It was said in jest, and the humor was apparently lost on the BBC. The full quote is: "we estimate this name change will save something like 60 million keystrokes a day. At approximately 217 microjoules per keystroke, that's about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!"
P.S. I like the idea of measuring energy use in bonbons.
And with all due respect, considering the gravity of this matter, skeptics are a bit unwise to require this incontestable proof to be served on a silver plate in front of them. This kind of attitude that "if someone doesn't convince me, then it isn't true" is a bit dangerous.
If AGW is happening, you should be asking for completely revised infrastructures and policies, for you own sake. It is your responsibility and in your own interest to find out what the truth of this matter is. Skeptics shouldn't expect others to do this work for them.
That is part of the problem feeding the skepticism too. We already have a solution to global warming, have had it for over 50 years: Switch our electricity generation to nuclear. Most of the people skeptical about AGW have been gung ho about nuclear for decades.
But no. The mere mention of nuclear sends the environmental groups into a conniption fit. Absolutely no way, no how, will they ever accept nuclear power. Even if it means we doom the Earth to fry in a CO2 bath. They not only want everyone to recognize that the problem (AGW) exists, they want the problem solved only in the manner they approve of (renewables like wind, solar, conservation).
IMHO that is what is contributing to a lot of the skepticism. The refusal by the environmental groups to accept the only energy solution we have ready right now which can stop AGW in its tracks. If they really believed in AGW and that we are in serious trouble unless we make massive changes to our infrastructure right now, then they should be willing to accept nuclear power despite its flaws since it's the only technology we have for probably the next few decades which can satisfy the world's energy needs without producing CO2. But they don't accept it, and that gives the impression of validating the conspiracy theory that there really is no AGW and that this is all just a bluff by environmental groups to try to "trick" everyone into changing the world's energy economy.
You seem to think that the environment can't cope with oil. Natural oil seepage in the Gulf of Mexico amounts to about 500,000 barrels/yr. (You didn't think those oil fields we're tapping were static, did you? They leak oil by themselves all the time.)
The big difference in this case is that the oil is concentrated to the point where it can gum up birds' feathers and kill off shellfish. With natural seeps, the oil is spread out where microbes can break it down before it adversely affects larger life forms. Over time the same microbes will deal with this spill. A lot of damage will happen before then, but they will deal with it. It happened before in 1979 (estimated 10k-30k barrels/day for 10 months) and it didn't kill off the ecosystem in the Gulf then. This one won't kill off the ecosystem in the Gulf either. It will be bad for a time, but it's not the end of the Gulf as you seem to think it will be.
To quote Peter himself, "... taxicab drivers suffer three times the homicide rate of any law enforcement category, that being a cabbie is the fifth-most-dangerous job in the US while Law Enforcement doesn't even make the Top 10. If the risks associated with border patrol can be invoked to excuse the kind of violence I experienced, should we not extend the same immunity to cabbies?"
Your post intrigued me enough to go and look up the statistics myself. You're playing a little fast and loose with the statistics yourself. Cab drivers suffer a much higher homicide rate than law enforcement officers (about 4x higher per 100,000 in 1998). But law enforcement has the second highest homicide rate. If you correct for the fraction of time actually spent out in the field (most officers only spend part of their time doing patrols out of a 40 hours work week, while cab drivers work about 60 hours a week), I imagine the homicide rate per hour interacting with the public may actually be higher for law enforcement than for cabbies.
That's not to say any of this is relevant in this case. I'm not even familiar with the facts of the case as this slashdot article was the first I've heard of it.
Its the lawyers doing all the work here, how much money do you expect for doing nothing but signing your name, you don't even have to show up in court.
Last time I checked, the payouts for those lawsuits were supposed to be compensatory for something the defendant company did wrong. The payouts are not payment for services rendered. In other words, if the court decides in the consumers' favor, then everyone who signs their name was "injured" by the defendant and deserves part of the settlement, and the lawyers should be thankful that they're getting a cut of it. Not the other way around as you seem to think it is.
To address OP's concern, the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 changed things so the court can make sure the lawyers' payout is reasonable and proportional to the award given to plaintiffs. e.g. If the lawyers negotiate a purely coupon payment for the plaintiffs, they can be required to take part or all of their payment in coupons.
The UK was badly hit by the recession obviously, but Germany has been out of recession for a long time now. Germany is the major nation in Europe. I believe France technically came out of recession too. Spain, Portugal and Greece are not large countries. I doubt you can find a European country that experienced the recession on the scale of the US.
The recession hit Europe harder than it did the U.S. GDP in the Euro area shrank by about 4% annually, while in the U.S. it only shrank a little more than 2%. Germany was actually one of the worst-hit OECD countries, faring significantly worse than the UK. They did come out of the recession quicker though. The U.S. recession in contrast was rather mild compared to all OECD countries. Where the U.S. has suffered most is in the government debt accrued during the recession.
IIRC, SCO never explained what parts of Linux they thought were infringing. They basically bluffed to buoy their stock price until certain shareholders could unwind their positions. A court would never grant an injunction on such flimsy evidence.
At the opposite extreme, consider a person whose SO shoots a private sex video of them. Then they break up, and the ex-SO threatens to release the video on the Internet. Your position that there should never be prior restraint means the victim in this case has to wait for the video to be released, then sue for damages. Prior restraint allows a court injunction to prevent the ex from releasing the video in the first place (at risk of great penalty).
