Logically, any sales tax levied should be the state you purchased the item from, not where you live. If I drive to a neighboring state and buy something, I pay that state's sales tax, not my home state's sales tax. By extension if I buy something online, the state where the "store" is located should be the one collecting sales tax. [...] Ordering online can be likened to having an designated agent go to another state to purchase something for you and bring it back to you.
You are mixing up what the Constitution says with what you think makes sense. The Constitution prohibits taxes on interstate commerce - that is, transactions which cross state boundaries. If you drive to a neighboring state and buy something, the purchase is not crossing a state boundary and thus does not run afoul of the Commerce clause. The state you're buying it in is free to assume you are a state resident (even if you aren't) and collect a tax.
When you buy something online, you the buyer are in one state, while the seller is in another state. The Commerce clause specifically says that States can't tax this type of transaction. Period. What the seller's state does to sellers within the state is its business. What your state does with buyers who live in the state is its business (e.g. use taxes). But neither state can specifically tax the transaction of Amazon selling to you across state lines. By the Commerce clause, it is totally not like a designated agent going to another state to purchase something for you and bringing it back to you.
The States just need to grow a pair and start up a referendum for a Constitutional amendment fixing this with some sort of national sales tax. The Commerce clause made sense back when trade was conducted by merchants carrying goods across state lines on horse-drawn wagons. The fledgling nation wanted free trade across state boundaries, and prohibiting taxes, duties, and levies when crossing state lines was a good way to do that. But in this day and age where you can conduct the entire transaction while sitting on the toilet in your home and the shipment of the product is a mere afterthought, it needs to be revamped.
The only reason I can think of why the States don't try for an amendment is that it would set up a huge debate between states with low (or no) sales tax and those with high sales taxes. Which is also related to the debate between collecting State government revenue through sales taxes vs. other taxes (income, property). The solution is a lot more complicated than simply setting up a national sales tax. And FWIW, stores in foreign countries enjoy the same advantage. If I buy something from a Canadian store, my state cannot charge sales tax on it. The Federal government may charge a levy or duty to import my purchase from Canada into the U.S., but my state gets nothing. So if this isn't handled properly (i.e. states with high sales taxes completely get their way), it will just end up driving buyers away from U.S. retailers like Amazon, towards foreign retailers which ship internationally.
Because oil is currently MASSIVELY subsidised. The tax breaks and benefits the oil industry get are huge
This meme really, really needs to die. It is mathematical ignorance at best, bald-faced lies intentionally phrased to mislead at worst.
By your reasoning, the lower 99% of taxpayers are MASSIVELY subsidized. The tax breaks and benefits they get are huge compared to what the top 1% receive. But that's only true because they outnumber the 1% by 99 to 1. The tax break per person is much smaller, but there are so many more of them that the aggregate tax break is bigger. The $5800 standard deduction they get, when multiplied by 99 people, works out to $574,200 per 1% person. The mean gross income for the 1%, from playing with the IRS tax statistics, is around $1 million (they make about 6% of all income), so it's highly unlikely that they're getting over a half million in tax breaks on average. Therefore, if we describe it as you're choosing to, the lower 99% receive bigger tax breaks than the top 1%.
Likewise, oil provides about 37% of the energy used in the U.S. Wind and solar about 2%. So while the total subsidy for oil is substantially larger, the subsidy per amount of energy is smaller. To put it in perspective, when you buy a gallon of gas, the price is about 2% lower due to subsidies. In contrast, when you buy a kWh of solar or wind, the price is about 20% lower due to subsidies. And that's ignoring fuel taxes which actually increase the price of oil far more than subsidies lower it.
Yeah but nuclear has the POTENTIAL to kill millions. It's why there are so many damned redundant safeguards on the plants. They simply can not fail. And yet, they do....
Yeah but planes have the POTENTIAL to kill hundreds. It's why there are so many damned redundant safeguards on planes. They simply can not fail. And yet, they do...
You can't make safety decisions based simply on worst-case potentials. You have to look at worst-case and average (along with a host of other factors like cost, feasibility, ease of maintenance, etc). With nuclear we have the third-worst worst-case (hydro and coal are more dangerous), and best average safety record (historically fewest deaths per MWh generated, about 3x safer than wind).
They actually considered evacuating Tokyo as one possible fallout of the Fukushima disaster. Tokyo. Where the hell do you evacuate 10 million people to?
They "considered" it in that government officials with no educational background to interpret the radiation amounts being measured or potential weather patterns asked some people who did know. They were informed that it wasn't anything worth worrying about, and so Tokyo wasn't evacuated.
If a nuclear plant had been built just upwind of Tokyo, then that's a problem with stupid bureaucratic decisions, not nuclear power. Same reason you wouldn't build a hydroelectric dam just upriver from a major city.
No other power source has that potential killing capacity.
The worst power generation-related accident in history was the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. 170,000 - 230,000 killed, 6 million buildings destroyed, 11 million people evacuated and/or made refugees. By fatalities, nearly two orders of magnitude worse than Chernobyl (estimated 3,000 will die prematurely from cancer - this despite the Soviets not evacuating the nearest city for over a day).
But hey, it's just water. That wet stuff you need to drink every day to live. So it must be safe. Meanwhile nuclear gives off these mysterious rays, so it must be more dangerous. Right?
What do we do with the waste? It's mostly ( >90% ) more dangerous than ore. The biggest problem with Fuckishima (sic) is the ponds of waste. Scaremongering aside, when solar is cheaper for a country than nuclear, why go with nuclear? (as is the case in my country)
Off the top of your head, how much coal do you think needs to be burned to power your house for 30 years? How much high-level nuclear waste do you think is generated from powering it with nuclear?
Photovoltaic solar is nearly an order of magnitude more expensive than nuclear. If you live somewhere where it's cheaper, then you're probably failing to subtract out government subsidies from the equation. Hydro is cheaper, but already tapped out in most developed countries. Wind is getting close, at about 1.5-2x more expensive. If you live in an area with strong, consistent, and abundant winds (like one of the respondents in Portugal), it's probably already cheaper than nuclear/coal. Solar thermal can be the cheapest yet, but due to directly converting the solar energy into heat its applications are limited.
