Are you sure crime is linked to California's 'gun control' laws, and not the fact that silicon valley is a rediculously affluent locale, and most businesses would have a bit more loot on hand than your average liquor store in Watts?
Yep.
The positive correlation between gun control laws and crime has been known for well over half a century. For some time there was debate over how much of it might be crime causing gun control laws (due to worried people), how much might be gun control laws causing crime (by creating a victim-rich environment), and how much might be extraneous factors (such as population density causing both). There was a lot of work to try to sort them out, and while it looked like it was laws causing crime it wasn't all that convincing.
Then (after some studies surprised the researchers with how often guns are used to STOP crime) some jurisdictions tried changing concealed carry laws that discouraged it with laws that permitted and/or encouraged it. And crime in those jurisdictions dropped like a rock, leading to more such laws and more such crime drops.
The sporadic semi-random passage of these laws, across areas with major variations in crime rate and recent deltas to it, got about as close to running a controlled experiment as you're ever likely to get on such a subject. This provided some very solid data for some very rigorous studies. These studies show that it's gun restrictions that promote crime, and that the effect is very large.
Of course California's coastal cities, especially the ones around the SF Bay (where Silicon Valley lies) are the belly of the anti-gun beast. Don't expect CCW liberalization in CA any time soon.
The fun part of this is that the researchers on several of the key projects were people who started out personally anti-gun and got a rude awakening. Fortunately they were good scientists and changed their opinions when confronted with real-world evidence.
There's a friggin 24/7 coffee shop in MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN but I cannot find *any* here in the goddamn SILICON VALLEY. There is something seriously wrong with this picture.:P
Some Silicon Valley cities require you to hire an off-duty cop as an armed guard if you want to be open after certain hours. (California's gun control has led to high crime rates and overnight stores are easy targets. The cities in question have used this as an excuse to set up a graft mechanism for their police officers.)
Others just zone things like that out of exisesence - so you need to be grandfathered or get a variance from the zoning board to go 24/7.
California runs the entertainment industry. The entertainment industry noticed that computer geeks keep late hours, jumped from that to the conclusion that Silicon Valley had more night life than the rest of the world, and promulgated that image.
I moved here from southeastern Michigan, which really DID have lots of stores open 24/7. (When I left there was a drugstore near my old place with a 24/7 MANNED AUTO PARTS counter! Rebuilt waterpumps at 3 AM if you needed 'em.) It was quite a shock to discover that Silicon Valley actually rolled up the streets at night.
For reference, my portable computer's battery [...] would cost less than 0.6 cents. I will gladly pay 0.6 cents extra to use my laptop wherever I go, if asked for.
Think about how much power it takes to run an ELEVATOR. (Sorry, don't have it handy - and it varies a lot by type, too.)
Then about how much it takes to INSTALL AND MAINTAIN one.
Laptop recharges are a vanishingly small expense by comparison.
I guess courtesy is out of order at the good ol' US of A.
In the US it depends on the restaurant's business model. Some of them (fast food joints) go for the fast nickles and want turnover. Some of them (classic sit-down restaurants) go for the slow dimes, catering to people who want to meet over food, enjoy a meal at a more leisurely pace, etc. Some are happy to have you camp out there long-term, some arent (especially those that close between major meals for cleanup and redressing).
And of course some restaurant managers are clueless about what is good for their business and what is not.
What gets me are the ones that provide WiFi service but no outlets. B-(.
Also: In the US getting wiring done to code costs a bundle - and may not be possible in leased space. (There are downsides to division of effort into separate businesses.) So some are OK with it but you have to use the outlets that were there for vacuums and the like. You have to ask for a table near the outlet and if it's busy you're on battery.
(By the way: Shouldn't the last line of your sig be "find ~ -name 'base*' -exec chown you {} \;" ?)
Why do i get the impression that it's bad at showing shades of blue?
Traditionally the blue OLEDs have been the ones with shorter lifetimes not with poor color purity. [...]
However, that the Samsung demo image contains no discernable blue is very strange indeed. I have my doubts that it was left out unintentionally.
Looks to me like they have a nasty problem with burn-in and they don't want to have it show in the demos.
The OLED dies fade with use, and the blue fades much faster than the other two. So blue pixels that are lit will become perceptably dimmer in a moderately short time. If they use a lot of blue in the images they demo, the screen will quickly become burned-in and blotchy. Even if they come up with some way to avoid the blotchyness (like a screensaver that averages to a negative of what has been shown before) the blue will fade and blue colors will become less brilliant and impressive.
The stories say that they haven't soled this but are going ahead with the monitor anyhow. IMHO the lack of blue in the demo picture confirms it.
I thought LED's pretty much lasted forever (~20 years).
Your typical LEDs are large crystals with doping atoms substituted for a miniscule fraction of the regular atoms in the structure. This is an extremely stable arrangement of atoms and lasts a long time, despite the electrical forces applied to it. Even if an atom is knocked out of place it tends to fall back into place, and it takes an enormous amount of damage to make it stop working, or even become appreciably less efficient.
Organic LEDs are based on single small molecules consisting of a carbon structural backbone with a bunch of other stuff hanging off it. This is nowhere near as stable. When you hammer it with enough energy to make it vibrate and release a photon - especially an energetic blue photon, you're stressing it with an appreciable fraction of the energy needed to break the backbone bonds, and occasionally the bonds break. Once it breaks it doesn't heal - that molecule is no longer playing the game.
It's a dye. Notice how dies fade when exposed to sunlight (with its blue and ultraviolet photons hammering the bonds). Now imagine the dye molecules hammered directly by mobile energetic electrons and forced into an energy state higher than that supplied by a photon of the color they emit.
