what he did was mere curiosity mixed with the desire to HELP these companies fix their network.
That line is total self-serving bullshit by Lamo. What Lamo will find out is that his childish rationalization of his behavior (helping companies with their security - yea right) might fly with his permissive parents, but not in real life. He STOLE $100,000 worth of Lexis/Nexis time that was actually billed to the NYTimes by a real company (Lexis/Nexis) that provided a real service maintained by real people that get paid real money to put real food on their tables.
I think Mr. Lamo is going to get a very expensive lesson in reality.
Gee, it would be soooo much better if they print the infrared in infrared ink and the utlra-violet in UV ink and the x-rays in x-ray ink. We could take the pics outside and see what the bees think.
The idea is to change the wavelengths from those humans can't detect to those humans CAN detect.
It would be a pretty inept conspiracy to make the Mars images too red on purpose [what would be the point anyway?] AND publish the calibration chart in the same image, wouldn't it?
Re:DLP has Rainbows,and MY HEAD HURTS, Doc!
on
CES 2004 Coverage
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· Score: 1
I'm really getting tired of all this DLP rainbow nonsense. The key to what you say is...
I have yet to sit down with someone and point out the rainbows and have them tell me they can't see them
...the point being you have to point them out! Rainbows happen, yes, and almost everyone can see them when looking for them, but you have to be sweeping you eyes across the screen at high speed in order make one appear. Rainbows do not occur when simply watching a picture on a DLP screen. Your friends probably get their headaches from all the extreme eye motion you are making them perform to see the rainbows in the first place!
The exact comparison to DLP rainbows is seeing the flashing of LED's when you quickly sweep your eyes around the room. Normally no one sees the LEDs flashing at 60Hz, but it IS possible if you try hard enough.
Its like the guy that goes to the doctor and says, "I think something's wrong with my head Doc. It hurts every time I bang my head on the wall."
Yeah, it's possible, but there is absolutely no evidence that was the reason there were 143 non-votes. It was just total supposition based on someone's guess. Just because someone with a definate self-interest in the validation of the touch screens comes up with a non-threatening reason it might have happened does not mean that _is_ what happened. A supposition about black helicopters and midnight re-programming by commandos in black camo holds just as much weight in the fact department.
This new fingerprinting will only allow the government keep track of us even more.
True. Expect the fingerprinting to be extended to US citizens who even travel to one of the countries on the fingerprint list - AFTER the elections of course. A national ID card - one of the wet dreams of the Bush administration.
Considering all the terrorists of 9/11 came into this country legally(as far as I know, dont quote me and tell me if Im wrong) this would not have stopped them from getting on the plane.
Correct. The program will have to be expanded to fingerprint screening BEFORE passengers get on the planes, so expect US Customs and Immigration to begin screening in foreign airports and in transit airports. Of course if they can get the foreign governments to do it then US citizens will not be exempted. I suspect the plan is to share the fingerprint information the same way as Echelon data is shared. The Brits spy on American communications and the Americans spy on British communications and then they simply pool the data - circumventing domestic spying laws very effectively in both countries.
Can you tell I trust this admnistration to protect the Constitution about as far as I can throw the lot of them?
I agree. Twenty-eight exempt countries is a BIG loophole. It looks supiciously like a political move to me. Why do it now, 10 months before the presidential election when 9/11 happened 2 1/2 years ago?
The administration also seems to have forgotten the important point that the terrorists are religious zealots, not nationalistic zealots. It isn;t like the 40's when our enemies were living in Germany, Japan and Italy and carried around passports identifying them as such. Today they can be any nationality. Mousssoui was a British citizen.
That law will probably be overruled in the next few days, since it wasn't issued by the Brazilian Supreme Court (don't ask... regional courts can issue directives that are valid for all country, and that can be overruled in superior courts... you don't want to understand the Brazilian legal system, believe me...)
You may be right about not wanting to understand Brazilian courts, but isn't this exactly the way the US court system works, too? Regional District courts make rulings all the time that are applicable everywhere, and can be overturned by the Supreme Court.
This looks like a purely political election-year make-the-voters-feel-good move. Excluding visitors from the countries that send the most visitors yearly to the US leaves a hole a terrorist could drive a truck through - literally. Moussoui (shoe-bomber) was a British citizen and would not have been photographed, but of course he wasn;t planning on making to customs to be photographed anyway so it is a moot point.
