I moved to Los Angeles in the late nineties and left before these traffic cameras were operational. When I first arrived, I noticed that people would collectively pause at a green light. It would be a one or two second delay which completely baffled me. In New England, we'd jump the greens like a drag race.
Along the same lines, another problem is the lack of standardization for the length of the yellow light. I moved from Boston to Los Angeles in 2002. The first month I was there, out of habit I would hit the brakes the instant the light turned yellow, screech to a stop, and wait. Still yellow. Hmm, maybe I should have gone through. Still yellow. How long is this going to stay yellow? Still yellow. Maybe I should just go through? Still yellow. Ok, I'm going to g... oh it finally turned red. Boston timed its yellow lights to be a lot shorter than Los Angeles, meaning people visiting between those two places have no idea how much leeway they had to avoid the red light.
It would seem to me that there is plenty of context as to why you were in the intersection. And from the same faq it says that you can request a review with an actual officer.
No, that shows what you were doing at the exact moment you were passing through the intersection. The problem is you get the ticket in the mail a week or two later. Can you remember what exactly you were doing at the time? The camera has perfect recollection of every person who drives through the intersection. You however do not have perfect recollection of every intersection you drive through. Maybe the truck in front of you which passed through during the green/yellow light blocked the "No Right Turn on Red" sign from your view just before you made that right turn on red. Can you remember reasons why you might not have seen a sign at a random intersection a week or two ago?
If an officer had pulled you over for the violation, the incident becomes memorable and you can note any extenuating circumstances to mount a defense. The camera OTOH is a silent witness who waits for your memory to fade before making its accusation. That is what is meant by lacking context.
Putting this together with TFA, why is it that the airplane mode in seemingly all cell phones shuts off both the cellular service and the wireless? If your commercial flight has WiFi, you can't use it on your smartphone without the interference-causing cellular service also being on.
So the phrase "they're using tanks to suppress people in the square" and "they're using tanks to physically crush people in the square" are the same in Chinese. Perhaps the real meaning was lost in the moment, then even more so in translation.
On the 5th anniversary of the Tienanmen uprisings, there was a graphic shock website which posted photos of the aftermath which had been smuggled out. Many of the photos were very graphic and disturbing, and I had the misfortune of being tricked into visiting it (the web being new, and me being young and innocent without an inkling about things like goatse.cx). One of the photos was indeed of a man who had been physically crushed by a tank. Trust me, you do not want to ever see a human being "flattened like a pancake" as the saying goes - it is disturbing to the point of making you want to throw up if you have an ounce of empathy.
Since it was just a photo though, it does still leave open the question of whether the man was alive at the time, or if he had been shot and killed earlier and the tanks just ran over his body while moving down the street. But either way, people-crushing by tanks really did occur there.
I'm surprised this hasn't been modded up. The FCC limit on omnidirectional broadcasts in the 2.4 GHz band is 1 Watt. Most wireless routers I've seen are 500-750 mW max. They actually self-regulate their power output to use the weakest possible signal and still maintain good throughput. Most microwaves are actually around 1500 Watts. So even if the shielding is 99.9% effective, it's still putting out at least 2-3x more "signal" than your router, probably a lot more. It's simple enough to demonstrate. Start copying a large file over wireless with something like Teracopy (which gives instantaneous MB/sec). Then turn on your microwave. Throughput will plummet.
And here's why. The guy didn't have the contaminated plants "accidentally" spread and take over his field. He quite deliberately selected the GM strain, separated it from the rest of his plants, and used it to replant:
[...]
One can argue about the merits of gene patents in general, but in this particular case it's not anywhere "poor innocent farmer who couldn't do anything about it".
The problem with this theory is that Schmeiser's actions don't fit the motive you're inferring. The wikipedia article seems to have had an editing hack job done on it to make him look bad. The large sections you've quoted are from the Federal Court decision. The Canadian Supreme Court affirmed the ruling on infringement (i.e. he did use Round-up Ready canola seed without a license), but overturned the ~$15,000 award to Monsanto because it found that he did not profit in any way from his canola being Round-up Ready. He treated it and sold it just like regular canola. In particular, this section of wikipedia you've quoted seems slanted:
Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field.
