Something to ad for people who are unfamiliar with this area, there are 15 generating dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Most of the power for Oregon and Washington is generated off these. There's some nuclear, gas and wind as well. We buy and sell power as needed to California and the SW.
However the upper Columbia watershed has lost a lot of jobs due to the Aluminum industry collapsing in part due to power losses a few years ago. Low water combined with high temps and high demand in California redirected power from the smelting plants. Eventually the Aluminum plants said nuts and moved.
There is a chance this could bite Google and Amazon on the butt in the future.
Some how I think the Tequila factories will do fine. South African Assassins are not going to take tequila with out fighting me, and most of mexico and the SW US.
It's a volunteer project from many nations. The largest single fund giver is the USA.
As for why to do it? Pure science breeds applied science breeds better lives. What will this project lead to if successful? I've got only a few glimmers.
But projects like this have huge implications in applied science that are unforeseen. Particle accelerators created to answer questions like this are now used to create very specific isotopes that are otherwise too brief to be useful. These are the foundation of both many cancer radiation treatments, but now being used to create isotopes which emit a form of antimatter. This antimatter, exotic products of pure science is used in PET scans and took us years to get the science worked out.
Further, an idea like hyperfine splitting, inpart quantified from particle accelerators is huge part of our daily life. Atomic clocks and GPS use this, as well as CAT scan technology. I have the pleasure of meeting Norman Ramsey who did the basic science research on this technology in the 40's and 50's. It would take 30 and more years to see it mature, but particle accelerator testing has had a drastic positive impact on our lives.
What the LHC will do will give us a new springboard. Other modern accelerators are giving us insight to subjects like high energy plasmas which if we're lucky could lead to practical Fusion reactors. Whose to say the LHC won't give us the final push in that area? And that alone would mean an end to fossil fuel consumption. LHC may give us insights into quantum computing or solar weather modeling too. Ideas that will transform our world to the better.
A friend and I used to play starcraft by directly hooking up our computers via SCSI cables. He had a laptop and I had a Powermac 6500. You weren't suppose to hotswap them. You were suppose to powerdown cause there was a chance you could fry the system.
I told him to wait till it powered down. That he shouldn't do it. He told me, 'oh I've done this dozens of times, there's no risk'.
Yeah. That's how I learned the Chimes of death and had to get a new motherboard.
The biggest issue is the maps are known fakes circulated for the last 6 months. Maps have been historically one of the last items finished. I beta tested the burning crusade, Maps were added in one of the last beta patches, especially the map for outlands.
Not to mention they have melee talents for a magic class...
A couple thousand books 80 years? Not if you read fast and like to read. I tend to knock out 3 books a week on my private time. I rather like reading, and have an extensive library. In college it was more like 6 or 7, so well over a thousand in my 4 years of undergrad.
Elderly care is an interesting point. America versus Europe shows one thing that's clear. Both sides are flawed. The US system is a bit heartless, while Europe has become institutionalized.
If you live in Britain, you face a problem at the end of the year. Doctors have an hour quota under NHS. They are usually done at the end of the year, making it damn hard to get treatment. There's an additional complication that Retirees are a net drain on the system. They no longer pay in, and use the majority of the resources.
A quirk of fate has US retirees generally paying into the entire system and being the largest group means the entire industry is seeing dollars in Elder care making it a very popular choice rather than a thankless chore.
However, you're not going broke due to debts for medical expenses like in the US, and defaulted debts aren't driving up the costs for everyone else. Neither system is especially great.
Mr. Novack, as an Oregonian, and registered voter who tends towards republicans, I need to know you can tell the difference between real pork and political programs. I'd also like to know you can tell what is good and bad for Oregon.
For example, Senator Smith has had the tendency to introduce RIAA written bills that have a massive negative effect on the Oregon Economy. I'm in the tech industry, and a bill that gives Media companies the ability to regulate standards of new technology for piracy problems doesn't exactly represent the best interests for Oregonians.
On the other hand, giving Korea Most Favor Nation status wouldn't either, as they have a tendency to underwrite their fabs and be able to outprice us.
The ISS however, despite being a very political football, is very important for research. Advance crystallography is superior in microgravity; allowing advanced viral research. The space shuttle, however is a jobs project for southern states. Saturn V's are cheaper than the shuttles and have a better price per pound. If you actually do some engineering on them you can get better payloads too. I personally would prefer to have NASA commission additional private industrial research in the field then be the sole consumer of them, but that may be some time off.
You still need several pounds of enriched U-235 or Pu-239. You can't exactly go down to the corner store and get that. To get it from raw materials you need a massive UF6 separation system. When we're looking at weapons programs, we're looking at the separation systems.