Back to my first questions. It takes about a train car full of coal to power your house for 30 years. That's how much mass is turned into pollution - either ash or particulates which get into the atmosphere (including trace amounts of atomic mercury, uranium, and thorium - the trace uranium in coal actually contains more energy than the coal itself). In contrast, nuclear can provide the same amount of electricity while generating about a tablespoon of high level waste. Yes when you scale up to the electrical needs of an entire country, the amount of nuclear waste starts to look scary. But only if you fail to scale the alternatives - the waste is a minuscule amount compared to pollution from fossil fuels. The U.S. generates about 20% of its electricity from nuclear. In the process, it generates about 2000 tons of raw high-level waste each year. 2000 tons would (if consolidated) fit into two tractor trailers. When I did the same calc for coal, it came out to something ridiculous like 15,000 oil tankers. And that's ignoring that a significant fraction of the mass is converted into high-volume gases (primarily CO2, with the O2 taken from the air) and released into the atmosphere. That's why the U.S. been able to run nuclear plants for ~60 years without a waste storage site. There's so little waste generated that the nuclear plants have just been storing decades worth of it on-site in pools of water.
As for what to do with the nuclear waste, it's only called waste because of politics. Our current fission reactors only extract a few percent of the fissile energy contained in the uranium. That's why the waste is radioactive for so long - it still contains almost all of the energy of the radionuclide decay chain. You can extract most of the remaining energy by using the "waste" as fuel in a breeder reactor, which in turn converts it into a form which can be used as fuel in regular reactors. This in turn results in waste which only needs to be stored for a bit over a hundred years. This is why a repository like Yucca Mountain was a good idea. Until fusion reactors become viable and widescale, future generations would probably view Yucca Mountain as a fuel source, not a long-term waste storage site. Unfortunately, one of the fissile products of breeder reactors is weapons-grade plutonium. So politically, reprocessing (as it's called) is unappealing.
It ran fine in 4MB if you were running all-native OS/2 apps. Unfortunately, because of lack of developer support, most people also ran a bunch of DOS and Windows apps. These essentially ran inside of what we now call virtual machines, which ate up a lot of RAM. OS/2 Warp came with a complete copy of Windows 3.1 for doing that (IBM's termination contract with Microsoft said IBM had access to and could incorporate Win 3.1 code, though I don't think including the whole shebang in a competing product was what Microsoft intended).
The enterprise version (which came with a database, networking, and other stuff) was ~$500. The consumer version was priced the same as Windows.
I'm pretty skeptical of conspiracy theories so didn't really believe at first that the press was being bought by Microsoft to favor Windows. But what convinced me was an issue of Infoweek I think. One article was headlined that IBM was delaying OS/2 2.0's release by a few months. Buried in the article text it mentioned that several new features were going to be added. Next page an article was headlined the Microsoft was adding new features to Windows 95. Buried in the text was that Windows 95 was going to be delayed by a few months.
Don't do that. The banks and credit card companies have gamed it so that they don't pay for fraud - the merchants do. They've made it the merchant's responsibility to make sure the card is not being used fraudulently, while simultaneously pushing through a law which prohibits declining a card because the user refuses to show ID (because that would, y'know, discourage credit card use*). If you contest a charge and the merchant cannot prove that you actually made the charge (usually a copy of your signature on the charge slip), the processor will reverse the payment. The merchant is out the money and the merchandise. The card processor suffers the minor inconvenience of having to pay someone to field your phone call and having to run a second transaction to reverse the initial purchase. That is why some places will ask for your zip code or home phone number, or won't deliver to anywhere but your home address when you buy with a card. Those are the only tools merchants have to prevent fraud.
* They also pushed through a law prohibiting merchants from charging extra for credit card transactions to cover the additional risk of fraud. Some merchants get around it by offering a cash discount.
In this particular case, CSIRO actually did invent a bunch of non-obvious stuff crucial to WiFi. So while their royalties will make the devices slightly more expensive, you're erring by comparing to a hypothetical world in which they didn't have a patent on this stuff. The proper comparison is to a world in which WiFi didn't exist or was delayed by years because nobody was willing to do research they did.
No, unlike software engineers, real engineers are legally accountable (at least in the west)
In a way, that's part of the problem. Too much emphasis on punishing failure, not enough on rewarding success. That philosophy works well when the failure mode is commonplace. If you design a plane and it can't fly, you can't sell it. The failure forces you to redesign it until it can fly.
But in the case of rare failures (plane crashes, nuclear accidents, bridge collapses, etc), it's not an adequate motivator for making good decisions. 99% of people who dangerously cut corners are never chastised for it because it never results in a failure. The unlucky 1% are the only ones who get the negative feedback. OTOH, most of those who did the right thing and cut corners were never recognized for their foresight and due diligence. In fact, a good many of them were probably disciplined for wasting money compared to the guy who did cut corners. Rather than receiving positive feedback for doing the right thing, they receive negative feedback.
It's the same reason we're dumping billions of dollars into security theater at airports. A dozen people hijack some planes and fly them into buildings killing thousands. Consequently, the organizations in charge of safeguarding air travel vow never to let that happen again and waste oodles of money on ultimately ineffective countermeasures against a terrorist tactic which will probably never be attempted again. Meanwhile, the alert border guard who spotted someone behaving oddly and stopped the millennium bomber gets a few headlines and fades from memory within a week. We've had two major incidents where intrusive airport security checks clearly failed (shoe bomber and underwear bomber), and one major incident where behavioral profiling succeeded. Yet most of the money is being spent on even more intrusive security checks, rather than enhanced behavioral profiling training.
Contrary to popular belief, the mixup was not an SI vs English units problem. The problem was that the numbers were passed from Lockheed to NASA without units. Without the actual units jotted down after the numbers, the Lockheed people knew the units were lb-f. The NASA people assumed the units were Newtons.
It's an important distinction because the same error can happen even if you work entirely in SI units. If I write down a number in kilonewtons but fail to write down the units, and you assume it is just newtons, we end up with the same problem. I've seen this happen countless times in the lab and while tutoring, with kids plugging grams into an equation when they're supposed to be using kg. (Which BTW is one stupid thing about SI units - really confuses the kids that the base unit for everything else has no prefix, but the base unit for mass is a kilo-gram.) Fortunately, forcing them to write down the units after every number usually takes care of this problem.
