We have two old (1913) non-winterized summer homes that are empty 9 months out of the year. Nothing's fool proof, but we, and our neighbors with neighboring cottages, haven't had any really huge problems in, well about 60 years, and since all seven cottages that are contemporaries of ours are still there, apparently nothing cottage-ending has occurred in 90+ years.
Turn off the water. Open the taps and drain the system backwards from the lowest point. Flush the toilets. Unscrew the j-traps under the sinks and dump them.
Empty, unplug, open, and defrost the fridge/freezer.
Shut off the power at the primary circuit breaker.
Buy a rubbermaid container and put any liquids you're leaving at the house in it- shampoo, 409, drain cleaner, liquid soap, batteries, whatever.
Unplug everything from all the wall outlets.
Lock up.
Keep your roof in good repair. Don't wait for it to start leaking before you replace it, just replace it every 15 years or whatever. Keep an eye on it.
Find someone local who you trust, preferably a neighbor or someone whose commute takes them past or right near the house and pay them a small fee to drive by the house and take a look once a week, and walk around it once a month. Even if they're a friend and insist that they'd be happy to look after your place, insist upon paying them something. It's only fair for their time, and it makes it more likely they'll take the obligation seriously.
There are no guarantees, but it works for us. We've only had one problem big enough to file an insurance claim over for one of the two cottages in 60 years. They're both in the woods and a tree fell on one. The property watcher noticed it the next day and the damages weren't too exorbitant.
256 kbit for $40? I have 6 megabits for $15. (student rate, I live with my girlfriend. It's $50 for other people). I download 3GB files in a day or so. Unless I made a mistake and am adding myself to the category of math idiots here, that means I could theoretically be paying as little as 0.0000001 cents per kilobit if I saturated my connection.
But that's not the point here. He asked them about the rate, and he thought that they had it wrong. Because they insisted that was the rate when he asked, he had them make note of it on his account before he even left on the trip. It absolutely doesn't matter whether it's a reasonable rate or not. If they quote you a price for something and put it in writing, and you ask them and prod them about the price because you think they're making a mistake and don't want to get things wrong, then they #$&! well better charge you that price. When someone agrees to sell you something for a certain price, they can't just go billing you 100x what they said they were going to charge after the fact. It's their responsibility to charge you a reasonable price, not your responsibility to pay something they consider reasonable after the fact regardless of what they said they were going to charge upfront.
OK, I linked to the wrong company. That 4D was founded in 2002.
I don't know what company I saw around 1997 talking about their new holographic storage medium that was going to revolutionize everything in just a few years, I thought they were called 4D. Perhaps they were and now they're gone and there's this other 4D, or perhaps I got the name wrong.
I remember when the first computers with DVD-ROM's started showing up, the computers generally had about 200-400MB hard drives. So a single 600MB CD disk held more than everything on your entire hard drive.
Now a standard computer might come with a 160 or 250GB hard drive, and where are disks? Only at about 8 GB for DL DVD's. Instead of fitting one or two hard drives of info on a single disc, now you fit 20 or more discs onto a single hard drive.
Yeah, I know Blue Ray and HD-DVD will be in computers soon, but they don't come close to reversing the trend. Soon we'll have 25-50 GB/disc, and by that time probably at least 500GB-1TB standard hard drives. And then it'll be a long time with frequent hard drive upgrades and no bigger discs again. Blue Ray and HDDVD may be bigger, but at the rate they're getting bigger, discs are still falling farther and farther behind.
I hope there will be some revolutionary increase like holographic storage discs, but I'm not holding my breath, because I remember reading articles about how we'd have terabyte holographic storage devices in a few years going back as far as NASA in 1993 and 4D around 1997. Holographic storage seems to be one of those technologies like fusion that are always a few years off.
At least holographic storage is always five years away, while fusion is always 20 years away. At least that sounds more promising.
First of all, I"m a fan of Lomborg's work: I think a lot of resources are misspent in poor attempts to improve the environment, when those resources could be much better spent in if they carefully targeted the most critical environmental problems. But Lomborg's not a climate scientist. He doesn't do research on global warming. The BBC is asking about suppressing global warming research, which is an issue irrelevant to Lomborg. Calling Lomborg a "counter-claimant" in this context makes it look like he does research showing that there isn't global warming, which might be being suppressed. That isn't the case at all. He doesn't do climate research. He evaluates the state of the environment and makes economic arguments about where and how we should direct resources to acheive the biggest envionmental improvements for our efforts.
Even as an economist, he's not a "global warming counter-claimant," as he believes in global warming. As he says right up front in this Telegraph opinion piece, "Global warming is real and caused by CO2."
Lomborg's arguments don't attempt to be, and are not, relevant to the scientific debate about global warming. (The debate being exactly how much there is and what all is contributing to it in what ways, not whether there is any, which is pretty well settled.) He just argues about the costs and benefits of various scenarios for attempting to counter global warming. For example, his argument in the linked article is:
1. Climate scientists think that even worldwide adherence to Kyoto would make a tiny difference in the speed of global warming.
2. Kyoto adherence would be fabulously expensive.
3. For less than the costs of adhering to Kyoto, we could provide clean water, sanitation, and basic health care to every poor person in the world.
If those three statements are provably true, I think they would make a lot of people rethink what actions should be taken regarding global warming.
I don't think any higher up (in organized government) would be dumb enough to order a hit this sloppy.
You're not thinking like the intelligence community.
If you witness a hit and your first instinct it to say "the way this hit was done, it clearly isn't [insert intelligence operative X here]," then the first perpetrator you should suspect is [intelligence operative X]. In fact, that's so well known, you probably shouldn't much suspect intelligence operative X, as you should suspect someone who wanted to frame intelligence operative X by making the hit look so clearly like it couldn't have been them that everyone in the intelligence community will suspect it must have been them. Especially if X had a motive.
Then again, if everyone thinks it's so clearly not X that it must have been X that they then conclude it must not have been X, then again it probably was X.
In conclusion, it's not easy to draw conclusions regarding the actions of the intelligence community. You certainly can't make any assumptions based upon obvious evidence, as if the evidence is obvious, than it's just as likely the intention of said evidence is obfuscation of the truth as it is that the evidence is indicative of the truth. Of course, the same goes for most non-obvious evidence.
What would be good evidence that Putin was behind this? If strong evidence comes out linking the crime to some faction within the Russian government whom Putin (either knowingly or, more likely, with entirely oblique motives) wants to depose ends up pinned with the blame, and Putin than purges that faction "for justice," and "to appease the international community," then you can figure probably, (but it will remain unproven), that Putin was behind it from the beginning.
