"Hate crime" legislation is superfluous, abused, and probably poorly written (since otherwise it wouldn't be so frequently abused). Everything that should be covered by "hate crime" law is already covered by "criminal threatening" and ordinary criminal law. "Hate crime" laws are just the result of legislators trying to look like they're doing something worthwhile.
Assuming that "1st quartile" means the bottom quartile, then 1380 is the average for the worst 25%. We don't know the shape of the curve, but saying that half of the 25% (12.5%) is below 1380 is reasonable.
Calling this a mistake is not entirely accurate. MIT was previously excluding from its averages some people who were not native English speakers, and the SAT relies heavily on good English ability. If MIT failed to admit intelligent people who had not yet mastered English, it would be doing both itself and those persons a disservice. MIT is a magnet for foreign students, and that tends to reduce MIT's average SAT more than other schools.
Although you say that being on the north side of a heavily forested hillside prohibits satellite internet, a tall enough tower will give you line-of-sight to the satellite. The question then becomes one of cost, zoning regulations and getting along with your neighbors.
The girl deliberately made something that looked like a bomb and took it to an airport. This is akin to yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre, where the likely result is panic. That there was no fire, or no bomb, does not mean there was no potential for damage. Among other possible classifications, this might be considered "reckless endangerment".
As to why she couldn't be released, it's because bail was required to make sure she'd not flee from the local court's jurisdiction, which is entirely reasonable for a college student who is unlikely to have strong ties to the community. That the bail was not enormous is recognition of the fact that not much actual damage occurred.
Cable company profit margins are not outlandish; figure 10% or so. If many people choose just a few channels, the people who choose a lot will have their bills go up. Likewise, if everything is pay-per-view, the people who watch very little will see their bills decline and people who keep the TV on 24 hours a day will see their bills become enormous.
If restrictions on bundling are enforced on the providers, less popular channels from 1 provider will be at an economic disadvantage and will tend to disappear. Diversity will decline; offbeat programming will become rarer. The unusual channels that remain will be more expensive. A French-only channel and an Italian-only channel are available from DirecTV; IIRC these are $5 to $10 per channel per month.
Popular channels attract advertising and pay for themselves. Compare Cartoon Network to Boomerang. Cartoon Network has ads, Boomerang doesn't. My guess is that Boomerang doesn't reach enough households to attract advertisers, and it might go away if a la carte becomes standard.
We aren't going to see prices come down meaningfully until the overall system, from actors and gaffers to cable companies, becomes more efficient. And that isn't going to happen until economic pressure is applied. That pressure is coming in the form of internet TV, but how it's going to turn out is anybody's guess.
It is possible to have too many fonts. Some applications (and some OSes) catalog all available fonts before they become usable, or at the first attempt to change font. On a slow computer with thousands of fonts, this can take in excess of a minute. For most users just trying to be practical, something in the range of 100 fonts seems reasonable.
The trick is to cover your whole body, without any holes larger than a small fraction of the wavelength. Holes would let radiation through to your skin, and might locally intensify the radiation. It would also be a good idea to keep your metallic mylar separated from your skin by a few mm, to avoid contact with the electric fields on and near the metal. As a bonus, your mylar armor will also be effective against tasers.
Personally, I like the idea of chain mail, but the gaps and the undependable conductivity between links would probably make it ineffective.
I knew a woman who owned a company in the Los Angeles area that did nothing but repair cable boxes. IIRC, she had about 10 employees. It wasn't the only company in the area doing this.
All electronic devices have a failure rate even if they are treated well, and not all cable boxes are treated well.
I checked your link, and there are a lot of unnecessary features there that boost the price, like IR blaster and LED display. Get rid of the excess; provide a SMALL box that does the absolute minimum required by law. Somebody has let feature creep become SOP.
WTF is the deal about "world hunger"? I've got a kitchen full of food, but I'm hungry right now and I intend to stay that way for several hours. Malnutrition, undernutrition, starvation, those are valid concerns, but hunger? Bah! Stupid words for thoughtless people.