In science and engineering, any time you see a number without units, your immediate reaction should be to ask the person who provided the numbers what the units are. (Actually you should be ripping him a new one for failing to write down the units, dimensionless numbers excepted.) Never assume the units, always ask.
this does not make sense to me.
You had all this time to profit and INNOVATE. Why not start your own VOIP service? instead, like some retarded dictator you want to block progress.
Their business model is based on vastly overcharging for POTS. The amounts they're charging per minute of phone call exceeds the actual cost of supply the line and bandwidth by several orders of magnitude. Customers willingly paid it because they had no choice, and they only made phone calls for a few minutes at a time.
OTOH, data lines are sold on the basis of being on and available 24/7. So their prices are much more in-line with the actual cost to provide the bandwidth.
Then VOIP comes in and suddenly the overcharging for POTS becomes obvious. And the company running the scam is has to choose between actually competing for the first time ever, or cutting off VOIP. Guess which one they choose?
To put it in perspective, gasoline contains about 34 MJ per liter (129 MJ per gallon). Even if you assume an internal combustion engine vehicle has an abysmal 15% efficiency (fuel to wheels), its usable energy density is 5.1 MJ/l (19.3 MJ/gal). If you spend 3 minutes at the pump filling up 50 liters (13.2 gal), you're transferring energy at a rate of 1.42 MegaWatts.
If you then assume the electric vehicle is 100% efficient (socket to wheels), to reach 1.42 MW with the 220 V circuit found in most homes, you'd need 6440 Amps. More than 40x the amperage which feeds into the typical home and enough to melt pretty much any wiring most people commonly deal with. This is the big problem with the idea of capacitors as batteries - unless you switch to extremely high voltages (meaning a steep step-down transformer needs to be on board the car with associated weight and efficiency losses), you're not gonna be able to use a cable in place of a gas pump hose to charge them up in a few minutes. The current will need to be transferred by something much more substantial.
Or if you like the idea of kinetic batteries (flywheels), 1.42 MW is about the same energy dissipation rate as two 2000 kg vehicles traveling 96 kph (60 mph) colliding and coming to a complete stop within 1 second. If you imagine 180 of such crashes happening in the span of 3 minutes, that's how much usable energy you're pumping into your gas tank every time you fill up.
Liquid chemical fuels contain a helluva lot of energy; so much that it's going to be very difficult for other technologies to supplant them for transportation. I really think the energy storage medium for vehicles in the future will turn out to be alcohol-based biofuels generated like in TFA.
Money is a representation of productivity. The economy keeps chugging along because when people spend money, the productivity they get out of what they bought with the money is greater than the productivity they spend to acquire the money. e.g. You earn $25/hr. You spend $100 buying a tool which will save you more than 4 hours of work in the long-run. So you're spending $100, but what you're spending it on is increasing your productivity by more than $100. That arbitrage is what makes the economy grow.
So compared to spending money on completely useless things like gold toilet seats, there is some benefit to rich people throwing money into projects like this of dubious benefit. But it's hardly ideal as it results in significantly less economic growth (if not causing economic contraction) compared to if the money were spent on something more productive instead. (And in fact, burning money is likely more beneficial. The loss of cash by the rich person incrementally raises the value of all other cash in existence. A significant portion of which is held by poorer and middle income people who will spend it on necessities which help drive the economy, rather than frivolous toys for the rich person.)
In addition to that article, I'd add that there's a strong inverse correlation between economic development and population growth. The vast majority of population growth is in developing countries. Industrialized nations have close to zero and in some cases negative population growth. Food, clean water, and medicinal aid to developing countries may be well-intentioned, but it's just exacerbating the problem. Families which would've stopped after x babies continue to have more offspring because of the availability of food and water. Africans who would've died of starvation or disease survive, adding to a population which isn't sustainable with the infrastructure that's present there.
We're tackling the problem backwards. Instead of treating the symptoms, we need to be treating the problem. First and foremost, we need to be helping African nations build an economic base. Help the countries there establish stable governments conducive to economic growth, develop educational structures to provide a skilled workforce, and provide economic assistance to help them start up their own businesses and trade. Once you get the economic ball rolling, they will build their own fresh water wells and distribution system; they will build their own farms and irrigation canals; they will build their own hospitals and train their own doctors. Doing it the way we're doing - providing food, water, and medicine for free - is just increasing their population while killing what economies they have. We're stunting their economic growth while simultaneously moving the goalpost of economic self-sustainability further away.
Immaterial. If the summary is right and the passcode is limited to 4 digits (I don't own an iPhone), then any practical delay is useless. If you add a 1 minute delay between attempts (which is long enough to make any Apple user scream obscenities about user unfriendliness), you can try all 9999 possible combinations in 6.9 days. That's a trivial delay for law enforcement.
The real problem is that 4 digits is just too short for a device which grants access to so much private data. Heck, even Android's pattern code (9 dots, 4-9 dots used, each dot can be used only once) has only 409,104 possible combinations (9! + 8! + 7! + 6! + 5! + 4!). With a 5 second delay between failed attempts, it'll take just 24 days to try all possible combinations.
To be of real security value, brute-forcing the code has to take on the order of centuries. The current passcodes and patterns are just to keep the device safe from prying eyes. Not to keep it safe from identity thieves and law enforcement.
If you look at global population statistics, there's an inverse correlation between industrialization and population growth. The vast majority of population growth is happening in undeveloped countries, while economically developed countries have close to zero and in some cases negative population growth (they are shrinking in population).
So what you're describing is a symptom, not the problem in itself. Economic development seems to take care of the population growth problem all by itself, without any need for forced sterilization or one child per couple rules.
I'm going to go out on a limb here (pun not intended) and predict that if you do hours of mind-numbingly boring math, it will turn out that if there is no tracking, the arrangement of leaves on trees are optimal for capturing sunlight from varying angles over the course of Spring/Summer/Fall.
RAID sucks as a backup because if you accidentally delete a file off your RAID storage, it gets deleted from all the drives in the RAID. Your file is not safe as it would be on a backup.
