The blog states several countries have come out against public disclosure while others have come out for it. On the U.S. in particular, it says:
Moreover, the U.S. has remained silent on the issue, as it remains unconvinced of the need for full disclosure. In doing so, it would appear that the U.S. is perhaps the biggest problem since a clear position of support might be enough to persuade the remaining outliers.
Somehow the submitter has morphed this into the U.S. being the lead opponent to public disclosure.
The three strikes provision isn't bad per se. It just needs some balance, some reciprocity.
Convicted three times of copyright infringement and you're kicked off the Internet.
Wrongly accuse people of copyright infringement three times and you're banned from ever filing a copyright infringement claim again.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Ya see the thing is generally speaking capital gains tax is less than income and payroll tax. Consultants running their own companies generally pay capital gains on most of their income whereas employees pay income tax and their employers pay payroll tax, which generates more revenue for the government.
Agreed with the rest of your post, but you're wrong about payroll taxes. Payroll taxes (the employer's portion) are simply matching amounts of what the employee pays for social security and medicare (and a small amount of unemployment). If you're an employee and pay $x in SS and Medicare taxes, your employer also pays an additional $x in SS and Medicare on behalf of you.
Self-employed people pay a self employment tax to match lost payroll tax revenue. Essentially, they pay $2x in SS and Medicare taxes, to match what they and their employer would've paid if they had been employed by the company instead of hired as a freelancer. So the IRS isn't losing any payroll taxes from someone being self-employed.
I believe the crux of the "lost IRS revenue" argument is that capital gains tax is generally less than income tax, and self-employed people are pretty anal about deducting business-related expenses whereas employees aren't (they're supposed to get their company to reimburse them, and the company "deducts" those expenses since they generally only pay taxes on net income: revenue minus expenses).
So I guess the normal compression wave by a sonic boom is not enough to alter the way light goes through it (think flickering air when looking across a heated highway), but these ice crystals do the trick. Right?
No, the compression wave always alters the way light travels through it. It's just that normally there's no light going straight through the wave to you, or if there is it's uniform in color and brightness (i.e. blue sky) so altering the direction of the light slightly doesn't produce a visible change.
My guess would be that the sundog by its very nature means sunlight is at the proper angle at that location to be reflected back to you. A compression wave at this location alters the angle of sunlight being reflected off ice crystals . So the large variability in brightness as a function of small changes in angle makes the ripples visible. Kinda like if someone were trying to signal you with a mirror. If you're seeing blue sky reflected in the mirror, shaking the mirror still yields blue sky so you don't notice any change. But if you're seeing the sun reflected in the mirror, shaking the mirror makes it alternately reflect sunlight and blue sky, causing a strobing effect which is easily visible.
MPG is backwards. It tells you how much further you can go on a single gallon, not how much less fuel it'll take to cover a fixed distance. In practical terms, the latter is much more relevant to how people drive. If you buy a car which gets twice the MPG, you do not suddenly start driving twice as far every day. Your miles driven each day will probably remain fixed, so fuel saved is based on the inverse of MPG.
A consequence of this is that MPG exaggerates the benefit of highly fuel-efficient vehicles. 2752 MPG sounds like a lot. But switching from a 25 MPG vehicle to a 50 MPG vehicle saves you more gas than switching from a 50 MPG vehicle to a 2752 MPG vehicle. To cover a distance of 50 miles, the 25 MPG vehicle would consume 2 gallons. The 50 MPG vehicle would consume 1 gallon, for a savings of 1 gallon. The 2752 MPG vehicle would consume 0.018 gallons, for a savings of 0.982 gallons. This is less improvement than the switch from 25 MPG to 50 MPG. Because MPG is inverted, a 10 MPG improvement on a 25 MPG vehicle saves a lot more fuel than a 10 MPG improvement on a 2000 MPG vehicle.
Consequently, the most important thing for reducing overall fuel consumption is to get people out of gas guzzlers and into more fuel efficient vehicles. Stuff like hypermiling vehicles getting >2000 MPG are interesting from an engineering and design standpoint, but they serve little practical use. Even if you could develop a real car which got 2000 MPG, getting a single SUV driver to switch to a Prius would save 3.5x as much fuel as getting a single Prius driver to switch to this new ultra-high MPG vehicle.
