A nuclear reactor offers the promise of unlimited, cheap, carbon-free energy. OTOH, there is a small risk of a very big catastrophe, Are great benefits worth great risks?
The problem is that humans suck at rationally appraising things with a small risk of a very big catastrophe. Car accidents are the leading cause of accidental death, both in raw numbers and in rate (i.e. death per distance traveled). Yet a plane crashes and the model gets grounded, the news goes into a frenzy, people wring their hands, a new batch of aerophobes is created, and the government conducts a 6-12 month investigation to try to make air travel even safer than it already is. (Yes death per time exposed is about the same for flying vs driving, but you'll be exposed to the car for a lot longer if you choose to drive to grandma's instead of fly.)
Heck, even the opposite is true. People suck at appraising a small chance at a very big benefit. That's why lotteries and casinos do so well. In both cases, fear of or desire for the rare outcome figures too prominently in the decision, while the minuscule probability of that outcome actually happening is not given enough weight.
Im sure doing something for the fact that nobody in human history has ever done it before, being in the history books, the prestige and kudos that comes with it, im sure none of those things have ever had anything to do with human exploration.
Quick, name the crew members of Apollo 8 - the first manned spacecraft not just to fly by the moon, but to leave Earth orbit and the safety of the Van Allen belt.
Drawing a blank? That's ok, you've got two more chances. Name the crew of Apollo 9. Still nothing? How about Apollo 10.
Still too hard? How about something easier? Name the crew member from Apollo 11 who stayed aboard the command module in lunar orbit while the other two went down to the surface.
Ok, now name the two crew members of Apollo 11 who landed on the moon.
The presitge, kudos, and the mention in the history books come with the first landing, not the first flyby.
Im also sure the engineering and science advances that come out of a flyby like this also has nothing to do with it. Nor would be the information gathered from doing 90% of a Mars landing be of any use too
There's certainly engineering knowledge to be gained, but nearly all of it can be done with unmanned spacecraft and extended stays in the ISS. Unlike the Apollo missions, we now know the dangers and problems associated with travel into deep space -- Apollo taught us. So there's little need to send people on a Mars flyby mission just to collect biometric data. Heck, if you really wanted to run that experiment under "authentic" conditions, you'd be better off putting a crew in orbit around the moon for 5 years. At least that way if something went catastrophically wrong or some unforeseen long-term effects began showing up, they'd be just a few days from the safety of Earth instead of years.
And in the Apollo missions, about 90% of the time was spent in transit, 10% on the surface. The relatively small transit time is what made the dry runs of Apollo 8-10 a smart choice. A Mars flyby of this type would probably replicate 99.5% of a Mars landing mission (figure 800 days each way, a week on the surface). If you're going to go 99.5% of the way, might as well go the extra 0.5% and land on Mars.
Damn I'm getting old. I thought Flexplay and DIVX should be fresh in everyone's minds. But upon looking them up on wiki so I could link to them, I see they were 10 and 15 years ago respectively. So I guess this post will be informative for our younger readers. Anyway, those two forms of DRM worked almost exactly as the chair did - limiting you to 48 hours of use (rather than n number of uses). After the time was up, the disc became a coaster.
Every gram of carbon dioxide you emit while cycling was previously fixed directly from the atmosphere by a plant or alga. If you didn't re-emit it, the food you would have eaten would rot instead, and the same CO2 would be released by bacteria..
1) How did all the oil get there? Oh right, it was fixed from the atmosphere by a plant or alga, then it didn't rot and ended up sequestered underground with its energy intact.
2) In our industrialized society, we no longer use manual labor to produce food. We use machines run by oil as a productivity multiplier. Instead of using x Joules of energy of human/animal labor to cultivate crops and grow a bushel of corn, we use machines. They consume n*x Joules of energy per bushel, but the cost to acquire that energy (via oil) is cheaper in $$$ than the time-value of having humans do it or raising animals to do it. i.e. We do it because it's easier for us, not because it's more energy-efficient (most energy-efficient would be gathering maize which grows naturally, but that's horrible at time-efficiency). Consequently unless you're stranded on a desert island and self-sufficient, every gram of CO2 you emit also has a cost in carbon which was extracted from the ground as oil. And so you cannot attribute all the energy you get from food to renewable sources.
"they showed learning behavior when confronted with electric shock." You shock anyone's little nub's of flesh enough and they tell you anything you want to hear.
If you (gasp!) read TFA, they used controls with no eyes, and with regular eyes. Those with the implanted eye (the two regular eyes were removed) did significantly better at avoiding the shock than the no-eye control. Though they didn't say how much better, which makes me suspect the difference was very small (albeit statistically significant).
The more interesting thing to me was that tadpoles without eyes could still sense when an LED was turned on.
Glitched memory usually isn't a problem. Other spacecraft have had similar memory problems. Usually it's temporary. If it's permanent, the computers are programmed to map around the glitched memory or (back in the tape drive days) not use that segment of tape..
The real danger is that such a glitch will first manifest itself by altering control or orientation instructions, breaking the spacecraft's contact with Earth. Most spacecraft are designed with a "safe mode" when this happens. If there's been no communication with Earth for x days, the main computer switches to a rudimentary instruction set or a second computer takes over, and tries to re-establish communications.
What Apple did was make a device that worked (relatively) smoothly. While everyone else was dicking around with picking a particular feature set, Apple produced a music player, phone, and tablet that people wanted to use. Case closed.
If you look at tablets prior to the iPad, most of them were basically full fledged laptops whose screens could swivel into tablet mode. Microsoft and Intel pushed this form factor because that's where their profits were (high-end CPUs and Windows licenses). They pushed the idea that tablet = convertible laptop year after year despite very limited sales.
In hindsight, the success of netbooks should've been a huge tipoff that there was a market for a thinner, lighter tablet with a reduced feature set compared to a laptop making it simpler to use. If Apple hadn't done it, I think Archos would've quite accidentally stumbled onto that latent market (their device started off as a glorified external hard drive with a screen).