Smoking tobacco to prevent Parkinson's would be a lot like becoming a regular at the local opium den. It keeps you off the streets, lowering your chances of getting hit by a bus. Drinking coffee to do the same would be more like hanging out inside the local Starbucks. Hmmm. Opium den - Starbucks. Opium Den - Starbucks... Maybe this isn;t such a good analogy after all.
You said:A random sampling such as would exist in such a study will include some average drivers, some bad drivers, and some good drivers. If there's some situation that the bad drivers don't handle well, that would drag down the score of the whole set of them,...
In the English I know, the above statement says - "Because the sample for the study was random, poor drivers were included in the study. This caused the resulting average score for all drivers to be too low and required upward adjustment of the mean". That is circular logic in any language.
You have also said:Claiming the average driver behaves in a certain fashion, based on the average of a sampling of drivers is just like claiming the average American family has 2.5 children. Nope, I'm sorry - ZERO families have 2.5 children.
You are correct in pointing out the error in someone saying the average family has 2.5 children, but it is perfectly correct to say the average family simply "has children". Similarly it was correct for the original poster to say there were situations the average driver might handle poorly if he were talking on a cellphone. This is correct in both language and logic.
But pretty easy to stop. Don't like a company? Don't work for it, and don't buy from it. If enough people see things your way, it will go out of buisness. (And if enough people don't agree with you, it will stay in buisness - such is life in a dollar-vote based system.)
It isn't that simplistic. Large corporations make billions and are powerful enough to change their environment so that it is favorable to them. They do it through campaign contributions, lobbying, public-relations and spin. The tobacco industy's creation of the Tobacco Intitute to manufacture favorable pseudo-science is a perfect example. Carefully constructed spin to make even negative news sound positive is common in almost every industry.
Pfizer Inc (pharmaceuticals) last year put out a very favorable press release in response to a potentialy damaging study about blood pressure medicines. The press release pointed out that the study showed Pfizer's new medicine was just as effective as older ones in lowering blood pressure. What could be wrong with that? It was true as far as it went, but what they left out was that the study also indicated the death rate from Pfizer's new drug was twice the rate of the older drugs. Pfizer had used public relations spin to make more money for themselves and did it without technically telling a lie. Maybe your parents or spouse is taking that medicine today.
Do you know that almost half of the "editorials" in newspapers are written by public relations professionals to give favorble impressions of industries? They are bought and paid for by industry groups, offered for free to editors, and then are passed off as unbiased opinions.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of similar spin-lies told every year. Lobbyists, public relations experts, and friendly politicians spend their well-paid lives promoting the image of corporations as good and benevolent while hiding the fact that they are exploitive and greed-based. Given this artificial environment where the truth becomes a lie and a lie becomes the truth it is almost impossible for consumers to make informed decisions about the morality of the companies they buy from.
A study of a random sampling of drivers is *NOT* the same thing as a study of what the average driver can handle. A random sampling such as would exist in such a study will include some average drivers, some bad drivers, and some good drivers. If there's some situation that the bad drivers don't handle well, that would drag down the score of the whole set of them, even if the average and better than average drivers are able to handle it.
You are using circular logic. You can't say the risk for the average driver population is skewed because bad drivers were included in the calculations. Data collected MUST be from a random sample to determine the risk. If a random sample were not used [for example by excluding drivers that have had two or more accidents], one would not be able to say anything about the overall driver population - only about drivers who don't have accidents.
Additionally, because random samples generate bell curve distributions, the Relative Risk calculated applies most accurately to the average population (read "average driver").
As an aside, an 'average' driver would usually be defined as one who's abilities fall within one standard deviation of the mean. Using this criteria would make about 66% of all drivers average.
People- Calm. The. Fuck. Down. Planes don't explode because something inside them catches fire, they don't start crashing because someone shoots a gun, yadda yadda. Cars don't explode because a battery overheats in the trunk.
You simply don't know what you are talking about.
First, oxygen systems are NOT on planes to protect passengers from toxic gases and fumes. O2 systems are designed to provide oxygen for the short time it takes to get passengers from high altitude without brain-damage or death. More people die from exposure to toxic gases in aircraft fires than die from the fire or any fire-related impact.