That kinda makes it sound like he sprayed the entire field. If you read the Federal Court decision, it's clear that he didn't spray the entire field, he merely sprayed a single 12-meter wide test-strip adjacent to the ditch to try to figure out what was going on:
[39] In an attempt to determine why the plants had survived the herbicide spraying, Mr. Schmeiser conducted a test in field 2. Using his sprayer, he sprayed, with Roundup herbicide, a section of that field in a strip along the road. He made two passes with his sprayer set to spray 40 feet, the first weaving between and around the power poles, and the second beyond but adjacent to the first pass in the field, and parallel to the power poles. This was said by him to be some three to four acres in all, or "a good three acres". After some days, approximately 60% of the plants earlier sprayed had persisted and continued to grow. Mr. Schmeiser testified that these plants grew in clumps which were thickest near the road and began to thin as one moved farther into the field.
At that point, I'm not quite sure what you expected him to do. Destroy the entire field because he detected Round-up ready canola in it? It sounds more like he figured the contamination wasn't substantial, so just treated the field like any regular field.
Anyhow, the reasoning in the Supreme Court ruling justifying infringement (that he "ought to have known" the canola contained Monsanto's patented Round-up Ready gene) was invalidated a few years ago, with the discovery of weeds which have developed a natural resistance to Round-up. You can no longer make the assumption that if a plant survives Round-up, then it must have Monsanto's patented gene in it. The only way to know for sure is to perform a DNA test on it. It remains to be seen whether farmers will be required to conduct such tests in order to avoid infringing Monsanto's patent (at the risk of destroying a naturally-occuring Round-up resistant plant if they can't pay). Or if they'll be allowed to assume the resistance is natural until Monsanto tests their field and tells them otherwise.
Sigh, not this again. CDMA won. The TDMA used by GSM's voice lost. It doesn't scale well with multiple simultaneous users. To put it in computer terms, TDMA is like multitasking by giving each process on your computer an equal slice of CPU time, regardless of how much CPU the process actually needs. CDMA is like multitasking by giving each process only as much CPU time as it needs. The only reason GSM still uses TDMA is to maintain backwards compatibility, and it's limited to voice.
This is why the CDMA carriers rolled out 3G so much quicker than the GSM carriers. It's also why you can't do simultaneous voice/3G data on CDMA carriers. CDMA scaled so well they could use the same radio for both voice and data. But due to different communications protocols between voice and data, the CDMA radio couldn't do both at once.. On the other hand, GSM carriers had to engineer an entirely new broadcast standard from scratch to achieve 3G data speeds. This necessitated an entirely new radio just for 3G data traffic, but with the fringe benefit of being able to do both voice and data simultaneously - they were on two separate radios. Most of these used a form of wideband CDMA for their data network (UMTS, which eventually became the HSPA family).
GSM networks would have had little pressure to overhaul their data networks like this if CDMA hadn't spanked it so badly at data, so you can thank CDMA for cellular data speeds being where they are today. CDMA is being superseded by OFDMA in LTE.
Most of my extensions made it to the add-on bar so that's been ok. The main problem I've been seeing from the missing status bar is that the link URL preview now floats on top of the bottom of the web page. This is fine, unless the link itself is in that bottom portion of the web page. Then that section of the screen starts flashing as the bottom of the page and the link URL preview both try to overwrite each other. Worse yet, clicking on the link does not work - your mouse click gets intercepted by the URL preview. That breaks a fundamental rule of UI - that clicking on a hyperlink should work the same no matter where the link is displayed. You have to first scroll the page up a bit so the link is clear of the URL preview area, then click on it.
That's an interesting stance. It's always seemed to me that design patents seem inherintly more just. After all, there should be an infinite number of ways of designing the look and feel of your interface.
So apple patented the design of a home screen consisting of rectangular icons with a 1:1 aspect ratio and corners clipped by a circle with a diameter 90% of the width. Why wouldn't I, as a competitor, want to make a product that looked different? Mine will have round icons instead. problem solved. Yeah, some people just want to make a knockoff product that looks like an iphone. Design patents make that hard. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them.