The iPad is its self almost exactly the maximum reasonable size for a tablet for most people. Even a tiny bit heavier than the heaviest iPad and many people can't hold it in one hand it for long.
Size and weight are not directly related. As technology improves you can maintain the same size at reduced weight. It may have been the right weight when it was released, but I maintain that a 9.7" screen is too small for a "full sized" tablet.
Another aspect which I don't think is being fully considered is inertia (not the watered-down high school version, the full 3x3 tensor). Hold a fork as you naturally would. Notice where it rests in your fingers. It will balance perfectly there. That's not an accident - it was deliberately designed that way. If your center of mass is at the point where the object is supported, the inertia tensor is symmetric. That means when you translate the object, it will not rotate. It feels "balanced". When you raise your fork with food attached, your finger naturally shifts forward to the new CM, keeping it balanced and the inertia tenser symmetric. (This is also why spoons and forks tend to flare out towards the end of the handle - the larger mass there increases the inertia, both making it slower to rotate and decreasing the distance you need to shift to rebalance it with food attached.)
To see how important this is, grab something like a curtain rod and hold it from the end. Now try pointing at a moving object with it. It'll be difficult because every time you move it (translate it), its inertia will cause a rotation making it point at something else. And every time you try to rotate it, it will want to translate. Your arm/hand effectively has to simultaneously make two corrections (translation and orientation) instead of just one (translation or orientation).
The same is true for tablets which are balanced at or near the center. That's not where you hand typically holds it, so any lateral movement also causes a rotation. Frequently adding weight to an unbalanced object to move its CM closer to the support point makes it easier to handhold even though it's heavier. Most of the fatigue from handholding an item isn't in supporting the weight (which your arm can easily do unless you're a total wimp). It's from your wrist having to constantly adjust it so it's oriented properly. When properly balanced, there is less need for orientation adjustments, and so your hand experiences less fatigue.
It's already big enough that it has to have a special split keyboard for some people to be able to type on comfortably. Also the iPad is close to the limit which fits comfortably into your personal space in economy class (no; a laptop is not "comfortable") and feels spacious elsewhere.
I find it (and 10.1" Android tablets) cramped. If you remove the margins, the informational area of a magazine page or letter/A4-sized sheet of paper is about 12" diagonal. Either Jobs was brilliant and 75+ years of magazine and paper publishers were wrong, or Jobs was wrong and those industries are correct. I tend to think the latter is more likely.
I agree the physical size of the iPad is very close to the mark (though I prefer 16:10 or 3:2). Roughly the same size as a magazine or sheet of paper. But the screen is too small and the bezel too big. That was a concession to the technology available currently and when it was first released, so I expect as technology improves we'll gradually transition to a 12" screen for full-size tablets.
Perhaps someone can come up with some seismic sensing technology that can detect underground voids. Similar to what the oil and gas people use, but optimized for shallower depths.
This sort of sensing usually involves setting off explosives, collecting data with seismographs placed around the area of interest, then correlating the data via tomography.
Unfortunately, because of the explosives part, I'm pretty sure anyone trying to provide this service would eventually be sued out of existence for "causing" the sinkholes.
1. They consider consumer goods bought in the country by traveling foreigners exports (t-shirts, cake, cell phones, etc) I don't think that should count its cheating since those goods were not manufactured here and we are just middle men. Walmart is not an exporter of TV's, they are a retailer.
2. The other factor they add in which accounts for 500 billion of that is software, movie, and TV royalties. These are not physically manufactured goods or property as much as your civil ideology likes to believe they will never be property. The wealth from this industry is even worse distributed then the wealth from the auto and oil industries. It only accounts for probably the top 1000 wealthiest families and is probably immediately exported to tax havens.
So I am going to call $2 trillion exports bullshit, its great that we can use Hollywood accounting there also.
These are the correct accounting definitions of exports - the money used to pay for these items came from outside the country. Semantic arguments like you are making matter little to the accountants. What matters is that the money on both sides of the transaction balance out. And in both these cases, the money used to pay for these goods is deducted from the "other country" column and is added to the "U.S." column. So they are exports.
If you try to classify them as domestic purchases as you are suggesting, the amount of money earned by workers domestically ends up not equaling the amount of money spent domestically (after factoring in money put into/taken out of savings accounts and the like). And the accountants throw a hissy fit.
It only accounts for probably the top 1000 wealthiest families and is probably immediately exported to tax havens.
This is an interesting one. I'll have to ask my account friend about it. But I suspect until that money is used to buy something (whether in the U.S. or abroad), it's still considered U.S. money. Just because they put it into an offshore account doesn't mean they won't eventually use it to buy something domestically.
Personally I think this is going to be like loud motorcycles, spam, and nuclear weapons. You and I may not want it, but if someone else wants it there's little stopping them from getting it. These things are getting miniaturized to the point where even if you passed laws banning it, people who really wanted it could have it without you ever knowing.
Fight to prevent it from coming into being if you like. But as with a nuclear North Korea and Iran, you'd better have a contingency plan for what to do when (not if) it becomes commonplace.
When Clinton was president the budget deficit was a big deal too. Then what did Clinton do? He fucking balanced the budget. We could have started paying down the debt then and there. Gore ran on a platform of doing just that. Bush ran on a platform of trillion-dollar tax cuts, increased spending, and wars in the middle east
...
Don't blame Democrats, this is 100% a Republican-created crisis. Republicans are as fiscally-irresponsible as they come.
Actually, Clinton didn't start balancing the budget until the Republican-led Congress which swept into office in 1994 forced him to. Unfortunately the usual spin (which you've fallen for) is to give Clinton the credit for balancing the budget, while giving Republicans the blame for cutting science and technology research funding. Both are responsible for both.
And the balanced budget during 1999-2000 was more an illusion than a reality. Spending dropped, but not below the long-term historical average for tax revenue. It's just that tax revenue was unusually high during those years because of the tech bubble.