This is why most of the rest of the world measures fuel efficiency in liters/100 km. It makes the amount of fuel your car will use for a typical drive pretty obvious, and makes it dirt simple to compare how much fuel you'll save switching to a different vehicle (just subtract the two numbers):
SUV = 16 liters/100 km
sedan = 9.4 liters/100 km
Prius = 4.7 liters/100 km
vehicle in article = 0.085 liters/100 km
Um, if this latest storm was due to wetter and warmer winters, wouldn't it have beeen characterized by excess snow in the mid and upper latitudes, but excess rain in the lower latitudes? Instead what we got with this storm was the snow line extending almost all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Dallas, Texas was buried in a foot of snow, and Atlanta, Georgia picked up a few inches as well. Lake Erie has frozen over for the first time in 14 years.
I mean I can buy the argument that global warming would cause wetter weather and more snow in winter. I can buy the argument that unusual weather like this does not a trend prove (or disprove). But you're citing a study which says warmer temperatures cause excess snowfall, and trying to use it to explain a storm which was notably unusual for its cold temperatures.
The thing that bugs me about being endlessly monitored and categorized is that it's never used to make my life better. It's only ever done to help some random corporation improve their profits by some fraction of a percentage.
It's supposed to make your life better by reducing your costs. The cable company gets extra revenue and thus can lower the amount you have to pay in your monthly service bill.
Unfortunately, nearly all media services in the U.S. are government-licensed monopolies. Without any competition, what ends up happening is the cable company simply pockets the extra revenue instead of passing some of it on to you.
I find it interesting that the TEA party movement aligns with Palin. She made sure Alaska was #1 in pork money every year. Yet she's the one to fight big government? She IS big government.
I'm no Palin fan, but that wasn't her doing. That was Ted Stevens' doing. When the Republicans won control of the Senate, he became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee (they decide which bills get funding). Historically, there's almost a p=1.0 correlation between the State whose Senator is chairman of this committee, and which State gets the most per-capita federal spending.
Taxes are not the enemy of small business. Most small business pay very little in tax, for the simple reason that taxes are paid on profits. Most small businesses that fail, fail without paying a dime of tax.
Small businesses pay a lot of employment taxes, even if they aren't profitable. The business has to match the employee's contribution to Social Security and Medicare, and pay into federal and state unemployment funds. These are not necessarily bad things to be paying for, and I'm not arguing that they shouldn't have to pay for these things. But it's simply not true that businesses only pay tax on profits. If the business employs people, it pays employment taxes regardless of profit.
With a 4"'er, you're not going to get any detail out of Jupiter or Saturn. No cloud bands on Jupiter -- just the moons as points of light. Saturn will look like this or this if you're lucky.
I bought a 4" scope late last year. Two bands on Jupiter were clearly visible. Saturn's rings were also clearly visible. Mars was disappointing - I could barely make out a disk, but I need to get some higher power eyepieces.
I remember when the American spy plane had the collision with the Chinese fighter jet in 2001, almost every Chinese person I knew, despite being US citizens, was adamant that the US should apologize.
Mostly agreed on what you have to say about integration into the U.S.. But the part I've quoted above is a cultural thing. In Asian cultures, apologies are a big deal. In this type of case, the one who created the situation should apologize, regardless of fault or the specifics of the incident. The U.S., being the one doing the spying, was the one who initially created the situation which caused both planes to be there. So in the minds of the Chinese, the U.S. is the party expected to apologize, open and shut case. It's why you hear all the time about Japanese managers and government officials apologizing and stepping down from their posts because something bad happened on their watch, even when you could not reasonably have expected them to have prevented the incident. It's just something that's expected of people in charge.
(The reverse does not apply here. Industrial espionage is the norm in Asia. The Chinese won't consider this something worthy of apologizing to the U.S. for because it was pure espionage, and there was no loss of life. Byzantine unwritten rules like this are part of what makes business and politics in Asia challenging.)
Anyway, in my experience, braking is problematic at best in competition with the accelerator. The brake might be enough to hold the car in place while revving the engine at a stop, but I doubt you could make a reasonable controlled stop at full throttle while at speed. (Your results may vary depending on your transmission, brakes, and engine)
Car and Driver tested just that scenario. At 70 mph and the accelerator floored, a 268 hp Camry came to a full stop in 190 feet (vs 174 feet with no accelerator). It was actually better than a Ford Taurus with no accelerator. So making a controlled stop at full throttle while at speed is very reasonable.