With an X-KGB operative as the near dictatorial head of the Russian state, you can figure that the blame being pinned squarely upon another eventually, pending clever investigation, is one of the (many) necessary elements for knowing it was actually Putin. If the evidence led convincingly to Putin, that would be one of the few ways of knowing it wasn't him. As a head of state, he doesn't want the publicity of that in the common mind, regardless of what kind of reverse psychology it may inflict upon the intelligence community. If Putin wanted to assassinate someone, the evidence trail might drive by The Kremlin, buy it would not end at his door. If it did, then you actually know someone else did it.
That was going to be my point. I moved both my Mom and Dad to Macs. The gap isn't as big as it used to be, but they are still easier to use, and the secrurity situation on Windows is out of control. If someone needs a computer who will never download or install any sort of patch or update, or read about or understand any sort of computer security problem, why on earth would you set them up with Windows? Do you like to facilitate more botnets, spambots, and DDOS attacks?
When my Mom was on a PC, we got her a digital camera. Despite my brother and I showing her how to get her pictures off the camera and onto the computer and do things with them about 10 times, she never once did so. She rarely ever used the camera for the first year she had it, because she wouldn't move them to the computer, which meant she couldn't do ANYTHING with the pictures. When we moved her to Mac, we showed her how to move her pictures to the computer- and within a month she was regularly using the camera, uploading the pictures, sorting them into folders, cropping them, touching them up, printing them, emailing them to people, and making slideshows set to music. All stuff she could have done on the PC, but despite frequent attempts to get her to do these things and teaching her how over and over again, she never once actually did it on her own until we moved her to Mac. It is easier to do that stuff in iPhoto than it was on her PC. I'm sure she could have learned it on the PC (she has a PhD). But she never did, and now she's taken about 6,000 pictures, bought herself a new digital camera, and does stuff with the pictures all the time because she's on a Mac, and that's what counts.
Corporate propaganda isnt' really still in the news. The giant anti-corporate propaganda industry produced and planted this story, and duped news outlets are reporting it. It's entirely untrue that any news outlet would run a story that was pla... nt... oh, wait... Darn.
Of course it's only 1% of sites...
on
Internet Only 1% Porn
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm not in the least surprised it's only 1% of sites. I think the interesting thing is, what percent of traffic is it?
Millions of people can belong to one huge site and spend all their time there. Dozens and dozens of "mini" sites all just feed into the same big site, and depending on how they counted this, those might all be "one site." A whole ton of the porn out there probably isn't indexed, because you have to have an account and log in to the one accessible page the crawler saw to get to the ten million pages of porn behind it. A huge amount of the porn online probably never has anything to do with the web, as it's moving over bittorrent, usenet, gnutella, etc.
Estimates I've seen of the percent of internet traffic that's porn have been much, much higher than 1%.
There was a good Wired Article on a startup company developing a solar cell product using a concentrator back in June of 2005, which included good coverage of the reasons behind using concentrators, as they're much cheaper than silicon, and solar cells can handle much more intense light than plain sunlight.
The 36-bit color data captured by Canons in RAW mode is to capture finer differentiation in colors to make gradients more smooth, particularly in allowing you more leeway in editing while maintaining smooth gradients in skin tones. While 36 bit data could theoretically provide dramatically better dynamic range, it doesn't. The limit to the dynamic range recorded by the camera is its sensor, not it's file format. You do get slightly better dynamic range recording in RAW, but by slightly, I mean 0.3 EV. So there's some, but this slight benefit is due to minor thresholding to increase contrast that the camera performs when it converts to JPEG, thereby throwing away a tiny bit of differentiation in the highs. This, like all the data captured by the sensor, is maintained in RAW format and can be exploited by changing the exposure on a RAW. So the tiny bit of extra dynamic range doesn't come from the extra bits or the RAW format, but from the fact that the camera intentionally ditches a tiny bit of information when it converts to JPEG, because this usually enhances the image's appearance.
Also, the additional bits here aren't even being used in a way that can increase dynamic range. Dynamic range is the ratio from the darkest black to the lightest white recorded. Whether you record your picture in 8 bits per channel JPEG or 12 bits per channel RAW, the black point and white point are still the same. You just get a lot more colors in between those points. There are High Dynamic Range file formats, but I've never seen a consumer digital camera that uses those, because the sensors can't capture that much dynamic range (yet) anyway. If you have a still subject and a still camera, you can take a series of bracketed exposures (probably at +/- 3ev) and then use Photoshop CS2 (or probably some other software, I think GIMP does this) to merge them into one HDR file.
All that said, you're certainly right that color negative film gives you a lot more exposure latitude than digital camera sensors. Interestingly, the dynamic range of film is less than that of a digital camera sensor. That is, the highest value captured by a digital image sensor is further separated in brightness from the darkest value than it is on film. Yet you're entirely correct in what you're saying about exposure latitude. The key thing is that color negative film has a highly non-linear response to brightness, so it achieves some differentiation in the values it records for a much larger range of input brightness (dynamic range of the subject). That is, it compresses the dynamic range of the scene much more heavily than a digital sensor does, even though it records a smaller range of values to represent that scene. Yet it does this without compromising contrast in correctly exposed photographs, by performing the majority of its compression at the extremes of the exposure range, and using a large amount of recorded dynamic range for values near the middle of the exposure. It's a great feature, and digital still has a ways to go to fully match it.
All thing considered, I still prefer digital.
In an unrelated topic, note that, since it's nice to have 48 bit chrominence, especially for editing purposes, and it's nice to have 48 or possibly even 96 bits luminance for HDRI, and camera's megapixels keep going up, we may have some really huge image files sometime in the future. Good thing storage keeps going up too.
These adapters are made and they're dirt cheap on Ebay and (oddly) even cheaper on Amazon.
The bad news is that EOS uses a longer focal length than FD mount, so a lens put on an EOS camera with an adapter either can not focus to infinity, or else has to use and adapter with a lens in it, which can reduce the quality on your thousands of dollars of camera and lenses to that of a point and shoot.
When EOS was new, Canon made a few high-quality lensed adapters that might still be available somewhere used, if you're lucky.
Or you can buy the $25 one on Amazon, in which you can unscrew the glass lens. Go ahead and use the much cheaper but still very high quality old FD mount Canon lenses for macro, portraits, anything close, with the lens taken out of the adapter and no quality loss. If you want, play around with infinity focus with the lens in the adapter and see what you get. Maybe the quality will be OK.