Second, according to an April 2000 Flight Safety Week article [google it: in-flight fire safety week], the US airline industry faces three potential in-flight fire occurances every day. In 1998, well after your 1996 Valuejet "turning point", Swissair Flight 111 went down off New York with the loss of all passengers and crew as a result of an out of control electrical fire, in spite of fire-suppression and smoke alarms. TWA 800 exploded in mid-air because of an electrical short in a center fuel tank. In 1999 more than 960 smoke and in-flight fire events were recorded, resulting in 350 unscheduled landings of commerical airliners in the US and Canada alone. The majority are electrical fires, (but wouldn't a laptop battery fire be electrical?) although there are plenty of instances of non-electrical fires too - read on...
From the article:
* A very high number of smoke or fire events occur on transport aircraft in the US and Canada - 964 over 10 months.
* 478 were high-temperature events... [instarx comment: as opposed to smoke events. These were real events - all false alarms were exluded from the study.]
* A detailed look at 392 high temperature events showed that 80 percent involved electrical systems and components. [instarx comment: which means 20% were not electrical and resulted from items overheating on-board or from cargo. This translates into about 80 in-flight fires caused by items carried as part of or on commercial flights in 1999]
* In the overwhelming number of cases, the crew had limited ability to recognize, gain access to, or to control the malfunction.
* The resetting of tripped circuit breakers with internal or external short circuits generally made things worse.
* There is an average of more than one unscheduled landing a day due to smoke or fire based only on Service Difficulty Report (SDR) data.
* The SDR database under-reports the significance of the problem.
Your track record with the fire thing was so bad I didn't even start to investigate your other unfounded claims about guns fired not bringing planes down, or batteries in cars not causing fires.
I think you let your anger get in the way of using your head. First, the post was not against small farmers, but against subsidies. You may not personally know any farmers that get subsidies, but I do. Just as an example, tobacco farmers are one large group that is made up entirely of small farmers - there are no large corporate tobacco farms and yet millions of dollars in annual subsidies. There are lots of other small to mid-sized farms that get subsidies. I'm not going to say if these subsidies are good or bad - its a complicated topic, but it is simply not true that only large corporations get them. You also have a US-centric viewpoint. Small European farmers, particularly in France, get incredible government subsidies.
Your biggest error however, was calling Worldwatch Institute a sensationalist site. WWI is one of the most highly respected organizations out there. They are dedicated to educating people like you and me in Sustainable Development issues.
Lastly, your post lacks coherency. You clearly have strong feelings about farmers, but you aren't going to convince anyone this way. In one place you rant against subsidies to large corporations, but then you attack an organization that agrees with you by calling it sensationalist! It makes me suspect that the only subsidies you don't like are the ones your relatives don't receive.
"Is WiFi worth $10/hr" is an unanswerable question - it totally depends on what you need the connection for. Want to surf and read the paper online? Maybe it isn't worth $5/hr. Need to get that report to the client or you will lose your contract - you better believe its worth a lot more than $10/hr.
There are also high-use or unlimited plans from T-Mobile and Verizon that bring the cost down considerably below $10/hr if you use the service a lot.
Deisel loco's aren't exactly the same system. The bus uses a very small engine to charge batteries continuously. Locomotives use a very large diesel engine connected to an electric generator that directly drives the electric motors providing power on-demand. It is less efficient than the bus but probably provides more maximum sustained power.
Anyway, the innovative part of this bus is the moter "being" the wheel, not the combo drive system which is fairly common and nothing new.
Leaning trains hardly went away. The Amtrack Acela high-speed train between NY and Washington leans into turns. It was the only way to run a high-speed train on the tracks designed for lower speed trains. I've ridden it and it works very well.
Thanks, I'll research it further and if false I'll change the quote. However it doesn't change my opinion of Bush's intelligence - I've heard him speak with my own ears.
In the late 80's and 90's I used to do air sampling with small battery-powered pumps that were electronically controlled for flow and duration. I used to carry these on planes all the time and often thought that whatever the inpectors were looking for it wasn't wires, batteries and timers. In more than 8 years I never had a single inpector even ask me what they were.
I don't do that any more, but maybe there are some Industrial Hygienists out there who can tell us how Gilian pumps are carried these days. I suspect they have to be shipped in advance.