I had a similar experience as you (passenger shoved a windshield heat reflector to my side without me noticing, and it restricted the accelerator's travel so it was half-depressed while I braked). I didn't notice any difference in braking at speed. It was only when I was close to stopped that I noticed it was taking longer than usual to come to a complete stop with the brake depressed the usual amount. So my experience says it just feels a lot worse than it really is. By the time you can feel it, you're traveling slow enough that it while it may take more time to stop completely, it won't take much more distance.
Considering the damages caused by the crime, $500 would be the high-ball figure for a sane punishment. Considering the act of downloading and uploading files is at least as common as speeding and done by millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans, that should be taken into account -- it's a bad law.
It's a good law, it's just being mis-applied. The copyright statutes were written with "piracy" meaning someone bootlegging your CD, stamping out thousands of copies, and selling them on the street corner. Because you can make a substantial amount of money doing that, the penalties for copyright infringement had to have equally substantial penalties to be successful as a deterrent.
Fast forward to the Internet age, and the content industry is taking laws meant to punish people making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars off of infringement, and using them to punish people trying to get a few songs for free. The penalties are grossly disproportionate to the violation. What we need are new laws and fines governing not-for-profit copyright infringement.
While what you say is true to a point, it neglects what this trade *is*, and the fact that China is just barely below trade with Canada at this point, and will over take it real soon now.
Canada exports to the US (and to a greater level daily to China) mostly raw materials, not much different except in scale from some third world colonized nation.
Whereas on the other hand, China exports to the US almost completely value-added manufactured items, i.e. economic multipliers, things that build their internal economy to a greater degree than just raw resource exporting
When a country exports raw materials as Canada does, 100% of the revenue goes to that country.
When a country exports value-added manufactured items, a large portion of the revenue goes right back out of the country, to pay for the raw materials and components. Slashdot even had a story on it. In fact, a lot of the money going to China to pay for products manufactured there ends up coming right back to the U.S.
So the difference between the type of trade Canada and China have with the U.S. which you point out actually favors Canada.
China only holds about $800 billion in U.S. Treasury Securities. U.S. GDP was about $14.2 trillion in 2008. U.S.imports from China were $338 billion in 2008. Exports around $70 billion, so trade with China accounted for 2.9% of U.S. GDP. If China were to exercise the "nuclear option" and suddenly dump all the U.S. treasury securities it owns onto the market, and stopped all trade with the U.S., its financial impact would be about 8.5% of U.S. GDP.
China's 2008 GDP was about $4.4 trillion. Their trade with the U.S.at $338+$70 billion accounted for 9.3% of their GDP. So if China were to dump all the U.S. securities and stop all trade with the U.S., they would be hurting their economy more than they would be hurting the U.S. economy.
China needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs China.
As soon as we heard that cameras were digital, we pretty much immediately thought, "Oh I can't wait until we can have tiny screens to see what we're taking/took.
I was a hobby film photographer at the time closely following the development of digital cameras in the early 1990s. I can tell you no, the first thing to cross everyone's mid was not the ability to review the picture you just took. Everyone was used to the film workflow process (take picture, develop, print negatives or review slides). Back in those days, just decompressing a 640x480 jpeg took 5-15 seconds on a PC (the processing power required for JPEGs was a big disadvantage vs. GIF at the time). So the digital workflow was similar - look through viewfinder, take photo, camera writes to hard drive/memory card, download to PC, review photos. It was not at all obvious at the time that we'd be able to quickly review photos in the camera immediately after we took them.
The first digital SLRreleased in 1991 followed this workflow model. So did the first consumer-grade digitalcameras released in 1994. The first digital camera I can recall which had an LCD to review picutres (not sure if you could preview them with a live feed) was the Casio QV-11 released in 1995. I recall lots of comments from photographers and reviewers about how innovative that concept was (but the camera's crappy resolution and toy lens killed it in the market). You have to remember that back in those days, most LCDs on laptops were greyscale. The few which were color were split-screen passive matrix with poor color reproduction and fidelity. CRTs were vastly superior and still dominated the desktop, so it never occurred to most people that they would want eventually want to review the picture they just took on a LCD built into the camera.
When a corporation owns a basic service, the question is, "How much is the customer willing to pay?" The question when run by a local (meaning, city or county) government is, "How much does it cost to provide?" The incentive for a corporation is always to make the most amount of money possible.