The courts decided to exempt clothing design from copyright protection precisely because of the reason you cite (1:58 into the talk). They didn't want someone owning the idea of using a button in a certain place, or having a cuff on your sleeve.
This simply does not happen on Mac. I am sorry, but it is true. Yes, someone can make a trojan horse and generate a lot of media hype but that boils to someone tricking people into giving the malicious software a chance to run.
Funny. That was the exact same attitude held by us Unix types way back in the 1980s. The PC (DOS) and Mac (MacOS) were rife with viruses and worms transmitted over sneakernet (i.e. on floppies). But Unix was designed from the ground up to be secure in a multi-user environment. There's no way you could infect a Unix system with a virus or worm. At worst the user would compromise their own account, but the system would still be safe since they didn't have root access.
Then the Morris worm hit and we all saw that the emperor had no clothes. If it can happen to Unix, it can happen to an OSX Mac. It's foolish to think otherwise.
I am sure that there will be those that will say this is a waste of government resources but I would disagree. One of the things that government should do is build out public infrastructure to areas that the private sector won't serve or wouldn't be feasible without the government doing it.
The government is just as prone to corruption as the private sector (some would say more so). Any project should be scrutinized from a cost-benefit standpoint. While there should be some leeway to build things which aren't cost-effective but are in the interest of increasing access, it can't be a blank check. You cannot agree with it merely because it's "public infrastructure" or "the private sector won't do it." There has to be some point at which you decide it's too expensive, even for the government.
Here is hoping that the current providers there don't file lawsuits preventing the state from laying fiber like they do to proposed municipal ISPs.
The providers catch a lot of flak for that (and they should), but let's not forget that the government is also complicit in it. If they hadn't granted service monopolies or duopolies in the first place, they wouldn't be in the non-competitive mess they're in.
The Tsunami knocked out the power, but if it knocked out the valve control systems and pumps, why didn't all three reactors melt down at the same time?
Unit 1 is a 460 MW reactor. Units 2 and 3 are 784 MW reactors. They have totally different ratios of heat generated to cooling capacity. This is why you're seeing reports for unit 1 coming separately, while reports for units 2 and 3 are (generally) coming concurrently. (The rest of your stuff about TEPCO being negligent, I agree with.)
They said "stable at relatively low temperatures." "Stable" for a reactor generally means 100C or lower. Higher than 100C, if a pipe bursts and you lose pressure, the water can flash into steam, exposing the core to air again - an unstable situation. At 100C, a pressure loss would drop the temperature below 100C, the water remains liquid, and the situation is stable (at least until the water boils off).
100C is relatively low compared to the temps required to melt the fuel. But it's still hot enough to kill you, so calling it "cool" wouldn't be accurate either.
Of course it could be that the news is making a much bigger deal than ever before and I never noticed before and now take more notice of these things.
Yes.
As the world's population increases, it becomes more and more likely that a natural disaster will strike a populated area. Corollary to that, as technology advances, it becomes more and more likely that there will be video of a natural disaster for news services to splash all over the TV/website.
It's because most of the evidence supporting global warming thus far is comprised of correlation studies. As I like to say, a good correlation paper can win you a high school science fair. A good causation paper can win you the Nobel prize. Which is precisely what happened with ozone depletion. A trio of scientists came up with an elegant, predictive, and empirically accurate mechanism to explain exactly how ozone depletion was occurring, and won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for it.
Come up with a comprehensive, predictive, and empirically accurate model for climate change, and you will probably win the Nobel prize (in something like physics, not a trophy prize like peace) and simultaneously convince the world's government that they must act. The problem with correlation studies is that they're always open to dispute since you never identify or test the actual mechanism causing the problem. That's what happened with cigarettes - for decades the medical community had tons of correlation studies saying that smoking was bad. But the government restrictions and bans didn't come about until medical researchers began to identify and confirm the mechanisms by which smoking was causing cancer.
It's not even not entirely new. It's been postedseveral times on/. in the past decade. I vaguely recall first reading of it in grad school, which would put it in the 1990s.