Security relies on the threat of having a weapon detected more than detecting each and every weapon, which is probably impossible. A recent security test found that inspectors missed 1 out of 10 hidden weapons in test bags. The press jumped on that figure and made the absurd claim that security was lousy since 200,000 bags per day went through the airport so 20,000 guns could have been smuggled onto airplanes. Other than the absurd assumption that each of the 200,000 bags would have to have a gun, that figure relies on inspectors doing nothing when they found a gun. Clearly inspectors would increase security if a single gun were found, and shut down the airport when the second gun was found. With a 9 to 1 hit rate this would happen after the second or third bag of the day. Since the number of bags actually containing weapons is very small, the security provided by a 90% hit rate is really very good.
Most people call for consistent, strict inspections to increase security, but if security procedures were uniform the terrorists would find it relatively easy to find a way to bypass it - a perfect example was the shoe-bomb. Moussoui knew that shoes were never searched.
IMHO what is really a big security issue is the focus on stupid things such as nail clippers, sewing needles other pointy objects. Looking for things that are essentially harmless given the awareness level of passengers and crew these days takes resources away from finding the really dangerous and hidden items meant to be used as weapons.
You are unlikely to win that argument since you (or the mirror sites in this case) did not originally have rights to use the material as did the NG. There is no way you could reproduce National Geopgraphic (or another web site) and then gain _any_ benefit from the material and still be legal. A mirror site that did absolutely nothing other than mirror the original material exactly might not be violating copyrights, but since most sites do other things (sell things, display ads, or count hits) it would likely be a rare occurance. Even the notariety gained as a result of displaying the material could be interpreted as benefit.
As an additional complication, the mirror could not deprive benefit to the copyright holders even if it gained no benefit itself. If there is potential benefit for NG or the photographer in putting up their own mirror site (ads, traffic, google-ranking, etc.) then copyight would be violated. IANAL.
That's probably garbage as in GARBAGE. There have been many attempts to send shiploads of garbage to African nations for disposal which have been opposed (rightly so) by Africans. More serious have been the attempts to send hazardous waste to African countries with no environmental laws for burial.
Old computers might very well be useful to some in Africa as training tools or recycling raw materials, but frankly the cost of sending them would exceed the value of the computer.
To a person surviving on $10,000/year, %100,000/year seems like more than they would ever need. Likewise a million/year to a person making $100,000 - but it never works that way. Expenses always expand to fill available income - just as storage needs always expand to fill available storage.
Slashdot Mirror
what he did was mere curiosity mixed with the desire to HELP these companies fix their network.
That line is total self-serving bullshit by Lamo. What Lamo will find out is that his childish rationalization of his behavior (helping companies with their security - yea right) might fly with his permissive parents, but not in real life. He STOLE $100,000 worth of Lexis/Nexis time that was actually billed to the NYTimes by a real company (Lexis/Nexis) that provided a real service maintained by real people that get paid real money to put real food on their tables.
I think Mr. Lamo is going to get a very expensive lesson in reality.
Gee, it would be soooo much better if they print the infrared in infrared ink and the utlra-violet in UV ink and the x-rays in x-ray ink. We could take the pics outside and see what the bees think.
The idea is to change the wavelengths from those humans can't detect to those humans CAN detect.
It would be a pretty inept conspiracy to make the Mars images too red on purpose [what would be the point anyway?] AND publish the calibration chart in the same image, wouldn't it?
I'm really getting tired of all this DLP rainbow nonsense. The key to what you say is...
...the point being you have to point them out! Rainbows happen, yes, and almost everyone can see them when looking for them, but you have to be sweeping you eyes across the screen at high speed in order make one appear. Rainbows do not occur when simply watching a picture on a DLP screen. Your friends probably get their headaches from all the extreme eye motion you are making them perform to see the rainbows in the first place!
I have yet to sit down with someone and point out the rainbows and have them tell me they can't see them
The exact comparison to DLP rainbows is seeing the flashing of LED's when you quickly sweep your eyes around the room. Normally no one sees the LEDs flashing at 60Hz, but it IS possible if you try hard enough.
Its like the guy that goes to the doctor and says, "I think something's wrong with my head Doc. It hurts every time I bang my head on the wall."
Yeah, it's possible, but there is absolutely no evidence that was the reason there were 143 non-votes. It was just total supposition based on someone's guess. Just because someone with a definate self-interest in the validation of the touch screens comes up with a non-threatening reason it might have happened does not mean that _is_ what happened. A supposition about black helicopters and midnight re-programming by commandos in black camo holds just as much weight in the fact department.
This new fingerprinting will only allow the government keep track of us even more.