When the bubble popped, tax revenue plummeted with it, putting Bush into perpetual deficits. The average spending (as percent of GDP) during Bush's 8 years was actually about the same as for Clinton's 8 years. The bigger deficits during his years were entirely due to lower tax revenue. (This is not to say Bush is blameless - his tax cuts made it worse, dropping revenue even further. When the stimulus effect of the tax cuts did kick in, the tax rates were so low that revenue peaked at only slightly above the long-term average despite the economy being in a boom due to the housing bubble.)
Just fyi, the scientist whose budgets are being cut agree with you. We cannot adequately fund science, education, and social services while gratuitously financing gratuitous military spending and asinine wars on drugs, brown people, etc.
We should first cut it all by 10% per year for a few years, make all those federal contractors show declining profits despite their lobbyists efforts. We should then evaluate which government financed industries tightened their belts but still did the work and which just pocketed the same amount while cutting real work. Any industries in the second category should continue getting cut.
Unfortunately, as long as this attitude prevails, our budget problems will continue to get worse. This mindset was correct in the 1950s and 1960s, when defense spending was over 10% of GDP and peaked at nearly 15%. It is not true today, with defense spending closer to 4.5% despite two wars. Defense is actually the one budget item which has seen the biggest decrease (as percent of GDP and percent of the budget) over the last three decades.
The bulk of the increases in federal spending have been due to entitlements. Primarily Medicare, but to a lesser extent Medicaid and Social Security. As long as people insist on blaming the red herring of defense spending and ignoring the real white elephant in the room, the budget problems will continue to get worse. This is not to say that defense spending can't be cut some more - I'm sure there's lots of cuts we can make, and even programs the military doesn't want but some Senator forced it on them so a contractor in his state could make money.
But the fact remains that even if you reduced defense spending to zero, we'd still be running a deficit because of growth in the entitlement programs. To balance the budget, you have to rein in the growth of entitlements.
Nice revisionist history there. The temporary payroll tax reduction act was allowed to expire by the dysfunctional house of representatives. They used it as a bargaining chip in their attempt to renew the temporary tax relief package that directly benefits the top 1% of income earners.
The temporary payroll tax reduction was intended as a stimulus, nothing more. The items paid for by payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) are the fastest-growing items in the budget, and are in fact the root cause of our budget woes.
Those programs are considered mandatory spending (i.e. shielded from sequestration cuts) because they are ostensibly paid for by payroll taxes. If you don't increase payroll taxes to keep pace with growth in the cost of those programs, you undercut the argument for classifying them as mandatory programs. Ergo either you have to raise payroll taxes, or you have to open up SS, Medicare/Medicaid to automatic budget cuts. You can't argue for reduced payroll taxes while simultaneously arguing that SS and M/M can't be cut. Temporarily reducing payroll taxes was a truly emergency stimulus measure to try to get more money into the hands of consumers. It was not something which was intended to be renewed over and over in perpetuity.
I would hope that if this were WW2 then a lot of the rather eyebrow-raising stuff he leaked wouldn't have existed in the first place.
I'm pretty sure it did exist during WW2. It's just been deleted from the historical record by judicious consideration over what to commit to paper, or when certain papers happened to be destroyed in a mysterious fire. With today's technology, people just shoot off their immediate thoughts in a quick email which gets archived multiple times and survives in perpetuity. Even of the mundane stuff like friendly fire incidents, you rarely read about that happening in WW2 despite battlefield communication being much, much worse back then.
It happens outside of classified papers too. It's the reason people think everyone was polite and genteel and didn't swear during the 1700-1800s - because most writing which survives from back then was careful to edit out the vulgarities which really peppered society.
The ideal size for a phone is for one end to reach your ear and the other end to reach your mouth. If you look at corded and cordless phones throughout history, you'll find they (or their handset) are all this size. It's only recently, in the last 20 years, that phones began to get smaller in an attempt to make them more portable. In fact flip phones were invented to maintain the ear-to-mouth length while collapsing into a smaller size for carrying. For a while it was a contest to see who could come out with the smallest phone, so they kept shrinking (often compromising voice quality during calls because the microphone was further from the mouth, causing the phone to pick up more ambient noise).
Then phones merged with PDAs and suddenly you wanted a bigger screen. So phones started to get bigger again. For people who just want a phone, a smaller size will do. For people who want to do more computer stuff on their phone, the screen is more important so they'll prefer the bigger screen. The whole premise that small is good and big is bad on a phone is a recent phenomenon, and outdated because it's based on when all you did with a mobile phone was make calls. Today it's a tradeoff between portability (smaller is better) and comfortable screen size (bigger is better).
The summary asks when is a phone too big? But an equally valid question is when is a smartphone too small?
There are artists, and there are artisans...artists create art, artisans create craft...the yardstick used [in the art world] to differentiate the two is the ability to reproduce the work given the same skills, equipment and environment.
Take for example, two metal workers...both with the same training, equipment, environment and requirements...likely it will be difficult to spot too much of a great difference in the resulting product. Same goes for photography...same camera, settings, direction, time of day, physical location etc...you end up with the same shot (as this article eludes to)....very difficult to tell the difference between two works of craft produced in the same way.
There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything to get the machine to work but to no avail.
In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. Finally, at the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and said, "This is where your problem is." The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.
The engineer responded briefly: One chalk mark $1; Knowing where to put it $49,999.
It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.
Lines drawn on paper, or light exposed to film or a sensor are simply physical manifestations, just like the chalk mark. And just like the chalk mark, the value, the art comes in knowing where to put it. Where does the person put the lines on the paper? Or for the photographer, what settings does he use on the camera, where does he point it, what time of day does he take the shot, etc.
If you're going to claim photography isn't an art, you might as well claim pianists are not musicians. With other instruments, the musician is in direct contact with the sound-generating medium (either the strings or membranes being vibrated, or the air being blown) and can shape it in nearly an infinite variety of ways. But in a piano, the contact with the strings is entirely mechanical, and the keyboard action is deliberately designed to give each note only two degrees of freedom: How quickly is the hammer moving when it hits the strings? And how long is the note held down? The hammer actually detaches from the action just before it hits the string. So now matter how expressively the pianist caresses the keys, none of that gets converted into sound. The only things that matter are velocity and duration.