I find this slightly odd, reading through the comments here suggests that 90% or more of people misunderstand what yellow means - they think it means "go if you think you can squeeze through", rather than "stop, unless you absolutely can't".
The problem with either definition of a yellow light is that the judgment of "squeeze through " or "can't stop" is highly dependent on the duration of the yellow light, which is not standardized throughout the country. I lived in Boston for 5 years before moving to Los Angeles. For the first month I was in L.A., I was slamming on the brakes every time I saw a yellow light. I would come to a stop, the light would still be yellow. I would wait a couple seconds, the light would still be yellow. I would consider going on through the intersection, and the light would finally turn red. Apparently, Boston times their yellow lights to be much shorter than L.A. does.
The point of their test isn't achieving high FPS. It's achieving high FPS with low CPU utilization. My crummy laptop gets about 40 FPS with Firefox 3.6.3, but the CPU meter is pegged at 50% (one core fully utilized).
we have been hearing these howls on the left for decades
but how come we don't hear it from the right?
Um, the first link in the summary is just that - the right-leaning Forbes magazine complaining about big corporations not paying U.S. taxes. The article starts off with: "As you work on your taxes this month, here's something to raise your hackles: Some of the world's biggest, most profitable corporations enjoy a far lower tax rate than you do--that is, if they pay taxes at all." But instead of degenerating into hatred for corporations as you did, it tries to probe the reasons why these companies do it, and points out why some proposed solutions may not work. I'm guessing you disagreed with their reasons and therefore classified it as being for these corporations dodging taxes, rather than against it.
Regardless, people on the right do complain about corporations dodging taxes. Very few people on the right are multi-millionaire owners and boardmembers of fortune 500 companies. Most of them are small business owners or part-owners/investors who don't have the luxury of opening offices offshore to take advantage of accounting tricks to avoid taxes. Their businesses have to pay the full burden of U.S. federal and state corporate tax rates, which are among the highest in the world. So there's a sizable group on "the right" who want sensible reform of tax laws (mostly simplification, and elimination of numerous exceptions which almost exclusively benefit the largest companies). But just because they don't believe as you do that all corporations are evil, that's no reason to conclude "the right" is saying nothing about the matter.
A better comparision would be the *area* required to safely store all that nuclear waste. That area is orders of magnitudes larger than the area of an olympic swimming pool.
The best comparison is to the volume of waste the preferred alternative generates. Coal contains about 24 MJ/kg, and has a density of about 1.5 kg/L in its solid form. 2500 m^3 of coal thus contains about 90 GJ of energy. That's enough to keep a 75 Watt light bulb lit for 40 years. So for the same volume of waste, you could light one 75 W light bulb, or provide 80% of the electricity of the entire nation of France. Gee, which one is better do you think?
And no, not even the "but nuclear waste is more dangerous!" argument works. Coal contains trace amounts of uranium and thorium, which ends up in the coal ash and the smoke released into the atmosphere when you burn coal. Those trace radioactives actually contain more energy than the coal itself. So for an equal amount of energy produced, coal produces more radioactive waste. With nuclear, at least that waste is concentrated and can be stored and handled as we wish instead of being dispersed in the air and in ash. But because some people have an irrational fear of nuclear power, we instead rely on coal, generating more pollution, more CO2, more radioactive waste, and killing a whole lot more people.
So tell me - why has every other first world nation been able to implement universal coverage? Why have so many of those nations consistently beaten the US in virtually every measure of health care efficacy? Why have so many of those nations consistently beaten the US when it comes to quality of life,
Because the metric used included equal access to health care. Of course a system which provides health care to all its citizens will score higher than a system where some citizens are not covered because they choose not to or cannot afford to buy insurance. Citing that metric as a reason why the U.S. needs universal coverage is circular reasoning.
child mortality rate,
When I looked into this and added up the stillbirth and infant mortality rate (PDF warning), the U.S. ends up in the middle of the pack of developed nations. Indicating there's still misreporting of infant deaths as stillbirths to try to lower your hospital/country's infant mortality rate, artificially lowering the U.S.' ranking in world infant mortality rate.
and lifespan?
Has more to do with lifestyle. All those jokes about fat, lazy Americans have a degree of truth to it.
In terms of quality of health care, the U.S. is really no different than other developed nations. That's not what's broken. The problem is the U.S. spends a massively disproportionate amount of its GDP on health care compared to those countries. 14% vs. about 8%.
Both labels (pro-life and pro-choice) are over-generalizations meant to garner more widespread appeal, so pretty much anything either side does can be interpreted as "ironic" if you parse the label too broadly. Fundamentally, those on the pro-life side also believe in personal responsibility: if you choose not to buy health insurance, then being unable to afford life-saving medical care if something goes wrong was your own choice (yes, they are for choice, see what I said above about over-generalizations). The fetus OTOH doesn't have a say in the matter, so they feel a moral responsibility to speak up on behalf of the fetus.
More accurate labels for the two sides would be pro- and anti- abortion. Or even, pro- and anti- abortion in certain cases. There is no irony here unless you misunderstand (naively or deliberately) the rationale of those you oppose.
Plus we might get digital media that allows us to "look around" during a live movie. Can you imagine watching Lord of The Rings about being able to turn your head to get an entirely new perspective of what is going on?
As an amateur photographer, generating a breathtaking visual is not as simple as pointing the camera and recording the scene. How you frame it, camera angles, lighting, etc. all play a huge role. I don't think the holographic immersion you describe will work for static storytelling like movies. It will work for news broadcasts, and for interactive entertainment like games (where you can control the camera's movement within the environment). But for movie-like static stories where aesthetically pleasing visuals are a large part of the experience, the perspective will have to remain fixed, pre-selected by a talented director, cinematographer, and editor.