True. Expect the fingerprinting to be extended to US citizens who even travel to one of the countries on the fingerprint list - AFTER the elections of course. A national ID card - one of the wet dreams of the Bush administration.
Considering all the terrorists of 9/11 came into this country legally(as far as I know, dont quote me and tell me if Im wrong) this would not have stopped them from getting on the plane.
Correct. The program will have to be expanded to fingerprint screening BEFORE passengers get on the planes, so expect US Customs and Immigration to begin screening in foreign airports and in transit airports. Of course if they can get the foreign governments to do it then US citizens will not be exempted. I suspect the plan is to share the fingerprint information the same way as Echelon data is shared. The Brits spy on American communications and the Americans spy on British communications and then they simply pool the data - circumventing domestic spying laws very effectively in both countries.
Can you tell I trust this admnistration to protect the Constitution about as far as I can throw the lot of them?
I agree. Twenty-eight exempt countries is a BIG loophole. It looks supiciously like a political move to me. Why do it now, 10 months before the presidential election when 9/11 happened 2 1/2 years ago?
The administration also seems to have forgotten the important point that the terrorists are religious zealots, not nationalistic zealots. It isn;t like the 40's when our enemies were living in Germany, Japan and Italy and carried around passports identifying them as such. Today they can be any nationality. Mousssoui was a British citizen.
That law will probably be overruled in the next few days, since it wasn't issued by the Brazilian Supreme Court (don't ask... regional courts can issue directives that are valid for all country, and that can be overruled in superior courts... you don't want to understand the Brazilian legal system, believe me...)
You may be right about not wanting to understand Brazilian courts, but isn't this exactly the way the US court system works, too? Regional District courts make rulings all the time that are applicable everywhere, and can be overturned by the Supreme Court.
This looks like a purely political election-year make-the-voters-feel-good move. Excluding visitors from the countries that send the most visitors yearly to the US leaves a hole a terrorist could drive a truck through - literally. Moussoui (shoe-bomber) was a British citizen and would not have been photographed, but of course he wasn;t planning on making to customs to be photographed anyway so it is a moot point.
The reason we think most people won't work without being paid is that most people like to eat.
Sheesh. Got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, didn't we?
Smoking tobacco to prevent Parkinson's would be a lot like becoming a regular at the local opium den. It keeps you off the streets, lowering your chances of getting hit by a bus. Drinking coffee to do the same would be more like hanging out inside the local Starbucks. Hmmm. Opium den - Starbucks. Opium Den - Starbucks... Maybe this isn;t such a good analogy after all.
But that isn't what you said in your first post.
You said: A random sampling such as would exist in such a study will include some average drivers, some bad drivers, and some good drivers. If there's some situation that the bad drivers don't handle well, that would drag down the score of the whole set of them,...
In the English I know, the above statement says - "Because the sample for the study was random, poor drivers were included in the study. This caused the resulting average score for all drivers to be too low and required upward adjustment of the mean". That is circular logic in any language.
You have also said: Claiming the average driver behaves in a certain fashion, based on the average of a sampling of drivers is just like claiming the average American family has 2.5 children. Nope, I'm sorry - ZERO families have 2.5 children.
You are correct in pointing out the error in someone saying the average family has 2.5 children, but it is perfectly correct to say the average family simply "has children". Similarly it was correct for the original poster to say there were situations the average driver might handle poorly if he were talking on a cellphone. This is correct in both language and logic.
But pretty easy to stop. Don't like a company? Don't work for it, and don't buy from it. If enough people see things your way, it will go out of buisness. (And if enough people don't agree with you, it will stay in buisness - such is life in a dollar-vote based system.)
It isn't that simplistic. Large corporations make billions and are powerful enough to change their environment so that it is favorable to them. They do it through campaign contributions, lobbying, public-relations and spin. The tobacco industy's creation of the Tobacco Intitute to manufacture favorable pseudo-science is a perfect example. Carefully constructed spin to make even negative news sound positive is common in almost every industry.
Pfizer Inc (pharmaceuticals) last year put out a very favorable press release in response to a potentialy damaging study about blood pressure medicines. The press release pointed out that the study showed Pfizer's new medicine was just as effective as older ones in lowering blood pressure. What could be wrong with that? It was true as far as it went, but what they left out was that the study also indicated the death rate from Pfizer's new drug was twice the rate of the older drugs. Pfizer had used public relations spin to make more money for themselves and did it without technically telling a lie. Maybe your parents or spouse is taking that medicine today.