OLEDs, especially the blue ones, have a short lifteime. On an atomic scale it may be enormous. But on a human scale if you leave it on 24/7 the blue has lost half its intensity in a tad over a year. (More if there's a lot of blue in the image. And it will have a serious burnin issue so you'd better use a "screensaver" with a pattern that's designed to actually save the screen rather than being pretty moving wallpaper.)
Apparently they haven't come up with a good solution to the problem. But they're going ahead with production anyhow.
If they don't either provide a cheap replacement for the screen material or drop the price to the mid-to-low two-digit levels for ordinary screen sizes I predict that OLED monitors will get a rep for being unacceptably flakey within about two years.
As violent as the terrorists are, they're not completely unthinking people(no matter how much rhetoric one can throw around). Even they may quite possibly deem the idea of creating a radioactive wasteland a bad idea.
A close frend of mine who happens to be a Muslum has characterized the terrorists as "murderous fruitcakes".
Islam explicitly forbids several things that, had they been paying attention to any one of, would have made the 9/11 attacks totally out of the question (and the terrorist bombings in the Middle East ditto). Using fire as a weapon of war and attacking innocent bystanders, just to name two.
Yes they're thinking. But they're using their thought processes to convince themselves that their tactics are permitted and even mandated. They're making political attacks and using religious arguments to justify them.
And they're no more worried about whether they render significant sections of "The Great Satan"'s cities and land area a wasteland than they were about the couple thousand Muslums they killed when the Twin Towers burned and fell. Their though processes are NOT driven by the concerns and goals you and I have.
Y'all had them in Vietnam. I don't know how well they worked, but you lost that war.
I understand that what lost the war was not the US pullout, but congress cutting off military aid shortly after. The SVA was apparently up to speed on taking over the war. But without supplies they collapsed.
If I was of a certain mind and wanted to detontate my pet nuke how would I get it into position. I would not hijack a ship, to much effort and risk. I would load it into a container and hook up a pocket GPS to the trigger.
This is something that has concerned me for a while - starting when I was motoring past a port instalation with an enormous stack of COSCO containers during a period when the US and China were rattling sabers a bit.
In case you're not familiar with it, COSCO is the Chinese Overseas Shiping COrporation - which evolved out of the Chinese Red Army.
Even a small container can contain a BIG H-bomb. Most places such containers commonly go - ports, transportaion hubs, railroads, highways, population centers - qualify as targets.
They're big enough to contain a chemical device suitable for taking out a city. Biologicals take even less space, and could disperse an aerosol while in motion.
Or you chould ship whole divisions of soldiers and their equipment in such containers (with the ones containing people disguised as refrigerated food containers to keep them at the edges of stacks for access to air and get them delivered quickly) if you wanted to stage an invasion.
However, I hear that since 9/11 and the antiterrorist reaction, US customs is inspecting and sealing many of the containers at the ports of EMbarcation, and stopping and inspecting container ships about 25 miles offshore, once they're inside the "you can enforce your antismuggling laws" limit. (You can't open the containers on shipboard, of course. But you can detect radiologicals - especially neutron emitters - without unstacking them.)
I don't know how much they're covering. (It IS a government program, after all.) But at least they're aware of the issue and trying to do what they can about it.
So tell me, what are the terrorists going to do, send a fleet of warships over here?
Well, let's see...
They can smuggle nukes in in a small boat. (Even H-bombs are pretty small these days. Have to fit on a missile after all. A-bombs are a tad bigger than a grapefruit.) Ditto biological, chemical, or radiological weapons, or even significant amounts of explosives.
Landing them to use elsewhere isn't really necessary. Most of the "blue" pouplation is concentrated in coastal cities that grew up around seaports. A terrorist could just motor into the harbor among all the other shipping (preferably when there's an onshore wind) and set something off to do damage to the population and economic infrastructure that would make the 9/11 attack look like a pinprick.
They can use a boat bomb to blow up shipping. One little motorboat put a big hole in the side of a major naval vessel under Clinton's watch. (It didn't sink mainly because warships are designed to survive having holes punched in them. Commercial ships generally are not - and even when they are, not to the same extent.) Imagine one going off next to a cargo ship - or worse, next to a tanker - in the narrow channel leading into a major port. Even if the destruction of the ship doesn't cause its cargo to damage the city and its population, sinking a ship there could easily take the port out of operation for a year or more, costing trillions and producing an economic recession.
They can smuggle in terrorists, too. Even a small boat can hold enough to pull off a whole series of attacks. If the US ever gets decent control over the southern border you don't want the coastline to be the next weakest link.
Of course defending the coastline border and coastal cities and population against terrorists is just part of the Coast Guard's job. (Aiding distressed mariners is among their tasks, just for starters.) The bouys will help some of their other work, too.
But I think it's pretty clear that terrorists coming to/across the seaward borders are a real threat and that improvements in ship tracking near the coast will help defend against them.
"If it stops the destruction of even one city..." B-)
In the US, 22 states now have laws on the books that say drug dealers must pay tax on the illegal drugs they sell. Of course these states aren't actually going to collect anything, but it gives them something else to charge drug dealers with when they're arrested.
It also gives them another excuse to sieze the drug dealers' assets.
Sounds like they're expecting RICO to be struck down or limited, and want to put another tether on the cash cow.
Has anyone tried defending an infringement suit on the theory that they paid a copyright levy on the media and thus paid for making the copy?
It sounds like the legal theory already has that blocked. But still the argument ought to be tried - especially in front of a jury.
If nothing else, getting the meme out there might make imposing such levies couner-productive. People who had been gouged for the fee might be more likely to make fair-use copies rather than buying additional originals and to ignore claims that it was somehow illegal.
Another popular misconception. (For starters, most of the actual rocket scientists are red staters.) In fact the IQ mix is similar. At one time the nutritional and educational influences gave the red staters a disadvantage, but for the last fifty years or so the disadvantage has gone the other way.