1) About half their govt budget came from selling oil... Their wells are now in permanent, fast decline. Once its all pumped out, its gone. That doesn't mean there is no production, just like the US has been in permanent oil production decline for 40 years but still produces a little oil. Higher tech means the extraction rate is higher so the decline is faster. And producers become importers at a much faster rate than total gross production decreases. Mexico is going to stop exporting oil pretty soon. Most of which, went to the USA. Ooops. So we're out of oil and they're out of cash. This won't turn out well.
Minor nitpick, but the U.S. produces more than "a little oil". It's the third largest oil producer in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia, and produces more than Canada and Mexico combined (2 of the 3 biggest suppliers of U.S. oil imports, Saudi Arabia is the 3rd).
In terms of historical oil production, google came up with this chart which I was going to link to initially and shows a rather steep decline. But it contradicts the DOE's own chart even though it cites the DOE as a source. So I'm guessing the wiki chart is wrong and uses figures massaged by a peak oil advocate.
If you want to obsess over one minor part of the purges, that speaks more to your agenda than Stalin's.
OP was responding to GP's statement that "No atheist is stopping religious people from living." OP wasn't the one who limited the debate to purges of religion by atheists, GP was. OP was merely responding within the confines of the debate established by the GP, not promoting his agenda.
What's amazing here is that an American city outside Utah acquiesced to demands that a piece of public infrastructure be degraded, on the basis of someone's religious objections to women who are not covered. It was a boneheaded decision to enforce values of a single religious group upon the public at large.
Why is it amazing? That's the way the U.S. is set up to work - to strike a balance allowing geographical differences in local community standards to coexist with larger scale government standards. The founders never wanted the entire country to be a homogeneous mass with everything being the same everywhere. They wanted some wider principles and and guidelines for the entire country, but the flexibility for local regions (initially States) to do things differrently they way they wanted. So anything not covered by Federal laws are subject to State laws. Anything not covered by State laws are subject to county ordinances. Anything not covered by county ordinances are subject to city ordinances. Anything not covered by city ordinances are subject to smaller official community organizations (e.g. school boards).
If there are no federal, state, county, or city regulations requiring that bike lanes be present, the local community is free to decide, based on the social standards of the majority of the local residents, whether or not their streets should have bike lanes. If a community is largely comprised of Hasidic Jews who don't want bike lanes, then as long as a higher layer of government doesn't require bike lanes, they are free to do with their community as they wish. That their reason is based on their religion is irrelevant. As long as it doesn't violate a law or ordinance, people can make decisions for their community based on science, religion, Oprah, phase of the moon, or the voices they hear in their head. If someone feels the majority has gone too far and is violating the rights of the minority, they bring it up in court.
This is what allows right-wing communities to have ordinances which they are more comfortable with (e.g. no nudie bars). And allows left-wing communities to have ordinances which they are more comfortable with (e.g. mandatory recycling pickup). The legal environment set up by these local norms live and die based on people voting - both at the ballot and with their feet (moving into or out of the community). Laws at the local level which don't work get filtered out, with a lesson learned not to try it at a higher level. Laws which do work at the local level get noticed as a good idea, and get tried out at a higher level.
Thanks for that great explanation. Do you think that this is the reason why military subs don't go deep, because otherwise they would have to use an unwieldy oil bladder based bouyancy control system?
Pretty much any military sub able to operate for long times underwater is nuclear powered. With that as an energy source, you don't really need to worry about fine-tuning your buoyancy. You can just propel yourself up or down. These small research subs are battery-powered, so you don't want to waste energy fighting a slightly rising or slightly sinking craft. Fine-tuning their buoyancy one and getting it over with saves a lot of energy.
The depth limit on a big sub has more to do with the type of pressure hull they use. A military sub uses a cylindrical pressure hull. This results in unequal stresses in the hull around the endcaps and the bulkheads, making it weaker for the thickness of the hull. You could make one capable of reaching 5000 m of depth, but its hull would have to be unreasonably thick and it would probably sink like a rock without a huge oil-filled gondola above it.
The really deep submersibles use spherical pressure hulls. A sphere results in equal loading on the hull, allowing you to take maximum advantage of the hull material's strength, and thus minimizing the thickness. The deepest diving sub I know of with a cylindrical pressure hull is the US Navy's NR-1 which was recently taken out of service. It's nuclear powered, and can operate down to about 700 meters. Officially, it was used for oceanographic research and to investigate and recover items from sunken USN vessels (it helped with debris recovery from the space shuttle Challenger accident as well). Unofficially, everyone in the field knows it was used to help maintain SOSUS, recover stuff from sunken Soviet vessels, and wiretapping Soviet undersea cables.
Most navies also operate DSRVs, deep submergence rescue vehicles, to recover survivors from a sunken submarine. But those use a spherical pressure hull. Most of the submarine-like volume in front of and behind the center is filled with oil tanks for buoyancy. The outer fairing is simply for hydrodynamics.
This is why such a balloon would need a _valve_ or a hole at the bottom, to allow excess gas to escape. It's precisely the same reason that SCUBA and deep sea divers doing a "free ascent" need to exhale quite a lot on their way up, lest they try to hold the expanding gas in their lungs and do something really destructive to their delicate alveoli and even give themselves serious embolisms.