RAID is for redundancy. So you don't have any downtime if a HDD fails. Without RAID, a HDD failure would mean downtime until you can get a new drive and restore from a backup. With RAID, your array and your business keeps chugging along as if there were no failure, and you can replace your failed HDD at your leisure.
Rebuilding a RAID array with a failed drive has been simple and automatic in my experience. Pop out the dead drive, plug in the new one, and it'll start rebuilding automatically. Your data is still accessible during the rebuild, although access times and transfer speeds may be degraded. Depending on the amount of data, a rebuild can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. A second failure while rebuilding means all your data is gone. So you want to keep backups of everything on your RAID array.
If you just want to glom a bunch of old drives together to use as a backup drive, you want a multi-bay JBOD/RAID enclosure like this or this. Be forewarned that if you plug these in over eSATA, you need an eSATA port with port multiplication. No laptop eSATA port I've found does, so you'll need to rely on USB or built-in hardware RAID/JBOD to use these with a laptop.
If you want something which will sit on your network acting as a file server, you want a NAS like this or this or this. You can read NAS comparisons at Small Net Builder. But keep in mind what I said above - even if you get a NAS, you will still need to make backups of it.
A friend and I were discussing the ramifications of superconducting racetracks for low-friction transportation. One of the problems he brought up was how to deal with intersections. Quantum levitation locks your maglev car into a certain orientation relative to a magnetic field. But at an intersection the magnetic field changes. Either you stop levitating, or your car comes to a screeching halt as if it had hit a brick wall.
Something which can shield from static magnetic fields would allow two magnetic tracks to cross (at slightly different heights) without interference. So you could build an intersection.
There's actually a slippery slope argument in here. With all the words in the English language, there are a finite number of combinations you can arrange them to create a book. Using Pi as the root of your music, there are a (smaller) finite number of ways you can transpose those digits into a melody, harmony, and rhythm. If I roll 3 six-sided dice, there are a (smaller yet) finite number of possible outcomes for the sum of those dice (16 to be exact).
At what point does something become copyrightable? How many possible combinations of things must there be before the work can be declared creative enough to be worthy of copyright? In terms of music, what if you wrote a program which generated every possible sequence of 8-note sequences within an octave irrespective of key or rhythm (about 36 million, first note is always the same), and published it and got a copyright on it. Could you then sue any musician who published a melody which had an identical 8-note sequence? Since you'd gotten a copyright on every 8-note sequence, that'd effectively make it illegal for anyone to write a melody comprised of 8 notes within an octave.
Because most places know that a flat tax is horribly regressive.
Unfortunately, the terms "progressive" and "regressive" when applied to taxes have been hijacked from their mathematical roots for political purposes. A flat tax is by definition not regressive, it's flat. A regressive tax is one whose effective tax rate decreases with increasing income. A progressive tax is one whose tax rate increases with increasing income.
A flat tax does neither. It is flat. It is the same effective tax rate regardless of income.
Where people get the idea that it is regressive is by pointing out that a certain fixed minimum amount of money needs to be spent on essentials (food, clothing, shelter). Poor people have to spend a greater percentage of their income on these essentials. Which means they have a smaller percentage of their income available for discretionary (optional) purchases. A flat tax takes the same percentage bite out of income, which turns into a larger proportional bite out of the discretionary income of poor people. e.g. Say $10k is the minimum needed for essentials, and the flat tax is 10%. A poor person making $15k has $5k discretionary income but pays $2k in taxes. That's 40% of his discretionary income. A rich person making $100k has $90k discretionary income but pays $10k in taxes. That's 11% of his discretionary income.
However, this has nothing to do with a flat tax. It is easily corrected by excluding from taxation the minimum amount which needs to be spent on essentials. Something like the standard deduction which the U.S. uses. Once you do that, the flat tax is then a tax only on discretionary spending, and is the same rate regardless of income. It is not regressive. e.g. After a $10k standard deduction, the poor person pays 10% tax on $5k. The rich person pays 10% tax on $90k. Both are paying 10% on their discretionary income. It is flat.
(I actually prefer a progressive tax, but hate it when people call a flat tax regressive. It's not if you implement the simple work-around of a standard deduction.)
We have a Green Party here in the US, too. Their Presidential candidate was on enough ballots last election to win, had the media given them coverage instead of convincing you that we only have two parties, or that a vote for a Green or Libertarian (also on enough ballots to win, as was the Constitution Party) is "wasted".
It's not a media problem. It's a problem with our plurality voting system. Each voter gets a single vote, and the candidate with the most votes wins. That's been mathematically proven to favor a two-party system. If the candidate you vote for isn't one of the top two finishers, you have wasted your vote.
The fix is to change our voting system. While a perfect voting system is impossible to create, certain voting systems are still better than others. Plurality is one of the worst. Instant run-off, while not the best, is one of the simplest to implement, and much better than plurality.
But the two parties will fight this tooth and nail because they like how the current voting system gives them more power.
I'd say the above equally match or exceed the 1-2.5% most merchant banks will charge for CC processing services. NFC pricing is generally the same amount. The fees charged by merchant banks for CC facilities are actually completely reasonable
No, if the cost of real-world non-CC transactions is 1-2.5%, that does not make CC processing transactions reasonable at 1-2.5%. The only time that happens is when you have a monopoly or industry collusion.
Say the floor cost of non-CC transactions is 2%. Say the floor cost of CC transactions is 0.25% (actually it's more like a flat 5 cents rather than a percentage because the CC processors have shifted the entire cost of fraud onto the merchants, but for the purposes of this explanation pretend it's a percentage). When CC transactions are first introduced, they undercut the cost of non-CC transactions so are preferred. That means initially they charge, say, 1.9%. Your mistake is thinking that that's where this process ends - with the transaction charge a smidgeon under the cost of non-CC transactions.
In a healthy market, you have competition. The competition tries to undercut the price to steal customers while still maintaining a reasonable profit. The first CC processor charges 1.9%. The next charges 1.8%. Another one charges 1.7%. The first one drops theirs to 1.6%. etc. until somewhere around 0.3%-0.5% all the CC processors are afraid to drop it anymore because the profit at such a low margin just isn't worth it. That's what's supposed to happen. The price is supposed to stabilize at at just above the cost to provide the service or product, not just below the cost of the next best alternative.
