The only way you can pay for something with the equity in your house is to take out a loan secured on it (a 2nd mortgage). When he sold the house to you, he would no longer own the property the loan was secured on...
Could you provide a link to an explanation of this type of mortgage? I can't understand how this works...
No down payment at all? What interest rate are you paying? Even excluding the PMI, you're probably paying far more than you would had you paid a deposit.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Seller paid it", who would pay to sell a house? That just doesn't make sense.
Of course, they weren't even right. The transit method doesn't tell them anything about mass, they did that using the "wobble" of the star (the way most planets were discovered in the first place), as the very next paragraph explains...
1-2%? We were talking about savings accounts - if your savings account pays that little (less than inflation!) you need to move banks.
If you're refering to a current account, that's a completely different story - they exist for convenience and security, not for making money on. Most banks make money on current accounts from charging fees, not from using the money in the account - if you have more than about one month's pay in a current account, you're wasting money.
you can lose your shirt even during the good times if you pick the wrong stocks or the wrong combination of stocks.
That's the whole point of diversity. Losing everything in a diverse portfolio without major economic trouble is extremely unlikely. (It boils down to the law of large numbers)
The return on investments on the other hand is unpredictable, and may even be negative, and liquidity is a variable.
If you invest in equity, sure. There are fixed rate investments, like bonds - they have a very predicate return. There is a risk of default, but that's just equivilent to the risk of your bank not having enough money to give you yours back (the risk is higher, certainly, but that's true throughout the spectrum of investments - higher return requires higher risk).
You can transmit information through a barrier, you just can't do it faster than light. I would imagine the uncertainty in your measurement of when they turned the transmitter on (due to physical effects, not just inaccuracies in your equipment) would be greater than the reduction in time it takes to reach you, which is enough to stop relativity being violated. (That's just a guess, there might be some other reason for it not working, but there will certainly be a reason)
"I can't see a reason for there to be any electronic connection between the pressurised forward module and propulsion module of the progress spacecraft."
This kind of situation would be that reason. The progress craft was launched knowing it would be used for boosting the station's orbit, so they could have rigged something up on the ground as a backup.
If the ISS can't control the Progress rockets, but Russian ground control can, it sounds like the problem is simply with the ISS, so why can't they just go through the airlock and control it from inside the Progress craft? I know Progress is an unmanned craft, so probably doesn't have a pilot's seat, but it shouldn't be too hard to rig something up, just in case. They're meant to have some of the best engineers around, surely one of them knows how to splice an extra interface into the system...
Idle hands get paid lots of money by companies wanting to send cheap spam? A lot of the Eastern European virus writers are paid good money - it's script kiddies that do it because they have nothing better to do with their lives.
The key figure isn't how many reached the top 48, it's what proportion of entrants did. If only 4 Americans entered, then 4 reaching the top 48 is brilliant. If 80% of all entrants were American, then they did extremely poorly.
Also, one other key question - is this competion in any way credible? How many/.ers had heard of it before today?
How would you regulate temperature in such a suit? It would be like wearing skintight PVC over your whole body. Skin needs to sweat etc. Also, the body is hardly a good shape - a small pocket of air could mess the whole thing up - it would need to be designed to cope with the pressure even if it wasn't designed to be pressurised.
It might be practicle for very short periods, but not for hours of EVA.
I don't know about big cities, but I've been in supermarkets in medium sized towns during powercuts.
I also remember being in a big powercut in Malaysia and the apartment building we were in had a generator to power the lights in the communal areas and the lifts - I think power cuts were quite common in KL, though. The airport also had generators - they were running almost completely uneffected.
It would seem it's not difficult to prepare, you just have to decide it's worth it.
How many years ago? Supermarkets in the UK quite often have backup generators and will stay open during power cuts. Tills quite often have batteries to keep them going for a bit while the power is out - a reasonably long cut would drain them, though, I expect.
Now that's a valid point. I guess the only counter is to argue that GDP isn't a realistic measure of contribution. It all depends on your priorities. If all you want to do is keep people alive then all the GDP that goes on luxury should be discounted, and you get back to something closer to the per capita arguements. It's a tricky one - you can obviously argue that life without luxuries isn't really worth living.