Consequently, pianos only have three degrees of freedom - which key(s) you press (frequency), how fast you press it (amplitude), and how long you hold it down (duration). Much, much simpler than a camera. So simple that player pianos have been around since the 1800s. Yet even with that simplicity there is such a broad range of possible expressions that nobody would take you seriously if you tried to claim pianists weren't musicians. Likewise, cameras may be simpler, more discrete to operate than a brush and canvas, but the range of possible expressions is so broad and varied that the final result is indisputably art.
Artisans or craftsmen build things for their utility, their functionality, their usefulness. Artists create things that are pleasing to look at or listen to (and I would argue smell and taste - I know a few chefs and have watched them work, and I consider them artists). Any artist who tries to tell you otherwise is just an art snob trying to marginalize another artist's work.
Is it legal to make a campaign donation to a candidate who does not (potentially) represent you? And even if it is legal, is it ethical? People got upset at the mere thought that China was making campaign donations to influence U.S. elections. But ideologically how different is that from, say, New Yorkers making campaign donations for a gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey? Being neighboring states, I'm sure there are lots of things they disagree on. It subverts the representative democratic process if people are able to influence the election of people who won't be representing them.
I mean I'm all for more candidates with some common sense. But if anyone in the country can directly contribute to anyone else's representative's campaign, I fear we have much deeper problems than a 6 strikes law for ISPs.
U.S. declares us part of The Axis of Evil, then proceeds to invade one of the other members of that Axis. The U.S. then becomes bogged down in that other country (thanks in part to our heroic support of the insurgency). This leaves us (and the third member of the Axis) with a brief window to develop nukes, before the U.S. can regroup and prepare invasions for us too.
So your supposition is that if Bush hadn't made the "axis of evil" speech, Iran wouldn't be pursuing nuclear weapons? That seems rather farfetched considering the history of regional conflicts in the area without or pre-dating the U.S.
Sometimes the "blame the U.S. for everything" reasoning strikes true. Sometimes it completely blinds people to what's really going on: Iran wants nukes because pretty much everyone agrees Israel probably has nukes. It has nothing to do with the U.S., other than perhaps making it more expedient in the minds of the Iranian leadership.
You're cynical about congress. But, people really don't vote for these issues in any kind of numbers. Not when there are much more important single wedge issues to get irate about. Also, people don't want to be informed about this until it starts retarding babies or dramatically increasing cancer rates. And then, they seem to only think it happens to them when it happens to them.
I much more blame the electorate than congress for this lack of attention.
I, the voter, have a full-time job and don't have the time to learn about all these issues in detail. The whole point of electing representatives is that it becomes their job. They can devote the time that I cannot, to learn about these issue in detail so they can make an informed decision on it. Whether it be a vote on a bill, or even just deciding what's important and what's not.
If I were well-informed enough to vote on this type of issue, we wouldn't need to elect representatives. We could just hold a direct electronic democratic vote by the entire electorate on each individual issue.
So it's either a failure by our representatives, or a failure of our system of government. It is not a failure of the electorate.
(3) Elements of notification.--
(A) To be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider that includes substantially the following: ...
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
In other words, the perjury isn't for filing a copyright claim against a video you don't hold the copyright to. It's for filing a claim when you don't hold the copyright you claim is being infringed.
Say I make a spoof video of the Oscar ceremony using completely self-shot footage and put it on Youtube, and it gets yanked due to a DMCA copyright claim saying I lifted video from ABC's broadcast of the ceremony. It's only perjury if the person filing the claim isn't authorized to file on behalf of ABC (the copyright holder for the Oscars broadcast). The fact that it's my own video is irrelevant. The claim is that I violated ABC's copyright, and as long as the person filing the DMCA claim is authorized to do it on behalf of ABC, they are safe from the perjury provision.
The relevant section of the DMCA in this type of situation is:
(f) Misrepresentations.-- Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section --
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
But good luck proving that they knew my video was original and not theirs when they filed the DMCA claim. All they have to say is, "Oh we're sorry, we didn't realize it was your original video, we thought it was a copy of ours" and they have no liability. The burden of proof rests with you.
The DMCA was written at the behest of copyright holders and treats their responsibility very lightly. Given how long it's been since it's been passed, I'm starting to think the only way it'll ever be reformed to be more balanced is if people who own copyrights to similar media start filing DMCA takedown notices against media published online by the big studios and record companies.
Class 10 is a measure of sequential write speed. Nothing more. Cards which are tuned for high sequential write speed (i.e. class 10 cards) suffer from low random 512k and 4k read/write speeds. And cards which are tuned for better random 512k and 4k read/write speeds suffer from lower sequential write speeds. It's a trade-off made when designing the card.
Here are the CrystalDiskMark scores I got for a 32 GB class 4 card I have:
So if you're recording video or a burst of photos from a camera, yes you want class 10 (or one of the "pro" cards which write even faster). But if you're going to be using the card to read/write lots of small files, like on a phone or tablet, you don't want class 10. For those devices, the sweet spot is around class 6, or maybe a good class 4.
try hauling a few gig of files on or off your ebook reader on anything less than a class 10
I've actually done something similar on both the above cards. I have an ~4 GB sheet music library (put it together when it wasn't clear if IMSLP would survive the copyright challenges). Most of the files are 100k to 1 MB PDFs, with a smaller number of 1-10 MB PDFs (small in number, but not in total MB). Average size is just under 1 MB. Copying the whole thing to the class 4 card took about 30 minutes. Copying it to the class 10 card took about 4 hours.
IMHO the F-35 will go down in history as an object lesson in specificity vs general purpose. They looked at all these different types of aircraft with different roles and different parts, and the huge expense that came with warehousing all those spare parts and training maintenance people who could fix one plane but not another. They thought they could cut costs by building one plane which could fill all those roles while using the same parts. In other words they went from a bunch of planes each build to a specific role, to one plane built to fill all those roles as a cost-cutting measure on the maintenance. But they're now discovering that when you try to assign so many different roles to the same airframe, it increases cost on the design side. And I predict it'll increase it more than they save on the maintenance side.