You either have a fundamental misunderstanding of economics, or you're blatantly pretending a corporation doesn't ask itself how much it costs to provide a service. All corporate entities ask themselves both questions: "How much can we get people to pay for this?" and "How much does it cost us to offer this for sale?" The spread between the two per unit is the profit margin. The profit margin times the number of units sold is the profit.
Corporations can increase the money they make by charging customers more as you state, or by decreasing their cost of what it is they are selling. From fundamental economics, simply ratcheting up the price (as you propose corporations do) usually results in sales volume decreasing so that the company actually makes less money, not more. The real money to be made is in lowering the price, not increasing it. Unless you're near market saturation, the increase in sales volume will swamp out the effects of the reduction in profit margin.
Where it starts breaking down is in monopoly, or near-monopoly situations creating an inelastic demand curve. That's where a corporation has so much control of the market that even if they ratchet up the price, the number of units they sell does not go down appreciably. Last-mile utility carriers are a good example. Whether I get my phone/internet service from Verizon, SBC, Speakeasy, whatever, Verizon owns the copper to my business so that company has to contract with Verizon to lease the copper. That gives Verizon total control over the floor price of my phone/internet service. If they decided to ratchet it up, I would have no choice but to pay it since there is no competition where I live.
That's what causes the price disparity and abuses you point out. Not the mere existence of a corporation. Things like basic services and utilities fall into the category of natural monopolies because it makes no economic sense to have more than one set of last-mile copper going into my business. That's when the government has to step in. In most situations, competition between companies creates a better outcome than government intervention. But in certain situations, government intervention yields a better outcome. This is one of those cases where the government approach is better.
I am wondering if Apple has some sort of patent on using multitouch in a UI which is preventing other phones from implementing it without getting a license from them. On the face of it, I'd consider it an obvious invention since the whole reason humans have thumbs is so they can manipulate objects with 2+ digits. But you never know with our crazy software patent system.
- uranium was thought to be pretty much endless, so why do more research into thorium? (yes, U is getting in short supply now)
The uranium fuel cycle requires refinement of U235 (which also happens to be the first step to making an atomic a bomb) and leads down a path which creates weapons-grade plutonium (an alternate material for making an atomic bomb). The thorium fuel cycle does not have this problem.
- nuclear power still has the stigma of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl attached to it. It'll be tough to get public opinion on that changed,
Measured by deaths per GW-years of electricity generated (p. 241, fig 7.2.7), nuclear power is the safest form of electricity generation man has invented. And yes, that stat includes Chernobyl. In terms of injuries per GW-years (p. 248, fig 7.3.4), nuclear is about the same as gas, oil, and hydro (coal is the safest). The public perception that nuclear power is dangerous is a myth perpetuated primarily by anti-nuclear and anti-development (mostly environmental) interests who quickly realized their main causes could be severely undercut by the establishment of nuclear power as a clean and cheap form of energy.
especially with advances in fuel cell and solar technologies
Solar is just about the worst energy-producing technology currently at our disposal. In a global survey of installed power systems, its cost per MWh (p. 122, fig 1) is roughly 10x-15x more than coal. Even wind does significantly better at 3x. Yeah it's great to dream, but solar is probably going to need another 50+ years of research and development before it's able to take over our wide-scale power generation needs economically.
The challenge isn't to write one story. It's to create a machine that can write N stories that remain interesting and fresh, and with less effort and cost than it would take journalists to just write N stories the traditional way.
My bot^H^H^H^H^H^HI have been posting comments to slashdot for years, and people are still modding them interesting, insightful, and informative.
Engineers are ALWAYS right. ALWAYS. Even when (especially when?) something is clearly opinion based.
Ask a non-eng what their favorite color is, you get a simple answer.
Ask an eng the same, you get an answer PLUS reasons why it is superior to other colors.
As I said, I am an engineer. It was only after I noticed behavior like this in other engs that I noticed it in myself as well.
I don't like having that trait (flaw?) and have had to make a conscious effort to be less judgmental. (Yet remaining critical.)
Disclaimer: I am an engineer.
It's not a flaw. It's a difference in how most engineers think compared to the general public. For most people, their favorite color is a personal, internal choice. The color may make them feel warm inside, or it was the color their mother liked to wear, or a color that they strongly associate with many positive events in their life, etc. It's their favorite for reasons which matter only to themselves.
Engineers tend to make choices based on external, practical criteria. What uses does the color have? How does it compare to other colors for different tasks? etc. It's their favorite for reasons which apply to everyone, not just themselves.