I'm not really sure where I stand on that one, but I do believe the US should do something about it's emmissions. Prehaps the amount you reduce by should depend on pollution per GDP rather than pollution per capita, but that only reduces the amount of reduction needed from the US, it doesn't eliminate it.
"The word "fair" never entered my arguments. I was looking at it from the one point that trumps all -- nature. Nature has no concept of "fair" nor does it have the concept of "rights", those are human inventions and ones that we cannot impose on nature no matter how hard we try."
The word "fair" was the whole point of this discussion. Someone claimed that it wasn't fair for the US to have to cut emmissions when China doesn't - it is that claim that is nonsense.
Of course, what's important is the total emmissions from the entire world, I never denied that. I was simply pointing out that US is a worse offender than China, so should cut down emissions more - it is all about fairness because fairness was the point I was countering.
Those are meaningless numbers. Try dividing by population. The population of China is something like 5 times than of the US (I haven't bothered looking it up, but I think that's close) which puts China at around 1/10 of the emissions of the US, that's a fraction by my definition.
Gravity is only slightly weaker in LEO than on the surface (97% springs to ming, but might be wrong). It's being in free fall that makes objects seem weightless. The tiny bit of gravity which makes people call it microgravity rather than zero gravity is just due to non perfect orbits, the earth not being a perfect sphere and the spacecraft not being a point particle. All those things change constantly, meaning you would need to be able to make very fine, very fast, adjustments to the artificial gravity - changing the speed of a spinning super conducter sounds quite hard to me.
I think LEO is close enough to true weightlessness not to affect the making of spheres, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way you can pay for something with the equity in your house is to take out a loan secured on it (a 2nd mortgage). When he sold the house to you, he would no longer own the property the loan was secured on...
Could you provide a link to an explanation of this type of mortgage? I can't understand how this works...
I know companies that do that, but I'd never do it myself. It would be worth the cost. You'd probably end up paying twice as much...
No down payment at all? What interest rate are you paying? Even excluding the PMI, you're probably paying far more than you would had you paid a deposit.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Seller paid it", who would pay to sell a house? That just doesn't make sense.
It would take years to pay as much in rent as you would to buy the house. It's not comparable at all.
Of course, they weren't even right. The transit method doesn't tell them anything about mass, they did that using the "wobble" of the star (the way most planets were discovered in the first place), as the very next paragraph explains...
Buerocracy for you...
They dropped the case before it even got to court! Yes, the police over-react sometimes, that's why the legal process doesn't stop there.
The people paying them would soon stop if the vast majority of hits were never going to result in sales since it's just a bot.
That's very much a "semantic game"...
1-2%? We were talking about savings accounts - if your savings account pays that little (less than inflation!) you need to move banks.
If you're refering to a current account, that's a completely different story - they exist for convenience and security, not for making money on. Most banks make money on current accounts from charging fees, not from using the money in the account - if you have more than about one month's pay in a current account, you're wasting money.
you can lose your shirt even during the good times if you pick the wrong stocks or the wrong combination of stocks.
That's the whole point of diversity. Losing everything in a diverse portfolio without major economic trouble is extremely unlikely. (It boils down to the law of large numbers)
The return on investments on the other hand is unpredictable, and may even be negative, and liquidity is a variable.
If you invest in equity, sure. There are fixed rate investments, like bonds - they have a very predicate return. There is a risk of default, but that's just equivilent to the risk of your bank not having enough money to give you yours back (the risk is higher, certainly, but that's true throughout the spectrum of investments - higher return requires higher risk).
A savings account is just a low-risk investment.
You can transmit information through a barrier, you just can't do it faster than light. I would imagine the uncertainty in your measurement of when they turned the transmitter on (due to physical effects, not just inaccuracies in your equipment) would be greater than the reduction in time it takes to reach you, which is enough to stop relativity being violated. (That's just a guess, there might be some other reason for it not working, but there will certainly be a reason)
"I can't see a reason for there to be any electronic connection between the pressurised forward module and propulsion module of the progress spacecraft."