Do you know that almost half of the "editorials" in newspapers are written by public relations professionals to give favorble impressions of industries? They are bought and paid for by industry groups, offered for free to editors, and then are passed off as unbiased opinions.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of similar spin-lies told every year. Lobbyists, public relations experts, and friendly politicians spend their well-paid lives promoting the image of corporations as good and benevolent while hiding the fact that they are exploitive and greed-based. Given this artificial environment where the truth becomes a lie and a lie becomes the truth it is almost impossible for consumers to make informed decisions about the morality of the companies they buy from.
A study of a random sampling of drivers is *NOT* the same thing as a study of what the average driver can handle. A random sampling such as would exist in such a study will include some average drivers, some bad drivers, and some good drivers. If there's some situation that the bad drivers don't handle well, that would drag down the score of the whole set of them, even if the average and better than average drivers are able to handle it.
You are using circular logic. You can't say the risk for the average driver population is skewed because bad drivers were included in the calculations. Data collected MUST be from a random sample to determine the risk. If a random sample were not used [for example by excluding drivers that have had two or more accidents], one would not be able to say anything about the overall driver population - only about drivers who don't have accidents.
Additionally, because random samples generate bell curve distributions, the Relative Risk calculated applies most accurately to the average population (read "average driver").
As an aside, an 'average' driver would usually be defined as one who's abilities fall within one standard deviation of the mean. Using this criteria would make about 66% of all drivers average.
People- Calm. The. Fuck. Down. Planes don't explode because something inside them catches fire, they don't start crashing because someone shoots a gun, yadda yadda. Cars don't explode because a battery overheats in the trunk.
You simply don't know what you are talking about.
First, oxygen systems are NOT on planes to protect passengers from toxic gases and fumes. O2 systems are designed to provide oxygen for the short time it takes to get passengers from high altitude without brain-damage or death. More people die from exposure to toxic gases in aircraft fires than die from the fire or any fire-related impact.
Second, according to an April 2000 Flight Safety Week article [google it: in-flight fire safety week], the US airline industry faces three potential in-flight fire occurances every day. In 1998, well after your 1996 Valuejet "turning point", Swissair Flight 111 went down off New York with the loss of all passengers and crew as a result of an out of control electrical fire, in spite of fire-suppression and smoke alarms. TWA 800 exploded in mid-air because of an electrical short in a center fuel tank. In 1999 more than 960 smoke and in-flight fire events were recorded, resulting in 350 unscheduled landings of commerical airliners in the US and Canada alone. The majority are electrical fires, (but wouldn't a laptop battery fire be electrical?) although there are plenty of instances of non-electrical fires too - read on...
From the article:
* A very high number of smoke or fire events occur on transport aircraft in the US and Canada - 964 over 10 months.
* 478 were high-temperature events... [instarx comment: as opposed to smoke events. These were real events - all false alarms were exluded from the study.]
* A detailed look at 392 high temperature events showed that 80 percent involved electrical systems and components. [instarx comment: which means 20% were not electrical and resulted from items overheating on-board or from cargo. This translates into about 80 in-flight fires caused by items carried as part of or on commercial flights in 1999]
* In the overwhelming number of cases, the crew had limited ability to recognize, gain access to, or to control the malfunction.
* The resetting of tripped circuit breakers with internal or external short circuits generally made things worse.
* There is an average of more than one unscheduled landing a day due to smoke or fire based only on Service Difficulty Report (SDR) data.
* The SDR database under-reports the significance of the problem.
Your track record with the fire thing was so bad I didn't even start to investigate your other unfounded claims about guns fired not bringing planes down, or batteries in cars not causing fires.
I think you let your anger get in the way of using your head. First, the post was not against small farmers, but against subsidies. You may not personally know any farmers that get subsidies, but I do. Just as an example, tobacco farmers are one large group that is made up entirely of small farmers - there are no large corporate tobacco farms and yet millions of dollars in annual subsidies. There are lots of other small to mid-sized farms that get subsidies. I'm not going to say if these subsidies are good or bad - its a complicated topic, but it is simply not true that only large corporations get them. You also have a US-centric viewpoint. Small European farmers, particularly in France, get incredible government subsidies.
Your biggest error however, was calling Worldwatch Institute a sensationalist site. WWI is one of the most highly respected organizations out there. They are dedicated to educating people like you and me in Sustainable Development issues.