Right. I wasn't saying the balloon idea was impossible, just explaining why it's inferior to oil and static pressure sphere buoyancy.
I am curious about the failure mechanism of these spheres. I can easily believe that an old, fatigued sphere can begin to crack and fail the rest of hte way catastrophically, but I'm curious how the failure spreads. Spewing glass shards cracking the other spheres? Shock wave directly cracking the sphere, or shock wave smacking the spheres against each other? Is the blast or shock wave from the failed sphere basically spherical, or is it directional from the way the sphere fails?
One of the Benthos reps (actually, he was one of the founders of the company) gave us a presentation which touched on sphere failures. It's an implosion which almost instantly turns the glass sphere into powder. The energy released goes into pulverizing the glass, and generating an inverse pressure wave which spreads outward disrupting or destroying any nearby equipment.
He also mentioned one unusual case where the vacuum valve for the sphere failed. If you didn't read the link I gave, the spheres is actually two hemispheres placed atop each other (this lets you put equipment and stuff inside). There's a small quarter-inch hole with a valve on it used to pump the air out of the sphere. The vacuum allows ambient air pressure to hold the two halves together. As it turns out, one of these spheres used only for floatation had this valve fail at depth. Instead of destroying the sphere, the water pressure simply filled the sphere very rapidly with water. All the netting which had been outside the sphere was forced through the quarter-inch hole into the sphere.
It's been a while since I worked with the WHOI folks so my memory is a bit hazy. But generally these underwater submersibles come with:
A descent weight, used to make the craft negatively buoyant for the initial descent, then dropped to leave it neutrally buoyant.
An ascent weight, dropped at the end of the mission to make the neutrally buoyant craft positively buoyant.
A bladder which can be pumped with oil from a reservoir tank to fine-tune buoyancy.
Air doesn't work because of the enormous pressure involved. A 3000 psi scuba tank could only inflate a balloon down to about 2000 meters. Below that, the water pressure is greater than that inside the tank, and opening the valve would result in water forcing the balloon into the tank, rather than air inflating the balloon. A 10000 psi high pressure tank would work at 5000 meters, but would only result in about a 30% increase in volume, meaning you'd need a very big tank to be able to raise the entire craft in a catastrophic failure. Furthermore, the air would expand as the craft rose, risking rupturing the balloon. That's why the buoyancy control uses an oil bladder - oil is relatively incompressible.
Dropping the ascent weight helps raise the craft at the end of a mission. But usually they're relatively lightweight so you can attach them manually. The 17-inch glass spheres typically used to house equipment provides over 50 pounds of buoyancy. The failure of one of these spheres at a depth of 3000 meters (~4500 psi) would release (4500 psi) * 4/3 * pi * (8.5 inches)^3 = 1.3 MJ of energy. A stick of dynamite is about 2.1 MJ, so losing one sphere is pretty much guaranteed to cause all the other spheres to fail. If the remainder of the craft somehow survived all that energy release, the loss in buoyancy would overwhelm what buoyancy you'd get by dropping the ascent weight.
Actually, I don't think that's hypocritical at all. Democrats want big government. They want the federal government to intervene in all avenues of life, and to adhere to that position must accept the laws the fed makes whether good or bad overall. They also happen to want the federal government to make abortions specifically legal.
That's stupid. You're taking taking a fundamental tenet of human rights - that an individual's rights in their natural state trump the government's power - and you're disposing of it to make it better fit your argument by pretending the individual's right to have an abortion comes about only because the government allows it. This is counter to the fundamental concept of Human Rights defined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. They are based on the premise that human rights pre-exist in the absence of government - whether there is or isn't a government present (nor type of government) doesn't change these rights. When a government is formed, the formation involves defining which of those rights can be curtailed (e.g. the right to own and keep your own property is curtailed to allow the government to collect taxes).
So the government does not make abortions legal - their default status is that of being legal. The debate is on whether government should be allowed to make abortions illegal. So a stance which opposes government curtailment of abortion is inconsistent with wanting government involved in every aspect of your life. (I also disagree with that defining how Democrats think, but more on that later.)
Republicans on the other hand, want the government completely out of their lives, which is why it is hypocritical to then want the federal government to interfere with issues they believe are morally correct. You can't have it both ways, it's all or nothing.
You're redefining the parties to fit the conclusion you want. Republicans don't want government completely out of their lives. Both parties want some government. Where they disagree on is what parts of their lives government should and shouldn't be involved in. Republicans place a higher priority on morality, Democrats place a higher priority on equality.
Either can be excessive. This whole "one party is hypocritical" thing is just straw men set up by deliberately mis-stating the opposition's party's position to make it appear hypocritical. Republicans tend to be for banning abortions because they feel the fetus is equivalent to a human life, and so while they dislike excessive government, they feel protecting life is a legitimate moral responsibility of government. Democrats tend to be against banning abortions because they do not feel the fetus is equivalent to a human life, and so there is no moral justification for government to get involved, meaning the individual's right to choose to abort remains intact. Neither stance is hypocritical.
As it happens, legislating equality turns out to be more invasive than legislating morality. In the presence of an energy source, thermodynamics and the universe tends to want to make things unequal. OTOH, society for the most part does agree on a common subset of moral principles. So consequently legislating things important to Democrats tends to make bigger government than legislating the things Republicans want. But it has nothing to do with one party wanting a bigger government, while the other party wants lesser government. It's a side effect, not the direct intention.