Unfortunately you have collusion in the industry creating a monopoly-like situation which sustains the transaction fees at around 1-2.5%. For sending a few dozen bytes of data saying to debit one account and credit another in their respective databases. It is ridiculously overpriced.
I mount my smartphone on my car's dash via a strip of velcro to use it as a GPS. This places it above (but not in front of) the radio. I've noticed if the radio, CD, or cassette player is on, occasionally I'll get interference from the phone over the speakers (chirping and patterned dit-dits). So yes cell phones do generate interference which can interfere with other electronics.
I'm of the opinion that the FAA rules regarding electronics below 10,000 feet are probably too strict, and many devices probably can be used safely. But it's not "common sense" nor "obvious" that electric devices couldn't bring down a plane. Especially with most modern airliners today using a fly by wire system.
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You are mixing up what the Constitution says with what you think makes sense. The Constitution prohibits taxes on interstate commerce - that is, transactions which cross state boundaries. If you drive to a neighboring state and buy something, the purchase is not crossing a state boundary and thus does not run afoul of the Commerce clause. The state you're buying it in is free to assume you are a state resident (even if you aren't) and collect a tax.
When you buy something online, you the buyer are in one state, while the seller is in another state. The Commerce clause specifically says that States can't tax this type of transaction. Period. What the seller's state does to sellers within the state is its business. What your state does with buyers who live in the state is its business (e.g. use taxes). But neither state can specifically tax the transaction of Amazon selling to you across state lines. By the Commerce clause, it is totally not like a designated agent going to another state to purchase something for you and bringing it back to you.
The States just need to grow a pair and start up a referendum for a Constitutional amendment fixing this with some sort of national sales tax. The Commerce clause made sense back when trade was conducted by merchants carrying goods across state lines on horse-drawn wagons. The fledgling nation wanted free trade across state boundaries, and prohibiting taxes, duties, and levies when crossing state lines was a good way to do that. But in this day and age where you can conduct the entire transaction while sitting on the toilet in your home and the shipment of the product is a mere afterthought, it needs to be revamped.
The only reason I can think of why the States don't try for an amendment is that it would set up a huge debate between states with low (or no) sales tax and those with high sales taxes. Which is also related to the debate between collecting State government revenue through sales taxes vs. other taxes (income, property). The solution is a lot more complicated than simply setting up a national sales tax. And FWIW, stores in foreign countries enjoy the same advantage. If I buy something from a Canadian store, my state cannot charge sales tax on it. The Federal government may charge a levy or duty to import my purchase from Canada into the U.S., but my state gets nothing. So if this isn't handled properly (i.e. states with high sales taxes completely get their way), it will just end up driving buyers away from U.S. retailers like Amazon, towards foreign retailers which ship internationally.
This meme really, really needs to die. It is mathematical ignorance at best, bald-faced lies intentionally phrased to mislead at worst.
By your reasoning, the lower 99% of taxpayers are MASSIVELY subsidized. The tax breaks and benefits they get are huge compared to what the top 1% receive. But that's only true because they outnumber the 1% by 99 to 1. The tax break per person is much smaller, but there are so many more of them that the aggregate tax break is bigger. The $5800 standard deduction they get, when multiplied by 99 people, works out to $574,200 per 1% person. The mean gross income for the 1%, from playing with the IRS tax statistics, is around $1 million (they make about 6% of all income), so it's highly unlikely that they're getting over a half million in tax breaks on average. Therefore, if we describe it as you're choosing to, the lower 99% receive bigger tax breaks than the top 1%.
Likewise, oil provides about 37% of the energy used in the U.S. Wind and solar about 2%. So while the total subsidy for oil is substantially larger, the subsidy per amount of energy is smaller. To put it in perspective, when you buy a gallon of gas, the price is about 2% lower due to subsidies. In contrast, when you buy a kWh of solar or wind, the price is about 20% lower due to subsidies. And that's ignoring fuel taxes which actually increase the price of oil far more than subsidies lower it.
Yeah but planes have the POTENTIAL to kill hundreds. It's why there are so many damned redundant safeguards on planes. They simply can not fail. And yet, they do...
You can't make safety decisions based simply on worst-case potentials. You have to look at worst-case and average (along with a host of other factors like cost, feasibility, ease of maintenance, etc). With nuclear we have the third-worst worst-case (hydro and coal are more dangerous), and best average safety record (historically fewest deaths per MWh generated, about 3x safer than wind).
They "considered" it in that government officials with no educational background to interpret the radiation amounts being measured or potential weather patterns asked some people who did know. They were informed that it wasn't anything worth worrying about, and so Tokyo wasn't evacuated.
If a nuclear plant had been built just upwind of Tokyo, then that's a problem with stupid bureaucratic decisions, not nuclear power. Same reason you wouldn't build a hydroelectric dam just upriver from a major city.
The worst power generation-related accident in history was the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. 170,000 - 230,000 killed, 6 million buildings destroyed, 11 million people evacuated and/or made refugees. By fatalities, nearly two orders of magnitude worse than Chernobyl (estimated 3,000 will die prematurely from cancer - this despite the Soviets not evacuating the nearest city for over a day).
But hey, it's just water. That wet stuff you need to drink every day to live. So it must be safe. Meanwhile nuclear gives off these mysterious rays, so it must be more dangerous. Right?
Off the top of your head, how much coal do you think needs to be burned to power your house for 30 years? How much high-level nuclear waste do you think is generated from powering it with nuclear?
Photovoltaic solar is nearly an order of magnitude more expensive than nuclear. If you live somewhere where it's cheaper, then you're probably failing to subtract out government subsidies from the equation. Hydro is cheaper, but already tapped out in most developed countries. Wind is getting close, at about 1.5-2x more expensive. If you live in an area with strong, consistent, and abundant winds (like one of the respondents in Portugal), it's probably already cheaper than nuclear/coal. Solar thermal can be the cheapest yet, but due to directly converting the solar energy into heat its applications are limited.