FYI, when using other lenses with an adapter, you don't get auto-anything. It's manual focus, manual aperture, and you have to shoot in Aperture Priority or Manual mode. Still if you don't use the lens all the time, it might be worth it, since you can get optically competitive FD mount lenses for a fifth or less the price of an EOS lens.
Talk about not having to put up with the same technological challenges, let's remember that for Apollo, when the astronauts had to do a math problem, they radioed the problem to NASA where a team of engineers worked it out by hand with slide-rules and confirmed each other's answers, then radioed back the answer. And they made it to the moon and back working with that sort of technology.
Things have progressed a bit since then. Aside from semiconductors and the entire digital age, just look at the advantages conferred by materials science.
However, while contributions of more modern technology are overwhelmingly positive, remember that there are some disadvantages too. When they invented everything from scratch for Apollo, they did a huge amount of tolerance and fault testing along the way. For a space program, it's not a good idea to just order whatever some manufacturer's latest chip is for your flight control computer, and pray that it's not the one in however many thousand that randomly malfunctions, and that it can withstand whatever unearthly conditions it may be subjected to. The same goes for every one of a million components they might want to source for the mission.
Also, note that the Pentax K10D has a choice of RAW modes, and can save directly to Adobe's.dng RAW format. I believe it's the first camera to offer this.
"we'll give you some money to save your company, like we did to Apple"
When this happened, Apple was already doing well again. Remember, Steve Jobs up on stage as CEO presenting Bill Gate's head on a giant screen a-la Apple's 1984 ad? The early/mid-90's bad days were already over. MS bought $150 million in Apple stock, but Apple still had over $1 billion in cash reserves. MS did not "save" Apple, they resolved a bunch of long standing patent disputes amicably and to both their benefits.
"like the OSX version of MS-Office created out of the Microsoft-Apple deal?"
Office for Mac wasn't created out of this deal, Office was first released on Macintosh, not Windows, in 1989, and has had continuous Mac versions ever since. MS's promise not to discontinue Office for 5 years probably cost them nothing, because they weren't going to discontinue it anyway. They made Office for Mac for 8 years before the 5-year deal, and they've kept making it for four years after the 5-year deal. It's now been 17 years of Office for Mac and they still have new versions in the pipeline. It wasn't a bad idea for Jobs to make sure they weren't going to drop Office when they saw high transition costs for bringing it over to OSX, but it probably all would have happened the same anyway. The primary value of Jobs securing the announcement was probably just to reassure their customers, investors, and other software companies that OSX was really going to happen and that everyone was going along for the ride, not to make MS change their behavior.
One category of gadget lovers can (mostly) rejoice, as four out of five of the new generation of c. $1,000 10-megapixel Digital SLR's are here. Those are the Canon 400D (Digital Rebel XTi), the Nikon D80, the Sony Alpha A100, and the Pentax K10D [which isn't here yet but is supposed to be available before Christmas]. The last one is the Olympus E-400, which they have decided not to sell in the US. (I'm an Olympus fan, but I'm moving to Canon because, (1.) I decided I'd get a new 10 MP DSLR a long time ago when I heard this generation was coming out, and Olympus decided not to release theirs here, and (2.) I think not releasing it here reveals a basic lack of commitment to the US market that scares me about the future of the system here.)
Anyway, please excuse my Olympus rant, the point was that, unless you're an Olympus fan living in the US, this has the potential to be a very Merry Christmas for photography enthusiasts, as there are four gorgeous new cameras available that are all raking in rave reviews. And if you live in Europe or Asia, you may have access to all five highly rated new 10 MP DSLR's before this Christmas. They're all so good, you may make yourself miserable just trying to choose.
FYI for those of you who aren't camera enthusiasts: this is probably the most exciting lineup of competitive "prosumer" cameras that have ever been released together.
I agree. But I also don't believe in revenge for revenge's sake. I do believe in punishment as a deterrent for others. But I don't think that killing Saddam will send any more of a message to potential psychotic dictators than just having him deposed and jailed does. There's also "deterrence" as in deterring him from future atrocities, although I personally feel that there is no chance of him assuming power again. Although I'm sure some disagree, and think he must be put to death simply to eliminate the possibility that he assume power again some day. Iraqis probably have a much better handle on the chances of this that anyone else ever could. If Iraq country were plunged into civil war and Saddam were freed, would anybody follow him? I think not, but don't know for sure.
Additionally, I believe he is of significant historical value alive. Over years, he may come to relate important things that only he knows about the history of his reign and the decisions he made. We may want to ask him questions some day.
I'm in favor of keeping him alive in jail, but if they kill him, I won't lose any sleep over it. I have little empathy for this man, who willfully caused misery and death for so many others.
Do you have something that you think is a better indicator of US inflation than the Consumer Price Index?
M2 and M3 are measures of the money supply, which is NOT inflation. CPI is a measure of inflation.
Inflation is determined by how much money there is chasing after how many goods. As the economy expands and contracts- seasonally, with productivity, etc, the amount of goods and overall size of the economy change. Inflation happens when the money supply expands faster than (or contracts less quickly than) the quantity of goods for the money to pursue.
Did you really think those monetary supply graphs you linked to were measures of inflation? You think US currency deflated 13% from 1984 to 1995 like the M2 graph shows?
And what's your reasoning with Weimar? Weimar, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Albania- tons of countries have had hyperinflation. The US hasn't, and we haven't even had significant inflation in 25 years, since Jimmy Carter. But when we had 10% deflation, we had The Great Depression. We have a very stable currency, so you point to an example of a country that didn't, and use that to claim we should make our currency much less stable by pegging it to the value to a volatile commodity?
Take a look at 10-year volatility in US Currency vs. Gold. Yes, the gold chart is in US dollars, so it's confounded by inflation. But that doesn't make much difference, since in the past five years, CPI went from 164.7 to 199, an increase of 21%, while gold went from $252.8 to $725, an increase of 186.79%. After adjusting for inflation in the dollar price of gold, the real price of gold changed by 137% while the CPI changed by 21%. Plus, it's generally considered that it's much harder for economies to deal with deflation than inflation, and Gold was deflating while the dollar was inflating. For inflation, prices and interest rates rise. If you have significant deflation, prices can fall if they're allowed to (and a lot aren't, like labor costs), but banks can't well have negative interest rates. They pay you to borrow money and charge you to deposit it? It doesn't work. Banking collapses. Look what happened to Japan's economy under exceedingly minor deflation in the 90's.