What makes them different is their value systems.
But blue staters (meaning the actual ones that voted to make them come out blue), like most collectivists, enforce social conformity by a number of mechanisms. One of the biggest is trashing the self-esteem of anyone who says or does something to indicate their value systems diverges, even slightly, from the norm. They recieve a broad range of invective, and one of the commest slurs is "stupid".
Within the group this drives them to change their attitudes to conform. But people outside the group, with their own social support networks, aren't swayed (or are quickly swayed back when their friends see their angst and offer moral support). So the continual slurs from the thought-police evolve into a stereotyping of the members of the outsider groups. This is followed by ethnic discrimination which, coming from people who constantly harp about "tolerance" and "diversity", is a source of much humor.
It's particularly funny when real-world evidence surfaces. For instance: There's a continual din in the blue states about how G. W. Bush is "stupid". As a result of the flap over their Vietnam-era military services, Bush's military records, and some of Kerry's, were opened. The military tests IQ, and both candidates' test results got out. Bush far outdid Kerry. B-)
I can't believe nobody has suggested this: If we can blow mountains up to make way for railroads/roads, then a slightly larger-scaled version of some mountain blowing-upping can push the side of the island into the water in small increments, causing no more than a smidgen of concern!
Unfortunately, that has high risk of precipitating exactly the event it is trying to mitigate.
For starters, it's already slipping even in the absense of eruptions. Secondly, removing some of the weight that's keeping the lid on the lava and gas will likely reawaken the volcano. (That's how mountains explode - as was discovered at Mt St Helens.)
And of course there's the question of who would PAY for this. And the little matter of what mining corporation in its right mind would take a contract, and its associated liability risks, where one screwup wipes out the whole atlntic seacoast of more than one continent.
I'd point out that, by your logic, you should immediately kill yourself to better the planet. I would, but I've actually pronouced a few people who did that very thing.
Reminds me of my wife's story of the carpool.
Four or so in the car. Driver put forth the proposition that the population of the earth really needed to be reduced (for all the usual leftist and envirowacko reasons). Others in the car were concurring.
As they were doing something over the speed limit on the main span of the Dumbarton Bridge at the time, my wife, doing her best deadpan, said that this was a GREAT idea and he should start RIGHT NOW by IMMEDIATELY turning HARD RIGHT. B-)
[We're] talking trillions of tons of rock off an active volcano, which might even distrub it enough to set it off anyway.
The mechanism of exploding mountains, as discovered when Mt St Helens went "bang" is:
- Pressure builds up, bulging the mountain upward.
- Suddenly the bulging causes the side of the mountain to slide off.
- With the weight suddenly removed, the pressure blasts the remaining portion of the mountain into dust and up into the stratosphere.
So IMHO attempting to remove the loose slab, slowly and gently, from the intermittently-active volcano (which is thus inactive now because the weight above it is enough to keep the lava and gas bottled up) very likely WOULD wake it up. If that happens, the part that isn't moved yet might just go right away.
And given that the slab is already slipping off slowly, disturbing it by trying to disassemble it risks finishing the job of loosening it and precipitating the event you're trying to avoid.
Kinda like defusing a BIG bomb. Or taking apart a large pile of jackstraws without having any of them collapse.
Industry in the US, back in the clolnial days, started out by explicitly violating the British patent system.
That system was intended to create long-term monopolies on many manufacturing processes and devices, such as thread mills and power looms. Part of the point of these patents was to keep colonies agricultural and raw-material producing, dependent on the "mother country" for their manufactured goods (rather than competing with it and becoming a world power).
The arrival of people with knowlege of mill manufacture, who set up their own plants here, was a major factor in the colonies achieving the ability to break away. And the "mother country"'s attempts to enforce these monopolies produced some of the major greviances that lead to the revolution.
So now it looks like the US has come full circle. B-(
Ok, I know I'm not the only one who has thought of this, but why not build a lawn mower out of this laser? It would be silent, energy efficient, compact, lightweight, non-polluting, and cheap to build and maintain.
Unfortunately, grass is green, and so is the laser. So most of the laser's energy will be reflected rather than deposited on the grass, and the grass won't be cut.
As Niven pointed out in his Ringworld series, an enemy with a shirt the color of your laser sword might as well be wearing mirror armor.
It might be good for cutting out the DEAD grass and leaving the live blades. B-)
You need to split the functions finer, too.
on
What's Wrong with Unix?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Managers need to be able to list, create, delete, read, write, and change permissions. [etc]
Writing should also be split into overwriting, appending, and truncating - with having all equivalent to write permission.
For instance: Append without the ability to overwrite or read lets someone leave a message or data without examining or damaging what's already there. Think "mailbox". Overwriting without appending prevents arbitrary expansion of the file, and so on.
Permissions also need to be not just in terms of users, but in terms of users, applications, or combinations of them. For instance: Jerry can use this set of tools to write-append to this mailbox, and that set (but no other) to examine and modify the bug database.
So how exactly did we go from a 1 in 37 chance to a 1 in 56000 chance in a few hours?
NASA dug out some older telescope observations
and found the object on them. That pushed back the length of the observation interval and resulted in a more accurate estimate of the trajectory (just as watching it for an equivalent amount of extra time in the future would have done).
The extra accuracy from the extra measurements both gives a better estimate of the center of the expected trajectory and narrows the uncertainty. It "shrinks the cone" - and perhaps also moves its ceter.
The earth used to be inside the cone 1-in-37 cone. Now that cone is much narrower and misses the earth. The earth is now only in the 1-in-56,000 cone (which also shrank but is still wide enough).
Think of it as an archery target. Bullseye is the best estimate of closest approach. The rings are increasingly lower probability locations for the flyby. The extra observations shrank the target and perhaps moved it a bit. The earth was on a high-probability inner ring. Now it's on a low-probability outer ring of the much smaller target.