So even though you're asking the same question, you're essentially asking two different questions to engineers and non-engineers. Most people parse your question as, "Which color do you feel the most personal affinity to?" Engineers parse it as, "Which color is the most useful?" (And no, asking the engineer the "personal affinity" question won't help - their brains are wired so that a great deal of personal affinity is based on an item's usefulness.)
Since the engineer is basing their choice on external factors, there is one best RIGHT answer, depending on your criteria. (In their defense, their answers do tend to be right. Other people tend to assume the engineer picked a favorite color for similar personal reasons as them, and so interpret the engineer's reply as conceited. They are being judgmental too.)
As for the original topic, personally I think it's this tendency to emphasize external criteria and de-emphasize personal factors which make them more likely to become terrorists. Just look at the Keirsey temperament which engineers fall under - it reads like a recruiting checklist. You'll get someone has technical expertise, has good planning skills, does not weigh heavily the human impact of their actions, and will arrive at a decision and be resolute in its correctness.
Actually, for cities that are 100 - 300 miles apart the train is quicker.
Flying that sort of distance might only take 45 minutes, but there is so much pissing about at either end it ends up taking loads longer. Over here you have to check in an hour early to go through security, then it takes them 30-40 minutes to get the bags out and send them round the conveyor when you land. That makes it close to 3 hours.
The train is quicker until more people start using it. Then some idiots decide airports have too much security, so they start putting bombs on trains instead (rapid deceleration from anything over 100 mph generally has a high probability of fatalities). Then we decide to add the same security checks to trains as we have for planes.
I like trains because they're the most fuel-efficient form of land transport we've invented (cargo ship is cheaper per ton-mile). But from the standpoint of transportation infrastructure, trains are worse than planes because a single incident shuts down that entire transit route. When a plane crashes, you lose the one plane. When a train crashes, it blocks all other trains from traveling the same route.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow the submitter has morphed this into the U.S. being the lead opponent to public disclosure.
The three strikes provision isn't bad per se. It just needs some balance, some reciprocity.
Convicted three times of copyright infringement and you're kicked off the Internet.
Wrongly accuse people of copyright infringement three times and you're banned from ever filing a copyright infringement claim again.
Agreed with the rest of your post, but you're wrong about payroll taxes. Payroll taxes (the employer's portion) are simply matching amounts of what the employee pays for social security and medicare (and a small amount of unemployment). If you're an employee and pay $x in SS and Medicare taxes, your employer also pays an additional $x in SS and Medicare on behalf of you.
Self-employed people pay a self employment tax to match lost payroll tax revenue. Essentially, they pay $2x in SS and Medicare taxes, to match what they and their employer would've paid if they had been employed by the company instead of hired as a freelancer. So the IRS isn't losing any payroll taxes from someone being self-employed.
I believe the crux of the "lost IRS revenue" argument is that capital gains tax is generally less than income tax, and self-employed people are pretty anal about deducting business-related expenses whereas employees aren't (they're supposed to get their company to reimburse them, and the company "deducts" those expenses since they generally only pay taxes on net income: revenue minus expenses).
No, the compression wave always alters the way light travels through it. It's just that normally there's no light going straight through the wave to you, or if there is it's uniform in color and brightness (i.e. blue sky) so altering the direction of the light slightly doesn't produce a visible change.
My guess would be that the sundog by its very nature means sunlight is at the proper angle at that location to be reflected back to you. A compression wave at this location alters the angle of sunlight being reflected off ice crystals . So the large variability in brightness as a function of small changes in angle makes the ripples visible. Kinda like if someone were trying to signal you with a mirror. If you're seeing blue sky reflected in the mirror, shaking the mirror still yields blue sky so you don't notice any change. But if you're seeing the sun reflected in the mirror, shaking the mirror makes it alternately reflect sunlight and blue sky, causing a strobing effect which is easily visible.
MPG is backwards. It tells you how much further you can go on a single gallon, not how much less fuel it'll take to cover a fixed distance. In practical terms, the latter is much more relevant to how people drive. If you buy a car which gets twice the MPG, you do not suddenly start driving twice as far every day. Your miles driven each day will probably remain fixed, so fuel saved is based on the inverse of MPG.