Gold is less stable than the US dollar. It's a commodity. Look at everything affecting the price of gold- new mines prospected, new mining technologies, mining labor rates, jewelry demand, investor demand in markets all around the world, the performance of competing economies, the decisions of foreign governments. Indeed, gold hit it's 25-year high a few weeks ago when Chinese Economist Liu Shanen suggested that China should use part of its $988 billion in reserves to buy 1,900 metric tons of gold. A lot of the inflation in gold prices over the past five years is due to the rapidly rising GDP's of India and China, whose combined populations of 2.4 billion can now afford to buy a lot more gold. This is an excellent reason to invest in gold, as one can expect the prices to continue to increase as rising global wealth competes to buy not-so-rapidly increasing stockpiles of gold. But it's also a very good reason not to peg your currency to it, or to any other commodity. We don't want to abandon control of our currency and let external factors cause massive inflation or deflation.
When the currency isn't pegged to some commodity, the Fed can make adjustments to track whatever they want. By manipulating the monetary supply to stabilize CPI, they can control inflation and deflation and stop them from getting out of hand, which is impossible by definition on a bullion standard. This is what they've been doing since 1980 when Reagan appointed Greenspan, and it's why the US dollar has been more stable than Gold in that time.
Although many of us who understand the issue believe that this is a huge threat to democracy and that solving it is critical, it always seems like most of society doesn't care. Because the issues are technical, most press reports primarily consist of some security researcher saying the system is vulnerable, followed by an industry spokesman saying "no it isn't," and they leave it at that, and most people don't know what to think and won't become incited.
As a possible remedy, I among others, have been advocating that some gutsy hackers steal an election in a grossly obvious way- use a technologically advanced, untraceable, un-auditable method to make, for example, a US Senate race come out with the unknown (and non-existant) darkhorse Mr. "I. Rigged Davote." winning by a landslide on a write-in campaign. Will the public ever come to care about this issue without solid evidence of fraud? Because the system can not be audited or verified, even if elections are frequently stolen, will we ever get evidence unless an election is rigged to show blatantly obvious false results?
Oh, you know, no where in particular. It's not like Milton Friedman won a nobel prize for it or anything. It's not like that's how they teach Economic History at, say, MIT and the University of Chicago. It's not like your own response refuting this also advances the same claim:
"It is interesting to note that during the Depression real wage rates generally increased due to the fact that prices of goods fell more quickly than monetary wages; this seems to be a general trend for deflationary economies. The widespread unemployment of the era was due to attempts by the government and government-supported unions to prohibit any decrease in monetary wage-rages. It should be obvious that if real wage rates (the price of labor) are increasing due to fixed monetary wages and falling prices the result will be a decrease in the demand for labor, and thus unemployment. If the real wage rates had remained at market levels (with roughly the same "purchasing power" as before the Depression) unemployment would not have been nearly so much of an issue; it would have been limited to "frictional" unemployment as people transitioned from the industries swollen by the inflationary malinvestments of the boom period into more productive lines of work."
Or, in other words, the massive deflation, in conjunction with price controls that would not allow prices (most particularly wages) to adjust to the new conditions they had created, stopped us from pulling out of a recession and instead sunk into a depression. It's interesting that half of your entire text following your thesis "Neither deflation nor the gold standard caused the Great Depression" is about how deflation contributed to The Depression.
Still, I it's surprising that you imagine where people get looney ideas about deflation and the gold standard being involved with the depression even when they read discredit books like Rothbard's, which says on pages 14-15:
"The depression phase begins with the end of inflation, and can
proceed without any further changes from the side of money.
Deflation has almost always set in, however. In the first place, the
inflation took place as an expansion of bank credit; now, the financial
difficulties and bankruptcies among borrowers cause banks to
pull in their horns and contract credit. Under the gold standard,
banks have another reason for contracting credit--if they had
ended inflation because of a gold drain to foreign countries. The
threat of this drain forces them to contract their outstanding loans.
Furthermore the rash of business failures may cause questions to
be raised about the banks; and banks, being inherently bankrupt
anyway, can ill afford such questions.11 Hence, the money supply
will contract because of actual bank runs, and because banks will
tighten their position in fear of such runs."
This
Ron Paul is good on a lot of things, but then he's also one of these Libertarians who latched on to an unfortunate idiotic attribute of Objectivism, The Gold Standard.
That's right, he wants to tie our currency's value to an international commodity's price. He complains about how 1-2% annual inflation has been devaluing our savings, failing to note that, had we been on a gold standard, the money supply would have experienced 50% deflation in five years, matching the 1929-1933 10% annual deflation that caused the Great Depression. Wouldn't that be a great way to stabilize the currency?
Net results from the study, for all you who don't want to RTF[PDF]A.
GERMANY 3.9 CANADA 3.6 BELGIUM 3.2 AUSTRIA 3.2 GREECE 3.1 HUNGARY 3 ARGENTINA 3 FRANCE 2.9 POLAND 2.9 PORTUGAL 2.9 CYPRUS 2.9 FINLAND 2.7 ITALY 2.6 LUXEMBOURG 2.6 LATVIA 2.6 ESTONIA 2.6 MALTA 2.6 DENMARK 2.5 CZECH REP. 2.5 IRELAND 2.5 SLOVAKIA 2.5 LITHUANIA 2.5 NEWZEALAND 2.5 SPAIN 2.4 AUSTRALIA 2.4 SLOVENIA 2.3 NETHERLANDS 2.3 SWEDEN 2.2 ISRAEL 2.2 US 2 THAILAND 1.9 PHILIPPINES 1.9 UK 1.5 SINGAPORE 1.4 RUSSIA 1.4 MALAYSIA 1.3 CHINA 1.3
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We have two old (1913) non-winterized summer homes that are empty 9 months out of the year. Nothing's fool proof, but we, and our neighbors with neighboring cottages, haven't had any really huge problems in, well about 60 years, and since all seven cottages that are contemporaries of ours are still there, apparently nothing cottage-ending has occurred in 90+ years.
Turn off the water. Open the taps and drain the system backwards from the lowest point. Flush the toilets. Unscrew the j-traps under the sinks and dump them.
Empty, unplug, open, and defrost the fridge/freezer.
Shut off the power at the primary circuit breaker.
Buy a rubbermaid container and put any liquids you're leaving at the house in it- shampoo, 409, drain cleaner, liquid soap, batteries, whatever.