Our main fuel source is a non-renewable, polluting one that won't last us into the next century.
We use coal, oil, and natural gas because they're CHEAPER than other energy sources. When they actually DO start to run short the price will rise and we'll (incrementally) switch to using something else.
But don't use "known reserves" as a measure of how much is left. "Known reserves" measure how much has been hunted up. When enough for a few decades has been found it becomes uneconomic to hunt for more now, rather than waiting until later.
Early money is better than later money - because it can be put to work meanwhile. There is a crossover point where it makes more sense to put the money to work earning more money rather than hunt for more resources that you won't need for decades. The exact crossover point varies depending on interest rate and other factors (such as the planning horizon needed for your operation). But normally it's never more than 30 years in the future.
As a result, having "known reserves" good for more than about 30 years occurs only by accident: Either the last discovery made was enormous, or expected demand has dropped since the planning that ordered the last round of explorations.
But that means, if you assume known reserves are all reserves, you ALWAYS think you're "going to run out in 30 years" or so, and have a crisis. This has been true for the last 50 years at least, and people have been "viewing with alarm" and raising a big popular stink about it every decade or so for all that time.
I hear it has been going on for much longer. History records similar popular angst about running out of whale oil for lamps and limits to city size due to knee-deep horseflops in the streets from the delivery wagons. But I can attest to the doomsayers of the last 50 years or so from personal observation.
Yes, eventually the oil will run short. But there won't be a sudden catastrophy when the last well suddenly sucks dry. Instead the price will gradually rise, and the production gradually fall. First power plants, then cars, will switch to other fuels while the remaining production is used for more lucrative purposes (such as chemical feedstocks, until it becomes expensive enough that the chemicals will be synthesized some other way).
We still have billions of people living in utter poverty, and children aspire to be rock stars, and the likes.
And that's a total non-sequitur. So some people are in poverty. So what? That has no effect on whether some of the people who AREN'T starving will chose to spend some resources building mansions, watching football, touring the Moon, or colonizing space.
I don't think our (american/european) culture is ready to venture into space and colonize, we need to start putting value on the right ideals.
If america/europe doesn't do it first, somebody else will. That's how evolution works - for species, ideologies, corporations, and the couple dozen or so other things that have some of the characteristics associated with life. Nature red in tooth and claw. Every gene/meme for itself, and cooperation occurs only if it's advantageous for the cooperator.
Some groups die out. Some find new, more successful, niches. But those that put expansion into new opportunities on the back burner until they have "perfected" themselves lose out to those who ignore such hand-wrining and "boldly go".
You snooze, you lose!
I'd hate to see these ideals brought into space. Militarization of space? No thanks.
So your feelings will be hurt. Space is already militarized, and has been since the first shots. The entire process evolved from a war effort.
Right now we have ICBMs and spy satellites as major parts of military strategy. The {apparent} lack of always-up orbiting nuclear bomb platforms (to suplement the always-up bombers and always-down submarines) is an artifact of the dance that brought all-out war to a screeching, no
Another poster has already pointed you to the Niven/Pournells book _Lucifer's Hammer_, wherin a comet makes a close pass and "calves" - i.e. it's breaking up a bit and arrives as a field of chunks around the main core. Some of the calves hit the earth causing considerable devastation - but short of an extinction event. More like a moderate-sized thermonuclear war, including the nuclear winter but minus the fallout.
During the months preceeding the close encounter, when it's believed it will be a near-miss (and a spectacular lightshow) but the media is exploring the possiblity of a collision, a scientist is interviewed on a tv-magazine style show. He and the host get into discussing the structure of a comet, and rather than the usual "dirty snowball" comparison, he starts by comparing it to a large scoop of ice cream. As they add in the rocks, outgassing "ices", and such this evolves into a hot fudge sundae (rocks for nuts, I think the atmospheric-gas ices as whipped cream, etc.), and as the analogy keeps holding together it gets funny and the two talking heads start cracking each other up. (The point of the discussion, of course, that even a hot fudge sundae, if it's the size of Manhattan Island and falling at solar escape velocity, can do a lot of damage.)
Punchline of the interview becomes "Hot Fudge Sundae falls on a Tuesdae this week." (Since the flyby is due on a Tuesday.) This becomes a catchphrase in popular culture and is repeated a lot during the period before the impact.
Theft, according to the criminal code in my country is defined as: "The taking away of a moveable thing owned by someone else."
Note: "taking away"
The theft claim comes from the idea that part of the value (in the form of potential profits) is removed.
It's similar to the doctorine of "partial taking". Courts use that to force payments to landowners out of zoning/land-use planning agencies when they drastically reduce an owner's property values by changing the rules to reduce the things that can be done with the property. "Partial taking" applies the fifth amendment prohibition on "private property be[ing] taken without just compensation". Even though the property is still there, some of the value has "been taken".
If the Supreme Court applies this interpretation of "taking" to GOVERNMENTS, you can bet it will apply it to individuals as well. And other people than judges can grasp the concept easily, as well.
So splitting hairs with dictionary entriesmight make you feel good. But it isn't going to convince any judges, anyone leaning toward the other side, or bring any significant numbers of fence-sitters around to your position. Instead it makes you look like you're disconnected from economic reality, making it counter-productive.
IMHO the thing to do is avoid this argument and concentrate on the Founders' original one: That copyright is a TEMPORARY PRIVILEGE intended to INCREASE the amount of creative material FREELY available in the middle-distant future by letting authors and their publishers make money on it without competition from copiers for a SHORT TIME after its creation.
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Are you sure crime is linked to California's 'gun control' laws, and not the fact that silicon valley is a rediculously affluent locale, and most businesses would have a bit more loot on hand than your average liquor store in Watts?