A consequence of this is that MPG exaggerates the benefit of highly fuel-efficient vehicles. 2752 MPG sounds like a lot. But switching from a 25 MPG vehicle to a 50 MPG vehicle saves you more gas than switching from a 50 MPG vehicle to a 2752 MPG vehicle. To cover a distance of 50 miles, the 25 MPG vehicle would consume 2 gallons. The 50 MPG vehicle would consume 1 gallon, for a savings of 1 gallon. The 2752 MPG vehicle would consume 0.018 gallons, for a savings of 0.982 gallons. This is less improvement than the switch from 25 MPG to 50 MPG. Because MPG is inverted, a 10 MPG improvement on a 25 MPG vehicle saves a lot more fuel than a 10 MPG improvement on a 2000 MPG vehicle.
Consequently, the most important thing for reducing overall fuel consumption is to get people out of gas guzzlers and into more fuel efficient vehicles. Stuff like hypermiling vehicles getting >2000 MPG are interesting from an engineering and design standpoint, but they serve little practical use. Even if you could develop a real car which got 2000 MPG, getting a single SUV driver to switch to a Prius would save 3.5x as much fuel as getting a single Prius driver to switch to this new ultra-high MPG vehicle.
This is why most of the rest of the world measures fuel efficiency in liters/100 km. It makes the amount of fuel your car will use for a typical drive pretty obvious, and makes it dirt simple to compare how much fuel you'll save switching to a different vehicle (just subtract the two numbers):
SUV = 16 liters/100 km
sedan = 9.4 liters/100 km
Prius = 4.7 liters/100 km
vehicle in article = 0.085 liters/100 km
Um, if this latest storm was due to wetter and warmer winters, wouldn't it have beeen characterized by excess snow in the mid and upper latitudes, but excess rain in the lower latitudes? Instead what we got with this storm was the snow line extending almost all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Dallas, Texas was buried in a foot of snow, and Atlanta, Georgia picked up a few inches as well. Lake Erie has frozen over for the first time in 14 years.
I mean I can buy the argument that global warming would cause wetter weather and more snow in winter. I can buy the argument that unusual weather like this does not a trend prove (or disprove). But you're citing a study which says warmer temperatures cause excess snowfall, and trying to use it to explain a storm which was notably unusual for its cold temperatures.
It's supposed to make your life better by reducing your costs. The cable company gets extra revenue and thus can lower the amount you have to pay in your monthly service bill.
Unfortunately, nearly all media services in the U.S. are government-licensed monopolies. Without any competition, what ends up happening is the cable company simply pockets the extra revenue instead of passing some of it on to you.
I'm no Palin fan, but that wasn't her doing. That was Ted Stevens' doing. When the Republicans won control of the Senate, he became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee (they decide which bills get funding). Historically, there's almost a p=1.0 correlation between the State whose Senator is chairman of this committee, and which State gets the most per-capita federal spending.
Small businesses pay a lot of employment taxes, even if they aren't profitable. The business has to match the employee's contribution to Social Security and Medicare, and pay into federal and state unemployment funds. These are not necessarily bad things to be paying for, and I'm not arguing that they shouldn't have to pay for these things. But it's simply not true that businesses only pay tax on profits. If the business employs people, it pays employment taxes regardless of profit.
I bought a 4" scope late last year. Two bands on Jupiter were clearly visible. Saturn's rings were also clearly visible. Mars was disappointing - I could barely make out a disk, but I need to get some higher power eyepieces.
Mostly agreed on what you have to say about integration into the U.S.. But the part I've quoted above is a cultural thing. In Asian cultures, apologies are a big deal. In this type of case, the one who created the situation should apologize, regardless of fault or the specifics of the incident. The U.S., being the one doing the spying, was the one who initially created the situation which caused both planes to be there. So in the minds of the Chinese, the U.S. is the party expected to apologize, open and shut case. It's why you hear all the time about Japanese managers and government officials apologizing and stepping down from their posts because something bad happened on their watch, even when you could not reasonably have expected them to have prevented the incident. It's just something that's expected of people in charge.
(The reverse does not apply here. Industrial espionage is the norm in Asia. The Chinese won't consider this something worthy of apologizing to the U.S. for because it was pure espionage, and there was no loss of life. Byzantine unwritten rules like this are part of what makes business and politics in Asia challenging.)
Car and Driver tested just that scenario. At 70 mph and the accelerator floored, a 268 hp Camry came to a full stop in 190 feet (vs 174 feet with no accelerator). It was actually better than a Ford Taurus with no accelerator. So making a controlled stop at full throttle while at speed is very reasonable.