Unplug everything from all the wall outlets.
Lock up.
Keep your roof in good repair. Don't wait for it to start leaking before you replace it, just replace it every 15 years or whatever. Keep an eye on it.
Find someone local who you trust, preferably a neighbor or someone whose commute takes them past or right near the house and pay them a small fee to drive by the house and take a look once a week, and walk around it once a month. Even if they're a friend and insist that they'd be happy to look after your place, insist upon paying them something. It's only fair for their time, and it makes it more likely they'll take the obligation seriously.
There are no guarantees, but it works for us. We've only had one problem big enough to file an insurance claim over for one of the two cottages in 60 years. They're both in the woods and a tree fell on one. The property watcher noticed it the next day and the damages weren't too exorbitant.
Good luck. Install a burglar alarm.
Three years ago, Wired had an article written by a guy who does tech support for the Mafia.
256 kbit for $40? I have 6 megabits for $15. (student rate, I live with my girlfriend. It's $50 for other people). I download 3GB files in a day or so. Unless I made a mistake and am adding myself to the category of math idiots here, that means I could theoretically be paying as little as 0.0000001 cents per kilobit if I saturated my connection.
But that's not the point here. He asked them about the rate, and he thought that they had it wrong. Because they insisted that was the rate when he asked, he had them make note of it on his account before he even left on the trip. It absolutely doesn't matter whether it's a reasonable rate or not. If they quote you a price for something and put it in writing, and you ask them and prod them about the price because you think they're making a mistake and don't want to get things wrong, then they #$&! well better charge you that price. When someone agrees to sell you something for a certain price, they can't just go billing you 100x what they said they were going to charge after the fact. It's their responsibility to charge you a reasonable price, not your responsibility to pay something they consider reasonable after the fact regardless of what they said they were going to charge upfront.
OK, I linked to the wrong company. That 4D was founded in 2002.
I don't know what company I saw around 1997 talking about their new holographic storage medium that was going to revolutionize everything in just a few years, I thought they were called 4D. Perhaps they were and now they're gone and there's this other 4D, or perhaps I got the name wrong.
I remember when the first computers with DVD-ROM's started showing up, the computers generally had about 200-400MB hard drives. So a single 600MB CD disk held more than everything on your entire hard drive.
Now a standard computer might come with a 160 or 250GB hard drive, and where are disks? Only at about 8 GB for DL DVD's. Instead of fitting one or two hard drives of info on a single disc, now you fit 20 or more discs onto a single hard drive.
Yeah, I know Blue Ray and HD-DVD will be in computers soon, but they don't come close to reversing the trend. Soon we'll have 25-50 GB/disc, and by that time probably at least 500GB-1TB standard hard drives. And then it'll be a long time with frequent hard drive upgrades and no bigger discs again. Blue Ray and HDDVD may be bigger, but at the rate they're getting bigger, discs are still falling farther and farther behind.
I hope there will be some revolutionary increase like holographic storage discs, but I'm not holding my breath, because I remember reading articles about how we'd have terabyte holographic storage devices in a few years going back as far as NASA in 1993 and 4D around 1997. Holographic storage seems to be one of those technologies like fusion that are always a few years off.
At least holographic storage is always five years away, while fusion is always 20 years away. At least that sounds more promising.
Maybe this guy has MS, he certainly seems to have cognitive impairment.
And you thought the paper clip was only on your computer.
First of all, I"m a fan of Lomborg's work: I think a lot of resources are misspent in poor attempts to improve the environment, when those resources could be much better spent in if they carefully targeted the most critical environmental problems. But Lomborg's not a climate scientist. He doesn't do research on global warming. The BBC is asking about suppressing global warming research, which is an issue irrelevant to Lomborg. Calling Lomborg a "counter-claimant" in this context makes it look like he does research showing that there isn't global warming, which might be being suppressed. That isn't the case at all. He doesn't do climate research. He evaluates the state of the environment and makes economic arguments about where and how we should direct resources to acheive the biggest envionmental improvements for our efforts.
Even as an economist, he's not a "global warming counter-claimant," as he believes in global warming. As he says right up front in this Telegraph opinion piece, "Global warming is real and caused by CO2."
Lomborg's arguments don't attempt to be, and are not, relevant to the scientific debate about global warming. (The debate being exactly how much there is and what all is contributing to it in what ways, not whether there is any, which is pretty well settled.) He just argues about the costs and benefits of various scenarios for attempting to counter global warming. For example, his argument in the linked article is:
1. Climate scientists think that even worldwide adherence to Kyoto would make a tiny difference in the speed of global warming.
2. Kyoto adherence would be fabulously expensive.
3. For less than the costs of adhering to Kyoto, we could provide clean water, sanitation, and basic health care to every poor person in the world.
If those three statements are provably true, I think they would make a lot of people rethink what actions should be taken regarding global warming.
I don't think any higher up (in organized government) would be dumb enough to order a hit this sloppy.
You're not thinking like the intelligence community.
If you witness a hit and your first instinct it to say "the way this hit was done, it clearly isn't [insert intelligence operative X here]," then the first perpetrator you should suspect is [intelligence operative X]. In fact, that's so well known, you probably shouldn't much suspect intelligence operative X, as you should suspect someone who wanted to frame intelligence operative X by making the hit look so clearly like it couldn't have been them that everyone in the intelligence community will suspect it must have been them. Especially if X had a motive.
Then again, if everyone thinks it's so clearly not X that it must have been X that they then conclude it must not have been X, then again it probably was X.
In conclusion, it's not easy to draw conclusions regarding the actions of the intelligence community. You certainly can't make any assumptions based upon obvious evidence, as if the evidence is obvious, than it's just as likely the intention of said evidence is obfuscation of the truth as it is that the evidence is indicative of the truth. Of course, the same goes for most non-obvious evidence.
What would be good evidence that Putin was behind this? If strong evidence comes out linking the crime to some faction within the Russian government whom Putin (either knowingly or, more likely, with entirely oblique motives) wants to depose ends up pinned with the blame, and Putin than purges that faction "for justice," and "to appease the international community," then you can figure probably, (but it will remain unproven), that Putin was behind it from the beginning.
With an X-KGB operative as the near dictatorial head of the Russian state, you can figure that the blame being pinned squarely upon another eventually, pending clever investigation, is one of the (many) necessary elements for knowing it was actually Putin. If the evidence led convincingly to Putin, that would be one of the few ways of knowing it wasn't him. As a head of state, he doesn't want the publicity of that in the common mind, regardless of what kind of reverse psychology it may inflict upon the intelligence community. If Putin wanted to assassinate someone, the evidence trail might drive by The Kremlin, buy it would not end at his door. If it did, then you actually know someone else did it.