Once you have enough, it's pretty easy. People were making fun of North Korea because their nuclear test is the only known dud out of the 10 nuclear powers.
Confession is never fully broken with out the confessee agreeing to it. A priest isnt under canon law allowed to break it even in the case of eminent death resulting from the confession. He can withhold absolution and is trained in methods to get the confessee to cooperate to help police in such cases, but can not break confessional seal.
Pretty much the only time a priest make break the seal is if the issue is something that normally excommunicates the confessee or something the priest needs a more senior member of the clergy to help with. And even that requires the confessee to agree to it.
Not all states and nations respect it, mostly based off their own law history with confidentiality.
Let's see, last 25 years. Let's start off with Blade Runner which I now have the Final Cut.
Going into general movies, we've got Schindler's List, Silence of the Lambs, The Abyss, Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Die Hard, Saving Private Ryan, Life is Beautiful, City of God, Hero, LotR, Unforgiven, Fargo, Hoop Dreams, Goodfellas.
Unless you're a total snob, you'll like one of those...
As would I. Honestly the prof whose name is on the office door and the grant writer whose name is on the building are going to split the profits with the university.
If the grad students play nice, they get paper credits and a shot at a good paying job out of this. If they make noise and try and get money, they'll get screwed. It's happened before, and even if the grad student was working on an basement project at home and their job is just TAing, most University contracts say they get any pattens while employed, regardless of the job.
Actually Apple doesn't have the patent. Planar Systems owns it. They've built up to 19 inch versions to my knowledge. But this tech is flawed as P-Si works best at receiving light in wavelengths either dangerous to human health in a display, or get absorbed by the polarizers.
Our Cryptography experts in the government are funding papers on Cryptography and mathematical and computer modeling related to it!
And NP! What will our government do with these horrors! The abuse of terrorists in Camp X-ray is mind boggling using papers like "A unified framework for enforcing multiple access control policies" http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=253260.253364&type=series
Well, to be fair, Tom Clancy has demonstrated extreme respect for the Russians. So much that the plot was closer in the book to your story than the movie.
The original plot of the Sum of All Fears dealt with an Israeli nuke made from American materials stolen in the 60s then lost during the confusion of the 6 day war's darkest hour. The nuke was accidently loaded on a plane instead of an extra fuel tank ( they had the same designed on the outside). The plane was shot down in Lebanon and the nuke was found at a later date by a scrap collector, who sold it to a terrorist organization.
And the Russians lost more than a few sunken subs full of weapons. K8 alone has 20 unaccounted warheads at the bottom of the bay of naples.
I, too, went to OSU physics and saw this being used well, especially in the engineering classes and the basic modern physics classes (with 200 and 50 students approx).
I got a 580 on my Verbal GRE and I was on the extreme end of physics students. They not do good in English.
It's really useful for speed of grading and for concept testing. Quick feedback for knowing that the class didn't understand the concept of, say, changing frames of reference. It's great because a professor can get everyone involved and not just the ten or so hyper kids with their hands and passions raised about it. It's great to ensure a good swath of questions get answered.
Negative uses in the program include an attempt to do computerized homework for the massive physics for engineers class. For instance, one might get 10 problems with the variables changed for each user. The program had a set number of chances and a fudge factor of 5% for minor math errors. Except of course most minor math errors are more like 50% off (divide instead of multiple, or add then multiple or multiple then add). An Error that would be worth 1 point off gets you ten because of that error. That error might also be very common...
Those who went there remember the excel sheets and the Macro. Different persons would have different answers. Argue to death, etc. Eventually one person would get it right and it would report it to the keeper of the excel sheet who'd enter the correct formula. Most people would eventually use the sheet for at least one answer. The rampant cheating the computer homework inspired made them go back to having a TA paid 10 bucks an hour to grade it (far cheaper and easier to spot 5 homeworks turned in at the same time with the same errors).
A final positive use was the ability to do 3d and 4d moving graphs.
Maybe for an Undergraduate. Graduate students very very rarely pay a dime in money for school in the US. Usually they pull a low, but ok wage. Universities wave tuition for most graduate students in exchange for research or teaching performed by them. For example I knew a guy who had his masters and he was making about 18,000 a year from TAing while he was doing his PhD research. Not great but paid for his cost of living.
And I am not talking MIT. I went to Oregon State and Washington State. Both schools that aren't anything special in my field. Not a single chinese grad student paid a dime. There were several from ex soviet nations as well. Heck a good number of captains in the Ukrainian air defense forces went there.
