I believe the idea is that next year visas will come with a computer chip containing biometric data, sorta like an RFID tag. If so, that would make scanning the fingerprint registered to the visa increadibly easy. The process then would hopefully be so quick that even re-entries wouldn't be inconvieninced by it. Simply place your thumb on the scanner while passing under an I-Pass like sensor and you're off.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Saying that we should have just spent the money on the inventions ignores the fact that the invention process is geared towards solving immediate problems, and one of the best sources for technical problems is space travel. So yes, it is a very good argument.
Haven't you ever heard the saying "It's not the destination, it's the journey"? We didn't go into space because we wanted teflon, velcro or cordless tools. We didn't find the technology to build MRIs, bone analyzers, or magnetic bearing systems laying around on the surface of the moon. The goals of the space program did not provide flywheel batteries, scratch resistant lenses, or microlasers. Instead it is the effort to stay in space that has given us the practical benefits. So you're going to be getting a lot more than just pictures of a barren wasteland from this.
You're talking about large scale production, I'm talking wealth generation, and there's a big difference. Let me attack this from a different angle to make it clear. Both Luxembourg and France use the Euro. Now, if both Luxembourg and France decide to up the minimum wage (not necessarily at the same time, mind you), which one will affect the Euro's inflation more? The answer is France because it's dumping far more additional Euros into the market. So, in essence, when France raises its minimum wage it does not get as big a boost out of it that Luxembourg does. Even if they weren't both on the same monetary system it's going to work similarly, only in a more round about way. Luxembourg, because of its small size, doesn't have a great deal of external influence on currency (when it wasn't using the Euro I'm sure French Francs and German Marks were major components of its currency), so it is far freer to play fast and loose with it without suffering as harsh consequences as would a larger country. This is why you can't really do a US/Luxembourg substitution. Now a US/Europe substitution would be much closer to the mark. You want to keep your variables as few as possible.
I think you've multiplied the minimum hourly wage by 13 twice.
And indeed I did, and not by accident. The contention held by the great-grandparent is that China is to US as US is to Europe. The multiplication of $5.15 by 13 is to illustrate what Luxemburg (or rather Europe) would have to achieve if the analogy were to hold true.
Whoa, how does that follow? Please explain how the job situation (or population size) affects how much a minimum waged worker gets paid. Unless you want to move this towards a standards of living, in which case I suspect Luxemburg is still higher than the US.
I'm not here to deny that Luxemburg may have a standard of living higher than that of the US. However, you must understand that just because something can be done on a small scale does not mean it can be done as effectively, if at all, on a scale orders of magnitude greater (BTW, China is not greater than the US by an order of magnitude). Keep in mind Luxemburg can benifit itself at the expense of the much larger Germany and France, yet is too small to put much of a dent in their economies.
Uh, that's only the minimum a TIPPED employee must be compensated for by his or her employeer, and even then the TOTAL that the employee makes per-hour must equal at least $5.15. You know, it's rather embarassing when someone doesn't read what he links to.
So, revising your math with the correct data with rough US standards (5 days/8 hours/4 weeks, not to mention we're missing a couple days on average with this formula):
Chinese worker: $0.39 per hour or 1/13th a US worker's wage.
13 times $5.15 an hour is $67 an hour, or roughly six times what they make in Luxembourg.
However, since the US job situation is far better than the European situation (and since Luxemburg is such a small country it's far easier for it to do better by its citizens) I'll stick with the US model, thank you very much.
I'm not sure where your "here" is, but in the State of Illinois I still find new episodes of Junkyard Wars (now called just Mega-Wars) being shown on TLC. If all you watch is Discovery (Monster Garage), no wonder you don't see it.
and instead of discovering the evils of racisim, just becoming himself racist to whatever ethnic group the racist was a member of.
Since the only nationality mentioned in his post is American, I'd have to say you're wrong there. People are simply pissed off because he thinks the US is great. It's sad really, and annoying. It should be noted that this treatment is not solely directed to US supporters, but they certainly get the brunt of it.
Now now, although I enjoy a good Clinton bashing as much as the next guy, Republicans were in charge of Congress, and thus the purse strings, for the bulk of his tenure. So don't just blame him.
The grandparent's post was not about issuing in-flight corrections, but rather being able to know what went wrong so that future missions will not make the same mistake.
