The only thing great about the august 14 blackout was that it protected power companies' plants, but it sucked majorly for the consumers. Instead of shutting down powerplants for protection as they did on the 14th, i can think of four other possibilities: 1) build more power plants to meet surge demand (most expensive option) 2) disable powerplants from overloading or shutting down -- just have it perform below (say) 130% all the time, but never over it. 3) make demand meet supply (by blacking out smaller regions, for example just northern Ohio). 4) detect where a short is occuring, disable that line only. But whatever you do, don't reduce supply when the demand is high!
In the US, power companies used to be regional monopolies, and they would usually be bought out by the government("nationalized") or be restriced on pricing. Deregulation in the US means bringing competition and giving consumers a choice. The phone lines have been deregulated, and it's a much easier process to draw new lines per telephone company, but for electric deregulation it's not easy to do this, so they share power lines. A market is created where distributors buy power from different power sources.... sort of like the stock market but more confusing.
In theory, competition will allow better, cheaper, uninterrupted service (think of food lines in USSR vs US).
IANAE (...not an economist), but from what I've heard from an economist professor who was involved with the deregulation in california, the jist of the problem is that the transitional phase that government set up artificially restricted prices, which resulted in lowered revenue and resultant output problems. In the end, it was gov't regulation during a phase of deregulation that caused the problems.
Floating arctic ice in general have lower salinity than the ocean.
Iceburgs come from salt-free snow and glaciers. The ocean is salty, so
the
iceburgs will float higher than when in fresh water. In otherwords,
iceburgs displace less volume than the volume of itself melted when
floating in salty water. Hence, if all the iceburgs melted, *the
sea
level will actually rise*. I also RTFA and there were no mention of
sea level not rising. As many others have pointed out, the point of
whether or not the melting of iceburgs will directly cause sea level to
rise is irrelevant anyway.
Most users hate horizontal scolling because they don't have a mouse wheel for horizontal scrolling! I used to hate vertical scrolling before there was a mouse wheel. What's also annoying are those pages that you have to scroll both directions, esp. those that you have to scroll an inch to the right, and then an inch back to the left for each line. I've seen artsy horizontal webpages before. Horizontal layout would also be a practical approach for vertically written East Asian text... oh wait, html wasn't designed with these types of layouts in mind... well... a flash plug-in could take care of that problem...
We also invented rum, which isn't a light drink at all. Today we pasteurize beer - before this practice became mainstream, beer used to be pretty unsanitary. I doubt it was any cleaner than well water.
I remember once I got a weird mail from Vector.. not sure if it was the same company. It basically said I got "approved" for their "job." The amazing thing about the letter was that they didn't describe what the job was. Some other peers of mine who also got the letter said it was some crummy marketing job - it was either door-to-door salesperson or telemarketing.
This problem can be fixed by exporting the Labor Unions, so that they encourage everyone everywhere to demand the same high pay.
Labor is cheap in India because the total cost of living is cheaper, hence wages are cheaper. This has nothing to do with unions. With or without them, if bread is cheaper in inda, then it remains cheaper.
Remember when Japanese cars were lots cheaper than American? The obvious reason was the lower cost of labor in Japan.
Japanese labor unions have been in existance since the end of WWII. Robots and more fuel efficient cars gave the Japanese car companies a greater competitive advantage during the 80's, not lower worker wages. If US car companies incorporated robots into their assembly line much sooner they would have lost less marketshare and thus less jobs. So what happens when US is defeated in the car market? They accuse Japan of not having labor unions(?), having wages too low, and other nonsensical Japan-bashing that went out of style after the end of the 80's.
English instruction is mandatory virtually everywhere on earth (except perhaps in some european states, where english may be an option out of several for their nation's foreign language requirement). English education is a double-edged sword as it can promote brain-drain.
English is frequently used in India due to India's historical ties with an english-speaking colonizer, and that language still is important for indians seeking a political career.
During the cold war, vast amounts of Chinese students came to the US for their education, while hardly any soviet students came. The chinese leaders paid closer attention to their economic advisors.