That was going to be my point. I moved both my Mom and Dad to Macs. The gap isn't as big as it used to be, but they are still easier to use, and the secrurity situation on Windows is out of control. If someone needs a computer who will never download or install any sort of patch or update, or read about or understand any sort of computer security problem, why on earth would you set them up with Windows? Do you like to facilitate more botnets, spambots, and DDOS attacks?
When my Mom was on a PC, we got her a digital camera. Despite my brother and I showing her how to get her pictures off the camera and onto the computer and do things with them about 10 times, she never once did so. She rarely ever used the camera for the first year she had it, because she wouldn't move them to the computer, which meant she couldn't do ANYTHING with the pictures. When we moved her to Mac, we showed her how to move her pictures to the computer- and within a month she was regularly using the camera, uploading the pictures, sorting them into folders, cropping them, touching them up, printing them, emailing them to people, and making slideshows set to music. All stuff she could have done on the PC, but despite frequent attempts to get her to do these things and teaching her how over and over again, she never once actually did it on her own until we moved her to Mac. It is easier to do that stuff in iPhoto than it was on her PC. I'm sure she could have learned it on the PC (she has a PhD). But she never did, and now she's taken about 6,000 pictures, bought herself a new digital camera, and does stuff with the pictures all the time because she's on a Mac, and that's what counts.
Corporate propaganda isnt' really still in the news. The giant anti-corporate propaganda industry produced and planted this story, and duped news outlets are reporting it. It's entirely untrue that any news outlet would run a story that was pla... nt... oh, wait... Darn.
I'm not in the least surprised it's only 1% of sites. I think the interesting thing is, what percent of traffic is it?
Millions of people can belong to one huge site and spend all their time there. Dozens and dozens of "mini" sites all just feed into the same big site, and depending on how they counted this, those might all be "one site." A whole ton of the porn out there probably isn't indexed, because you have to have an account and log in to the one accessible page the crawler saw to get to the ten million pages of porn behind it. A huge amount of the porn online probably never has anything to do with the web, as it's moving over bittorrent, usenet, gnutella, etc.
Estimates I've seen of the percent of internet traffic that's porn have been much, much higher than 1%.
How'd you like to be one of the developers on this? Every system has some errors and has to be debugged.
"Hmmm... when I turn it off, it's not sending the confirmation that it's been deactivated. Go see what's wrong with it."
"You 'go see what's wrong with it'"
"I'm in charge here!"
"Where's Jennings? How come I haven't seen him at work since the last malfunction?"
"I said go!"
"I quit"
There was a good Wired Article on a startup company developing a solar cell product using a concentrator back in June of 2005, which included good coverage of the reasons behind using concentrators, as they're much cheaper than silicon, and solar cells can handle much more intense light than plain sunlight.
The 36-bit color data captured by Canons in RAW mode is to capture finer differentiation in colors to make gradients more smooth, particularly in allowing you more leeway in editing while maintaining smooth gradients in skin tones. While 36 bit data could theoretically provide dramatically better dynamic range, it doesn't. The limit to the dynamic range recorded by the camera is its sensor, not it's file format. You do get slightly better dynamic range recording in RAW, but by slightly, I mean 0.3 EV. So there's some, but this slight benefit is due to minor thresholding to increase contrast that the camera performs when it converts to JPEG, thereby throwing away a tiny bit of differentiation in the highs. This, like all the data captured by the sensor, is maintained in RAW format and can be exploited by changing the exposure on a RAW. So the tiny bit of extra dynamic range doesn't come from the extra bits or the RAW format, but from the fact that the camera intentionally ditches a tiny bit of information when it converts to JPEG, because this usually enhances the image's appearance.
Also, the additional bits here aren't even being used in a way that can increase dynamic range. Dynamic range is the ratio from the darkest black to the lightest white recorded. Whether you record your picture in 8 bits per channel JPEG or 12 bits per channel RAW, the black point and white point are still the same. You just get a lot more colors in between those points. There are High Dynamic Range file formats, but I've never seen a consumer digital camera that uses those, because the sensors can't capture that much dynamic range (yet) anyway. If you have a still subject and a still camera, you can take a series of bracketed exposures (probably at +/- 3ev) and then use Photoshop CS2 (or probably some other software, I think GIMP does this) to merge them into one HDR file.
All that said, you're certainly right that color negative film gives you a lot more exposure latitude than digital camera sensors. Interestingly, the dynamic range of film is less than that of a digital camera sensor. That is, the highest value captured by a digital image sensor is further separated in brightness from the darkest value than it is on film. Yet you're entirely correct in what you're saying about exposure latitude. The key thing is that color negative film has a highly non-linear response to brightness, so it achieves some differentiation in the values it records for a much larger range of input brightness (dynamic range of the subject). That is, it compresses the dynamic range of the scene much more heavily than a digital sensor does, even though it records a smaller range of values to represent that scene. Yet it does this without compromising contrast in correctly exposed photographs, by performing the majority of its compression at the extremes of the exposure range, and using a large amount of recorded dynamic range for values near the middle of the exposure. It's a great feature, and digital still has a ways to go to fully match it.
All thing considered, I still prefer digital.
In an unrelated topic, note that, since it's nice to have 48 bit chrominence, especially for editing purposes, and it's nice to have 48 or possibly even 96 bits luminance for HDRI, and camera's megapixels keep going up, we may have some really huge image files sometime in the future. Good thing storage keeps going up too.
These adapters are made and they're dirt cheap on Ebay and (oddly) even cheaper on Amazon.
The bad news is that EOS uses a longer focal length than FD mount, so a lens put on an EOS camera with an adapter either can not focus to infinity, or else has to use and adapter with a lens in it, which can reduce the quality on your thousands of dollars of camera and lenses to that of a point and shoot.
When EOS was new, Canon made a few high-quality lensed adapters that might still be available somewhere used, if you're lucky.
Or you can buy the $25 one on Amazon, in which you can unscrew the glass lens. Go ahead and use the much cheaper but still very high quality old FD mount Canon lenses for macro, portraits, anything close, with the lens taken out of the adapter and no quality loss. If you want, play around with infinity focus with the lens in the adapter and see what you get. Maybe the quality will be OK.