Actually no, because *I* will no longer buy Assassin's Creed 2 and people I know will not buy it either because of the DRM. I do not wish to dick around with cracking tools just so I can play a game.
But I'm certain Ubisoft would say they didn't want my money in the first place:)
No, they'll point to your lost sale and claim it's because you pirated it.
I married two years ago and I made damn clear I was contracting a service and that all byproducts and associated rights from that service were my own. There were two phographers that didn't see it that way... well, they didn't get neither the copyright nor the money for the service.
If you're in the U.S., you can't make photographers transfer copyright this way. What you're essentially doing is setting up a work for hire situation. Unfortunately, due to the one-shot nature of the work and the fact that the photos comprise the entirety of the visual record, it fails to qualify as work for hire. For copyright to be assigned to you as work for hire, you either have to be their employer for multiple projects, or the material has to fall into one of nine categories (quoting from Wikipedia): "(1) a contribution to a collective work, (2) a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, (3) a translation, (4) a supplementary work, (5) a compilation, (6) an instructional text, (7) a test, (8) answer material for a test, (9) an atlas;"
So whatever agreement you came to with the photographer you hired to let you have copyright would probably be tossed out in court. The law is set up to prevent someone from coercing the actual creative authors from giving up their copyrights in the way you did. The music studios fall under (2) since multiple people (artist,s producer, sound engineers, etc) are involved in creating the final product. Most wedding photographers OTOH take the photos and process them by themselves.
What you could do is after the wedding is over and the photos processed, negotiate to buy all rights to the photos from the photographer. But if you do this the rights reverts to the original creator in 35 years. Aside from the above exceptions, the law makes it really hard to separate copyright from the actual creative authors.
the results are random, just biased, and biased against IE, if I may add, which is an important fact the summary omitted.
Actually, studies have shown that when people are presented with a list of items, the first and last are most likely to be remembered. So I would hazard a guess that if all choices are equal, the first spot would be most picked, and the last spot would be second-most picked.
That is the reason downloading is legal in Canada. The Canadian supreme court ruled that because the CRIA effectively collects royalties on all blank media in Canada, they have waived their right to sue for illegal copies burned onto that media. (The law backfired on the CRIA - in typical "I want my cake and to eat it too" fashion, they were expecting to be able to collect royalties and sue for illegal downloading.)
There has not been a similar ruling in the U.S. regarding audio CD blanks. There could be in the future; you and I seem to agree with the Canadian court's logic. But as of yet I don't know of a U.S. court ruling on the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
It was said in jest, and the humor was apparently lost on the BBC. The full quote is: "we estimate this name change will save something like 60 million keystrokes a day. At approximately 217 microjoules per keystroke, that's about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!"
P.S. I like the idea of measuring energy use in bonbons.
That is part of the problem feeding the skepticism too. We already have a solution to global warming, have had it for over 50 years: Switch our electricity generation to nuclear. Most of the people skeptical about AGW have been gung ho about nuclear for decades.
But no. The mere mention of nuclear sends the environmental groups into a conniption fit. Absolutely no way, no how, will they ever accept nuclear power. Even if it means we doom the Earth to fry in a CO2 bath. They not only want everyone to recognize that the problem (AGW) exists, they want the problem solved only in the manner they approve of (renewables like wind, solar, conservation).
IMHO that is what is contributing to a lot of the skepticism. The refusal by the environmental groups to accept the only energy solution we have ready right now which can stop AGW in its tracks. If they really believed in AGW and that we are in serious trouble unless we make massive changes to our infrastructure right now, then they should be willing to accept nuclear power despite its flaws since it's the only technology we have for probably the next few decades which can satisfy the world's energy needs without producing CO2. But they don't accept it, and that gives the impression of validating the conspiracy theory that there really is no AGW and that this is all just a bluff by environmental groups to try to "trick" everyone into changing the world's energy economy.
You seem to think that the environment can't cope with oil. Natural oil seepage in the Gulf of Mexico amounts to about 500,000 barrels/yr. (You didn't think those oil fields we're tapping were static, did you? They leak oil by themselves all the time.)
The big difference in this case is that the oil is concentrated to the point where it can gum up birds' feathers and kill off shellfish. With natural seeps, the oil is spread out where microbes can break it down before it adversely affects larger life forms. Over time the same microbes will deal with this spill. A lot of damage will happen before then, but they will deal with it. It happened before in 1979 (estimated 10k-30k barrels/day for 10 months) and it didn't kill off the ecosystem in the Gulf then. This one won't kill off the ecosystem in the Gulf either. It will be bad for a time, but it's not the end of the Gulf as you seem to think it will be.
Your post intrigued me enough to go and look up the statistics myself. You're playing a little fast and loose with the statistics yourself. Cab drivers suffer a much higher homicide rate than law enforcement officers (about 4x higher per 100,000 in 1998). But law enforcement has the second highest homicide rate. If you correct for the fraction of time actually spent out in the field (most officers only spend part of their time doing patrols out of a 40 hours work week, while cab drivers work about 60 hours a week), I imagine the homicide rate per hour interacting with the public may actually be higher for law enforcement than for cabbies.
That's not to say any of this is relevant in this case. I'm not even familiar with the facts of the case as this slashdot article was the first I've heard of it.
Last time I checked, the payouts for those lawsuits were supposed to be compensatory for something the defendant company did wrong. The payouts are not payment for services rendered. In other words, if the court decides in the consumers' favor, then everyone who signs their name was "injured" by the defendant and deserves part of the settlement, and the lawyers should be thankful that they're getting a cut of it. Not the other way around as you seem to think it is.