Except you'd kinda think that "bird highways" would tend to utilize the same conditions a wind farm works best in (that is, lots of wind from a consistant direction).
So then a solution would be finding the appropriate paint job to "trick" the birds into seeing its motion or at least steer way clear of it, kinda like the off-centered dot on turbines to scare birds so they aren't sucked into a jet engine. Of course, with the size of these things, that would be quite a trick.
Except that you generally get something besides just "ad free" when you get a subscription service. On the Internet you'd get more privliges, on TV you get movies before they hit the networks, what are you going to get on Satelite Radio, Rush Limbaugh? I'm sorry, I just fail to see the killer ap that will cause what you're talking about to come to pass.
After the tiered model is in place, basic service offered at a discount would include one C & W, one talk, one news, one rock (slightly out of date, one soft rock etc.) all sponsored with lots of advertisements.
Why yes, people will certainly pay for that basic service when they already get the exact same thing for free over FM... unless you mean XM and Sirius would offer the basic service for free to sell recievers, which would actually be an improvement and even be plausible.
PPL sporting events? You're kidding, right? If you're going to spend money on a sporting event chances are you're also going to adjust your schedual around it, which heavily favors TV over radio (most satellite radio recievers are in cars). XM and Sirius may try it, but I doubt it would last long, only if they get a major bandwidth upgrade would they be willing to devote the resources to gather the meager profits.
The one premium channel you mentioned is actually Playboy Radio, so I don't think you can use that as a basis to claim that you'll need to buy premium channels in order to avoid commercials.
Actually, it's not a good comparison. One AE test (Oh! It's NightFlight! So... um... what functions are being tested? At least provide a link to the breakdown.) A fricken BRYCE 5 test. (I'm sorry, if you're doing something in Bryce that would tax a PIII you should look to Maya or 3D Studio Max. At least test something with the Maya personal learning edition.) Again, not so much as a snapshot of the image being generated. Oh, Photoshop 7 "Mp Actions" and "Non-MP" Actions. Gee, that's helpful. Again, what are they testing? Chrome? Glowing Edges? Rotation? Gradient Map? Polar Coordinates? RGB to CMYK? What? How about a breakdown of the time on the individual actions so we know if a single action threw the results?
Now, I'm not saying the G5 isn't faster than the Opteron, I'm just saying the documentation on this benchmark is utter crap. It's not even useful as a component of a larger set of benchmarks, because you don't know what is being tested. This doesn't deserve to be news on Slashdot.
Maybe that's it; DVD are, essentially, an expendable commodity and CDs aren't. So, when you buy a CD you can listen to it for years, which naturally reduces your need to buy more CDs, so you have a hard time justifying spending another $15 on it. However, with a DVD, watch it a couple times and now your collection feels old. The reason we tolerate spending $20 for this expendable commodity is because of all the neat extras and the visible effort put in to its production, so we don't feel that the people selling us a DVD are ripping us off. Also, we can compare the cost of owning a DVD to going to see a movie in the theater and see there's not much difference (once you factor in costs for popcorn, soda and the like).
If I recall correctly, heat tiles are not used on the leading edge of the wing. Instead it's a solid piece of carbon-fibre material. That would mean that tile repair components would be of no use on the damaged section.
You are attempting to affect my argument through insults. 'I'm arguing with a child,' 'I'm arguing with an idiot.' Yes, it's ad hominem.
Of course you made the claim that you have more wisdom. Anyone with half a brain, remember? Oh, in order for it to be a straw man, I would have had to use it to prove one of your arguments false. Instead, I used it only as my motivation for giving you a hard time.
And yes, I evoked Pascal's Wager, too bad few philosophers who have disagreed with it have claimed it to be an invalid argument. In fact, I changed it around a little to alleviate some problems they have found, such as not attributing infinite reward if a person is correct in their belief God exists.
By "one way or the other" I was talking about evidence of existence or non-existence of God. It is possible to prove something does not exist; magic is thrown out by the laws of thermodynamics, for instance.
The fact that I made no statement one way or the other about the ethereal dragon in the garage is, in fact, consistent with the philosophy of waiting for proof BEFORE YOU ASSERT YOUR BELIEF AS THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH, which, you'll note, is what I said. Also, I felt it was not worth any effort, so I kept my mouth shut on the topic as opposed to lashing out at you for proposing such an asinine argument.
You speak with absolute certainty whenever you ridicule another for their dissent with your view.