Back to my first questions. It takes about a train car full of coal to power your house for 30 years. That's how much mass is turned into pollution - either ash or particulates which get into the atmosphere (including trace amounts of atomic mercury, uranium, and thorium - the trace uranium in coal actually contains more energy than the coal itself). In contrast, nuclear can provide the same amount of electricity while generating about a tablespoon of high level waste. Yes when you scale up to the electrical needs of an entire country, the amount of nuclear waste starts to look scary. But only if you fail to scale the alternatives - the waste is a minuscule amount compared to pollution from fossil fuels. The U.S. generates about 20% of its electricity from nuclear. In the process, it generates about 2000 tons of raw high-level waste each year. 2000 tons would (if consolidated) fit into two tractor trailers. When I did the same calc for coal, it came out to something ridiculous like 15,000 oil tankers. And that's ignoring that a significant fraction of the mass is converted into high-volume gases (primarily CO2, with the O2 taken from the air) and released into the atmosphere. That's why the U.S. been able to run nuclear plants for ~60 years without a waste storage site. There's so little waste generated that the nuclear plants have just been storing decades worth of it on-site in pools of water.
As for what to do with the nuclear waste, it's only called waste because of politics. Our current fission reactors only extract a few percent of the fissile energy contained in the uranium. That's why the waste is radioactive for so long - it still contains almost all of the energy of the radionuclide decay chain. You can extract most of the remaining energy by using the "waste" as fuel in a breeder reactor, which in turn converts it into a form which can be used as fuel in regular reactors. This in turn results in waste which only needs to be stored for a bit over a hundred years. This is why a repository like Yucca Mountain was a good idea. Until fusion reactors become viable and widescale, future generations would probably view Yucca Mountain as a fuel source, not a long-term waste storage site. Unfortunately, one of the fissile products of breeder reactors is weapons-grade plutonium. So politically, reprocessing (as it's called) is unappealing.
It ran fine in 4MB if you were running all-native OS/2 apps. Unfortunately, because of lack of developer support, most people also ran a bunch of DOS and Windows apps. These essentially ran inside of what we now call virtual machines, which ate up a lot of RAM. OS/2 Warp came with a complete copy of Windows 3.1 for doing that (IBM's termination contract with Microsoft said IBM had access to and could incorporate Win 3.1 code, though I don't think including the whole shebang in a competing product was what Microsoft intended).
The enterprise version (which came with a database, networking, and other stuff) was ~$500. The consumer version was priced the same as Windows.
I'm pretty skeptical of conspiracy theories so didn't really believe at first that the press was being bought by Microsoft to favor Windows. But what convinced me was an issue of Infoweek I think. One article was headlined that IBM was delaying OS/2 2.0's release by a few months. Buried in the article text it mentioned that several new features were going to be added. Next page an article was headlined the Microsoft was adding new features to Windows 95. Buried in the text was that Windows 95 was going to be delayed by a few months.
Don't do that. The banks and credit card companies have gamed it so that they don't pay for fraud - the merchants do. They've made it the merchant's responsibility to make sure the card is not being used fraudulently, while simultaneously pushing through a law which prohibits declining a card because the user refuses to show ID (because that would, y'know, discourage credit card use*). If you contest a charge and the merchant cannot prove that you actually made the charge (usually a copy of your signature on the charge slip), the processor will reverse the payment. The merchant is out the money and the merchandise. The card processor suffers the minor inconvenience of having to pay someone to field your phone call and having to run a second transaction to reverse the initial purchase. That is why some places will ask for your zip code or home phone number, or won't deliver to anywhere but your home address when you buy with a card. Those are the only tools merchants have to prevent fraud.
* They also pushed through a law prohibiting merchants from charging extra for credit card transactions to cover the additional risk of fraud. Some merchants get around it by offering a cash discount.
In this particular case, CSIRO actually did invent a bunch of non-obvious stuff crucial to WiFi. So while their royalties will make the devices slightly more expensive, you're erring by comparing to a hypothetical world in which they didn't have a patent on this stuff. The proper comparison is to a world in which WiFi didn't exist or was delayed by years because nobody was willing to do research they did.
In a way, that's part of the problem. Too much emphasis on punishing failure, not enough on rewarding success. That philosophy works well when the failure mode is commonplace. If you design a plane and it can't fly, you can't sell it. The failure forces you to redesign it until it can fly.
But in the case of rare failures (plane crashes, nuclear accidents, bridge collapses, etc), it's not an adequate motivator for making good decisions. 99% of people who dangerously cut corners are never chastised for it because it never results in a failure. The unlucky 1% are the only ones who get the negative feedback. OTOH, most of those who did the right thing and cut corners were never recognized for their foresight and due diligence. In fact, a good many of them were probably disciplined for wasting money compared to the guy who did cut corners. Rather than receiving positive feedback for doing the right thing, they receive negative feedback.
It's the same reason we're dumping billions of dollars into security theater at airports. A dozen people hijack some planes and fly them into buildings killing thousands. Consequently, the organizations in charge of safeguarding air travel vow never to let that happen again and waste oodles of money on ultimately ineffective countermeasures against a terrorist tactic which will probably never be attempted again. Meanwhile, the alert border guard who spotted someone behaving oddly and stopped the millennium bomber gets a few headlines and fades from memory within a week. We've had two major incidents where intrusive airport security checks clearly failed (shoe bomber and underwear bomber), and one major incident where behavioral profiling succeeded. Yet most of the money is being spent on even more intrusive security checks, rather than enhanced behavioral profiling training.
Contrary to popular belief, the mixup was not an SI vs English units problem. The problem was that the numbers were passed from Lockheed to NASA without units. Without the actual units jotted down after the numbers, the Lockheed people knew the units were lb-f. The NASA people assumed the units were Newtons.
It's an important distinction because the same error can happen even if you work entirely in SI units. If I write down a number in kilonewtons but fail to write down the units, and you assume it is just newtons, we end up with the same problem. I've seen this happen countless times in the lab and while tutoring, with kids plugging grams into an equation when they're supposed to be using kg. (Which BTW is one stupid thing about SI units - really confuses the kids that the base unit for everything else has no prefix, but the base unit for mass is a kilo-gram.) Fortunately, forcing them to write down the units after every number usually takes care of this problem.
In science and engineering, any time you see a number without units, your immediate reaction should be to ask the person who provided the numbers what the units are. (Actually you should be ripping him a new one for failing to write down the units, dimensionless numbers excepted.) Never assume the units, always ask.