I had a similar experience as you (passenger shoved a windshield heat reflector to my side without me noticing, and it restricted the accelerator's travel so it was half-depressed while I braked). I didn't notice any difference in braking at speed. It was only when I was close to stopped that I noticed it was taking longer than usual to come to a complete stop with the brake depressed the usual amount. So my experience says it just feels a lot worse than it really is. By the time you can feel it, you're traveling slow enough that it while it may take more time to stop completely, it won't take much more distance.
It's a good law, it's just being mis-applied. The copyright statutes were written with "piracy" meaning someone bootlegging your CD, stamping out thousands of copies, and selling them on the street corner. Because you can make a substantial amount of money doing that, the penalties for copyright infringement had to have equally substantial penalties to be successful as a deterrent.
Fast forward to the Internet age, and the content industry is taking laws meant to punish people making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars off of infringement, and using them to punish people trying to get a few songs for free. The penalties are grossly disproportionate to the violation. What we need are new laws and fines governing not-for-profit copyright infringement.
When a country exports raw materials as Canada does, 100% of the revenue goes to that country.
When a country exports value-added manufactured items, a large portion of the revenue goes right back out of the country, to pay for the raw materials and components. Slashdot even had a story on it. In fact, a lot of the money going to China to pay for products manufactured there ends up coming right back to the U.S.
So the difference between the type of trade Canada and China have with the U.S. which you point out actually favors Canada.
Some past companies who partnered with Microsoft (or tried to):
IBM
Spyglass
Stac Electronics
Sun
Sendo
OpenDocument
Good luck, Apple!
China only holds about $800 billion in U.S. Treasury Securities. U.S. GDP was about $14.2 trillion in 2008. U.S.imports from China were $338 billion in 2008. Exports around $70 billion, so trade with China accounted for 2.9% of U.S. GDP. If China were to exercise the "nuclear option" and suddenly dump all the U.S. treasury securities it owns onto the market, and stopped all trade with the U.S., its financial impact would be about 8.5% of U.S. GDP.
China's 2008 GDP was about $4.4 trillion. Their trade with the U.S.at $338+$70 billion accounted for 9.3% of their GDP. So if China were to dump all the U.S. securities and stop all trade with the U.S., they would be hurting their economy more than they would be hurting the U.S. economy.
China needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs China.
I was a hobby film photographer at the time closely following the development of digital cameras in the early 1990s. I can tell you no, the first thing to cross everyone's mid was not the ability to review the picture you just took. Everyone was used to the film workflow process (take picture, develop, print negatives or review slides). Back in those days, just decompressing a 640x480 jpeg took 5-15 seconds on a PC (the processing power required for JPEGs was a big disadvantage vs. GIF at the time). So the digital workflow was similar - look through viewfinder, take photo, camera writes to hard drive/memory card, download to PC, review photos. It was not at all obvious at the time that we'd be able to quickly review photos in the camera immediately after we took them.
The first digital SLRreleased in 1991 followed this workflow model. So did the first consumer-grade digital cameras released in 1994. The first digital camera I can recall which had an LCD to review picutres (not sure if you could preview them with a live feed) was the Casio QV-11 released in 1995. I recall lots of comments from photographers and reviewers about how innovative that concept was (but the camera's crappy resolution and toy lens killed it in the market). You have to remember that back in those days, most LCDs on laptops were greyscale. The few which were color were split-screen passive matrix with poor color reproduction and fidelity. CRTs were vastly superior and still dominated the desktop, so it never occurred to most people that they would want eventually want to review the picture they just took on a LCD built into the camera.
So the Chinese government successfully got you to censor your site from its citizens?
You either have a fundamental misunderstanding of economics, or you're blatantly pretending a corporation doesn't ask itself how much it costs to provide a service. All corporate entities ask themselves both questions: "How much can we get people to pay for this?" and "How much does it cost us to offer this for sale?" The spread between the two per unit is the profit margin. The profit margin times the number of units sold is the profit.
Corporations can increase the money they make by charging customers more as you state, or by decreasing their cost of what it is they are selling. From fundamental economics, simply ratcheting up the price (as you propose corporations do) usually results in sales volume decreasing so that the company actually makes less money, not more. The real money to be made is in lowering the price, not increasing it. Unless you're near market saturation, the increase in sales volume will swamp out the effects of the reduction in profit margin.