Yep.
The positive correlation between gun control laws and crime has been known for well over half a century. For some time there was debate over how much of it might be crime causing gun control laws (due to worried people), how much might be gun control laws causing crime (by creating a victim-rich environment), and how much might be extraneous factors (such as population density causing both). There was a lot of work to try to sort them out, and while it looked like it was laws causing crime it wasn't all that convincing.
Then (after some studies surprised the researchers with how often guns are used to STOP crime) some jurisdictions tried changing concealed carry laws that discouraged it with laws that permitted and/or encouraged it. And crime in those jurisdictions dropped like a rock, leading to more such laws and more such crime drops.
The sporadic semi-random passage of these laws, across areas with major variations in crime rate and recent deltas to it, got about as close to running a controlled experiment as you're ever likely to get on such a subject. This provided some very solid data for some very rigorous studies. These studies show that it's gun restrictions that promote crime, and that the effect is very large.
Of course California's coastal cities, especially the ones around the SF Bay (where Silicon Valley lies) are the belly of the anti-gun beast. Don't expect CCW liberalization in CA any time soon.
The fun part of this is that the researchers on several of the key projects were people who started out personally anti-gun and got a rude awakening. Fortunately they were good scientists and changed their opinions when confronted with real-world evidence.
There's a friggin 24/7 coffee shop in MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN but I cannot find *any* here in the goddamn SILICON VALLEY. There is something seriously wrong with this picture. :P
Some Silicon Valley cities require you to hire an off-duty cop as an armed guard if you want to be open after certain hours. (California's gun control has led to high crime rates and overnight stores are easy targets. The cities in question have used this as an excuse to set up a graft mechanism for their police officers.)
Others just zone things like that out of exisesence - so you need to be grandfathered or get a variance from the zoning board to go 24/7.
California runs the entertainment industry. The entertainment industry noticed that computer geeks keep late hours, jumped from that to the conclusion that Silicon Valley had more night life than the rest of the world, and promulgated that image.
I moved here from southeastern Michigan, which really DID have lots of stores open 24/7. (When I left there was a drugstore near my old place with a 24/7 MANNED AUTO PARTS counter! Rebuilt waterpumps at 3 AM if you needed 'em.) It was quite a shock to discover that Silicon Valley actually rolled up the streets at night.
For reference, my portable computer's battery [...] would cost less than 0.6 cents. I will gladly pay 0.6 cents extra to use my laptop wherever I go, if asked for.
Think about how much power it takes to run an ELEVATOR. (Sorry, don't have it handy - and it varies a lot by type, too.)
Then about how much it takes to INSTALL AND MAINTAIN one.
Laptop recharges are a vanishingly small expense by comparison.
I guess courtesy is out of order at the good ol' US of A.
In the US it depends on the restaurant's business model. Some of them (fast food joints) go for the fast nickles and want turnover. Some of them (classic sit-down restaurants) go for the slow dimes, catering to people who want to meet over food, enjoy a meal at a more leisurely pace, etc. Some are happy to have you camp out there long-term, some arent (especially those that close between major meals for cleanup and redressing).
And of course some restaurant managers are clueless about what is good for their business and what is not.
What gets me are the ones that provide WiFi service but no outlets. B-(.
Also: In the US getting wiring done to code costs a bundle - and may not be possible in leased space. (There are downsides to division of effort into separate businesses.) So some are OK with it but you have to use the outlets that were there for vacuums and the like. You have to ask for a table near the outlet and if it's busy you're on battery.
(By the way: Shouldn't the last line of your sig be "find ~ -name 'base*' -exec chown you {} \;" ?)
Why do i get the impression that it's bad at showing shades of blue?
Traditionally the blue OLEDs have been the ones with shorter lifetimes not with poor color purity. [...]
However, that the Samsung demo image contains no discernable blue is very strange indeed. I have my doubts that it was left out unintentionally.
Looks to me like they have a nasty problem with burn-in and they don't want to have it show in the demos.
The OLED dies fade with use, and the blue fades much faster than the other two. So blue pixels that are lit will become perceptably dimmer in a moderately short time. If they use a lot of blue in the images they demo, the screen will quickly become burned-in and blotchy. Even if they come up with some way to avoid the blotchyness (like a screensaver that averages to a negative of what has been shown before) the blue will fade and blue colors will become less brilliant and impressive.
The stories say that they haven't soled this but are going ahead with the monitor anyhow. IMHO the lack of blue in the demo picture confirms it.
I thought LED's pretty much lasted forever (~20 years).
Your typical LEDs are large crystals with doping atoms substituted for a miniscule fraction of the regular atoms in the structure. This is an extremely stable arrangement of atoms and lasts a long time, despite the electrical forces applied to it. Even if an atom is knocked out of place it tends to fall back into place, and it takes an enormous amount of damage to make it stop working, or even become appreciably less efficient.
Organic LEDs are based on single small molecules consisting of a carbon structural backbone with a bunch of other stuff hanging off it. This is nowhere near as stable. When you hammer it with enough energy to make it vibrate and release a photon - especially an energetic blue photon, you're stressing it with an appreciable fraction of the energy needed to break the backbone bonds, and occasionally the bonds break. Once it breaks it doesn't heal - that molecule is no longer playing the game.
It's a dye. Notice how dies fade when exposed to sunlight (with its blue and ultraviolet photons hammering the bonds). Now imagine the dye molecules hammered directly by mobile energetic electrons and forced into an energy state higher than that supplied by a photon of the color they emit.
OLEDs, especially the blue ones, have a short lifteime. On an atomic scale it may be enormous. But on a human scale if you leave it on 24/7 the blue has lost half its intensity in a tad over a year. (More if there's a lot of blue in the image. And it will have a serious burnin issue so you'd better use a "screensaver" with a pattern that's designed to actually save the screen rather than being pretty moving wallpaper.)