"a vast majority of people get considerably more out of Social Security and Medicare then they put in."
Citations needed.
Both SS and Medicare began paying out immediately when the programs began, to people who never paid a dime in. It wasn't until about 1982 that new retirees had paid Social Security all their lives (SS began in 1937, figure 45 working years til retirement). Before then, all retirees had only paid into SS for none or part of their working careers. Same thing with Medicare. It wasn't until about 2010 that new beneficiares had paid into Medicare all their lives. So everyone who began collecting from those programs prior to those dates got considerably more out them than they put in.
For 50 years, far more has been collected than was needed to pay current obligations.
The catch is that "current obligations" is simply what's paid out today, not money needed to pay those who paid into it. The money you pay into Social Security isn't put into some savings account where it grows with interest waiting for you to retire. It's paid out almost immediately to current retirees (solvency varies from 1 year to about 15 years depending on program changes). That's why the baby boomers retiring is such a shock to the system - it drastically altered the ratio of SS payers to payees. If it had been structured like a real pension, the baby boomers would just be getting back money they paid in and there would be no shock to the system from the payer/payee ratio changing. But that's not how it works.
Medicare works the same way - current workers paying current retirees. This is why it's very dangerous to think of these programs as getting back money you paid in, or as "solvent and paid for" just because they've been running in the black on the accounting books thus far . They're not run like a regular retirement or pension fund. To compare their health like you would a pension fund, you have to project out about 30-40 years ahead to take into account the current batch of payers turning into payees. And the CBO has been warning for over a decade that these (primarily Medicare) are the biggest threats to the budget when you project out that far.
While I'm sure there's lots of waste in Defense spending which could be cut, it is not growing. It's more or less been holding steady. Even with the uptick from the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense spending is still below 1980s levels. The bottom line is that you cannot balance a budget by cutting things which aren't growing, and ignoring the things which are growing. Eventually you're going to run out of things to cut, while the things you're ignoring will continue to grow (which btw is projected to happen around 2070, when SS + Medicare/Medicaid spending are projected to exceed all tax receipts). You have to look at the costs that are growing and do something to get their growth under control. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to implement those cost controls.
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The problem is that humans suck at rationally appraising things with a small risk of a very big catastrophe. Car accidents are the leading cause of accidental death, both in raw numbers and in rate (i.e. death per distance traveled). Yet a plane crashes and the model gets grounded, the news goes into a frenzy, people wring their hands, a new batch of aerophobes is created, and the government conducts a 6-12 month investigation to try to make air travel even safer than it already is. (Yes death per time exposed is about the same for flying vs driving, but you'll be exposed to the car for a lot longer if you choose to drive to grandma's instead of fly.)
Heck, even the opposite is true. People suck at appraising a small chance at a very big benefit. That's why lotteries and casinos do so well. In both cases, fear of or desire for the rare outcome figures too prominently in the decision, while the minuscule probability of that outcome actually happening is not given enough weight.
Quick, name the crew members of Apollo 8 - the first manned spacecraft not just to fly by the moon, but to leave Earth orbit and the safety of the Van Allen belt.
Drawing a blank? That's ok, you've got two more chances. Name the crew of Apollo 9. Still nothing? How about Apollo 10.
Still too hard? How about something easier? Name the crew member from Apollo 11 who stayed aboard the command module in lunar orbit while the other two went down to the surface.
Ok, now name the two crew members of Apollo 11 who landed on the moon.
The presitge, kudos, and the mention in the history books come with the first landing, not the first flyby.
There's certainly engineering knowledge to be gained, but nearly all of it can be done with unmanned spacecraft and extended stays in the ISS. Unlike the Apollo missions, we now know the dangers and problems associated with travel into deep space -- Apollo taught us. So there's little need to send people on a Mars flyby mission just to collect biometric data. Heck, if you really wanted to run that experiment under "authentic" conditions, you'd be better off putting a crew in orbit around the moon for 5 years. At least that way if something went catastrophically wrong or some unforeseen long-term effects began showing up, they'd be just a few days from the safety of Earth instead of years.
And in the Apollo missions, about 90% of the time was spent in transit, 10% on the surface. The relatively small transit time is what made the dry runs of Apollo 8-10 a smart choice. A Mars flyby of this type would probably replicate 99.5% of a Mars landing mission (figure 800 days each way, a week on the surface). If you're going to go 99.5% of the way, might as well go the extra 0.5% and land on Mars.
Damn I'm getting old. I thought Flexplay and DIVX should be fresh in everyone's minds. But upon looking them up on wiki so I could link to them, I see they were 10 and 15 years ago respectively. So I guess this post will be informative for our younger readers. Anyway, those two forms of DRM worked almost exactly as the chair did - limiting you to 48 hours of use (rather than n number of uses). After the time was up, the disc became a coaster.
1) How did all the oil get there? Oh right, it was fixed from the atmosphere by a plant or alga, then it didn't rot and ended up sequestered underground with its energy intact.
2) In our industrialized society, we no longer use manual labor to produce food. We use machines run by oil as a productivity multiplier. Instead of using x Joules of energy of human/animal labor to cultivate crops and grow a bushel of corn, we use machines. They consume n*x Joules of energy per bushel, but the cost to acquire that energy (via oil) is cheaper in $$$ than the time-value of having humans do it or raising animals to do it. i.e. We do it because it's easier for us, not because it's more energy-efficient (most energy-efficient would be gathering maize which grows naturally, but that's horrible at time-efficiency). Consequently unless you're stranded on a desert island and self-sufficient, every gram of CO2 you emit also has a cost in carbon which was extracted from the ground as oil. And so you cannot attribute all the energy you get from food to renewable sources.