Where it starts breaking down is in monopoly, or near-monopoly situations creating an inelastic demand curve. That's where a corporation has so much control of the market that even if they ratchet up the price, the number of units they sell does not go down appreciably. Last-mile utility carriers are a good example. Whether I get my phone/internet service from Verizon, SBC, Speakeasy, whatever, Verizon owns the copper to my business so that company has to contract with Verizon to lease the copper. That gives Verizon total control over the floor price of my phone/internet service. If they decided to ratchet it up, I would have no choice but to pay it since there is no competition where I live.
That's what causes the price disparity and abuses you point out. Not the mere existence of a corporation. Things like basic services and utilities fall into the category of natural monopolies because it makes no economic sense to have more than one set of last-mile copper going into my business. That's when the government has to step in. In most situations, competition between companies creates a better outcome than government intervention. But in certain situations, government intervention yields a better outcome. This is one of those cases where the government approach is better.
I am wondering if Apple has some sort of patent on using multitouch in a UI which is preventing other phones from implementing it without getting a license from them. On the face of it, I'd consider it an obvious invention since the whole reason humans have thumbs is so they can manipulate objects with 2+ digits. But you never know with our crazy software patent system.
The uranium fuel cycle requires refinement of U235 (which also happens to be the first step to making an atomic a bomb) and leads down a path which creates weapons-grade plutonium (an alternate material for making an atomic bomb). The thorium fuel cycle does not have this problem.
Measured by deaths per GW-years of electricity generated (p. 241, fig 7.2.7), nuclear power is the safest form of electricity generation man has invented. And yes, that stat includes Chernobyl. In terms of injuries per GW-years (p. 248, fig 7.3.4), nuclear is about the same as gas, oil, and hydro (coal is the safest). The public perception that nuclear power is dangerous is a myth perpetuated primarily by anti-nuclear and anti-development (mostly environmental) interests who quickly realized their main causes could be severely undercut by the establishment of nuclear power as a clean and cheap form of energy.
Solar is just about the worst energy-producing technology currently at our disposal. In a global survey of installed power systems, its cost per MWh (p. 122, fig 1) is roughly 10x-15x more than coal. Even wind does significantly better at 3x. Yeah it's great to dream, but solar is probably going to need another 50+ years of research and development before it's able to take over our wide-scale power generation needs economically.
FYI, that company makes solar water heating panels. Not solar photovoltaic panels.
My bot^H^H^H^H^H^HI have been posting comments to slashdot for years, and people are still modding them interesting, insightful, and informative.
Disclaimer: I am an engineer.
It's not a flaw. It's a difference in how most engineers think compared to the general public. For most people, their favorite color is a personal, internal choice. The color may make them feel warm inside, or it was the color their mother liked to wear, or a color that they strongly associate with many positive events in their life, etc. It's their favorite for reasons which matter only to themselves.
Engineers tend to make choices based on external, practical criteria. What uses does the color have? How does it compare to other colors for different tasks? etc. It's their favorite for reasons which apply to everyone, not just themselves.
So even though you're asking the same question, you're essentially asking two different questions to engineers and non-engineers. Most people parse your question as, "Which color do you feel the most personal affinity to?" Engineers parse it as, "Which color is the most useful?" (And no, asking the engineer the "personal affinity" question won't help - their brains are wired so that a great deal of personal affinity is based on an item's usefulness.)
Since the engineer is basing their choice on external factors, there is one best RIGHT answer, depending on your criteria. (In their defense, their answers do tend to be right. Other people tend to assume the engineer picked a favorite color for similar personal reasons as them, and so interpret the engineer's reply as conceited. They are being judgmental too.)
As for the original topic, personally I think it's this tendency to emphasize external criteria and de-emphasize personal factors which make them more likely to become terrorists. Just look at the Keirsey temperament which engineers fall under - it reads like a recruiting checklist. You'll get someone has technical expertise, has good planning skills, does not weigh heavily the human impact of their actions, and will arrive at a decision and be resolute in its correctness.
The train is quicker until more people start using it. Then some idiots decide airports have too much security, so they start putting bombs on trains instead (rapid deceleration from anything over 100 mph generally has a high probability of fatalities). Then we decide to add the same security checks to trains as we have for planes.
I like trains because they're the most fuel-efficient form of land transport we've invented (cargo ship is cheaper per ton-mile). But from the standpoint of transportation infrastructure, trains are worse than planes because a single incident shuts down that entire transit route. When a plane crashes, you lose the one plane. When a train crashes, it blocks all other trains from traveling the same route.