The cost is the big problem: a failure in a coal plant results in some nasty chemicals released into the environment, maybe some people burned in a steam explosion or the like. But it is very hard to create a coal plant disaster that writes off the capital investment or exposes the operator to the kind of widespread liability that nuclear disasters do.
So anyone who is not innumerate realizes that the risk-cost/benefit trade-off for nuclear power is very different from most other technologies.
The problem with this reasoning is that the normal operation of a coal plant is much more dangerous than all but the worst nuclear accidents. All you're doing is saying that concentrated dangers are more worthy of avoidance than distributed dangers simply because they're concentrated. That's a completely arbitrary assertion with no reasoning to back it up.
To properly assess risk, you have to take (1) the severity of the danger represented by a power source in an accident, (2) multiply it by the chance of such an accident occurring, then (3) add it to the dangers presented by the power source under normal operation, and finally (4) normalize it to the same amount of power generated so you can compare between sources with different power output. That will give you a total risk assessment under all conditions of operation/accident of a power system.
If you look only at (1), nuclear looks worst. If you look at (1), (2), and (4) nuclear ends up being less risky (in terms of fatalities) than hydro, solar, and wind. Fossil fuels fail very badly at (3), so once you account for all four, nuclear ends up being the safest power source we could use, coal the worst.
So eliminate all exemptions for those above a certain income. No overseas stashes, no lower capital gains rate, no nothing. Attempt to hide or underdeclare a significant amount of income, you pay triple and do time.
Oh, you'd prefer to have a "residence" in Bermuda, would you? Enjoy your trip! Just sure you keep paying every nickel of your taxes from there, too. Traveling abroad remains much more pleasant if your passport doesn't get revoked with a wanted felon watch on it.
Part of the problem is that the U.S. taxes based on citizenship. If you're a U.S. citizen, you have to pay U.S. taxes no matter where you are, no matter where you earned your money. This causes U.S. citizens who are abroad (or who own companies which conduct business abroad) to do everything they can to decrease their income tax exposure.
Sane countries like Canada tax based on residency. If you're a Canadian residing outside of Canada (and presumably earning your money abroad), you don't owe Canadian taxes. If you reside in Canada part-time, it's a little more complicated because you need to track what percentage of the year you were in Canada and pay partial Canadian taxes based on that. But it's eminently fairer to do it that way, and decreases the incentive to weasel out of your taxes. The U.S. system is skewed to favor the government, so you have to weasel just to get to a point most would consider fair. And if you've gone that far, it's pretty easy to weasel even more to dodge taxes you should probably be paying.
Incidentally, California tries to do the same thing as the U.S. for state taxes. If you're a California resident living outside the state (e.g. going to an out-of-state school), California will still try to tax your income as if you were a full-time resident.
40% of the federal budget comes from payroll taxes. That's a 15.3% tax on all wages up to about 90k or so.
Minor nitpick. Half of that 15.3% is paid by the employee. The other half is paid by the employer. I never understood the point of doing it this way. It's the same amount of money the employer is paying to hire the employee, whether they give half the payroll taxes to the employee and half to the government, or all to the employee who then gives it all to the government. It's a pointless extra accounting step when doing payroll, and (I'm guessing this is the real purpose) makes it look to the employee like the amount of payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare) is half what they really are.
This is also the reason the "self-employment tax" hits many people hard when they go into business for themselves. If you're self-employed, you're responsible for paying both the employee's and employer's share of those payroll taxes. Many people don't know about this, think they're going to earn 5% more by quitting their job and freelancing, then find out that after the "self-employment tax" they're actually making less money than before.
(Although your federal and state withholdings come out of your paycheck and look like a payroll tax, they are not a payroll tax. They are a pre-payment on your income taxes.)
It's past time that internet businesses need government handouts to survive, especially Amazon.
That is quite backwards thinking. The natural state of a sale is for there to be no tax. If a state chooses to tax sales, it must accept both the benefits and the drawbacks that come with a sales tax. So the problem is not that Amazon is getting a "government handout" by not having to charge sales tax. The problem is that states put their brick and mortar stores at a competitive disadvantage by requiring them to charge a sales tax which is high enough to sway people's purchasing decisions in favor of retailers outside the state.