FYI, when using other lenses with an adapter, you don't get auto-anything. It's manual focus, manual aperture, and you have to shoot in Aperture Priority or Manual mode. Still if you don't use the lens all the time, it might be worth it, since you can get optically competitive FD mount lenses for a fifth or less the price of an EOS lens.
Talk about not having to put up with the same technological challenges, let's remember that for Apollo, when the astronauts had to do a math problem, they radioed the problem to NASA where a team of engineers worked it out by hand with slide-rules and confirmed each other's answers, then radioed back the answer. And they made it to the moon and back working with that sort of technology.
Things have progressed a bit since then. Aside from semiconductors and the entire digital age, just look at the advantages conferred by materials science.
However, while contributions of more modern technology are overwhelmingly positive, remember that there are some disadvantages too. When they invented everything from scratch for Apollo, they did a huge amount of tolerance and fault testing along the way. For a space program, it's not a good idea to just order whatever some manufacturer's latest chip is for your flight control computer, and pray that it's not the one in however many thousand that randomly malfunctions, and that it can withstand whatever unearthly conditions it may be subjected to. The same goes for every one of a million components they might want to source for the mission.
Also, note that the Pentax K10D has a choice of RAW modes, and can save directly to Adobe's.dng RAW format. I believe it's the first camera to offer this.
"we'll give you some money to save your company, like we did to Apple"
When this happened, Apple was already doing well again. Remember, Steve Jobs up on stage as CEO presenting Bill Gate's head on a giant screen a-la Apple's 1984 ad? The early/mid-90's bad days were already over. MS bought $150 million in Apple stock, but Apple still had over $1 billion in cash reserves. MS did not "save" Apple, they resolved a bunch of long standing patent disputes amicably and to both their benefits.
"like the OSX version of MS-Office created out of the Microsoft-Apple deal?"
Office for Mac wasn't created out of this deal, Office was first released on Macintosh, not Windows, in 1989, and has had continuous Mac versions ever since. MS's promise not to discontinue Office for 5 years probably cost them nothing, because they weren't going to discontinue it anyway. They made Office for Mac for 8 years before the 5-year deal, and they've kept making it for four years after the 5-year deal. It's now been 17 years of Office for Mac and they still have new versions in the pipeline. It wasn't a bad idea for Jobs to make sure they weren't going to drop Office when they saw high transition costs for bringing it over to OSX, but it probably all would have happened the same anyway. The primary value of Jobs securing the announcement was probably just to reassure their customers, investors, and other software companies that OSX was really going to happen and that everyone was going along for the ride, not to make MS change their behavior.
One category of gadget lovers can (mostly) rejoice, as four out of five of the new generation of c. $1,000 10-megapixel Digital SLR's are here. Those are the Canon 400D (Digital Rebel XTi), the Nikon D80, the Sony Alpha A100, and the Pentax K10D [which isn't here yet but is supposed to be available before Christmas]. The last one is the Olympus E-400, which they have decided not to sell in the US. (I'm an Olympus fan, but I'm moving to Canon because, (1.) I decided I'd get a new 10 MP DSLR a long time ago when I heard this generation was coming out, and Olympus decided not to release theirs here, and (2.) I think not releasing it here reveals a basic lack of commitment to the US market that scares me about the future of the system here.)
Anyway, please excuse my Olympus rant, the point was that, unless you're an Olympus fan living in the US, this has the potential to be a very Merry Christmas for photography enthusiasts, as there are four gorgeous new cameras available that are all raking in rave reviews. And if you live in Europe or Asia, you may have access to all five highly rated new 10 MP DSLR's before this Christmas. They're all so good, you may make yourself miserable just trying to choose.
FYI for those of you who aren't camera enthusiasts: this is probably the most exciting lineup of competitive "prosumer" cameras that have ever been released together.
I agree. But I also don't believe in revenge for revenge's sake. I do believe in punishment as a deterrent for others. But I don't think that killing Saddam will send any more of a message to potential psychotic dictators than just having him deposed and jailed does. There's also "deterrence" as in deterring him from future atrocities, although I personally feel that there is no chance of him assuming power again. Although I'm sure some disagree, and think he must be put to death simply to eliminate the possibility that he assume power again some day. Iraqis probably have a much better handle on the chances of this that anyone else ever could. If Iraq country were plunged into civil war and Saddam were freed, would anybody follow him? I think not, but don't know for sure.
Additionally, I believe he is of significant historical value alive. Over years, he may come to relate important things that only he knows about the history of his reign and the decisions he made. We may want to ask him questions some day.
I'm in favor of keeping him alive in jail, but if they kill him, I won't lose any sleep over it. I have little empathy for this man, who willfully caused misery and death for so many others.
OK, you're right, inflation has been 1.6 - 3.4% per year.
From the Consumer Price Index.
Do you have something that you think is a better indicator of US inflation than the Consumer Price Index?
M2 and M3 are measures of the money supply, which is NOT inflation. CPI is a measure of inflation.
Inflation is determined by how much money there is chasing after how many goods. As the economy expands and contracts- seasonally, with productivity, etc, the amount of goods and overall size of the economy change. Inflation happens when the money supply expands faster than (or contracts less quickly than) the quantity of goods for the money to pursue.
Did you really think those monetary supply graphs you linked to were measures of inflation? You think US currency deflated 13% from 1984 to 1995 like the M2 graph shows?
And what's your reasoning with Weimar? Weimar, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Albania- tons of countries have had hyperinflation. The US hasn't, and we haven't even had significant inflation in 25 years, since Jimmy Carter. But when we had 10% deflation, we had The Great Depression. We have a very stable currency, so you point to an example of a country that didn't, and use that to claim we should make our currency much less stable by pegging it to the value to a volatile commodity?
Take a look at 10-year volatility in US Currency vs. Gold. Yes, the gold chart is in US dollars, so it's confounded by inflation. But that doesn't make much difference, since in the past five years, CPI went from 164.7 to 199, an increase of 21%, while gold went from $252.8 to $725, an increase of 186.79%. After adjusting for inflation in the dollar price of gold, the real price of gold changed by 137% while the CPI changed by 21%. Plus, it's generally considered that it's much harder for economies to deal with deflation than inflation, and Gold was deflating while the dollar was inflating. For inflation, prices and interest rates rise. If you have significant deflation, prices can fall if they're allowed to (and a lot aren't, like labor costs), but banks can't well have negative interest rates. They pay you to borrow money and charge you to deposit it? It doesn't work. Banking collapses. Look what happened to Japan's economy under exceedingly minor deflation in the 90's.