If you (gasp!) read TFA, they used controls with no eyes, and with regular eyes. Those with the implanted eye (the two regular eyes were removed) did significantly better at avoiding the shock than the no-eye control. Though they didn't say how much better, which makes me suspect the difference was very small (albeit statistically significant).
The more interesting thing to me was that tadpoles without eyes could still sense when an LED was turned on.
Glitched memory usually isn't a problem. Other spacecraft have had similar memory problems. Usually it's temporary. If it's permanent, the computers are programmed to map around the glitched memory or (back in the tape drive days) not use that segment of tape..
The real danger is that such a glitch will first manifest itself by altering control or orientation instructions, breaking the spacecraft's contact with Earth. Most spacecraft are designed with a "safe mode" when this happens. If there's been no communication with Earth for x days, the main computer switches to a rudimentary instruction set or a second computer takes over, and tries to re-establish communications.
If you look at tablets prior to the iPad, most of them were basically full fledged laptops whose screens could swivel into tablet mode. Microsoft and Intel pushed this form factor because that's where their profits were (high-end CPUs and Windows licenses). They pushed the idea that tablet = convertible laptop year after year despite very limited sales.
In hindsight, the success of netbooks should've been a huge tipoff that there was a market for a thinner, lighter tablet with a reduced feature set compared to a laptop making it simpler to use. If Apple hadn't done it, I think Archos would've quite accidentally stumbled onto that latent market (their device started off as a glorified external hard drive with a screen).
Size and weight are not directly related. As technology improves you can maintain the same size at reduced weight. It may have been the right weight when it was released, but I maintain that a 9.7" screen is too small for a "full sized" tablet.
Another aspect which I don't think is being fully considered is inertia (not the watered-down high school version, the full 3x3 tensor). Hold a fork as you naturally would. Notice where it rests in your fingers. It will balance perfectly there. That's not an accident - it was deliberately designed that way. If your center of mass is at the point where the object is supported, the inertia tensor is symmetric. That means when you translate the object, it will not rotate. It feels "balanced". When you raise your fork with food attached, your finger naturally shifts forward to the new CM, keeping it balanced and the inertia tenser symmetric. (This is also why spoons and forks tend to flare out towards the end of the handle - the larger mass there increases the inertia, both making it slower to rotate and decreasing the distance you need to shift to rebalance it with food attached.)
To see how important this is, grab something like a curtain rod and hold it from the end. Now try pointing at a moving object with it. It'll be difficult because every time you move it (translate it), its inertia will cause a rotation making it point at something else. And every time you try to rotate it, it will want to translate. Your arm/hand effectively has to simultaneously make two corrections (translation and orientation) instead of just one (translation or orientation).
The same is true for tablets which are balanced at or near the center. That's not where you hand typically holds it, so any lateral movement also causes a rotation. Frequently adding weight to an unbalanced object to move its CM closer to the support point makes it easier to handhold even though it's heavier. Most of the fatigue from handholding an item isn't in supporting the weight (which your arm can easily do unless you're a total wimp). It's from your wrist having to constantly adjust it so it's oriented properly. When properly balanced, there is less need for orientation adjustments, and so your hand experiences less fatigue.
I find it (and 10.1" Android tablets) cramped. If you remove the margins, the informational area of a magazine page or letter/A4-sized sheet of paper is about 12" diagonal. Either Jobs was brilliant and 75+ years of magazine and paper publishers were wrong, or Jobs was wrong and those industries are correct. I tend to think the latter is more likely.
I agree the physical size of the iPad is very close to the mark (though I prefer 16:10 or 3:2). Roughly the same size as a magazine or sheet of paper. But the screen is too small and the bezel too big. That was a concession to the technology available currently and when it was first released, so I expect as technology improves we'll gradually transition to a 12" screen for full-size tablets.
This sort of sensing usually involves setting off explosives, collecting data with seismographs placed around the area of interest, then correlating the data via tomography.
Unfortunately, because of the explosives part, I'm pretty sure anyone trying to provide this service would eventually be sued out of existence for "causing" the sinkholes.
These are the correct accounting definitions of exports - the money used to pay for these items came from outside the country. Semantic arguments like you are making matter little to the accountants. What matters is that the money on both sides of the transaction balance out. And in both these cases, the money used to pay for these goods is deducted from the "other country" column and is added to the "U.S." column. So they are exports.
If you try to classify them as domestic purchases as you are suggesting, the amount of money earned by workers domestically ends up not equaling the amount of money spent domestically (after factoring in money put into/taken out of savings accounts and the like). And the accountants throw a hissy fit.
This is an interesting one. I'll have to ask my account friend about it. But I suspect until that money is used to buy something (whether in the U.S. or abroad), it's still considered U.S. money. Just because they put it into an offshore account doesn't mean they won't eventually use it to buy something domestically.
Personally I think this is going to be like loud motorcycles, spam, and nuclear weapons. You and I may not want it, but if someone else wants it there's little stopping them from getting it. These things are getting miniaturized to the point where even if you passed laws banning it, people who really wanted it could have it without you ever knowing.
Fight to prevent it from coming into being if you like. But as with a nuclear North Korea and Iran, you'd better have a contingency plan for what to do when (not if) it becomes commonplace.
Actually, Clinton didn't start balancing the budget until the Republican-led Congress which swept into office in 1994 forced him to. Unfortunately the usual spin (which you've fallen for) is to give Clinton the credit for balancing the budget, while giving Republicans the blame for cutting science and technology research funding. Both are responsible for both.
And the balanced budget during 1999-2000 was more an illusion than a reality. Spending dropped, but not below the long-term historical average for tax revenue. It's just that tax revenue was unusually high during those years because of the tech bubble.
When the bubble popped, tax revenue plummeted with it, putting Bush into perpetual deficits. The average spending (as percent of GDP) during Bush's 8 years was actually about the same as for Clinton's 8 years. The bigger deficits during his years were entirely due to lower tax revenue. (This is not to say Bush is blameless - his tax cuts made it worse, dropping revenue even further. When the stimulus effect of the tax cuts did kick in, the tax rates were so low that revenue peaked at only slightly above the long-term average despite the economy being in a boom due to the housing bubble.)