Amazon's got a right to get over on taxes, while its competitior must pay?
Doesn't sound like a fair marketplace to me.
Amazon is in Washington. If it sells something to someone in Washington, it charges sales tax. If it sells something to someone outside Washington but in a state where Amazon has some sort of presence (like a warehouse), they charge sales tax. Any other state, they charge no sales tax.
Their competitor is in some state. if it sells something to someone in that state, it charges sales tax. If it sells something to someone outside that state but in a state where it has some sort of presence (like a warehouse), they charge sales tax. Any other state, they charge no sales tax.
Seems perfectly fair to me. The disparity arises when you're comparing a mail-order/internet business to a brick and mortar business. The brick and mortar business sells primarily to people who live in the state, the mail-order and internet businesses sell primarily to people who live outside the state. Fundamentally, the problem in that case is that the state's sales tax is too high, and thus puts the brick and mortar business at a competitive disadvantage. But for some reason it always seems to get portrayed as Amazon having some sort of unfair advantage. If the state is unhappy that its businesses are at a disadvantage due to high sales tax, the direct solution within their power is to simply lower their sales tax.
If the states want their cake and to eat it too - keep their high sales tax but level the playing field - it's going to take an act of Congress to do it. Bezos is correct that the Constitution explicitly prohibits state taxation of interstate commerce. Only the Federal government has that power.
After that article on filter bubbles yesterday, it's amusing/disconcerting to see an effort by Republicans to strip funding for these scanners characterized as "the House of Representatives" trying to strip funding.
Slashdot Mirror
Along the same lines, another problem is the lack of standardization for the length of the yellow light. I moved from Boston to Los Angeles in 2002. The first month I was there, out of habit I would hit the brakes the instant the light turned yellow, screech to a stop, and wait. Still yellow. Hmm, maybe I should have gone through. Still yellow. How long is this going to stay yellow? Still yellow. Maybe I should just go through? Still yellow. Ok, I'm going to g... oh it finally turned red. Boston timed its yellow lights to be a lot shorter than Los Angeles, meaning people visiting between those two places have no idea how much leeway they had to avoid the red light.
No, that shows what you were doing at the exact moment you were passing through the intersection. The problem is you get the ticket in the mail a week or two later. Can you remember what exactly you were doing at the time? The camera has perfect recollection of every person who drives through the intersection. You however do not have perfect recollection of every intersection you drive through. Maybe the truck in front of you which passed through during the green/yellow light blocked the "No Right Turn on Red" sign from your view just before you made that right turn on red. Can you remember reasons why you might not have seen a sign at a random intersection a week or two ago?
If an officer had pulled you over for the violation, the incident becomes memorable and you can note any extenuating circumstances to mount a defense. The camera OTOH is a silent witness who waits for your memory to fade before making its accusation. That is what is meant by lacking context.
Putting this together with TFA, why is it that the airplane mode in seemingly all cell phones shuts off both the cellular service and the wireless? If your commercial flight has WiFi, you can't use it on your smartphone without the interference-causing cellular service also being on.
On the 5th anniversary of the Tienanmen uprisings, there was a graphic shock website which posted photos of the aftermath which had been smuggled out. Many of the photos were very graphic and disturbing, and I had the misfortune of being tricked into visiting it (the web being new, and me being young and innocent without an inkling about things like goatse.cx). One of the photos was indeed of a man who had been physically crushed by a tank. Trust me, you do not want to ever see a human being "flattened like a pancake" as the saying goes - it is disturbing to the point of making you want to throw up if you have an ounce of empathy.
Since it was just a photo though, it does still leave open the question of whether the man was alive at the time, or if he had been shot and killed earlier and the tanks just ran over his body while moving down the street. But either way, people-crushing by tanks really did occur there.
I'll bet if you asked them, they'll say they did it on their own time, off-campus.