I have presented evidence for God's existence, just not the omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being. Theists and theistic religions don't agree on these points, so I don't include them in the basic definition of God.
And I have to ask, if something which cannot be proven is not worth the scant effort to believe in, it is worth the greater effort to argue over and it is worth trying to piss people off over?
I always thought that, for a moral system to be valid, it must be able to stand on its own with a need for a deity. However, your behavior here is putting that premise to the test.
Judging from the attitudes displayed and the spelling errors, I find it humorous that the one who stoops to ad hominem attacks calls the other a child. I wonder what it is about you that causes you to belittle others who so much as toy with opinions you disagree with. I'm only on your case because you are so absolutely sure and feel that you have so much more wisdom than anyone else on the matter. I would do the same with the blindly religious, but there seems to be more than enough people willing to take on that job here.
Maybe there is no reason to think that there is a God (OK, maybe the presence of abundant energy when it can't be created or destroyed, alright, even if the total energy is 0, the temporary suspension of entropy laws to cause the big bang is weird. Plus both an uncaused caused and an infinite regression of causes are strange also), but of course, there's no reason to think that there isn't as well. Let's give odds and say there is a 99.9999% chance that you are correct and that there is no God. A sucker's bet for sure. If you are right, what have you gained, and what have the theists lost? Answers: nothing and nothing. If the theists are right and you are wrong, well, they stand to gain a lot and you could possibly lose a great deal. Even with a point 0.0001% chance, it would seem the practical man would side with the theists. Nothing to lose, everything to gain, I believe it goes. Perhaps that's it. You realize that if you're right you'll have no opportunity to gloat, so you're trying to get it over with now.
You say that you want to see proof. Now that's a good idea. If you are truly skeptical you would wait for proof one way or the other before you made up your mind, at least before you started taking your position as the absolute Truth (you'll notice that no where in our conversation that I've said there is a God). In the absence of proof, if you devoutly side with the negative, that makes you a cynic, not a skeptic.
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Um, what liberty are Americans sacrificing for this "security"? They don't need visas for traveling within the US.
I believe the idea is that next year visas will come with a computer chip containing biometric data, sorta like an RFID tag. If so, that would make scanning the fingerprint registered to the visa increadibly easy. The process then would hopefully be so quick that even re-entries wouldn't be inconvieninced by it. Simply place your thumb on the scanner while passing under an I-Pass like sensor and you're off.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Saying that we should have just spent the money on the inventions ignores the fact that the invention process is geared towards solving immediate problems, and one of the best sources for technical problems is space travel. So yes, it is a very good argument.
Haven't you ever heard the saying "It's not the destination, it's the journey"? We didn't go into space because we wanted teflon, velcro or cordless tools. We didn't find the technology to build MRIs, bone analyzers, or magnetic bearing systems laying around on the surface of the moon. The goals of the space program did not provide flywheel batteries, scratch resistant lenses, or microlasers. Instead it is the effort to stay in space that has given us the practical benefits. So you're going to be getting a lot more than just pictures of a barren wasteland from this.
That would be why they have included the color calibration tool/sundial on the probes.
Nonsense! Just make it up in volume!
You're talking about large scale production, I'm talking wealth generation, and there's a big difference. Let me attack this from a different angle to make it clear. Both Luxembourg and France use the Euro. Now, if both Luxembourg and France decide to up the minimum wage (not necessarily at the same time, mind you), which one will affect the Euro's inflation more? The answer is France because it's dumping far more additional Euros into the market. So, in essence, when France raises its minimum wage it does not get as big a boost out of it that Luxembourg does. Even if they weren't both on the same monetary system it's going to work similarly, only in a more round about way. Luxembourg, because of its small size, doesn't have a great deal of external influence on currency (when it wasn't using the Euro I'm sure French Francs and German Marks were major components of its currency), so it is far freer to play fast and loose with it without suffering as harsh consequences as would a larger country. This is why you can't really do a US/Luxembourg substitution. Now a US/Europe substitution would be much closer to the mark. You want to keep your variables as few as possible.
I think you've multiplied the minimum hourly wage by 13 twice.
And indeed I did, and not by accident. The contention held by the great-grandparent is that China is to US as US is to Europe. The multiplication of $5.15 by 13 is to illustrate what Luxemburg (or rather Europe) would have to achieve if the analogy were to hold true.