There's value to the argument that someone who tries homeopathy will eventually have to enter the conventional healthcare system in worse condition than if he had not tried homeopathy, thereby increasing everyone's costs through the mechanism of insurance. However, humans usually defeat most diseases without any special care, and in these cases if homeopathy delays a trip to the doctor so long that the disease ends and the trip never happens, everyone's costs are cut. Furthermore, homeopathic "remedies" are often self-inflicted, so no expensive "professional" services are ever used.
The number of people who would try to use homeopathy for crisis medicine (heart attack, stroke, car crash) is vanishingly small, so it's probably not a valid concern in such cases.
Most homeopathic substances aren't very expensive because there isn't much but water or sugar being sold.
We'd be better off if people didn't believe in frauds, but homeopathy does less damage than many other forms of medical stupidity.
The properties needed for a reference are utility, stability and ease of measurement. It's fairly easy (haha) to measure both the time and the distance of so many cycles of radiation from cesium, at least in principle. Both time and distance have a great deal of utility as very accurate standards. I suspect the utility of a mass standard is much better than the utility of an energy standard, and it is much easier to duplicate. Furthermore, I don't think that energy can be measured as easily as mass (provided that there's a reference mass to measure against). Thus, the standard should be a certain number of atoms of a material that is as chemically and radiologically inert as possible, and that does not normally exist in a variety of isotopes. "Anyone" could recreate the standard by counting out the prescribed number of atoms.
The idea that emergency responders need any significant portion of the current TV spectrum is complete BS. The current TV spectrum is more than 400 MHz. An emergency responder needs only a voice channel, 4 kHz. That's 1/100,000th of the TV spectrum. Furthermore, in an emergency a 5 watt voice channel will punch through any TV signal that's not from a transmitter within about a mile of the emergency, so generally it's not even necessary to forbid TV transmission on the emergency band.
The actual manufacturing cost of an ATSC tuner should minimal, well under $10 in volume. It's just a normal tuner plus an IC. The selling price of the complete TV, once manufactured in volume, should be well under $100. Keep in mind that it is currently possible to buy a new (B&W, mediocre, small) TV for $40.
A person too poor to pay less than $100 for a TV is too poor to be wasting money on such foolishness, and is a member of a very small fraction of the general population.
The biggest flaw in the design was the choice of college students as the only test subjects. This provides a sharp age selection and a fairly sharp intelligence selection. Liberals tend to be younger. Liberals tend to fall into 2 academic groups, (1) the bright and highly educated, and (2) the dull and poorly educated. Conservatives tend to be older and fall in the middle academically.
Thus, the experimental universe was most likely to include moderately bright conservatives and brighter liberals. Had they instead chosen college-age people who were not in college, the experimental universe would probably have included conservatives of mediocre intelligence and liberals who were stupider. I think that in that case, the results would have been reversed.
Nonetheless, the results of the study were so strong that there does seem to be something meaningful happening. A better designed test with many more subjects and more dimensions of political beliefs would be enlightening. A downside of better knowledge in this area would be helping lying politicians to better fine-tune their messages.
According to the article, the price of fuel derived from this will be in excess of $1/liter, or about $4/gallon. That's more that diesel is now. Something will have to change for this to be profitable.
For how much of every hospital do you want to require shielding? Each intensive care ward and operating room has one or more heart monitors. Shielding still doesn't solve the problem. If a whole floor is an intensive care unit, even if it's shielded everyone on that floor with a cell phone is potentially interfering.
E. T. Bell and George Gamow both wrote many books of high quality, Bell on math and Gamow on math snd science. Bell's "Men of Mathemetics" is particularly good. Whether these are good for attracting interest to science and math or just enhancing interest that's already present, I don't know.
Early interest in science was created mostly by Heinlein. Interest in math was stimulated by my frustration of not being taught things that were clearly within the ability range of myself and my classmates, although I suspect that had I been taught those things, I would have hungered for even more. State-run school math was crippled when I was taking it 45 years ago, and I'm sure it hasn't gotten better.