Comparison to:
Limewire settlement: $10,808 per song, 65x more. 300,000 infringements -> $3.24 billion
Joel Tenenbaum: $22,500 per song, 135x more. 300,000 infringements -> $6.75 billion
Jammie Thomas-Rasset 2010: $62,500 per song, 375x more. 300,000 infringements -> $18.75 billion
The scales of justice seem badly in need of calibration.
I'm surprised this hasn't been modded up. The FCC limit on omnidirectional broadcasts in the 2.4 GHz band is 1 Watt. Most wireless routers I've seen are 500-750 mW max. They actually self-regulate their power output to use the weakest possible signal and still maintain good throughput. Most microwaves are actually around 1500 Watts. So even if the shielding is 99.9% effective, it's still putting out at least 2-3x more "signal" than your router, probably a lot more. It's simple enough to demonstrate. Start copying a large file over wireless with something like Teracopy (which gives instantaneous MB/sec). Then turn on your microwave. Throughput will plummet.
The problem with this theory is that Schmeiser's actions don't fit the motive you're inferring. The wikipedia article seems to have had an editing hack job done on it to make him look bad. The large sections you've quoted are from the Federal Court decision. The Canadian Supreme Court affirmed the ruling on infringement (i.e. he did use Round-up Ready canola seed without a license), but overturned the ~$15,000 award to Monsanto because it found that he did not profit in any way from his canola being Round-up Ready. He treated it and sold it just like regular canola. In particular, this section of wikipedia you've quoted seems slanted:
That kinda makes it sound like he sprayed the entire field. If you read the Federal Court decision, it's clear that he didn't spray the entire field, he merely sprayed a single 12-meter wide test-strip adjacent to the ditch to try to figure out what was going on:
At that point, I'm not quite sure what you expected him to do. Destroy the entire field because he detected Round-up ready canola in it? It sounds more like he figured the contamination wasn't substantial, so just treated the field like any regular field.
Anyhow, the reasoning in the Supreme Court ruling justifying infringement (that he "ought to have known" the canola contained Monsanto's patented Round-up Ready gene) was invalidated a few years ago, with the discovery of weeds which have developed a natural resistance to Round-up. You can no longer make the assumption that if a plant survives Round-up, then it must have Monsanto's patented gene in it. The only way to know for sure is to perform a DNA test on it. It remains to be seen whether farmers will be required to conduct such tests in order to avoid infringing Monsanto's patent (at the risk of destroying a naturally-occuring Round-up resistant plant if they can't pay). Or if they'll be allowed to assume the resistance is natural until Monsanto tests their field and tells them otherwise.
Meteorologists have already been sued. About 25 years ago, and successfully too.
Sigh, not this again. CDMA won. The TDMA used by GSM's voice lost. It doesn't scale well with multiple simultaneous users. To put it in computer terms, TDMA is like multitasking by giving each process on your computer an equal slice of CPU time, regardless of how much CPU the process actually needs. CDMA is like multitasking by giving each process only as much CPU time as it needs. The only reason GSM still uses TDMA is to maintain backwards compatibility, and it's limited to voice.
This is why the CDMA carriers rolled out 3G so much quicker than the GSM carriers. It's also why you can't do simultaneous voice/3G data on CDMA carriers. CDMA scaled so well they could use the same radio for both voice and data. But due to different communications protocols between voice and data, the CDMA radio couldn't do both at once.. On the other hand, GSM carriers had to engineer an entirely new broadcast standard from scratch to achieve 3G data speeds. This necessitated an entirely new radio just for 3G data traffic, but with the fringe benefit of being able to do both voice and data simultaneously - they were on two separate radios. Most of these used a form of wideband CDMA for their data network (UMTS, which eventually became the HSPA family).
GSM networks would have had little pressure to overhaul their data networks like this if CDMA hadn't spanked it so badly at data, so you can thank CDMA for cellular data speeds being where they are today. CDMA is being superseded by OFDMA in LTE.
Most of my extensions made it to the add-on bar so that's been ok. The main problem I've been seeing from the missing status bar is that the link URL preview now floats on top of the bottom of the web page. This is fine, unless the link itself is in that bottom portion of the web page. Then that section of the screen starts flashing as the bottom of the page and the link URL preview both try to overwrite each other. Worse yet, clicking on the link does not work - your mouse click gets intercepted by the URL preview. That breaks a fundamental rule of UI - that clicking on a hyperlink should work the same no matter where the link is displayed. You have to first scroll the page up a bit so the link is clear of the URL preview area, then click on it.