Undergraduate studies are completely different. The majority of Chinese undergraduate students I've known are from rich political families. Graduate students are the hard working smart ones.
By the way, stop with that political policy bullshit (Nearly every university has a low cost health plan for students). I'm not gonna argue advancement because there's no point, but I will point out I've worked with a heck of a lot of bright Europeans who came over to the US because the economics were much better for them over here. Not only in taking significantly more pay home, but there were more jobs for them here.
Except the very very best of china, that one in 10,000 engineer/scientist that will make a huge difference in the world, will come to the US for education.
My own background in graduate school for physics had a program of many 80 grad students at a time, 10 to 20 of them born and raised in China. One of our professors, the one most cited in his field, had a similar background and a tendency to recruit other kids from China.
None of the graduate students has any intention of returning to China. Ever. Most were marked at youth for their academic ability, and raised away from their parents in boarding schools. They don't have loyalty to China, nor a big family that roots them to China. The Married ones bring their wives/husbands with them (often having financial issues while in grad school).
I've known some from western provinces that would be a 'Stan and loathe the government. I know others from the big cities that just want the money they can get here. So now the brain drain is very favorable for the US. So doom isn't going to happen in 10 years. But maybe in 20 or 30 when we stop being the target of the Brains looking for money.
The next intelligent species will find us and be amazed at how many human corpses they've found lying around next to an artifact with what seems to be a mice-shaped object in their hand. It might take them a while to guess what we were doing, unless Slashdot plans to be around by the year five million
What do you think caused our extinction? Not Digg for sure...
The issue is Documentary films used to not have an argument at all. They were to show the issues and let the facts speak.
Proper Commentary and Editorials are themselves a good body of work, and Moore does a decent enough commentary. But he is not making Documentaries. He makes Commentaries that try to be Documentaries. Documentaries suggest an attempt at gathering all the facts on an issue but not judging. Of course they won't be neutral, but they will try. It's the Wikipedia NPOV attempt. Doesn't always work, but they really do try.
Commentaries have clear agendas and a point to make. Documentaries let you decide the point, and often enough Moore is trying to shove his point down the throat. (Not that it's just him, or it's just one side of the political debate). I dislike him for his spreading of his film style.
The only way you can really do this is crippling tax rates on the super rich, which only work for so long and has a side benefit of killing the industrial drive that creates them. Or you gut the military spending.
I'm not just talking Iraq with the military spending either. No new jet planes, aircraft carriers etc. Some might argue for this, some might argue against it, some might try and find some other place to get the money. But in truth the US choose national security over national healthcare. I've got my own issues with national Healthcare. (Imagine having a nationwide version of the DoD system or the VA). I don't feel our government is able to give that care even with the money.
Honestly, our best bet is bulk buying plans, requiring private insurance for anything approaching a full time job, and trying to make insurance rates stop climbing, both for doctors and patients. Hell, make it much more of a tax write of for every patient a doctor or hospital sees for free. Make it enough and doctors will find it to be their wild. This along with more incentives for new doctors and nurses might help us with out going big government.
Slashdot Mirror
However the upper Columbia watershed has lost a lot of jobs due to the Aluminum industry collapsing in part due to power losses a few years ago. Low water combined with high temps and high demand in California redirected power from the smelting plants. Eventually the Aluminum plants said nuts and moved.
There is a chance this could bite Google and Amazon on the butt in the future.
Some how I think the Tequila factories will do fine. South African Assassins are not going to take tequila with out fighting me, and most of mexico and the SW US.
As for why to do it? Pure science breeds applied science breeds better lives. What will this project lead to if successful? I've got only a few glimmers.
But projects like this have huge implications in applied science that are unforeseen. Particle accelerators created to answer questions like this are now used to create very specific isotopes that are otherwise too brief to be useful. These are the foundation of both many cancer radiation treatments, but now being used to create isotopes which emit a form of antimatter. This antimatter, exotic products of pure science is used in PET scans and took us years to get the science worked out.
Further, an idea like hyperfine splitting, inpart quantified from particle accelerators is huge part of our daily life. Atomic clocks and GPS use this, as well as CAT scan technology. I have the pleasure of meeting Norman Ramsey who did the basic science research on this technology in the 40's and 50's. It would take 30 and more years to see it mature, but particle accelerator testing has had a drastic positive impact on our lives.
What the LHC will do will give us a new springboard. Other modern accelerators are giving us insight to subjects like high energy plasmas which if we're lucky could lead to practical Fusion reactors. Whose to say the LHC won't give us the final push in that area? And that alone would mean an end to fossil fuel consumption. LHC may give us insights into quantum computing or solar weather modeling too. Ideas that will transform our world to the better.
