-4 levels down in the organization. Then all you have are political hacks who are not smart enough (or experienced) to champion a course of action. IE... put a bomb in someone's smoke-stack.
We do not want the decades of Hoover style FBI. That was a man who clearly had delusions of his own grandeur and was so powerful that presidents were afraid to kick him out. It took Hoover dying before change could happen.
Having the top slot filled by a political appointee is fine if they know that the strength of the organization is THE LAYERS BENEATH them. Too many sit in their big comfy offices and think that suddenly they have the wisdom of the seven sages at their disposal.
I do not care what party, what president, what administration... they all do this game.
I have been a paying member of the group for a few years now and I am distressed that they are constantly re-defining what doomsday is. Now it includes global warming, overpopulation, unstable governments, the building of any sort of nuclear power system, etc...
It really diminishes from the message when they add in all of these other things. There have always been threats to our existence and there always will be.
Asteroid impacts, genetically engineered plants or the eventual supernovae that will happen when Eta Carinae self-destructs are all threats as well.
People claiming to be suffering from ill effects from power lines, radio towers and signals from the martians has been cause célèbre for several decades now. I frequently run across these groups as a communications consultant working with utilities. Sometimes what I want to say is "if you are so concerned about power lines why don't you disconnect the power to your house?".
Right now since you are sitting in front a computer to read this, you are exposed to a great deal more RF energy than a microwave dish that is 100 feet up in the air is putting out.
It is like the hysteria surrounding cadmium in children's toys that is also this weeks latest worry. People will cite cancer clusters and anecdotal evidence yet when confronted with the facts they will jump to some other reason. After going through a long process with community groups and concerned citizens it ended up being an issue about what color the antenna was.
One point as well is that many of these folks who would download a bunch of pirated apps for their phone would not purchase them in the first place. I think it is more accurate to say that the income was unrealized and not lost.
If you put something on the market for $1000 and only two people think it is worth the price to pay for it but six hundred people would have purchased it for $100 then you have significantly overvalued your product and lose money. I think that the prices on the app store are all inflated. This is a similar model to the entire music and movie industry. Most people steal your product because they do not believe that what you are asking for it is reasonable, not because they would not pay anything at all for it.
It is interesting to read the opinion. Conspiracy to fix prices, agreements to not compete against each other, all record companies refusing to do any business with certain companies.
They are acting like a monopoly. This is what led to the breakup of Standard Oil back in the early part of the 20th century and the breakup of the Bell System into Baby Bells.
This most favored nation (MFN) deal they have going and how all prices change in lockstep.
Wow, it reminds me of how they eventually caught Al Capone. Not on running a crime syndicate but on tax evasion.
They probably tried to patent the design of the human eye and God (big JuJu, whatever you call it) sued as prior art.
I am in a quandary over the entire patent vs. copyright issue. If you could patent a book then you could lock out all of your competition from writing about "Westerns involving horses and indians". In a patent you are going after an idea or design.
To me, software is a creative work more akin to a copyright. If someone wants to mimic your idea using a different software platform and uniquely created code they are free to do so. I know that is a contestable issue amongst this crowd but I am adverse to the pressures moving prior art into patentable works where you can sue the asses off of anyone who has deployed it in the past 20 years.
There is a movement afoot amongst many companies to patent the obvious. It may just be my sensitivity to the issue but it seems to come from companies that feel beset upon by all sides and are languishing.
Evolution is not always a beneficial change. There are plenty of evolutionary traits that resulted in dead ends for some species.
The related articles off of the MIT site point out that the Y chromosome has areas of replication that can make the entire chromosome or parts of it fold back upon themselves, creating non-viable offspring.
The idea of the article points out that there is much changing in the Y chromosome and it does not have the mechanisms in place to prevent some of the gross errors in duplication.
I was careful to not use the word improvement in the title. Maybe some folks cannot make the distinction between an evolutionary change and an improvement but I can.
In some ways cro-mag was superior in design to modern h-sap. A shorter body build, better musculature, larger brain case, improved sinus design, etc.. But they still died out or were out-competed by h-sap.
We do not know what the relationship is between genetics and autism. Maybe (my speculation here) autism results from the human brain being turned up way too much.
This will really date me, the series that only lasted less than a year;
The Starlost
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starlost
It was kinda early 70's funkadelic (groovy baby) but it had a great deal of potential.
A multi-generation colony ship where the crew dies, leaving only the colonists living in domes. The domes looked exactly like the structures used in the movie Silent Running but much larger.