Unfortunately, as long as this attitude prevails, our budget problems will continue to get worse. This mindset was correct in the 1950s and 1960s, when defense spending was over 10% of GDP and peaked at nearly 15%. It is not true today, with defense spending closer to 4.5% despite two wars. Defense is actually the one budget item which has seen the biggest decrease (as percent of GDP and percent of the budget) over the last three decades.
The bulk of the increases in federal spending have been due to entitlements. Primarily Medicare, but to a lesser extent Medicaid and Social Security. As long as people insist on blaming the red herring of defense spending and ignoring the real white elephant in the room, the budget problems will continue to get worse. This is not to say that defense spending can't be cut some more - I'm sure there's lots of cuts we can make, and even programs the military doesn't want but some Senator forced it on them so a contractor in his state could make money.
But the fact remains that even if you reduced defense spending to zero, we'd still be running a deficit because of growth in the entitlement programs. To balance the budget, you have to rein in the growth of entitlements.
The temporary payroll tax reduction was intended as a stimulus, nothing more. The items paid for by payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) are the fastest-growing items in the budget, and are in fact the root cause of our budget woes.
Those programs are considered mandatory spending (i.e. shielded from sequestration cuts) because they are ostensibly paid for by payroll taxes. If you don't increase payroll taxes to keep pace with growth in the cost of those programs, you undercut the argument for classifying them as mandatory programs. Ergo either you have to raise payroll taxes, or you have to open up SS, Medicare/Medicaid to automatic budget cuts. You can't argue for reduced payroll taxes while simultaneously arguing that SS and M/M can't be cut. Temporarily reducing payroll taxes was a truly emergency stimulus measure to try to get more money into the hands of consumers. It was not something which was intended to be renewed over and over in perpetuity.
I'm pretty sure it did exist during WW2. It's just been deleted from the historical record by judicious consideration over what to commit to paper, or when certain papers happened to be destroyed in a mysterious fire. With today's technology, people just shoot off their immediate thoughts in a quick email which gets archived multiple times and survives in perpetuity. Even of the mundane stuff like friendly fire incidents, you rarely read about that happening in WW2 despite battlefield communication being much, much worse back then.
It happens outside of classified papers too. It's the reason people think everyone was polite and genteel and didn't swear during the 1700-1800s - because most writing which survives from back then was careful to edit out the vulgarities which really peppered society.
The ideal size for a phone is for one end to reach your ear and the other end to reach your mouth. If you look at corded and cordless phones throughout history, you'll find they (or their handset) are all this size. It's only recently, in the last 20 years, that phones began to get smaller in an attempt to make them more portable. In fact flip phones were invented to maintain the ear-to-mouth length while collapsing into a smaller size for carrying. For a while it was a contest to see who could come out with the smallest phone, so they kept shrinking (often compromising voice quality during calls because the microphone was further from the mouth, causing the phone to pick up more ambient noise).
Then phones merged with PDAs and suddenly you wanted a bigger screen. So phones started to get bigger again. For people who just want a phone, a smaller size will do. For people who want to do more computer stuff on their phone, the screen is more important so they'll prefer the bigger screen. The whole premise that small is good and big is bad on a phone is a recent phenomenon, and outdated because it's based on when all you did with a mobile phone was make calls. Today it's a tradeoff between portability (smaller is better) and comfortable screen size (bigger is better).
The summary asks when is a phone too big? But an equally valid question is when is a smartphone too small?
There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything to get the machine to work but to no avail.
In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. Finally, at the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and said, "This is where your problem is." The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.
The engineer responded briefly: One chalk mark $1; Knowing where to put it $49,999.
It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.
Lines drawn on paper, or light exposed to film or a sensor are simply physical manifestations, just like the chalk mark. And just like the chalk mark, the value, the art comes in knowing where to put it. Where does the person put the lines on the paper? Or for the photographer, what settings does he use on the camera, where does he point it, what time of day does he take the shot, etc.
If you're going to claim photography isn't an art, you might as well claim pianists are not musicians. With other instruments, the musician is in direct contact with the sound-generating medium (either the strings or membranes being vibrated, or the air being blown) and can shape it in nearly an infinite variety of ways. But in a piano, the contact with the strings is entirely mechanical, and the keyboard action is deliberately designed to give each note only two degrees of freedom: How quickly is the hammer moving when it hits the strings? And how long is the note held down? The hammer actually detaches from the action just before it hits the string. So now matter how expressively the pianist caresses the keys, none of that gets converted into sound. The only things that matter are velocity and duration.
Consequently, pianos only have three degrees of freedom - which key(s) you press (frequency), how fast you press it (amplitude), and how long you hold it down (duration). Much, much simpler than a camera. So simple that player pianos have been around since the 1800s. Yet even with that simplicity there is such a broad range of possible expressions that nobody would take you seriously if you tried to claim pianists weren't musicians. Likewise, cameras may be simpler, more discrete to operate than a brush and canvas, but the range of possible expressions is so broad and varied that the final result is indisputably art.
Artisans or craftsmen build things for their utility, their functionality, their usefulness. Artists create things that are pleasing to look at or listen to (and I would argue smell and taste - I know a few chefs and have watched them work, and I consider them artists). Any artist who tries to tell you otherwise is just an art snob trying to marginalize another artist's work.
Is it legal to make a campaign donation to a candidate who does not (potentially) represent you? And even if it is legal, is it ethical? People got upset at the mere thought that China was making campaign donations to influence U.S. elections. But ideologically how different is that from, say, New Yorkers making campaign donations for a gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey? Being neighboring states, I'm sure there are lots of things they disagree on. It subverts the representative democratic process if people are able to influence the election of people who won't be representing them.
I mean I'm all for more candidates with some common sense. But if anyone in the country can directly contribute to anyone else's representative's campaign, I fear we have much deeper problems than a 6 strikes law for ISPs.