I told him to wait till it powered down. That he shouldn't do it. He told me, 'oh I've done this dozens of times, there's no risk'.
Yeah. That's how I learned the Chimes of death and had to get a new motherboard.
http://www.starslip.com/2008/09/12/so-thats-what-happened-to-the-ssc/
They didn't see anything, move along http://www.starslip.com/2008/09/12/so-thats-what-happened-to-the-ssc/
The biggest issue is the maps are known fakes circulated for the last 6 months. Maps have been historically one of the last items finished. I beta tested the burning crusade, Maps were added in one of the last beta patches, especially the map for outlands.
Not to mention they have melee talents for a magic class...
A couple thousand books 80 years? Not if you read fast and like to read. I tend to knock out 3 books a week on my private time. I rather like reading, and have an extensive library. In college it was more like 6 or 7, so well over a thousand in my 4 years of undergrad.
Elderly care is an interesting point. America versus Europe shows one thing that's clear. Both sides are flawed. The US system is a bit heartless, while Europe has become institutionalized. If you live in Britain, you face a problem at the end of the year. Doctors have an hour quota under NHS. They are usually done at the end of the year, making it damn hard to get treatment. There's an additional complication that Retirees are a net drain on the system. They no longer pay in, and use the majority of the resources. A quirk of fate has US retirees generally paying into the entire system and being the largest group means the entire industry is seeing dollars in Elder care making it a very popular choice rather than a thankless chore. However, you're not going broke due to debts for medical expenses like in the US, and defaulted debts aren't driving up the costs for everyone else. Neither system is especially great.
For example, Senator Smith has had the tendency to introduce RIAA written bills that have a massive negative effect on the Oregon Economy. I'm in the tech industry, and a bill that gives Media companies the ability to regulate standards of new technology for piracy problems doesn't exactly represent the best interests for Oregonians.
On the other hand, giving Korea Most Favor Nation status wouldn't either, as they have a tendency to underwrite their fabs and be able to outprice us.
The ISS however, despite being a very political football, is very important for research. Advance crystallography is superior in microgravity; allowing advanced viral research. The space shuttle, however is a jobs project for southern states. Saturn V's are cheaper than the shuttles and have a better price per pound. If you actually do some engineering on them you can get better payloads too. I personally would prefer to have NASA commission additional private industrial research in the field then be the sole consumer of them, but that may be some time off.
Once you have enough, it's pretty easy. People were making fun of North Korea because their nuclear test is the only known dud out of the 10 nuclear powers.
Confession is never fully broken with out the confessee agreeing to it. A priest isnt under canon law allowed to break it even in the case of eminent death resulting from the confession. He can withhold absolution and is trained in methods to get the confessee to cooperate to help police in such cases, but can not break confessional seal.
Pretty much the only time a priest make break the seal is if the issue is something that normally excommunicates the confessee or something the priest needs a more senior member of the clergy to help with. And even that requires the confessee to agree to it.
Not all states and nations respect it, mostly based off their own law history with confidentiality.
Going into general movies, we've got Schindler's List, Silence of the Lambs, The Abyss, Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Die Hard, Saving Private Ryan, Life is Beautiful, City of God, Hero, LotR, Unforgiven, Fargo, Hoop Dreams, Goodfellas.
Unless you're a total snob, you'll like one of those...
If the grad students play nice, they get paper credits and a shot at a good paying job out of this. If they make noise and try and get money, they'll get screwed. It's happened before, and even if the grad student was working on an basement project at home and their job is just TAing, most University contracts say they get any pattens while employed, regardless of the job.
Here's a link to a 2003 white paper for the Society of Information Displays that explains the tech completely and much more than the article http://www.planar.com/advantages/whitepapers/docs/Planar-AMLCD-Optical-Touchscreen.pdf
Our Cryptography experts in the government are funding papers on Cryptography and mathematical and computer modeling related to it!
And NP! What will our government do with these horrors! The abuse of terrorists in Camp X-ray is mind boggling using papers like "A unified framework for enforcing multiple access control policies" http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=253260.253364&type=series
CowboyNeil is not in charge of Gundam
The original plot of the Sum of All Fears dealt with an Israeli nuke made from American materials stolen in the 60s then lost during the confusion of the 6 day war's darkest hour. The nuke was accidently loaded on a plane instead of an extra fuel tank ( they had the same designed on the outside). The plane was shot down in Lebanon and the nuke was found at a later date by a scrap collector, who sold it to a terrorist organization.