To address OP's concern, the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 changed things so the court can make sure the lawyers' payout is reasonable and proportional to the award given to plaintiffs. e.g. If the lawyers negotiate a purely coupon payment for the plaintiffs, they can be required to take part or all of their payment in coupons.
The recession hit Europe harder than it did the U.S. GDP in the Euro area shrank by about 4% annually, while in the U.S. it only shrank a little more than 2%. Germany was actually one of the worst-hit OECD countries, faring significantly worse than the UK. They did come out of the recession quicker though. The U.S. recession in contrast was rather mild compared to all OECD countries. Where the U.S. has suffered most is in the government debt accrued during the recession.
IIRC, SCO never explained what parts of Linux they thought were infringing. They basically bluffed to buoy their stock price until certain shareholders could unwind their positions. A court would never grant an injunction on such flimsy evidence.
At the opposite extreme, consider a person whose SO shoots a private sex video of them. Then they break up, and the ex-SO threatens to release the video on the Internet. Your position that there should never be prior restraint means the victim in this case has to wait for the video to be released, then sue for damages. Prior restraint allows a court injunction to prevent the ex from releasing the video in the first place (at risk of great penalty).
The problem with either definition of a yellow light is that the judgment of "squeeze through " or "can't stop" is highly dependent on the duration of the yellow light, which is not standardized throughout the country. I lived in Boston for 5 years before moving to Los Angeles. For the first month I was in L.A., I was slamming on the brakes every time I saw a yellow light. I would come to a stop, the light would still be yellow. I would wait a couple seconds, the light would still be yellow. I would consider going on through the intersection, and the light would finally turn red. Apparently, Boston times their yellow lights to be much shorter than L.A. does.
The point of their test isn't achieving high FPS. It's achieving high FPS with low CPU utilization. My crummy laptop gets about 40 FPS with Firefox 3.6.3, but the CPU meter is pegged at 50% (one core fully utilized).
Um, the first link in the summary is just that - the right-leaning Forbes magazine complaining about big corporations not paying U.S. taxes. The article starts off with: "As you work on your taxes this month, here's something to raise your hackles: Some of the world's biggest, most profitable corporations enjoy a far lower tax rate than you do--that is, if they pay taxes at all." But instead of degenerating into hatred for corporations as you did, it tries to probe the reasons why these companies do it, and points out why some proposed solutions may not work. I'm guessing you disagreed with their reasons and therefore classified it as being for these corporations dodging taxes, rather than against it.
Regardless, people on the right do complain about corporations dodging taxes. Very few people on the right are multi-millionaire owners and boardmembers of fortune 500 companies. Most of them are small business owners or part-owners/investors who don't have the luxury of opening offices offshore to take advantage of accounting tricks to avoid taxes. Their businesses have to pay the full burden of U.S. federal and state corporate tax rates, which are among the highest in the world. So there's a sizable group on "the right" who want sensible reform of tax laws (mostly simplification, and elimination of numerous exceptions which almost exclusively benefit the largest companies). But just because they don't believe as you do that all corporations are evil, that's no reason to conclude "the right" is saying nothing about the matter.
The best comparison is to the volume of waste the preferred alternative generates. Coal contains about 24 MJ/kg, and has a density of about 1.5 kg/L in its solid form. 2500 m^3 of coal thus contains about 90 GJ of energy. That's enough to keep a 75 Watt light bulb lit for 40 years. So for the same volume of waste, you could light one 75 W light bulb, or provide 80% of the electricity of the entire nation of France. Gee, which one is better do you think?
And no, not even the "but nuclear waste is more dangerous!" argument works. Coal contains trace amounts of uranium and thorium, which ends up in the coal ash and the smoke released into the atmosphere when you burn coal. Those trace radioactives actually contain more energy than the coal itself. So for an equal amount of energy produced, coal produces more radioactive waste. With nuclear, at least that waste is concentrated and can be stored and handled as we wish instead of being dispersed in the air and in ash. But because some people have an irrational fear of nuclear power, we instead rely on coal, generating more pollution, more CO2, more radioactive waste, and killing a whole lot more people.
Because the metric used included equal access to health care. Of course a system which provides health care to all its citizens will score higher than a system where some citizens are not covered because they choose not to or cannot afford to buy insurance. Citing that metric as a reason why the U.S. needs universal coverage is circular reasoning.
When I looked into this and added up the stillbirth and infant mortality rate (PDF warning), the U.S. ends up in the middle of the pack of developed nations. Indicating there's still misreporting of infant deaths as stillbirths to try to lower your hospital/country's infant mortality rate, artificially lowering the U.S.' ranking in world infant mortality rate.
Has more to do with lifestyle. All those jokes about fat, lazy Americans have a degree of truth to it.
In terms of quality of health care, the U.S. is really no different than other developed nations. That's not what's broken. The problem is the U.S. spends a massively disproportionate amount of its GDP on health care compared to those countries. 14% vs. about 8%.
Both labels (pro-life and pro-choice) are over-generalizations meant to garner more widespread appeal, so pretty much anything either side does can be interpreted as "ironic" if you parse the label too broadly. Fundamentally, those on the pro-life side also believe in personal responsibility: if you choose not to buy health insurance, then being unable to afford life-saving medical care if something goes wrong was your own choice (yes, they are for choice, see what I said above about over-generalizations). The fetus OTOH doesn't have a say in the matter, so they feel a moral responsibility to speak up on behalf of the fetus.