The colonists are locked off from each other, hundreds of years have passed and everyone has forgotten that they are on a ship. The ship is damaged and heading for certain destruction.
There are hundreds of domes, this ship contains the last survivors of the human race. The ship is thousands of miles across. Each dome contains a different culture and some have diverged wildly from what they may have started as.
Imagine a dome, 50 miles across that is nothing but wacked-out Islam, a Amazonian dome with jungles....
The potential varieties are amazing. All of this without even leaving the ship.
Three people have accidentally gotten out of their dome. Think of their culture as 19th century Amish. They gradually
I agree, seven years ago I suddenly found myself laid-off during the collapse of the telcos. That same day I had put my resume up on a half-dozen different job sites similar to headhunter.com. My normally stealthy email address that would only get spam a few times a week was suddenly taking 20-30 spam emails a day. If I had known that would be the consequence I would have created a temporary email address and had all of my job-seeking contacts (and the spammers) send emails there.
Right now I get 40+ pieces of spam today to my new account. Fortunately the gmail filter works pretty darned good and eliminates 95% of them.
I have taught classes to an InfraGuard chapter in my area, it is quite different than the scary statements that have been made by many.
It is about being aware of your vulnerabilities and developing contingency plans and fairly basic security procedures to make it less easy for someone to mess with your infrastructure. Most of the folks who attend the InfraGuard monthly meetings are already in middle management and have been tasked with the chore of improving security. While pretty much anyone can participate there are levels to it. Some information is compartmentalized on a need to know basis when it comes to specific incidents or threats.
If it was only the FBI who had access to the genetic material than I would say that this is a major problem during a trial.
I would hope that my defense team would have access to a sample of the DNA taken at a crime scene and my DNA and they would run a more complete comparison. If they went into court with a more thorough DNA comparison that completely blew-away the CODIS matchup then this would turn the prosecutors case on it's ear.
If it is only 15 markers out of 580,000 that is used to determine your guilt or innocence then there is a major concern that the wrong person could be hanged for the crime.
I do believe that they should be using more than 15 markers, as you indicated, this is 1990's technology.
A hit on a 15 marker test should be a reason to narrow the pool of prospective folks down some. Further testing and evidence must be necessary to gain a conviction. We have seen where folks have been convicted off of partial evidence before.
Do they need to test for all 580,000? No, but a sampling greater than 15 is probably called for.
Back in the 80's I was working for an oil company and had to catch a flight to a different city to make a determination on a potentially contaminated batch of jet fuel. This was to a very small fuel terminal that did not necessarily have the right equipment to capture a sample of fuel. What I was dragging along with me was some sampling and analysis gear. Being in a hurry, since this was going to be a flight to an airport, to do work on airport property, catch a flight back the same day, I hand-carried my gear along.
Here is how the conversation went at security screening;
"Miss, what is this thing in the box?"
"Oh, that's a test bomb"
-- you can imagine what happened next, needless to say I was NOT catching that flight and United would not reschedule me on ANY flights for several days. ---
What I had was a "bacon test bomb" http://www.koehlerinstrument.com/products/K27700.html it was packed in a wooden crate that I was hand-carrying on-board the aircraft. It is just a shiny steel cylinder, about the size of a thermos container but has a funky plunger assembly inside and a length of coiled up line to lower it into the tank.
It is used to grab a sample off of the bottom of a storage tank so I could in turn, run flash-point tests on a 50,000 BBL tank of aviation fuel. The airline was rejecting the batch, claiming that it was contaminated with gasoline (bad, bad thing for jet aircraft).
Since then I have learned to give pause when speaking to security screeners
They are about as anatomically correct as the dancing baby animations.
One of the problems is that these terrorists want to remove our civilization and return to their 12th century version of it. They have no problems with inflicting casualties and it is much easier to do this in a free society.
Or a really obese person can just hide something under the rolls of fat.
Strangely, that is even grosser than an anal-bomb
That is sheer insanity. So we grant a foreign agency extra-legal protections to operate within our borders. There must be some sort of protections for American citizens to prevent us from being subject to tyranny. We put limitations (with damned good reasons) on our own law enforcement agencies but we turn around and grant Interpol (not even responsible to any one particular government) near unlimited authority within our country.
The long espoused fears of a world government (something that has been claimed as a threat by right-wingers) suddenly looms much larger in the rear-view mirror.