Gold is less stable than the US dollar. It's a commodity. Look at everything affecting the price of gold- new mines prospected, new mining technologies, mining labor rates, jewelry demand, investor demand in markets all around the world, the performance of competing economies, the decisions of foreign governments. Indeed, gold hit it's 25-year high a few weeks ago when Chinese Economist Liu Shanen suggested that China should use part of its $988 billion in reserves to buy 1,900 metric tons of gold. A lot of the inflation in gold prices over the past five years is due to the rapidly rising GDP's of India and China, whose combined populations of 2.4 billion can now afford to buy a lot more gold. This is an excellent reason to invest in gold, as one can expect the prices to continue to increase as rising global wealth competes to buy not-so-rapidly increasing stockpiles of gold. But it's also a very good reason not to peg your currency to it, or to any other commodity. We don't want to abandon control of our currency and let external factors cause massive inflation or deflation.
When the currency isn't pegged to some commodity, the Fed can make adjustments to track whatever they want. By manipulating the monetary supply to stabilize CPI, they can control inflation and deflation and stop them from getting out of hand, which is impossible by definition on a bullion standard. This is what they've been doing since 1980 when Reagan appointed Greenspan, and it's why the US dollar has been more stable than Gold in that time.
Although many of us who understand the issue believe that this is a huge threat to democracy and that solving it is critical, it always seems like most of society doesn't care. Because the issues are technical, most press reports primarily consist of some security researcher saying the system is vulnerable, followed by an industry spokesman saying "no it isn't," and they leave it at that, and most people don't know what to think and won't become incited.
As a possible remedy, I among others, have been advocating that some gutsy hackers steal an election in a grossly obvious way- use a technologically advanced, untraceable, un-auditable method to make, for example, a US Senate race come out with the unknown (and non-existant) darkhorse Mr. "I. Rigged Davote." winning by a landslide on a write-in campaign. Will the public ever come to care about this issue without solid evidence of fraud? Because the system can not be audited or verified, even if elections are frequently stolen, will we ever get evidence unless an election is rigged to show blatantly obvious false results?
"Where do people get this stuff?
Oh, you know, no where in particular. It's not like Milton Friedman won a nobel prize for it or anything. It's not like that's how they teach Economic History at, say, MIT and the University of Chicago. It's not like your own response refuting this also advances the same claim:
"It is interesting to note that during the Depression real wage rates generally increased due to the fact that prices of goods fell more quickly than monetary wages; this seems to be a general trend for deflationary economies. The widespread unemployment of the era was due to attempts by the government and government-supported unions to prohibit any decrease in monetary wage-rages. It should be obvious that if real wage rates (the price of labor) are increasing due to fixed monetary wages and falling prices the result will be a decrease in the demand for labor, and thus unemployment. If the real wage rates had remained at market levels (with roughly the same "purchasing power" as before the Depression) unemployment would not have been nearly so much of an issue; it would have been limited to "frictional" unemployment as people transitioned from the industries swollen by the inflationary malinvestments of the boom period into more productive lines of work."
Or, in other words, the massive deflation, in conjunction with price controls that would not allow prices (most particularly wages) to adjust to the new conditions they had created, stopped us from pulling out of a recession and instead sunk into a depression. It's interesting that half of your entire text following your thesis "Neither deflation nor the gold standard caused the Great Depression" is about how deflation contributed to The Depression.
This is just the summary; for the full analysis of the events leading up to and contributing to the Great Depression see A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. America's Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard is pretty thoroughly discredited by modern economists. I understand why you feel the way you do believing in that book, because like Ron Paul, it advocates a gold standard. Note that, in my post, I didn't say that the gold standard caused the depression, I said deflation caused it, which, together with price controls, is the predominant view among today's economists, be they Monetarists, Keynsenians, Neo-keynsians, or even Austrian School (Rothbard excepted.) And there's no doubt, looking at the price of gold, that we would have suffered severe deflation over the past five years if we'd been on a gold standard, as over the past five years, US dollar monetary inflation has been about 1%, while the relative value of gold with respect to the dollar has increased 50%.
Still, I it's surprising that you imagine where people get looney ideas about deflation and the gold standard being involved with the depression even when they read discredit books like Rothbard's, which says on pages 14-15:
"The depression phase begins with the end of inflation, and can proceed without any further changes from the side of money. Deflation has almost always set in, however. In the first place, the inflation took place as an expansion of bank credit; now, the financial difficulties and bankruptcies among borrowers cause banks to pull in their horns and contract credit. Under the gold standard, banks have another reason for contracting credit--if they had ended inflation because of a gold drain to foreign countries. The threat of this drain forces them to contract their outstanding loans. Furthermore the rash of business failures may cause questions to be raised about the banks; and banks, being inherently bankrupt anyway, can ill afford such questions.11 Hence, the money supply will contract because of actual bank runs, and because banks will tighten their position in fear of such runs." This
Ron Paul is good on a lot of things, but then he's also one of these Libertarians who latched on to an unfortunate idiotic attribute of Objectivism, The Gold Standard.
That's right, he wants to tie our currency's value to an international commodity's price. He complains about how 1-2% annual inflation has been devaluing our savings, failing to note that, had we been on a gold standard, the money supply would have experienced 50% deflation in five years, matching the 1929-1933 10% annual deflation that caused the Great Depression. Wouldn't that be a great way to stabilize the currency?
Net results from the study, for all you who don't want to RTF[PDF]A.
GERMANY 3.9
CANADA 3.6
BELGIUM 3.2
AUSTRIA 3.2
GREECE 3.1
HUNGARY 3
ARGENTINA 3
FRANCE 2.9
POLAND 2.9
PORTUGAL 2.9
CYPRUS 2.9
FINLAND 2.7
ITALY 2.6
LUXEMBOURG 2.6
LATVIA 2.6
ESTONIA 2.6
MALTA 2.6
DENMARK 2.5
CZECH REP. 2.5
IRELAND 2.5
SLOVAKIA 2.5
LITHUANIA 2.5
NEWZEALAND 2.5
SPAIN 2.4
AUSTRALIA 2.4
SLOVENIA 2.3
NETHERLANDS 2.3
SWEDEN 2.2
ISRAEL 2.2
US 2
THAILAND 1.9
PHILIPPINES 1.9
UK 1.5
SINGAPORE 1.4
RUSSIA 1.4
MALAYSIA 1.3
CHINA 1.3