So your supposition is that if Bush hadn't made the "axis of evil" speech, Iran wouldn't be pursuing nuclear weapons? That seems rather farfetched considering the history of regional conflicts in the area without or pre-dating the U.S.
Sometimes the "blame the U.S. for everything" reasoning strikes true. Sometimes it completely blinds people to what's really going on: Iran wants nukes because pretty much everyone agrees Israel probably has nukes. It has nothing to do with the U.S., other than perhaps making it more expedient in the minds of the Iranian leadership.
I, the voter, have a full-time job and don't have the time to learn about all these issues in detail. The whole point of electing representatives is that it becomes their job. They can devote the time that I cannot, to learn about these issue in detail so they can make an informed decision on it. Whether it be a vote on a bill, or even just deciding what's important and what's not.
If I were well-informed enough to vote on this type of issue, we wouldn't need to elect representatives. We could just hold a direct electronic democratic vote by the entire electorate on each individual issue.
So it's either a failure by our representatives, or a failure of our system of government. It is not a failure of the electorate.
In other words, the perjury isn't for filing a copyright claim against a video you don't hold the copyright to. It's for filing a claim when you don't hold the copyright you claim is being infringed.
Say I make a spoof video of the Oscar ceremony using completely self-shot footage and put it on Youtube, and it gets yanked due to a DMCA copyright claim saying I lifted video from ABC's broadcast of the ceremony. It's only perjury if the person filing the claim isn't authorized to file on behalf of ABC (the copyright holder for the Oscars broadcast). The fact that it's my own video is irrelevant. The claim is that I violated ABC's copyright, and as long as the person filing the DMCA claim is authorized to do it on behalf of ABC, they are safe from the perjury provision.
The relevant section of the DMCA in this type of situation is:
But good luck proving that they knew my video was original and not theirs when they filed the DMCA claim. All they have to say is, "Oh we're sorry, we didn't realize it was your original video, we thought it was a copy of ours" and they have no liability. The burden of proof rests with you.
The DMCA was written at the behest of copyright holders and treats their responsibility very lightly. Given how long it's been since it's been passed, I'm starting to think the only way it'll ever be reformed to be more balanced is if people who own copyrights to similar media start filing DMCA takedown notices against media published online by the big studios and record companies.
Here are the CrystalDiskMark scores I got for a 32 GB class 4 card I have:
seq: 22.9 MB/s read, 4.3 MB/s write
512k: 22.0 MB/s read, 1.3 MB/s write
4k: 3.3 MB/s read, 1.3 MB/s write
And here are the benchmarks for a 16 GB class 10 card I have:
seq: 21.8 MB/s read, 12.0 MB/s write
512k: 21.5 MB/s read, 0.9 MB/s write
4k: 5.7 MB/s read, 0.008 MB/s write (not a typo)
So if you're recording video or a burst of photos from a camera, yes you want class 10 (or one of the "pro" cards which write even faster). But if you're going to be using the card to read/write lots of small files, like on a phone or tablet, you don't want class 10. For those devices, the sweet spot is around class 6, or maybe a good class 4.
I've actually done something similar on both the above cards. I have an ~4 GB sheet music library (put it together when it wasn't clear if IMSLP would survive the copyright challenges). Most of the files are 100k to 1 MB PDFs, with a smaller number of 1-10 MB PDFs (small in number, but not in total MB). Average size is just under 1 MB. Copying the whole thing to the class 4 card took about 30 minutes. Copying it to the class 10 card took about 4 hours.
IMHO the F-35 will go down in history as an object lesson in specificity vs general purpose. They looked at all these different types of aircraft with different roles and different parts, and the huge expense that came with warehousing all those spare parts and training maintenance people who could fix one plane but not another. They thought they could cut costs by building one plane which could fill all those roles while using the same parts. In other words they went from a bunch of planes each build to a specific role, to one plane built to fill all those roles as a cost-cutting measure on the maintenance. But they're now discovering that when you try to assign so many different roles to the same airframe, it increases cost on the design side. And I predict it'll increase it more than they save on the maintenance side.
Both SS and Medicare began paying out immediately when the programs began, to people who never paid a dime in. It wasn't until about 1982 that new retirees had paid Social Security all their lives (SS began in 1937, figure 45 working years til retirement). Before then, all retirees had only paid into SS for none or part of their working careers. Same thing with Medicare. It wasn't until about 2010 that new beneficiares had paid into Medicare all their lives. So everyone who began collecting from those programs prior to those dates got considerably more out them than they put in.
The catch is that "current obligations" is simply what's paid out today, not money needed to pay those who paid into it. The money you pay into Social Security isn't put into some savings account where it grows with interest waiting for you to retire. It's paid out almost immediately to current retirees (solvency varies from 1 year to about 15 years depending on program changes). That's why the baby boomers retiring is such a shock to the system - it drastically altered the ratio of SS payers to payees. If it had been structured like a real pension, the baby boomers would just be getting back money they paid in and there would be no shock to the system from the payer/payee ratio changing. But that's not how it works.
Medicare works the same way - current workers paying current retirees. This is why it's very dangerous to think of these programs as getting back money you paid in, or as "solvent and paid for" just because they've been running in the black on the accounting books thus far . They're not run like a regular retirement or pension fund. To compare their health like you would a pension fund, you have to project out about 30-40 years ahead to take into account the current batch of payers turning into payees. And the CBO has been warning for over a decade that these (primarily Medicare) are the biggest threats to the budget when you project out that far.
While I'm sure there's lots of waste in Defense spending which could be cut, it is not growing. It's more or less been holding steady. Even with the uptick from the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense spending is still below 1980s levels. The bottom line is that you cannot balance a budget by cutting things which aren't growing, and ignoring the things which are growing. Eventually you're going to run out of things to cut, while the things you're ignoring will continue to grow (which btw is projected to happen around 2070, when SS + Medicare/Medicaid spending are projected to exceed all tax receipts). You have to look at the costs that are growing and do something to get their growth under control. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to implement those cost controls.