Apparently they haven't come up with a good solution to the problem. But they're going ahead with production anyhow.
If they don't either provide a cheap replacement for the screen material or drop the price to the mid-to-low two-digit levels for ordinary screen sizes I predict that OLED monitors will get a rep for being unacceptably flakey within about two years.
I can't wait until we can ride SpaceShipThree across the Atlantic in 20 minutes!
There are SOME CEO's I've always wanted to stuff into an ICBM. B-)
As violent as the terrorists are, they're not completely unthinking people(no matter how much rhetoric one can throw around). Even they may quite possibly deem the idea of creating a radioactive wasteland a bad idea.
A close frend of mine who happens to be a Muslum has characterized the terrorists as "murderous fruitcakes".
Islam explicitly forbids several things that, had they been paying attention to any one of, would have made the 9/11 attacks totally out of the question (and the terrorist bombings in the Middle East ditto). Using fire as a weapon of war and attacking innocent bystanders, just to name two.
Yes they're thinking. But they're using their thought processes to convince themselves that their tactics are permitted and even mandated. They're making political attacks and using religious arguments to justify them.
And they're no more worried about whether they render significant sections of "The Great Satan"'s cities and land area a wasteland than they were about the couple thousand Muslums they killed when the Twin Towers burned and fell. Their though processes are NOT driven by the concerns and goals you and I have.
Y'all had them in Vietnam. I don't know how well they worked, but you lost that war.
I understand that what lost the war was not the US pullout, but congress cutting off military aid shortly after. The SVA was apparently up to speed on taking over the war. But without supplies they collapsed.
If I was of a certain mind and wanted to detontate my pet nuke how would I get it into position. I would not hijack a ship, to much effort and risk. I would load it into a container and hook up a pocket GPS to the trigger.
This is something that has concerned me for a while - starting when I was motoring past a port instalation with an enormous stack of COSCO containers during a period when the US and China were rattling sabers a bit.
In case you're not familiar with it, COSCO is the Chinese Overseas Shiping COrporation - which evolved out of the Chinese Red Army.
Even a small container can contain a BIG H-bomb. Most places such containers commonly go - ports, transportaion hubs, railroads, highways, population centers - qualify as targets.
They're big enough to contain a chemical device suitable for taking out a city. Biologicals take even less space, and could disperse an aerosol while in motion.
Or you chould ship whole divisions of soldiers and their equipment in such containers (with the ones containing people disguised as refrigerated food containers to keep them at the edges of stacks for access to air and get them delivered quickly) if you wanted to stage an invasion.
However, I hear that since 9/11 and the antiterrorist reaction, US customs is inspecting and sealing many of the containers at the ports of EMbarcation, and stopping and inspecting container ships about 25 miles offshore, once they're inside the "you can enforce your antismuggling laws" limit. (You can't open the containers on shipboard, of course. But you can detect radiologicals - especially neutron emitters - without unstacking them.)
I don't know how much they're covering. (It IS a government program, after all.) But at least they're aware of the issue and trying to do what they can about it.
So tell me, what are the terrorists going to do, send a fleet of warships over here?
Well, let's see...
They can smuggle nukes in in a small boat. (Even H-bombs are pretty small these days. Have to fit on a missile after all. A-bombs are a tad bigger than a grapefruit.) Ditto biological, chemical, or radiological weapons, or even significant amounts of explosives.
Landing them to use elsewhere isn't really necessary. Most of the "blue" pouplation is concentrated in coastal cities that grew up around seaports. A terrorist could just motor into the harbor among all the other shipping (preferably when there's an onshore wind) and set something off to do damage to the population and economic infrastructure that would make the 9/11 attack look like a pinprick.
They can use a boat bomb to blow up shipping. One little motorboat put a big hole in the side of a major naval vessel under Clinton's watch. (It didn't sink mainly because warships are designed to survive having holes punched in them. Commercial ships generally are not - and even when they are, not to the same extent.) Imagine one going off next to a cargo ship - or worse, next to a tanker - in the narrow channel leading into a major port. Even if the destruction of the ship doesn't cause its cargo to damage the city and its population, sinking a ship there could easily take the port out of operation for a year or more, costing trillions and producing an economic recession.
They can smuggle in terrorists, too. Even a small boat can hold enough to pull off a whole series of attacks. If the US ever gets decent control over the southern border you don't want the coastline to be the next weakest link.
Of course defending the coastline border and coastal cities and population against terrorists is just part of the Coast Guard's job. (Aiding distressed mariners is among their tasks, just for starters.) The bouys will help some of their other work, too.
But I think it's pretty clear that terrorists coming to/across the seaward borders are a real threat and that improvements in ship tracking near the coast will help defend against them.
"If it stops the destruction of even one city..." B-)
In the US, 22 states now have laws on the books that say drug dealers must pay tax on the illegal drugs they sell. Of course these states aren't actually going to collect anything, but it gives them something else to charge drug dealers with when they're arrested.
It also gives them another excuse to sieze the drug dealers' assets.
Sounds like they're expecting RICO to be struck down or limited, and want to put another tether on the cash cow.
Has anyone tried defending an infringement suit on the theory that they paid a copyright levy on the media and thus paid for making the copy?
It sounds like the legal theory already has that blocked. But still the argument ought to be tried - especially in front of a jury.
If nothing else, getting the meme out there might make imposing such levies couner-productive. People who had been gouged for the fee might be more likely to make fair-use copies rather than buying additional originals and to ignore claims that it was somehow illegal.
A popular misconception.
:)
Red staters aren't evil...just stupid.