The courts decided to exempt clothing design from copyright protection precisely because of the reason you cite (1:58 into the talk). They didn't want someone owning the idea of using a button in a certain place, or having a cuff on your sleeve.
Funny. That was the exact same attitude held by us Unix types way back in the 1980s. The PC (DOS) and Mac (MacOS) were rife with viruses and worms transmitted over sneakernet (i.e. on floppies). But Unix was designed from the ground up to be secure in a multi-user environment. There's no way you could infect a Unix system with a virus or worm. At worst the user would compromise their own account, but the system would still be safe since they didn't have root access.
Then the Morris worm hit and we all saw that the emperor had no clothes. If it can happen to Unix, it can happen to an OSX Mac. It's foolish to think otherwise.
You mean like The Bridge to Nowhere?
The government is just as prone to corruption as the private sector (some would say more so). Any project should be scrutinized from a cost-benefit standpoint. While there should be some leeway to build things which aren't cost-effective but are in the interest of increasing access, it can't be a blank check. You cannot agree with it merely because it's "public infrastructure" or "the private sector won't do it." There has to be some point at which you decide it's too expensive, even for the government.
The providers catch a lot of flak for that (and they should), but let's not forget that the government is also complicit in it. If they hadn't granted service monopolies or duopolies in the first place, they wouldn't be in the non-competitive mess they're in.
Unit 1 is a 460 MW reactor. Units 2 and 3 are 784 MW reactors. They have totally different ratios of heat generated to cooling capacity. This is why you're seeing reports for unit 1 coming separately, while reports for units 2 and 3 are (generally) coming concurrently. (The rest of your stuff about TEPCO being negligent, I agree with.)
They said "stable at relatively low temperatures." "Stable" for a reactor generally means 100C or lower. Higher than 100C, if a pipe bursts and you lose pressure, the water can flash into steam, exposing the core to air again - an unstable situation. At 100C, a pressure loss would drop the temperature below 100C, the water remains liquid, and the situation is stable (at least until the water boils off).
100C is relatively low compared to the temps required to melt the fuel. But it's still hot enough to kill you, so calling it "cool" wouldn't be accurate either.
As the world's population increases, it becomes more and more likely that a natural disaster will strike a populated area. Corollary to that, as technology advances, it becomes more and more likely that there will be video of a natural disaster for news services to splash all over the TV/website.
It's because most of the evidence supporting global warming thus far is comprised of correlation studies. As I like to say, a good correlation paper can win you a high school science fair. A good causation paper can win you the Nobel prize. Which is precisely what happened with ozone depletion. A trio of scientists came up with an elegant, predictive, and empirically accurate mechanism to explain exactly how ozone depletion was occurring, and won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for it.
Come up with a comprehensive, predictive, and empirically accurate model for climate change, and you will probably win the Nobel prize (in something like physics, not a trophy prize like peace) and simultaneously convince the world's government that they must act. The problem with correlation studies is that they're always open to dispute since you never identify or test the actual mechanism causing the problem. That's what happened with cigarettes - for decades the medical community had tons of correlation studies saying that smoking was bad. But the government restrictions and bans didn't come about until medical researchers began to identify and confirm the mechanisms by which smoking was causing cancer.
It's not even not entirely new. It's been posted several times on /. in the past decade. I vaguely recall first reading of it in grad school, which would put it in the 1990s.
The problem with this reasoning is that the normal operation of a coal plant is much more dangerous than all but the worst nuclear accidents. All you're doing is saying that concentrated dangers are more worthy of avoidance than distributed dangers simply because they're concentrated. That's a completely arbitrary assertion with no reasoning to back it up.
To properly assess risk, you have to take (1) the severity of the danger represented by a power source in an accident, (2) multiply it by the chance of such an accident occurring, then (3) add it to the dangers presented by the power source under normal operation, and finally (4) normalize it to the same amount of power generated so you can compare between sources with different power output. That will give you a total risk assessment under all conditions of operation/accident of a power system.