Sony customers are screwed when their PC breaks down and their warranty is up - how does that make Sony worse than any other PC manufacturer? Laptop motherboards tend to be more expensive than desktop motherboards.
Also, I recall a long time ago when I tried abiword, the default.abw file format was in xml.
I think ooo is rather slow and poorly designed, despite being feature-rich (or feature-bloated). Too bad...
I still think the biggest problem is that Disney doesn't know what to do with these films. They don't fit into their standard G rating pipeline so the films end up showing on 100 screens and getting attended to by the film heads only. Too bad.
In any case, I think Disney failed at marketing a fantastic film. Makes me wonder if Disney buying the rights to distributing Ghibli's films were a Good Thing or not. Then again I guess Pixar and other companies do the same thing. Companies as big as Disney kinda scares me, though.
Yes, AC. The Indians are going to take all the wealth out of America. Keep up the paranoia. Maybe the US can develop a stereotype for them, like we did for the Japanese. We all know this country needs more stereotypes for other nationalities.
What's cool about TRON is the TRON code character encoding format, which supports all Unicode characters and more. By switching between different character set planes (like ISO 2022 does), they do away with pesky Unicode surrogate pairs, which not even Windows 2000 supports.
A) Ground-level ozone will not thicken the ozone layer up in the stratosphere. (Which is a Good Thing(TM) anyway, seeing that the world is overpopulated right now.)
B) Yes, the ozone layer does heat up the atmosphere, but not the troposphere, like CO2 does, where major weather phonomena takes place. The ozone layer's contribution to global warming is minimal.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing great about the august 14 blackout was that it protected power companies' plants, but it sucked majorly for the consumers. Instead of shutting down powerplants for protection as they did on the 14th, i can think of four other possibilities: 1) build more power plants to meet surge demand (most expensive option) 2) disable powerplants from overloading or shutting down -- just have it perform below (say) 130% all the time, but never over it. 3) make demand meet supply (by blacking out smaller regions, for example just northern Ohio). 4) detect where a short is occuring, disable that line only. But whatever you do, don't reduce supply when the demand is high!
Now all we need are cybernetic organisms.
In the US, power companies used to be regional monopolies, and they would usually be bought out by the government("nationalized") or be restriced on pricing. Deregulation in the US means bringing competition and giving consumers a choice. The phone lines have been deregulated, and it's a much easier process to draw new lines per telephone company, but for electric deregulation it's not easy to do this, so they share power lines. A market is created where distributors buy power from different power sources.... sort of like the stock market but more confusing.
In theory, competition will allow better, cheaper, uninterrupted service (think of food lines in USSR vs US).
IANAE (...not an economist), but from what I've heard from an economist professor who was involved with the deregulation in california, the jist of the problem is that the transitional phase that government set up artificially restricted prices, which resulted in lowered revenue and resultant output problems. In the end, it was gov't regulation during a phase of deregulation that caused the problems.
Floating arctic ice in general have lower salinity than the ocean. Iceburgs come from salt-free snow and glaciers. The ocean is salty, so the iceburgs will float higher than when in fresh water. In otherwords, iceburgs displace less volume than the volume of itself melted when floating in salty water. Hence, if all the iceburgs melted, *the sea level will actually rise*. I also RTFA and there were no mention of sea level not rising. As many others have pointed out, the point of whether or not the melting of iceburgs will directly cause sea level to rise is irrelevant anyway.
FSFSSFS (free software foundation says save free software)!
Most users hate horizontal scolling because they don't have a mouse wheel for horizontal scrolling! I used to hate vertical scrolling before there was a mouse wheel. What's also annoying are those pages that you have to scroll both directions, esp. those that you have to scroll an inch to the right, and then an inch back to the left for each line. I've seen artsy horizontal webpages before. Horizontal layout would also be a practical approach for vertically written East Asian text... oh wait, html wasn't designed with these types of layouts in mind... well... a flash plug-in could take care of that problem...
...Transmeta and other manufacturers went from 1.7% to 1.8% in a single year.
In other news, CPUs do not exist outside US. Seriously, wasn't this supposed to be big in Japan?