Wow, AT&T with it's lock-in of the iPhone, now Verizon with a lock-in to Bing. Can it be that this is the only way that Microsoft can get people to use Bing?
I tried Bing, gave it a fair shake and ended up back with Google. To have my choices taken away by my phone carrier in a backroom deal between Microsoft and Verizon would get me looking for a new carrier.
Of course, Microsoft has been in this business for a long time so they can give lessons to Verizon.
Absolutely correct. You see the same thing happen with test equipment that must be periodically calibrated to NIST traceable standards. I had a "deadweight tester" (a very arcane piece of test equipment for accurately measuring pressures) that had to have it's brass weights tested to make sure they weighed "exactly" the right amount. We were even discouraged from polishing the brass weights as the polishing process would remove minute amounts of brass.
When my former employer offered to send my DVM (digital voltmeter) off for NIST calibration I jumped at the opportunity. When they came back and said that it was a Piece of Shit (really old, 1980's vintage) I used that as an excuse to get them buy me a new meter.
I think the pricing of scientific instrumentation is based largely upon the limited number of devices produced. The folks who make sensors really do not care too much about the price and are looking at recovering their development, manufacturing and marketing costs off of very small sales quantities.
A case in point; I work with AMI (SmartGrid) systems for measuring water and electricity consumption. These devices have a surprising level of sophistication, very long battery lives (10-20 years off of a Li-Ion battery) and can store a data-point every fifteen minutes and report it back across a radio network. I "know" the manufacturing costs are down in the $30-60 range for each device. The manufacturers are all anxious to get customers (utilities) to spend their millions on projects to put SmartGrid technologies into cities so the more you buy, the cheaper they get. The data is frequently coming from "absolute encoders" on water meters and less frequently, from pulse encoders that generate a certain number of pulses per 1000's of gallons (the device counts them up, multiplies them by a K factor and gives you a corrected value for gallons of water consumed).
The Nintendo Wi is a good example. How many millions of the Wi devices are made? If they were $250 each there would not be many consumers buying them so they mass-produce and keep the prices low. You see the same effect when you hear about banks of PlayStation 3's being used in clusters for supercomputing.
If someone was in the room and yelled "TOUCHDOWN" the doc may have spiked the baby.
By causing an "earthquake" the incident relieved built up stresses along the fault line. If faults were able to slide continually and smoothly you would not have earthquakes at all.
It would not be surprising to find out that the earthquake came while they were hydraulically fracturing the rock to allow for water channels to exist between boreholes. If you cannot pump cool water down one shaft and hot water up another you will have no means of recovering the built up heat and generating electricity. Creating these cracks and channels between boreholes is essential for geothermal (oil and gas as well) systems.
In hydro-fracturing they pump a fluid (water and a bunch of other chemicals and little beads to wedge into the cracks to keep them open) at extremely high pressures (>10,000 psi) to open of seams in the rock and to create channels to allow the working fluid (water) to move between the wells. As the water moves through the rock it sucks up the heat and is then used to drive some sort of secondary loop. Since the water is not converted into steam (being cooler than 100 C) they must have planned on using some sort of intermediate process to generate the expanding gas to run a turbine or sterling engine.
I am glad that I dug through the postings to find your intelligent response to the "loudness" of commercials. You are right on the nose with it being related to compression.
I have been toying with the idea of creating a "compression detector" (in hardware because I am a hardware geek) that can detect the sustained amplitude of a signal (indicating compression.. aka commercials) and then automatically pad it down by 20 dB. When the compression goes away, so does the padding. This would have a really cool effect of nearly muting commercials and could be a retrofit device between your receiver and an external amp.
If anyone with an oscilloscope looked at the audio component you can see the effects of compression. All of the signals, irrespective of frequency or natural amplitude are boosted up to a uniform level. This is also why commercials sound so harsh, normal speech has lows and highs of sound level, commercials just ramp it all up to get the maximum effect. I am sure that some marketing wankers have focus groups going that consider it a positive attribute when a commercial causes you to wince and reach for the volume control.
If there was a small circuit (like an op-amp) that could be hacked together with Radio Shack parts by any 14 year old (and the schematic freely available for download off of the internet) you can bet that some enterprising folks would mass-market a box (of course they would have to subtitle their commercials because we will all be on mute).
There can be other things that can cause multiple offspring in a pregnancy. Subtle hormonal changes (or drastic changes like what happens with fertility treatments) can cause multiple ova (eggs) per term.
It would be interesting to see if there is a statistical difference in the age of onset of menopause or other reproductive changes.