If you look only at (1), nuclear looks worst. If you look at (1), (2), and (4) nuclear ends up being less risky (in terms of fatalities) than hydro, solar, and wind. Fossil fuels fail very badly at (3), so once you account for all four, nuclear ends up being the safest power source we could use, coal the worst.
Part of the problem is that the U.S. taxes based on citizenship. If you're a U.S. citizen, you have to pay U.S. taxes no matter where you are, no matter where you earned your money. This causes U.S. citizens who are abroad (or who own companies which conduct business abroad) to do everything they can to decrease their income tax exposure.
Sane countries like Canada tax based on residency. If you're a Canadian residing outside of Canada (and presumably earning your money abroad), you don't owe Canadian taxes. If you reside in Canada part-time, it's a little more complicated because you need to track what percentage of the year you were in Canada and pay partial Canadian taxes based on that. But it's eminently fairer to do it that way, and decreases the incentive to weasel out of your taxes. The U.S. system is skewed to favor the government, so you have to weasel just to get to a point most would consider fair. And if you've gone that far, it's pretty easy to weasel even more to dodge taxes you should probably be paying.
Incidentally, California tries to do the same thing as the U.S. for state taxes. If you're a California resident living outside the state (e.g. going to an out-of-state school), California will still try to tax your income as if you were a full-time resident.
Minor nitpick. Half of that 15.3% is paid by the employee. The other half is paid by the employer. I never understood the point of doing it this way. It's the same amount of money the employer is paying to hire the employee, whether they give half the payroll taxes to the employee and half to the government, or all to the employee who then gives it all to the government. It's a pointless extra accounting step when doing payroll, and (I'm guessing this is the real purpose) makes it look to the employee like the amount of payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare) is half what they really are.
This is also the reason the "self-employment tax" hits many people hard when they go into business for themselves. If you're self-employed, you're responsible for paying both the employee's and employer's share of those payroll taxes. Many people don't know about this, think they're going to earn 5% more by quitting their job and freelancing, then find out that after the "self-employment tax" they're actually making less money than before.
(Although your federal and state withholdings come out of your paycheck and look like a payroll tax, they are not a payroll tax. They are a pre-payment on your income taxes.)
That is quite backwards thinking. The natural state of a sale is for there to be no tax. If a state chooses to tax sales, it must accept both the benefits and the drawbacks that come with a sales tax. So the problem is not that Amazon is getting a "government handout" by not having to charge sales tax. The problem is that states put their brick and mortar stores at a competitive disadvantage by requiring them to charge a sales tax which is high enough to sway people's purchasing decisions in favor of retailers outside the state.
Amazon is in Washington. If it sells something to someone in Washington, it charges sales tax. If it sells something to someone outside Washington but in a state where Amazon has some sort of presence (like a warehouse), they charge sales tax. Any other state, they charge no sales tax.
Their competitor is in some state. if it sells something to someone in that state, it charges sales tax. If it sells something to someone outside that state but in a state where it has some sort of presence (like a warehouse), they charge sales tax. Any other state, they charge no sales tax.
Seems perfectly fair to me. The disparity arises when you're comparing a mail-order/internet business to a brick and mortar business. The brick and mortar business sells primarily to people who live in the state, the mail-order and internet businesses sell primarily to people who live outside the state. Fundamentally, the problem in that case is that the state's sales tax is too high, and thus puts the brick and mortar business at a competitive disadvantage. But for some reason it always seems to get portrayed as Amazon having some sort of unfair advantage. If the state is unhappy that its businesses are at a disadvantage due to high sales tax, the direct solution within their power is to simply lower their sales tax.
If the states want their cake and to eat it too - keep their high sales tax but level the playing field - it's going to take an act of Congress to do it. Bezos is correct that the Constitution explicitly prohibits state taxation of interstate commerce. Only the Federal government has that power.
After that article on filter bubbles yesterday, it's amusing/disconcerting to see an effort by Republicans to strip funding for these scanners characterized as "the House of Representatives" trying to strip funding.