More accurate labels for the two sides would be pro- and anti- abortion. Or even, pro- and anti- abortion in certain cases. There is no irony here unless you misunderstand (naively or deliberately) the rationale of those you oppose.
As an amateur photographer, generating a breathtaking visual is not as simple as pointing the camera and recording the scene. How you frame it, camera angles, lighting, etc. all play a huge role. I don't think the holographic immersion you describe will work for static storytelling like movies. It will work for news broadcasts, and for interactive entertainment like games (where you can control the camera's movement within the environment). But for movie-like static stories where aesthetically pleasing visuals are a large part of the experience, the perspective will have to remain fixed, pre-selected by a talented director, cinematographer, and editor.
Minor nitpick, but the U.S. produces more than "a little oil". It's the third largest oil producer in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia, and produces more than Canada and Mexico combined (2 of the 3 biggest suppliers of U.S. oil imports, Saudi Arabia is the 3rd).
In terms of historical oil production, google came up with this chart which I was going to link to initially and shows a rather steep decline. But it contradicts the DOE's own chart even though it cites the DOE as a source. So I'm guessing the wiki chart is wrong and uses figures massaged by a peak oil advocate.
OP was responding to GP's statement that "No atheist is stopping religious people from living." OP wasn't the one who limited the debate to purges of religion by atheists, GP was. OP was merely responding within the confines of the debate established by the GP, not promoting his agenda.
Why is it amazing? That's the way the U.S. is set up to work - to strike a balance allowing geographical differences in local community standards to coexist with larger scale government standards. The founders never wanted the entire country to be a homogeneous mass with everything being the same everywhere. They wanted some wider principles and and guidelines for the entire country, but the flexibility for local regions (initially States) to do things differrently they way they wanted. So anything not covered by Federal laws are subject to State laws. Anything not covered by State laws are subject to county ordinances. Anything not covered by county ordinances are subject to city ordinances. Anything not covered by city ordinances are subject to smaller official community organizations (e.g. school boards).
If there are no federal, state, county, or city regulations requiring that bike lanes be present, the local community is free to decide, based on the social standards of the majority of the local residents, whether or not their streets should have bike lanes. If a community is largely comprised of Hasidic Jews who don't want bike lanes, then as long as a higher layer of government doesn't require bike lanes, they are free to do with their community as they wish. That their reason is based on their religion is irrelevant. As long as it doesn't violate a law or ordinance, people can make decisions for their community based on science, religion, Oprah, phase of the moon, or the voices they hear in their head. If someone feels the majority has gone too far and is violating the rights of the minority, they bring it up in court.
This is what allows right-wing communities to have ordinances which they are more comfortable with (e.g. no nudie bars). And allows left-wing communities to have ordinances which they are more comfortable with (e.g. mandatory recycling pickup). The legal environment set up by these local norms live and die based on people voting - both at the ballot and with their feet (moving into or out of the community). Laws at the local level which don't work get filtered out, with a lesson learned not to try it at a higher level. Laws which do work at the local level get noticed as a good idea, and get tried out at a higher level.
Pretty much any military sub able to operate for long times underwater is nuclear powered. With that as an energy source, you don't really need to worry about fine-tuning your buoyancy. You can just propel yourself up or down. These small research subs are battery-powered, so you don't want to waste energy fighting a slightly rising or slightly sinking craft. Fine-tuning their buoyancy one and getting it over with saves a lot of energy.
The depth limit on a big sub has more to do with the type of pressure hull they use. A military sub uses a cylindrical pressure hull. This results in unequal stresses in the hull around the endcaps and the bulkheads, making it weaker for the thickness of the hull. You could make one capable of reaching 5000 m of depth, but its hull would have to be unreasonably thick and it would probably sink like a rock without a huge oil-filled gondola above it.
The really deep submersibles use spherical pressure hulls. A sphere results in equal loading on the hull, allowing you to take maximum advantage of the hull material's strength, and thus minimizing the thickness. The deepest diving sub I know of with a cylindrical pressure hull is the US Navy's NR-1 which was recently taken out of service. It's nuclear powered, and can operate down to about 700 meters. Officially, it was used for oceanographic research and to investigate and recover items from sunken USN vessels (it helped with debris recovery from the space shuttle Challenger accident as well). Unofficially, everyone in the field knows it was used to help maintain SOSUS, recover stuff from sunken Soviet vessels, and wiretapping Soviet undersea cables.
Most navies also operate DSRVs, deep submergence rescue vehicles, to recover survivors from a sunken submarine. But those use a spherical pressure hull. Most of the submarine-like volume in front of and behind the center is filled with oil tanks for buoyancy. The outer fairing is simply for hydrodynamics.
Right. I wasn't saying the balloon idea was impossible, just explaining why it's inferior to oil and static pressure sphere buoyancy.
One of the Benthos reps (actually, he was one of the founders of the company) gave us a presentation which touched on sphere failures. It's an implosion which almost instantly turns the glass sphere into powder. The energy released goes into pulverizing the glass, and generating an inverse pressure wave which spreads outward disrupting or destroying any nearby equipment.
He also mentioned one unusual case where the vacuum valve for the sphere failed. If you didn't read the link I gave, the spheres is actually two hemispheres placed atop each other (this lets you put equipment and stuff inside). There's a small quarter-inch hole with a valve on it used to pump the air out of the sphere. The vacuum allows ambient air pressure to hold the two halves together. As it turns out, one of these spheres used only for floatation had this valve fail at depth. Instead of destroying the sphere, the water pressure simply filled the sphere very rapidly with water. All the netting which had been outside the sphere was forced through the quarter-inch hole into the sphere.