Their business model is based on vastly overcharging for POTS. The amounts they're charging per minute of phone call exceeds the actual cost of supply the line and bandwidth by several orders of magnitude. Customers willingly paid it because they had no choice, and they only made phone calls for a few minutes at a time.
OTOH, data lines are sold on the basis of being on and available 24/7. So their prices are much more in-line with the actual cost to provide the bandwidth.
Then VOIP comes in and suddenly the overcharging for POTS becomes obvious. And the company running the scam is has to choose between actually competing for the first time ever, or cutting off VOIP. Guess which one they choose?
To put it in perspective, gasoline contains about 34 MJ per liter (129 MJ per gallon). Even if you assume an internal combustion engine vehicle has an abysmal 15% efficiency (fuel to wheels), its usable energy density is 5.1 MJ/l (19.3 MJ/gal). If you spend 3 minutes at the pump filling up 50 liters (13.2 gal), you're transferring energy at a rate of 1.42 MegaWatts.
If you then assume the electric vehicle is 100% efficient (socket to wheels), to reach 1.42 MW with the 220 V circuit found in most homes, you'd need 6440 Amps. More than 40x the amperage which feeds into the typical home and enough to melt pretty much any wiring most people commonly deal with. This is the big problem with the idea of capacitors as batteries - unless you switch to extremely high voltages (meaning a steep step-down transformer needs to be on board the car with associated weight and efficiency losses), you're not gonna be able to use a cable in place of a gas pump hose to charge them up in a few minutes. The current will need to be transferred by something much more substantial.
Or if you like the idea of kinetic batteries (flywheels), 1.42 MW is about the same energy dissipation rate as two 2000 kg vehicles traveling 96 kph (60 mph) colliding and coming to a complete stop within 1 second. If you imagine 180 of such crashes happening in the span of 3 minutes, that's how much usable energy you're pumping into your gas tank every time you fill up.
Liquid chemical fuels contain a helluva lot of energy; so much that it's going to be very difficult for other technologies to supplant them for transportation. I really think the energy storage medium for vehicles in the future will turn out to be alcohol-based biofuels generated like in TFA.
Money is a representation of productivity. The economy keeps chugging along because when people spend money, the productivity they get out of what they bought with the money is greater than the productivity they spend to acquire the money. e.g. You earn $25/hr. You spend $100 buying a tool which will save you more than 4 hours of work in the long-run. So you're spending $100, but what you're spending it on is increasing your productivity by more than $100. That arbitrage is what makes the economy grow.
So compared to spending money on completely useless things like gold toilet seats, there is some benefit to rich people throwing money into projects like this of dubious benefit. But it's hardly ideal as it results in significantly less economic growth (if not causing economic contraction) compared to if the money were spent on something more productive instead. (And in fact, burning money is likely more beneficial. The loss of cash by the rich person incrementally raises the value of all other cash in existence. A significant portion of which is held by poorer and middle income people who will spend it on necessities which help drive the economy, rather than frivolous toys for the rich person.)
In addition to that article, I'd add that there's a strong inverse correlation between economic development and population growth. The vast majority of population growth is in developing countries. Industrialized nations have close to zero and in some cases negative population growth. Food, clean water, and medicinal aid to developing countries may be well-intentioned, but it's just exacerbating the problem. Families which would've stopped after x babies continue to have more offspring because of the availability of food and water. Africans who would've died of starvation or disease survive, adding to a population which isn't sustainable with the infrastructure that's present there.
We're tackling the problem backwards. Instead of treating the symptoms, we need to be treating the problem. First and foremost, we need to be helping African nations build an economic base. Help the countries there establish stable governments conducive to economic growth, develop educational structures to provide a skilled workforce, and provide economic assistance to help them start up their own businesses and trade. Once you get the economic ball rolling, they will build their own fresh water wells and distribution system; they will build their own farms and irrigation canals; they will build their own hospitals and train their own doctors. Doing it the way we're doing - providing food, water, and medicine for free - is just increasing their population while killing what economies they have. We're stunting their economic growth while simultaneously moving the goalpost of economic self-sustainability further away.
Just prohibit service providers from offering content. And prohibit content providers from offering service. Problem solved.
Immaterial. If the summary is right and the passcode is limited to 4 digits (I don't own an iPhone), then any practical delay is useless. If you add a 1 minute delay between attempts (which is long enough to make any Apple user scream obscenities about user unfriendliness), you can try all 9999 possible combinations in 6.9 days. That's a trivial delay for law enforcement.
The real problem is that 4 digits is just too short for a device which grants access to so much private data. Heck, even Android's pattern code (9 dots, 4-9 dots used, each dot can be used only once) has only 409,104 possible combinations (9! + 8! + 7! + 6! + 5! + 4!). With a 5 second delay between failed attempts, it'll take just 24 days to try all possible combinations.
To be of real security value, brute-forcing the code has to take on the order of centuries. The current passcodes and patterns are just to keep the device safe from prying eyes. Not to keep it safe from identity thieves and law enforcement.
If you look at global population statistics, there's an inverse correlation between industrialization and population growth. The vast majority of population growth is happening in undeveloped countries, while economically developed countries have close to zero and in some cases negative population growth (they are shrinking in population).
So what you're describing is a symptom, not the problem in itself. Economic development seems to take care of the population growth problem all by itself, without any need for forced sterilization or one child per couple rules.
I'm going to go out on a limb here (pun not intended) and predict that if you do hours of mind-numbingly boring math, it will turn out that if there is no tracking, the arrangement of leaves on trees are optimal for capturing sunlight from varying angles over the course of Spring/Summer/Fall.
RAID sucks as a backup because if you accidentally delete a file off your RAID storage, it gets deleted from all the drives in the RAID. Your file is not safe as it would be on a backup.
RAID is for redundancy. So you don't have any downtime if a HDD fails. Without RAID, a HDD failure would mean downtime until you can get a new drive and restore from a backup. With RAID, your array and your business keeps chugging along as if there were no failure, and you can replace your failed HDD at your leisure.