Whoa, how does that follow? Please explain how the job situation (or population size) affects how much a minimum waged worker gets paid. Unless you want to move this towards a standards of living, in which case I suspect Luxemburg is still higher than the US.
I'm not here to deny that Luxemburg may have a standard of living higher than that of the US. However, you must understand that just because something can be done on a small scale does not mean it can be done as effectively, if at all, on a scale orders of magnitude greater (BTW, China is not greater than the US by an order of magnitude). Keep in mind Luxemburg can benifit itself at the expense of the much larger Germany and France, yet is too small to put much of a dent in their economies.
Uh, that's only the minimum a TIPPED employee must be compensated for by his or her employeer, and even then the TOTAL that the employee makes per-hour must equal at least $5.15. You know, it's rather embarassing when someone doesn't read what he links to.
So, revising your math with the correct data with rough US standards (5 days/8 hours/4 weeks, not to mention we're missing a couple days on average with this formula):
Chinese worker: $0.39 per hour or 1/13th a US worker's wage.
13 times $5.15 an hour is $67 an hour, or roughly six times what they make in Luxembourg.
However, since the US job situation is far better than the European situation (and since Luxemburg is such a small country it's far easier for it to do better by its citizens) I'll stick with the US model, thank you very much.
I'm not sure where your "here" is, but in the State of Illinois I still find new episodes of Junkyard Wars (now called just Mega-Wars) being shown on TLC. If all you watch is Discovery (Monster Garage), no wonder you don't see it.
and instead of discovering the evils of racisim, just becoming himself racist to whatever ethnic group the racist was a member of.
Since the only nationality mentioned in his post is American, I'd have to say you're wrong there. People are simply pissed off because he thinks the US is great. It's sad really, and annoying. It should be noted that this treatment is not solely directed to US supporters, but they certainly get the brunt of it.
Hey, if "Opportunity" makes it as well, NASA will have performed quite the hat trick when you include Stardust.
Now now, although I enjoy a good Clinton bashing as much as the next guy, Republicans were in charge of Congress, and thus the purse strings, for the bulk of his tenure. So don't just blame him.
The grandparent's post was not about issuing in-flight corrections, but rather being able to know what went wrong so that future missions will not make the same mistake.
Except you'd kinda think that "bird highways" would tend to utilize the same conditions a wind farm works best in (that is, lots of wind from a consistant direction).
So then a solution would be finding the appropriate paint job to "trick" the birds into seeing its motion or at least steer way clear of it, kinda like the off-centered dot on turbines to scare birds so they aren't sucked into a jet engine. Of course, with the size of these things, that would be quite a trick.
Except that you generally get something besides just "ad free" when you get a subscription service. On the Internet you'd get more privliges, on TV you get movies before they hit the networks, what are you going to get on Satelite Radio, Rush Limbaugh? I'm sorry, I just fail to see the killer ap that will cause what you're talking about to come to pass.
After the tiered model is in place, basic service offered at a discount would include one C & W, one talk, one news, one rock (slightly out of date, one soft rock etc.) all sponsored with lots of advertisements.
Why yes, people will certainly pay for that basic service when they already get the exact same thing for free over FM... unless you mean XM and Sirius would offer the basic service for free to sell recievers, which would actually be an improvement and even be plausible.
PPL sporting events? You're kidding, right? If you're going to spend money on a sporting event chances are you're also going to adjust your schedual around it, which heavily favors TV over radio (most satellite radio recievers are in cars). XM and Sirius may try it, but I doubt it would last long, only if they get a major bandwidth upgrade would they be willing to devote the resources to gather the meager profits.
The one premium channel you mentioned is actually Playboy Radio, so I don't think you can use that as a basis to claim that you'll need to buy premium channels in order to avoid commercials.
Actually, it's not a good comparison. One AE test (Oh! It's NightFlight! So... um... what functions are being tested? At least provide a link to the breakdown.) A fricken BRYCE 5 test. (I'm sorry, if you're doing something in Bryce that would tax a PIII you should look to Maya or 3D Studio Max. At least test something with the Maya personal learning edition.) Again, not so much as a snapshot of the image being generated. Oh, Photoshop 7 "Mp Actions" and "Non-MP" Actions. Gee, that's helpful. Again, what are they testing? Chrome? Glowing Edges? Rotation? Gradient Map? Polar Coordinates? RGB to CMYK? What? How about a breakdown of the time on the individual actions so we know if a single action threw the results?