I understood early that math was necessary to do interesting things, and with the introduction of math puzzles math becaume more intersting by itself.
I've read that this has been done, but it's not cost-effective. I guess that would be because there isn't much demand for this technique, so low production quantities mean high prices. OTOH, I don't think anyone has tried it recently, and it might be worthwhile for some very demanding applications. I suspect in most cases that another 1 Gbyte of RAM would be more effective than cutting seek time from 5 ms to 3 ms.
Your claim that Rand "has no concept of (and explicitly argues against) romantic love and scientific curiosity" is typical of the outrageous lies about Rand that I've been hearing for 35 years. In particular, she wrote explicitly about romantic love.
Although codes can be broken eventually, properly designed systems don't have a single number that can just be copied. Even more than 30 years ago, IFF systems were based upon challenge-response techniques, and it could take an enormous number of challenges to break the code. If the RFID chip was restricted to responding only once every ten seconds and 10 billion challenges were required to deduce the code system, it would take 3000 years to break the code system, by which time the solution would be pointless.
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"Hate crime" legislation is superfluous, abused, and probably poorly written (since otherwise it wouldn't be so frequently abused). Everything that should be covered by "hate crime" law is already covered by "criminal threatening" and ordinary criminal law. "Hate crime" laws are just the result of legislators trying to look like they're doing something worthwhile.
Calling this a mistake is not entirely accurate. MIT was previously excluding from its averages some people who were not native English speakers, and the SAT relies heavily on good English ability. If MIT failed to admit intelligent people who had not yet mastered English, it would be doing both itself and those persons a disservice. MIT is a magnet for foreign students, and that tends to reduce MIT's average SAT more than other schools.
Although you say that being on the north side of a heavily forested hillside prohibits satellite internet, a tall enough tower will give you line-of-sight to the satellite. The question then becomes one of cost, zoning regulations and getting along with your neighbors.
As to why she couldn't be released, it's because bail was required to make sure she'd not flee from the local court's jurisdiction, which is entirely reasonable for a college student who is unlikely to have strong ties to the community. That the bail was not enormous is recognition of the fact that not much actual damage occurred.
If restrictions on bundling are enforced on the providers, less popular channels from 1 provider will be at an economic disadvantage and will tend to disappear. Diversity will decline; offbeat programming will become rarer. The unusual channels that remain will be more expensive. A French-only channel and an Italian-only channel are available from DirecTV; IIRC these are $5 to $10 per channel per month.
Popular channels attract advertising and pay for themselves. Compare Cartoon Network to Boomerang. Cartoon Network has ads, Boomerang doesn't. My guess is that Boomerang doesn't reach enough households to attract advertisers, and it might go away if a la carte becomes standard.
We aren't going to see prices come down meaningfully until the overall system, from actors and gaffers to cable companies, becomes more efficient. And that isn't going to happen until economic pressure is applied. That pressure is coming in the form of internet TV, but how it's going to turn out is anybody's guess.
It is possible to have too many fonts. Some applications (and some OSes) catalog all available fonts before they become usable, or at the first attempt to change font. On a slow computer with thousands of fonts, this can take in excess of a minute. For most users just trying to be practical, something in the range of 100 fonts seems reasonable.
Personally, I like the idea of chain mail, but the gaps and the undependable conductivity between links would probably make it ineffective.
All electronic devices have a failure rate even if they are treated well, and not all cable boxes are treated well.
I checked your link, and there are a lot of unnecessary features there that boost the price, like IR blaster and LED display. Get rid of the excess; provide a SMALL box that does the absolute minimum required by law. Somebody has let feature creep become SOP.
WTF is the deal about "world hunger"? I've got a kitchen full of food, but I'm hungry right now and I intend to stay that way for several hours. Malnutrition, undernutrition, starvation, those are valid concerns, but hunger? Bah! Stupid words for thoughtless people.
nVidia had a 3:2 stock split Sept. 11, 2007 and the price adjusted accordingly. This has nothing to do with TDA.