Rebuilding a RAID array with a failed drive has been simple and automatic in my experience. Pop out the dead drive, plug in the new one, and it'll start rebuilding automatically. Your data is still accessible during the rebuild, although access times and transfer speeds may be degraded. Depending on the amount of data, a rebuild can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. A second failure while rebuilding means all your data is gone. So you want to keep backups of everything on your RAID array.
If you just want to glom a bunch of old drives together to use as a backup drive, you want a multi-bay JBOD/RAID enclosure like this or this. Be forewarned that if you plug these in over eSATA, you need an eSATA port with port multiplication. No laptop eSATA port I've found does, so you'll need to rely on USB or built-in hardware RAID/JBOD to use these with a laptop.
If you want something which will sit on your network acting as a file server, you want a NAS like this or this or this. You can read NAS comparisons at Small Net Builder. But keep in mind what I said above - even if you get a NAS, you will still need to make backups of it.
A friend and I were discussing the ramifications of superconducting racetracks for low-friction transportation. One of the problems he brought up was how to deal with intersections. Quantum levitation locks your maglev car into a certain orientation relative to a magnetic field. But at an intersection the magnetic field changes. Either you stop levitating, or your car comes to a screeching halt as if it had hit a brick wall.
Something which can shield from static magnetic fields would allow two magnetic tracks to cross (at slightly different heights) without interference. So you could build an intersection.
There's actually a slippery slope argument in here. With all the words in the English language, there are a finite number of combinations you can arrange them to create a book. Using Pi as the root of your music, there are a (smaller) finite number of ways you can transpose those digits into a melody, harmony, and rhythm. If I roll 3 six-sided dice, there are a (smaller yet) finite number of possible outcomes for the sum of those dice (16 to be exact).
At what point does something become copyrightable? How many possible combinations of things must there be before the work can be declared creative enough to be worthy of copyright? In terms of music, what if you wrote a program which generated every possible sequence of 8-note sequences within an octave irrespective of key or rhythm (about 36 million, first note is always the same), and published it and got a copyright on it. Could you then sue any musician who published a melody which had an identical 8-note sequence? Since you'd gotten a copyright on every 8-note sequence, that'd effectively make it illegal for anyone to write a melody comprised of 8 notes within an octave.
Unfortunately, the terms "progressive" and "regressive" when applied to taxes have been hijacked from their mathematical roots for political purposes. A flat tax is by definition not regressive, it's flat. A regressive tax is one whose effective tax rate decreases with increasing income. A progressive tax is one whose tax rate increases with increasing income.
A flat tax does neither. It is flat. It is the same effective tax rate regardless of income.
Where people get the idea that it is regressive is by pointing out that a certain fixed minimum amount of money needs to be spent on essentials (food, clothing, shelter). Poor people have to spend a greater percentage of their income on these essentials. Which means they have a smaller percentage of their income available for discretionary (optional) purchases. A flat tax takes the same percentage bite out of income, which turns into a larger proportional bite out of the discretionary income of poor people. e.g. Say $10k is the minimum needed for essentials, and the flat tax is 10%. A poor person making $15k has $5k discretionary income but pays $2k in taxes. That's 40% of his discretionary income. A rich person making $100k has $90k discretionary income but pays $10k in taxes. That's 11% of his discretionary income.
However, this has nothing to do with a flat tax. It is easily corrected by excluding from taxation the minimum amount which needs to be spent on essentials. Something like the standard deduction which the U.S. uses. Once you do that, the flat tax is then a tax only on discretionary spending, and is the same rate regardless of income. It is not regressive. e.g. After a $10k standard deduction, the poor person pays 10% tax on $5k. The rich person pays 10% tax on $90k. Both are paying 10% on their discretionary income. It is flat.
(I actually prefer a progressive tax, but hate it when people call a flat tax regressive. It's not if you implement the simple work-around of a standard deduction.)
It's not a media problem. It's a problem with our plurality voting system. Each voter gets a single vote, and the candidate with the most votes wins. That's been mathematically proven to favor a two-party system. If the candidate you vote for isn't one of the top two finishers, you have wasted your vote.
The fix is to change our voting system. While a perfect voting system is impossible to create, certain voting systems are still better than others. Plurality is one of the worst. Instant run-off, while not the best, is one of the simplest to implement, and much better than plurality.
But the two parties will fight this tooth and nail because they like how the current voting system gives them more power.
No, if the cost of real-world non-CC transactions is 1-2.5%, that does not make CC processing transactions reasonable at 1-2.5%. The only time that happens is when you have a monopoly or industry collusion.
Say the floor cost of non-CC transactions is 2%. Say the floor cost of CC transactions is 0.25% (actually it's more like a flat 5 cents rather than a percentage because the CC processors have shifted the entire cost of fraud onto the merchants, but for the purposes of this explanation pretend it's a percentage). When CC transactions are first introduced, they undercut the cost of non-CC transactions so are preferred. That means initially they charge, say, 1.9%. Your mistake is thinking that that's where this process ends - with the transaction charge a smidgeon under the cost of non-CC transactions.
In a healthy market, you have competition. The competition tries to undercut the price to steal customers while still maintaining a reasonable profit. The first CC processor charges 1.9%. The next charges 1.8%. Another one charges 1.7%. The first one drops theirs to 1.6%. etc. until somewhere around 0.3%-0.5% all the CC processors are afraid to drop it anymore because the profit at such a low margin just isn't worth it. That's what's supposed to happen. The price is supposed to stabilize at at just above the cost to provide the service or product, not just below the cost of the next best alternative.
Unfortunately you have collusion in the industry creating a monopoly-like situation which sustains the transaction fees at around 1-2.5%. For sending a few dozen bytes of data saying to debit one account and credit another in their respective databases. It is ridiculously overpriced.
I mount my smartphone on my car's dash via a strip of velcro to use it as a GPS. This places it above (but not in front of) the radio. I've noticed if the radio, CD, or cassette player is on, occasionally I'll get interference from the phone over the speakers (chirping and patterned dit-dits). So yes cell phones do generate interference which can interfere with other electronics.
I'm of the opinion that the FAA rules regarding electronics below 10,000 feet are probably too strict, and many devices probably can be used safely. But it's not "common sense" nor "obvious" that electric devices couldn't bring down a plane. Especially with most modern airliners today using a fly by wire system.