Now, I'm not saying the G5 isn't faster than the Opteron, I'm just saying the documentation on this benchmark is utter crap. It's not even useful as a component of a larger set of benchmarks, because you don't know what is being tested. This doesn't deserve to be news on Slashdot.
Maybe that's it; DVD are, essentially, an expendable commodity and CDs aren't. So, when you buy a CD you can listen to it for years, which naturally reduces your need to buy more CDs, so you have a hard time justifying spending another $15 on it. However, with a DVD, watch it a couple times and now your collection feels old. The reason we tolerate spending $20 for this expendable commodity is because of all the neat extras and the visible effort put in to its production, so we don't feel that the people selling us a DVD are ripping us off. Also, we can compare the cost of owning a DVD to going to see a movie in the theater and see there's not much difference (once you factor in costs for popcorn, soda and the like).
If I recall correctly, heat tiles are not used on the leading edge of the wing. Instead it's a solid piece of carbon-fibre material. That would mean that tile repair components would be of no use on the damaged section.
Iin the last line, it should read "it must be able to stand on its own without."
You are attempting to affect my argument through insults. 'I'm arguing with a child,' 'I'm arguing with an idiot.' Yes, it's ad hominem.
Of course you made the claim that you have more wisdom. Anyone with half a brain, remember? Oh, in order for it to be a straw man, I would have had to use it to prove one of your arguments false. Instead, I used it only as my motivation for giving you a hard time.
And yes, I evoked Pascal's Wager, too bad few philosophers who have disagreed with it have claimed it to be an invalid argument. In fact, I changed it around a little to alleviate some problems they have found, such as not attributing infinite reward if a person is correct in their belief God exists.
By "one way or the other" I was talking about evidence of existence or non-existence of God. It is possible to prove something does not exist; magic is thrown out by the laws of thermodynamics, for instance.
The fact that I made no statement one way or the other about the ethereal dragon in the garage is, in fact, consistent with the philosophy of waiting for proof BEFORE YOU ASSERT YOUR BELIEF AS THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH, which, you'll note, is what I said. Also, I felt it was not worth any effort, so I kept my mouth shut on the topic as opposed to lashing out at you for proposing such an asinine argument.
You speak with absolute certainty whenever you ridicule another for their dissent with your view.
I have presented evidence for God's existence, just not the omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being. Theists and theistic religions don't agree on these points, so I don't include them in the basic definition of God.
And I have to ask, if something which cannot be proven is not worth the scant effort to believe in, it is worth the greater effort to argue over and it is worth trying to piss people off over?
I always thought that, for a moral system to be valid, it must be able to stand on its own with a need for a deity. However, your behavior here is putting that premise to the test.
Again, your response has absolutely nothing to do with what I said.
Judging from the attitudes displayed and the spelling errors, I find it humorous that the one who stoops to ad hominem attacks calls the other a child. I wonder what it is about you that causes you to belittle others who so much as toy with opinions you disagree with. I'm only on your case because you are so absolutely sure and feel that you have so much more wisdom than anyone else on the matter. I would do the same with the blindly religious, but there seems to be more than enough people willing to take on that job here.
Maybe there is no reason to think that there is a God (OK, maybe the presence of abundant energy when it can't be created or destroyed, alright, even if the total energy is 0, the temporary suspension of entropy laws to cause the big bang is weird. Plus both an uncaused caused and an infinite regression of causes are strange also), but of course, there's no reason to think that there isn't as well. Let's give odds and say there is a 99.9999% chance that you are correct and that there is no God. A sucker's bet for sure. If you are right, what have you gained, and what have the theists lost? Answers: nothing and nothing. If the theists are right and you are wrong, well, they stand to gain a lot and you could possibly lose a great deal. Even with a point 0.0001% chance, it would seem the practical man would side with the theists. Nothing to lose, everything to gain, I believe it goes. Perhaps that's it. You realize that if you're right you'll have no opportunity to gloat, so you're trying to get it over with now.
You say that you want to see proof. Now that's a good idea. If you are truly skeptical you would wait for proof one way or the other before you made up your mind, at least before you started taking your position as the absolute Truth (you'll notice that no where in our conversation that I've said there is a God). In the absence of proof, if you devoutly side with the negative, that makes you a cynic, not a skeptic.