The number of people who would try to use homeopathy for crisis medicine (heart attack, stroke, car crash) is vanishingly small, so it's probably not a valid concern in such cases.
Most homeopathic substances aren't very expensive because there isn't much but water or sugar being sold.
We'd be better off if people didn't believe in frauds, but homeopathy does less damage than many other forms of medical stupidity.
The properties needed for a reference are utility, stability and ease of measurement. It's fairly easy (haha) to measure both the time and the distance of so many cycles of radiation from cesium, at least in principle. Both time and distance have a great deal of utility as very accurate standards. I suspect the utility of a mass standard is much better than the utility of an energy standard, and it is much easier to duplicate. Furthermore, I don't think that energy can be measured as easily as mass (provided that there's a reference mass to measure against). Thus, the standard should be a certain number of atoms of a material that is as chemically and radiologically inert as possible, and that does not normally exist in a variety of isotopes. "Anyone" could recreate the standard by counting out the prescribed number of atoms.
The idea that emergency responders need any significant portion of the current TV spectrum is complete BS. The current TV spectrum is more than 400 MHz. An emergency responder needs only a voice channel, 4 kHz. That's 1/100,000th of the TV spectrum. Furthermore, in an emergency a 5 watt voice channel will punch through any TV signal that's not from a transmitter within about a mile of the emergency, so generally it's not even necessary to forbid TV transmission on the emergency band.
A person too poor to pay less than $100 for a TV is too poor to be wasting money on such foolishness, and is a member of a very small fraction of the general population.
Thus, the experimental universe was most likely to include moderately bright conservatives and brighter liberals. Had they instead chosen college-age people who were not in college, the experimental universe would probably have included conservatives of mediocre intelligence and liberals who were stupider. I think that in that case, the results would have been reversed.
Nonetheless, the results of the study were so strong that there does seem to be something meaningful happening. A better designed test with many more subjects and more dimensions of political beliefs would be enlightening. A downside of better knowledge in this area would be helping lying politicians to better fine-tune their messages.
There are exotic reflectors with the secondary mirror located off-axis, out of the path of incoming light.
According to the article, the price of fuel derived from this will be in excess of $1/liter, or about $4/gallon. That's more that diesel is now. Something will have to change for this to be profitable.
For how much of every hospital do you want to require shielding? Each intensive care ward and operating room has one or more heart monitors. Shielding still doesn't solve the problem. If a whole floor is an intensive care unit, even if it's shielded everyone on that floor with a cell phone is potentially interfering.
Early interest in science was created mostly by Heinlein. Interest in math was stimulated by my frustration of not being taught things that were clearly within the ability range of myself and my classmates, although I suspect that had I been taught those things, I would have hungered for even more. State-run school math was crippled when I was taking it 45 years ago, and I'm sure it hasn't gotten better.
I understood early that math was necessary to do interesting things, and with the introduction of math puzzles math becaume more intersting by itself.
I've read that this has been done, but it's not cost-effective. I guess that would be because there isn't much demand for this technique, so low production quantities mean high prices. OTOH, I don't think anyone has tried it recently, and it might be worthwhile for some very demanding applications. I suspect in most cases that another 1 Gbyte of RAM would be more effective than cutting seek time from 5 ms to 3 ms.
Your claim that Rand "has no concept of (and explicitly argues against) romantic love and scientific curiosity" is typical of the outrageous lies about Rand that I've been hearing for 35 years. In particular, she wrote explicitly about romantic love.
Majority has already been defined, it means "more than half". In the context of voting, no other interpretation is valid.
Although codes can be broken eventually, properly designed systems don't have a single number that can just be copied. Even more than 30 years ago, IFF systems were based upon challenge-response techniques, and it could take an enormous number of challenges to break the code. If the RFID chip was restricted to responding only once every ten seconds and 10 billion challenges were required to deduce the code system, it would take 3000 years to break the code system, by which time the solution would be pointless.
It comes out in 1976 and it will be called "Logan's Run"; it will be based upon the novel of the same name which will be written in 1967