Air doesn't work because of the enormous pressure involved. A 3000 psi scuba tank could only inflate a balloon down to about 2000 meters. Below that, the water pressure is greater than that inside the tank, and opening the valve would result in water forcing the balloon into the tank, rather than air inflating the balloon. A 10000 psi high pressure tank would work at 5000 meters, but would only result in about a 30% increase in volume, meaning you'd need a very big tank to be able to raise the entire craft in a catastrophic failure. Furthermore, the air would expand as the craft rose, risking rupturing the balloon. That's why the buoyancy control uses an oil bladder - oil is relatively incompressible.
Dropping the ascent weight helps raise the craft at the end of a mission. But usually they're relatively lightweight so you can attach them manually. The 17-inch glass spheres typically used to house equipment provides over 50 pounds of buoyancy. The failure of one of these spheres at a depth of 3000 meters (~4500 psi) would release (4500 psi) * 4/3 * pi * (8.5 inches)^3 = 1.3 MJ of energy. A stick of dynamite is about 2.1 MJ, so losing one sphere is pretty much guaranteed to cause all the other spheres to fail. If the remainder of the craft somehow survived all that energy release, the loss in buoyancy would overwhelm what buoyancy you'd get by dropping the ascent weight.
That's stupid. You're taking taking a fundamental tenet of human rights - that an individual's rights in their natural state trump the government's power - and you're disposing of it to make it better fit your argument by pretending the individual's right to have an abortion comes about only because the government allows it. This is counter to the fundamental concept of Human Rights defined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. They are based on the premise that human rights pre-exist in the absence of government - whether there is or isn't a government present (nor type of government) doesn't change these rights. When a government is formed, the formation involves defining which of those rights can be curtailed (e.g. the right to own and keep your own property is curtailed to allow the government to collect taxes).
So the government does not make abortions legal - their default status is that of being legal. The debate is on whether government should be allowed to make abortions illegal. So a stance which opposes government curtailment of abortion is inconsistent with wanting government involved in every aspect of your life. (I also disagree with that defining how Democrats think, but more on that later.)
You're redefining the parties to fit the conclusion you want. Republicans don't want government completely out of their lives. Both parties want some government. Where they disagree on is what parts of their lives government should and shouldn't be involved in. Republicans place a higher priority on morality, Democrats place a higher priority on equality.
Either can be excessive. This whole "one party is hypocritical" thing is just straw men set up by deliberately mis-stating the opposition's party's position to make it appear hypocritical. Republicans tend to be for banning abortions because they feel the fetus is equivalent to a human life, and so while they dislike excessive government, they feel protecting life is a legitimate moral responsibility of government. Democrats tend to be against banning abortions because they do not feel the fetus is equivalent to a human life, and so there is no moral justification for government to get involved, meaning the individual's right to choose to abort remains intact. Neither stance is hypocritical.
As it happens, legislating equality turns out to be more invasive than legislating morality. In the presence of an energy source, thermodynamics and the universe tends to want to make things unequal. OTOH, society for the most part does agree on a common subset of moral principles. So consequently legislating things important to Democrats tends to make bigger government than legislating the things Republicans want. But it has nothing to do with one party wanting a bigger government, while the other party wants lesser government. It's a side effect, not the direct intention.
No, they'll point to your lost sale and claim it's because you pirated it.
If you're in the U.S., you can't make photographers transfer copyright this way. What you're essentially doing is setting up a work for hire situation. Unfortunately, due to the one-shot nature of the work and the fact that the photos comprise the entirety of the visual record, it fails to qualify as work for hire. For copyright to be assigned to you as work for hire, you either have to be their employer for multiple projects, or the material has to fall into one of nine categories (quoting from Wikipedia): "(1) a contribution to a collective work, (2) a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, (3) a translation, (4) a supplementary work, (5) a compilation, (6) an instructional text, (7) a test, (8) answer material for a test, (9) an atlas;"
So whatever agreement you came to with the photographer you hired to let you have copyright would probably be tossed out in court. The law is set up to prevent someone from coercing the actual creative authors from giving up their copyrights in the way you did. The music studios fall under (2) since multiple people (artist,s producer, sound engineers, etc) are involved in creating the final product. Most wedding photographers OTOH take the photos and process them by themselves.
What you could do is after the wedding is over and the photos processed, negotiate to buy all rights to the photos from the photographer. But if you do this the rights reverts to the original creator in 35 years. Aside from the above exceptions, the law makes it really hard to separate copyright from the actual creative authors.
Actually, studies have shown that when people are presented with a list of items, the first and last are most likely to be remembered. So I would hazard a guess that if all choices are equal, the first spot would be most picked, and the last spot would be second-most picked.
That is the reason downloading is legal in Canada. The Canadian supreme court ruled that because the CRIA effectively collects royalties on all blank media in Canada, they have waived their right to sue for illegal copies burned onto that media. (The law backfired on the CRIA - in typical "I want my cake and to eat it too" fashion, they were expecting to be able to collect royalties and sue for illegal downloading.)
There has not been a similar ruling in the U.S. regarding audio CD blanks. There could be in the future; you and I seem to agree with the Canadian court's logic. But as of yet I don't know of a U.S. court ruling on the matter.