Another popular misconception. (For starters, most of the actual rocket scientists are red staters.) In fact the IQ mix is similar. At one time the nutritional and educational influences gave the red staters a disadvantage, but for the last fifty years or so the disadvantage has gone the other way.
What makes them different is their value systems.
But blue staters (meaning the actual ones that voted to make them come out blue), like most collectivists, enforce social conformity by a number of mechanisms. One of the biggest is trashing the self-esteem of anyone who says or does something to indicate their value systems diverges, even slightly, from the norm. They recieve a broad range of invective, and one of the commest slurs is "stupid".
Within the group this drives them to change their attitudes to conform. But people outside the group, with their own social support networks, aren't swayed (or are quickly swayed back when their friends see their angst and offer moral support). So the continual slurs from the thought-police evolve into a stereotyping of the members of the outsider groups. This is followed by ethnic discrimination which, coming from people who constantly harp about "tolerance" and "diversity", is a source of much humor.
It's particularly funny when real-world evidence surfaces. For instance: There's a continual din in the blue states about how G. W. Bush is "stupid". As a result of the flap over their Vietnam-era military services, Bush's military records, and some of Kerry's, were opened. The military tests IQ, and both candidates' test results got out. Bush far outdid Kerry. B-)
I can't believe nobody has suggested this: If we can blow mountains up to make way for railroads/roads, then a slightly larger-scaled version of some mountain blowing-upping can push the side of the island into the water in small increments, causing no more than a smidgen of concern!
Unfortunately, that has high risk of precipitating exactly the event it is trying to mitigate.
For starters, it's already slipping even in the absense of eruptions. Secondly, removing some of the weight that's keeping the lid on the lava and gas will likely reawaken the volcano. (That's how mountains explode - as was discovered at Mt St Helens.)
And of course there's the question of who would PAY for this. And the little matter of what mining corporation in its right mind would take a contract, and its associated liability risks, where one screwup wipes out the whole atlntic seacoast of more than one continent.
If the red staters were as evil as the blue staters portray them, they'd be out there with jacks right now...
I'd point out that, by your logic, you should immediately kill yourself to better the planet. I would, but I've actually pronouced a few people who did that very thing.
Reminds me of my wife's story of the carpool.
Four or so in the car. Driver put forth the proposition that the population of the earth really needed to be reduced (for all the usual leftist and envirowacko reasons). Others in the car were concurring.
As they were doing something over the speed limit on the main span of the Dumbarton Bridge at the time, my wife, doing her best deadpan, said that this was a GREAT idea and he should start RIGHT NOW by IMMEDIATELY turning HARD RIGHT. B-)
[We're] talking trillions of tons of rock off an active volcano, which might even distrub it enough to set it off anyway.
The mechanism of exploding mountains, as discovered when Mt St Helens went "bang" is:
- Pressure builds up, bulging the mountain upward.
- Suddenly the bulging causes the side of the mountain to slide off.
- With the weight suddenly removed, the pressure blasts the remaining portion of the mountain into dust and up into the stratosphere.
So IMHO attempting to remove the loose slab, slowly and gently, from the intermittently-active volcano (which is thus inactive now because the weight above it is enough to keep the lava and gas bottled up) very likely WOULD wake it up. If that happens, the part that isn't moved yet might just go right away.
And given that the slab is already slipping off slowly, disturbing it by trying to disassemble it risks finishing the job of loosening it and precipitating the event you're trying to avoid.
Kinda like defusing a BIG bomb. Or taking apart a large pile of jackstraws without having any of them collapse.
Industry in the US, back in the clolnial days, started out by explicitly violating the British patent system.
That system was intended to create long-term monopolies on many manufacturing processes and devices, such as thread mills and power looms. Part of the point of these patents was to keep colonies agricultural and raw-material producing, dependent on the "mother country" for their manufactured goods (rather than competing with it and becoming a world power).
The arrival of people with knowlege of mill manufacture, who set up their own plants here, was a major factor in the colonies achieving the ability to break away. And the "mother country"'s attempts to enforce these monopolies produced some of the major greviances that lead to the revolution.
So now it looks like the US has come full circle. B-(
Ok, I know I'm not the only one who has thought of this, but why not build a lawn mower out of this laser? It would be silent, energy efficient, compact, lightweight, non-polluting, and cheap to build and maintain.
Unfortunately, grass is green, and so is the laser. So most of the laser's energy will be reflected rather than deposited on the grass, and the grass won't be cut.
As Niven pointed out in his Ringworld series, an enemy with a shirt the color of your laser sword might as well be wearing mirror armor.
It might be good for cutting out the DEAD grass and leaving the live blades. B-)
Managers need to be able to list, create, delete, read, write, and change permissions. [etc]
Writing should also be split into overwriting, appending, and truncating - with having all equivalent to write permission.
For instance: Append without the ability to overwrite or read lets someone leave a message or data without examining or damaging what's already there. Think "mailbox". Overwriting without appending prevents arbitrary expansion of the file, and so on.
Permissions also need to be not just in terms of users, but in terms of users, applications, or combinations of them. For instance: Jerry can use this set of tools to write-append to this mailbox, and that set (but no other) to examine and modify the bug database.
So how exactly did we go from a 1 in 37 chance to a 1 in 56000 chance in a few hours?
NASA dug out some older telescope observations
and found the object on them. That pushed back the length of the observation interval and resulted in a more accurate estimate of the trajectory (just as watching it for an equivalent amount of extra time in the future would have done).
The extra accuracy from the extra measurements both gives a better estimate of the center of the expected trajectory and narrows the uncertainty. It "shrinks the cone" - and perhaps also moves its ceter.
The earth used to be inside the cone 1-in-37 cone. Now that cone is much narrower and misses the earth. The earth is now only in the 1-in-56,000 cone (which also shrank but is still wide enough).