And the Russians lost more than a few sunken subs full of weapons. K8 alone has 20 unaccounted warheads at the bottom of the bay of naples.
I got a 580 on my Verbal GRE and I was on the extreme end of physics students. They not do good in English.
It's really useful for speed of grading and for concept testing. Quick feedback for knowing that the class didn't understand the concept of, say, changing frames of reference. It's great because a professor can get everyone involved and not just the ten or so hyper kids with their hands and passions raised about it. It's great to ensure a good swath of questions get answered.
Negative uses in the program include an attempt to do computerized homework for the massive physics for engineers class. For instance, one might get 10 problems with the variables changed for each user. The program had a set number of chances and a fudge factor of 5% for minor math errors. Except of course most minor math errors are more like 50% off (divide instead of multiple, or add then multiple or multiple then add). An Error that would be worth 1 point off gets you ten because of that error. That error might also be very common...
Those who went there remember the excel sheets and the Macro. Different persons would have different answers. Argue to death, etc. Eventually one person would get it right and it would report it to the keeper of the excel sheet who'd enter the correct formula. Most people would eventually use the sheet for at least one answer. The rampant cheating the computer homework inspired made them go back to having a TA paid 10 bucks an hour to grade it (far cheaper and easier to spot 5 homeworks turned in at the same time with the same errors).
A final positive use was the ability to do 3d and 4d moving graphs.
http://xkcd.com/225/
Cost?
Maybe for an Undergraduate. Graduate students very very rarely pay a dime in money for school in the US. Usually they pull a low, but ok wage. Universities wave tuition for most graduate students in exchange for research or teaching performed by them. For example I knew a guy who had his masters and he was making about 18,000 a year from TAing while he was doing his PhD research. Not great but paid for his cost of living.
And I am not talking MIT. I went to Oregon State and Washington State. Both schools that aren't anything special in my field. Not a single chinese grad student paid a dime. There were several from ex soviet nations as well. Heck a good number of captains in the Ukrainian air defense forces went there.
Undergraduate studies are completely different. The majority of Chinese undergraduate students I've known are from rich political families. Graduate students are the hard working smart ones.
By the way, stop with that political policy bullshit (Nearly every university has a low cost health plan for students). I'm not gonna argue advancement because there's no point, but I will point out I've worked with a heck of a lot of bright Europeans who came over to the US because the economics were much better for them over here. Not only in taking significantly more pay home, but there were more jobs for them here.
My own background in graduate school for physics had a program of many 80 grad students at a time, 10 to 20 of them born and raised in China. One of our professors, the one most cited in his field, had a similar background and a tendency to recruit other kids from China.
None of the graduate students has any intention of returning to China. Ever. Most were marked at youth for their academic ability, and raised away from their parents in boarding schools. They don't have loyalty to China, nor a big family that roots them to China. The Married ones bring their wives/husbands with them (often having financial issues while in grad school).
I've known some from western provinces that would be a 'Stan and loathe the government. I know others from the big cities that just want the money they can get here. So now the brain drain is very favorable for the US. So doom isn't going to happen in 10 years. But maybe in 20 or 30 when we stop being the target of the Brains looking for money.
What do you think caused our extinction? Not Digg for sure...
The issue is Documentary films used to not have an argument at all. They were to show the issues and let the facts speak.
Proper Commentary and Editorials are themselves a good body of work, and Moore does a decent enough commentary. But he is not making Documentaries. He makes Commentaries that try to be Documentaries. Documentaries suggest an attempt at gathering all the facts on an issue but not judging. Of course they won't be neutral, but they will try. It's the Wikipedia NPOV attempt. Doesn't always work, but they really do try.
Commentaries have clear agendas and a point to make. Documentaries let you decide the point, and often enough Moore is trying to shove his point down the throat. (Not that it's just him, or it's just one side of the political debate). I dislike him for his spreading of his film style.
I'm not just talking Iraq with the military spending either. No new jet planes, aircraft carriers etc. Some might argue for this, some might argue against it, some might try and find some other place to get the money. But in truth the US choose national security over national healthcare. I've got my own issues with national Healthcare. (Imagine having a nationwide version of the DoD system or the VA). I don't feel our government is able to give that care even with the money.
Honestly, our best bet is bulk buying plans, requiring private insurance for anything approaching a full time job, and trying to make insurance rates stop climbing, both for doctors and patients. Hell, make it much more of a tax write of for every patient a doctor or hospital sees for free. Make it enough and doctors will find it to be their wild. This along with more incentives for new doctors and nurses might help us with out going big government.