We also invented rum, which isn't a light drink at all. Today we pasteurize beer - before this practice became mainstream, beer used to be pretty unsanitary. I doubt it was any cleaner than well water.
I remember once I got a weird mail from Vector.. not sure if it was the same company. It basically said I got "approved" for their "job." The amazing thing about the letter was that they didn't describe what the job was. Some other peers of mine who also got the letter said it was some crummy marketing job - it was either door-to-door salesperson or telemarketing.
This problem can be fixed by exporting the Labor Unions, so that they encourage everyone everywhere to demand the same high pay.
Labor is cheap in India because the total cost of living is cheaper, hence wages are cheaper. This has nothing to do with unions. With or without them, if bread is cheaper in inda, then it remains cheaper.
Remember when Japanese cars were lots cheaper than American? The obvious reason was the lower cost of labor in Japan.
Japanese labor unions have been in existance since the end of WWII. Robots and more fuel efficient cars gave the Japanese car companies a greater competitive advantage during the 80's, not lower worker wages. If US car companies incorporated robots into their assembly line much sooner they would have lost less marketshare and thus less jobs. So what happens when US is defeated in the car market? They accuse Japan of not having labor unions(?), having wages too low, and other nonsensical Japan-bashing that went out of style after the end of the 80's.
English instruction is mandatory virtually everywhere on earth (except perhaps in some european states, where english may be an option out of several for their nation's foreign language requirement). English education is a double-edged sword as it can promote brain-drain. English is frequently used in India due to India's historical ties with an english-speaking colonizer, and that language still is important for indians seeking a political career. During the cold war, vast amounts of Chinese students came to the US for their education, while hardly any soviet students came. The chinese leaders paid closer attention to their economic advisors.
On the plus side, most jobs have higher wages on holidays. Even if your job doesn't have it, there are lots of open jobs out there that do.
Sony customers are screwed when their PC breaks down and their warranty is up - how does that make Sony worse than any other PC manufacturer? Laptop motherboards tend to be more expensive than desktop motherboards.
an icon for Japan-related articles? I think that would be pertty cool...
IIRC...
* superdrive = some combination of CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD.
* superdisk = LS-120 = 120 MB slow-ass floppy drive that is backward compatible with 1.4 MB
Is packet sniffing against the DMCA?
Can an ISP catch someone using it?
The next big thing in Keyboard design will be one handed keyboards optimized for the internet.
This can be achieved by eliminating 13 letters from the English alphabet. polm ol. nohin o h. mo lon.
you will die of vitamin B4 deficiency with such a diet.
Also, I recall a long time ago when I tried abiword, the default .abw file format was in xml.
I think ooo is rather slow and poorly designed, despite being feature-rich (or feature-bloated). Too bad...
well, it's not entirely an impossible language...
take Java Language Specification's definition of whitespace, which includes space, tab, form feed, and line terminator. There are languages that require very few characters, such as brainfuck. There are irritating languages like that one. In fact, two characters is enough to form a language.
However, according to Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java(TM) , whitespace is the computer's way of telling you that you haven't done any work.
In any case, I think Disney failed at marketing a fantastic film. Makes me wonder if Disney buying the rights to distributing Ghibli's films were a Good Thing or not. Then again I guess Pixar and other companies do the same thing. Companies as big as Disney kinda scares me, though.
Yes, AC. The Indians are going to take all the wealth out of America. Keep up the paranoia. Maybe the US can develop a stereotype for them, like we did for the Japanese. We all know this country needs more stereotypes for other nationalities.
What's cool about TRON is the TRON code character encoding format, which supports all Unicode characters and more. By switching between different character set planes (like ISO 2022 does), they do away with pesky Unicode surrogate pairs, which not even Windows 2000 supports.
A) Ground-level ozone will not thicken the ozone layer up in the stratosphere. (Which is a Good Thing(TM) anyway, seeing that the world is overpopulated right now.) B) Yes, the ozone layer does heat up the atmosphere, but not the troposphere, like CO2 does, where major weather phonomena takes place. The ozone layer's contribution to global warming is minimal.