Think of it as an archery target. Bullseye is the best estimate of closest approach. The rings are increasingly lower probability locations for the flyby. The extra observations shrank the target and perhaps moved it a bit. The earth was on a high-probability inner ring. Now it's on a low-probability outer ring of the much smaller target.
Our main fuel source is a non-renewable, polluting one that won't last us into the next century.
We use coal, oil, and natural gas because they're CHEAPER than other energy sources. When they actually DO start to run short the price will rise and we'll (incrementally) switch to using something else.
But don't use "known reserves" as a measure of how much is left. "Known reserves" measure how much has been hunted up. When enough for a few decades has been found it becomes uneconomic to hunt for more now, rather than waiting until later.
Early money is better than later money - because it can be put to work meanwhile. There is a crossover point where it makes more sense to put the money to work earning more money rather than hunt for more resources that you won't need for decades. The exact crossover point varies depending on interest rate and other factors (such as the planning horizon needed for your operation). But normally it's never more than 30 years in the future.
As a result, having "known reserves" good for more than about 30 years occurs only by accident: Either the last discovery made was enormous, or expected demand has dropped since the planning that ordered the last round of explorations.
But that means, if you assume known reserves are all reserves, you ALWAYS think you're "going to run out in 30 years" or so, and have a crisis. This has been true for the last 50 years at least, and people have been "viewing with alarm" and raising a big popular stink about it every decade or so for all that time.
I hear it has been going on for much longer. History records similar popular angst about running out of whale oil for lamps and limits to city size due to knee-deep horseflops in the streets from the delivery wagons. But I can attest to the doomsayers of the last 50 years or so from personal observation.
Yes, eventually the oil will run short. But there won't be a sudden catastrophy when the last well suddenly sucks dry. Instead the price will gradually rise, and the production gradually fall. First power plants, then cars, will switch to other fuels while the remaining production is used for more lucrative purposes (such as chemical feedstocks, until it becomes expensive enough that the chemicals will be synthesized some other way).
We still have billions of people living in utter poverty, and children aspire to be rock stars, and the likes.
And that's a total non-sequitur. So some people are in poverty. So what? That has no effect on whether some of the people who AREN'T starving will chose to spend some resources building mansions, watching football, touring the Moon, or colonizing space.
I don't think our (american/european) culture is ready to venture into space and colonize, we need to start putting value on the right ideals.
If america/europe doesn't do it first, somebody else will. That's how evolution works - for species, ideologies, corporations, and the couple dozen or so other things that have some of the characteristics associated with life. Nature red in tooth and claw. Every gene/meme for itself, and cooperation occurs only if it's advantageous for the cooperator.
Some groups die out. Some find new, more successful, niches. But those that put expansion into new opportunities on the back burner until they have "perfected" themselves lose out to those who ignore such hand-wrining and "boldly go".
You snooze, you lose!
I'd hate to see these ideals brought into space. Militarization of space? No thanks.
So your feelings will be hurt. Space is already militarized, and has been since the first shots. The entire process evolved from a war effort.
Right now we have ICBMs and spy satellites as major parts of military strategy. The {apparent} lack of always-up orbiting nuclear bomb platforms (to suplement the always-up bombers and always-down submarines) is an artifact of the dance that brought all-out war to a screeching, no
Another poster has already pointed you to the Niven/Pournells book _Lucifer's Hammer_, wherin a comet makes a close pass and "calves" - i.e. it's breaking up a bit and arrives as a field of chunks around the main core. Some of the calves hit the earth causing considerable devastation - but short of an extinction event. More like a moderate-sized thermonuclear war, including the nuclear winter but minus the fallout.
During the months preceeding the close encounter, when it's believed it will be a near-miss (and a spectacular lightshow) but the media is exploring the possiblity of a collision, a scientist is interviewed on a tv-magazine style show. He and the host get into discussing the structure of a comet, and rather than the usual "dirty snowball" comparison, he starts by comparing it to a large scoop of ice cream. As they add in the rocks, outgassing "ices", and such this evolves into a hot fudge sundae (rocks for nuts, I think the atmospheric-gas ices as whipped cream, etc.), and as the analogy keeps holding together it gets funny and the two talking heads start cracking each other up. (The point of the discussion, of course, that even a hot fudge sundae, if it's the size of Manhattan Island and falling at solar escape velocity, can do a lot of damage.)
Punchline of the interview becomes "Hot Fudge Sundae falls on a Tuesdae this week." (Since the flyby is due on a Tuesday.) This becomes a catchphrase in popular culture and is repeated a lot during the period before the impact.
Theft, according to the criminal code in my country is defined as:
"The taking away of a moveable thing owned by someone else."
Note: "taking away"
The theft claim comes from the idea that part of the value (in the form of potential profits) is removed.
It's similar to the doctorine of "partial taking". Courts use that to force payments to landowners out of zoning/land-use planning agencies when they drastically reduce an owner's property values by changing the rules to reduce the things that can be done with the property. "Partial taking" applies the fifth amendment prohibition on "private property be[ing] taken without just compensation". Even though the property is still there, some of the value has "been taken".
If the Supreme Court applies this interpretation of "taking" to GOVERNMENTS, you can bet it will apply it to individuals as well. And other people than judges can grasp the concept easily, as well.
So splitting hairs with dictionary entriesmight make you feel good. But it isn't going to convince any judges, anyone leaning toward the other side, or bring any significant numbers of fence-sitters around to your position. Instead it makes you look like you're disconnected from economic reality, making it counter-productive.
IMHO the thing to do is avoid this argument and concentrate on the Founders' original one: That copyright is a TEMPORARY PRIVILEGE intended to INCREASE the amount of creative material FREELY available in the middle-distant future by letting authors and their publishers make money on it without competition from copiers for a SHORT TIME after its creation.