This kind of situation would be that reason. The progress craft was launched knowing it would be used for boosting the station's orbit, so they could have rigged something up on the ground as a backup.
If the ISS can't control the Progress rockets, but Russian ground control can, it sounds like the problem is simply with the ISS, so why can't they just go through the airlock and control it from inside the Progress craft? I know Progress is an unmanned craft, so probably doesn't have a pilot's seat, but it shouldn't be too hard to rig something up, just in case. They're meant to have some of the best engineers around, surely one of them knows how to splice an extra interface into the system...
Idle hands get paid lots of money by companies wanting to send cheap spam? A lot of the Eastern European virus writers are paid good money - it's script kiddies that do it because they have nothing better to do with their lives.
Exactly!
/.ers had heard of it before today?
The key figure isn't how many reached the top 48, it's what proportion of entrants did. If only 4 Americans entered, then 4 reaching the top 48 is brilliant. If 80% of all entrants were American, then they did extremely poorly.
Also, one other key question - is this competion in any way credible? How many
How would you regulate temperature in such a suit? It would be like wearing skintight PVC over your whole body. Skin needs to sweat etc. Also, the body is hardly a good shape - a small pocket of air could mess the whole thing up - it would need to be designed to cope with the pressure even if it wasn't designed to be pressurised.
It might be practicle for very short periods, but not for hours of EVA.
The human body needs pressure to prevent liquids from boiling, gasses coming out out solution in the blood (the bends), etc.
The pressure on Mars is effectively zero.
I don't know about big cities, but I've been in supermarkets in medium sized towns during powercuts.
I also remember being in a big powercut in Malaysia and the apartment building we were in had a generator to power the lights in the communal areas and the lifts - I think power cuts were quite common in KL, though. The airport also had generators - they were running almost completely uneffected.
It would seem it's not difficult to prepare, you just have to decide it's worth it.
How many years ago? Supermarkets in the UK quite often have backup generators and will stay open during power cuts. Tills quite often have batteries to keep them going for a bit while the power is out - a reasonably long cut would drain them, though, I expect.
Now that's a valid point. I guess the only counter is to argue that GDP isn't a realistic measure of contribution. It all depends on your priorities. If all you want to do is keep people alive then all the GDP that goes on luxury should be discounted, and you get back to something closer to the per capita arguements. It's a tricky one - you can obviously argue that life without luxuries isn't really worth living.
I'm not really sure where I stand on that one, but I do believe the US should do something about it's emmissions. Prehaps the amount you reduce by should depend on pollution per GDP rather than pollution per capita, but that only reduces the amount of reduction needed from the US, it doesn't eliminate it.
"The word "fair" never entered my arguments. I was looking at it from the one point that trumps all -- nature. Nature has no concept of "fair" nor does it have the concept of "rights", those are human inventions and ones that we cannot impose on nature no matter how hard we try."
The word "fair" was the whole point of this discussion. Someone claimed that it wasn't fair for the US to have to cut emmissions when China doesn't - it is that claim that is nonsense.
Of course, what's important is the total emmissions from the entire world, I never denied that. I was simply pointing out that US is a worse offender than China, so should cut down emissions more - it is all about fairness because fairness was the point I was countering.
Those are meaningless numbers. Try dividing by population. The population of China is something like 5 times than of the US (I haven't bothered looking it up, but I think that's close) which puts China at around 1/10 of the emissions of the US, that's a fraction by my definition.
Gravity is only slightly weaker in LEO than on the surface (97% springs to ming, but might be wrong). It's being in free fall that makes objects seem weightless. The tiny bit of gravity which makes people call it microgravity rather than zero gravity is just due to non perfect orbits, the earth not being a perfect sphere and the spacecraft not being a point particle. All those things change constantly, meaning you would need to be able to make very fine, very fast, adjustments to the artificial gravity - changing the speed of a spinning super conducter sounds quite hard to me.
I think LEO is close enough to true weightlessness not to affect the making of spheres, etc.