Lastly, your post lacks coherency. You clearly have strong feelings about farmers, but you aren't going to convince anyone this way. In one place you rant against subsidies to large corporations, but then you attack an organization that agrees with you by calling it sensationalist! It makes me suspect that the only subsidies you don't like are the ones your relatives don't receive.
"Is WiFi worth $10/hr" is an unanswerable question - it totally depends on what you need the connection for. Want to surf and read the paper online? Maybe it isn't worth $5/hr. Need to get that report to the client or you will lose your contract - you better believe its worth a lot more than $10/hr.
There are also high-use or unlimited plans from T-Mobile and Verizon that bring the cost down considerably below $10/hr if you use the service a lot.
Deisel loco's aren't exactly the same system. The bus uses a very small engine to charge batteries continuously. Locomotives use a very large diesel engine connected to an electric generator that directly drives the electric motors providing power on-demand. It is less efficient than the bus but probably provides more maximum sustained power.
Anyway, the innovative part of this bus is the moter "being" the wheel, not the combo drive system which is fairly common and nothing new.
Leaning trains hardly went away. The Amtrack Acela high-speed train between NY and Washington leans into turns. It was the only way to run a high-speed train on the tracks designed for lower speed trains. I've ridden it and it works very well.
Thanks, I'll research it further and if false I'll change the quote. However it doesn't change my opinion of Bush's intelligence - I've heard him speak with my own ears.
In the late 80's and 90's I used to do air sampling with small battery-powered pumps that were electronically controlled for flow and duration. I used to carry these on planes all the time and often thought that whatever the inpectors were looking for it wasn't wires, batteries and timers. In more than 8 years I never had a single inpector even ask me what they were.
I don't do that any more, but maybe there are some Industrial Hygienists out there who can tell us how Gilian pumps are carried these days. I suspect they have to be shipped in advance.
Security relies on the threat of having a weapon detected more than detecting each and every weapon, which is probably impossible. A recent security test found that inspectors missed 1 out of 10 hidden weapons in test bags. The press jumped on that figure and made the absurd claim that security was lousy since 200,000 bags per day went through the airport so 20,000 guns could have been smuggled onto airplanes. Other than the absurd assumption that each of the 200,000 bags would have to have a gun, that figure relies on inspectors doing nothing when they found a gun. Clearly inspectors would increase security if a single gun were found, and shut down the airport when the second gun was found. With a 9 to 1 hit rate this would happen after the second or third bag of the day. Since the number of bags actually containing weapons is very small, the security provided by a 90% hit rate is really very good.
Most people call for consistent, strict inspections to increase security, but if security procedures were uniform the terrorists would find it relatively easy to find a way to bypass it - a perfect example was the shoe-bomb. Moussoui knew that shoes were never searched.
IMHO what is really a big security issue is the focus on stupid things such as nail clippers, sewing needles other pointy objects. Looking for things that are essentially harmless given the awareness level of passengers and crew these days takes resources away from finding the really dangerous and hidden items meant to be used as weapons.
You are right, it doesn't. The post was pointing out a possible implication of the ruling in another area. Its called "thinking".
You are unlikely to win that argument since you (or the mirror sites in this case) did not originally have rights to use the material as did the NG. There is no way you could reproduce National Geopgraphic (or another web site) and then gain _any_ benefit from the material and still be legal. A mirror site that did absolutely nothing other than mirror the original material exactly might not be violating copyrights, but since most sites do other things (sell things, display ads, or count hits) it would likely be a rare occurance. Even the notariety gained as a result of displaying the material could be interpreted as benefit.
As an additional complication, the mirror could not deprive benefit to the copyright holders even if it gained no benefit itself. If there is potential benefit for NG or the photographer in putting up their own mirror site (ads, traffic, google-ranking, etc.) then copyight would be violated. IANAL.
That's probably garbage as in GARBAGE. There have been many attempts to send shiploads of garbage to African nations for disposal which have been opposed (rightly so) by Africans. More serious have been the attempts to send hazardous waste to African countries with no environmental laws for burial.
Old computers might very well be useful to some in Africa as training tools or recycling raw materials, but frankly the cost of sending them would exceed the value of the computer.
To a person surviving on $10,000/year, %100,000/year seems like more than they would ever need. Likewise a million/year to a person making $100,000 - but it never works that way. Expenses always expand to fill available income - just as storage needs always expand to fill available storage.