Hey, if the Feds are involved, does that mean the 4th Amendment now applies? They need to get a warrant, none of this surreptitious monitoring and demanding ISPs hand over log files based on a fishing expedition?
Just change it so only registered voters can contribute to political campaigns / political groups. If a company wants to spend $100,000 lobbying for a political change, they can just give it to their employees, stress to the employees the importance of contributing it to this effort so the company can survive and they can keep their jobs. If the employees agree and contribute the money, everything is fine. If the employees disagree and spend the money on a new TV, then the company has problems that aren't going to be solved by donating to a political campaign.
I never said that the genders are perfectly equal.
Well then girls doing as well as boys in math could just as easily be interpreted as boys being hamstrung as it could be interpreted as girls no longer being held back.
How does correcting an unfair imbalance equal hamstringing? More attention was paid to boys, and they did better. Now that teachers are giving more time to girls and teaching in a more gender neutral fashion, the scores are becoming more equal. If I give you something that I don't give to others, and then I take some of that away from you in order to more fairly distribute it, I am not hamstringing you.
I dunno if there's hamstringing going on. But girls used to score better than boys on reading and verbal tests under the old system (which you claim discriminated against them). And they still score better than boys under the current system. That would seem to contradict your hypothesis that the genders are equally capable and that the school system has merely gone from being unequal to equal.
Cell phones operate at 800-900 MHz and 1.8-1.9 GHz. Bluetooth operates at 2.4 GHz
Microwave ovens operate at 2.45 GHz because that frequency resonates with water molecules.
While Bluetooth puts out fewer watts, I suspect that a much greater portion of those watts are absorbed by the body than for regular cell phone signals.
Your manager, who is supposed to have all the keys and passwords so the system is not dependent on a single person but has no idea how to actually runs the reactor comes in and demands to be given all of the necessary keys and passwords to the reactor.
Am I hopelessly old fashioned, or are there other people still alive who feel that there's something morally suspect about intending to kill people in the first place?
Lemme invoke Godwin's law and get this over with. If you had a chance to go back and kill Hitler before WWII, would you? There are lots of situations where it's morally ambiguous whether you should kill or not. The only moral paradigm where killing is always wrong is one in which you ignore all consequences, and disallow self-defense.
SUVs are not safer than mid- and full-sized cars. If you read the PDF, you'll see this is primarily due to lack of maneuverability and penchant to roll over, and a higher fatality rate in rollovers. Those increased risk factors more than swamp out any benefit of "passive safety." Yes compact and subcompact cars do worse, but I would argue anyone who could afford an SUV would be buying a mid- or full-size sedan, not a compact or subcompact.
In Quebec, almost all power is hydro. Ontario is a mix of nuclear, hydro, and coal. Many places in the US also use nuclear. France is almost completely nuclear
While the power you're getting may not directly be from fossil fuels, that's not the way the power grid works. A certain level of capacity is generated by always-on power sources such as hydro and nuclear. When additional capacity beyond that is required, in North America it almost always comes from coal.
e.g. Say you plug your electric car in Quebec without an equivalent drop in electricity use elsewhere in your life. The car will take a little more electricity from the hydro plant. The hydro plant now has a little less electricity to send across the grid to a neighboring region. That neighboring region now has a shortfall in electricity that they need to make up, and they'll crank up the coal plant to do it.
So any increase in electricity use results in a nearly 100% corresponding increase in the amount of coal burned regardless of the cleanliness of your local power source. The only way to avoid this is to maintain your total electricity use at a constant level, or to increase the generating capacity of non-coal energy sources.
Life expectancy in France and Italy is only 2.5 and 2 years longer than in the U.S. respectively. Given the age distribution of the population, that probably only translates into a 0.5%-1.5% difference in employment figures. Retirement age seems 2-5 years earlier than in the U.S., which while significant would probably only account for half of the difference (and paradoxically, Italy fares worse than France even though its employment figures are lower). That second link as lots of other interesting stats by the way.
Not that it makes a difference in the overall argument (that none of the EU nations are anywhere close to 35% unemployment). But due to differing definitions of "unemployed" in different countries, perhaps a better measure of overall employment is per capita work force (basically, number of employed workers divided by total population). France and especially Italy do markedly worse by this measure than their unemployment figures would indicate (approx 8% and 11% lower than the U.S.). But it's still nowhere near supporting the initial 35% claim.
The way I see, it, both are inexcusably high, but China uses 2/3 less per person. I would have assumed from the way people go on about it, that China actually create MORE pollution per person, not much, much less.
If you project their emissions levels out to first-world status, they're on route to be much, much dirtier than even the U.S. The fact that their coal plants don't have any emissions controls at all is a pretty good indication of where they're headed. For this reason I never understood why China and India were left off of Kyoto. All the treaty needed to do was set their CO2 quotas at first-world levels. That would've been way higher than what they're currently emitting, giving them lots of room to grow. But it would've been hanging over them as ceiling, thus discouraging the total disregard for air quality they've shown thus far. It's baffling that a treaty which was based on concern for the future would miss such an obvious future development. So I suspect the reasons were political, and not "they're not emitting enough to worry about" as is so commonly given.
They've spent a fortune relocating factories including one of the world's biggest steelworks. They are not going to spend a fortune moving them all back again. They are not going to close the new metro lines. Even some of the temporary measures may have long term effects; people using the new transport networks while their cars are banned may switch permanently. This isn't just window dressing.
While public transport use is definitely a plus, moving the factories is probably a net negative. The factories were probably initially located there for a reason - availability of labor, proximity to customers. Moving them doesn't reduce the pollution, it simply shifts it to a different location. Forcing workers into longer commutes and increasing transport distance to customers causes an overall increase in pollution.
Do the algae release the CO2 when they die? Or does it sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking the carbon with it?
It sinks to the bottom, and gets silted over. Gradually over time it gets converted into oil, which holds the CO2 trapped until someone pumps it out and burns it for energy, releasing the CO2.
I'm buying made in the USA or Canada - first, less pollution in transportation, saves jobs, and (should) be higher quality and safer.
You realize it typically takes less fuel to transport something by container ship from China than it does to truck it from cross-country? Barges are 9x more fuel efficient per ton-mile than trucks, and container ships are even more fuel efficient than barges. If you're on the US or Canadian West coast, stuff coming from China burned less fuel in transport than stuff coming by truck from more than a couple states/provinces over.
The reason is a bit more insidious. Many of those surcharges and fees are imposed by the phone company. They just tack it on at the end with the taxes and government levies to make you think they're all imposed by the government and thus outside the phone company's control. Sprint's customer service may suck, but this is something they've started being truthful about. At the end of my bill, they break up the surcharges into "Sprint surcharges" and "government surcharges". On my latest bill, 75% of the surcharges were Sprint surcharges.
Depends what kind of bus. If it's the big vehicle on wheels, yeah that'd be boring. But if it's, say, a PCI bus, I think the details of how that could happen would be very interesting. Mr. Plum, in the server room, with a motherboard?
The concept of cells and handoffs between cells were also invented in the U.S. by AT&T / Bell Labs in 1947 and 1971 respectively.
The first commercial cell phone network was rolled out in Chicago in 1978 using AMPS (albeit as a trial - full commercial service didn't begin until 1983). Japan was next in 1979. NMT didn't show up until 1981. There appears to have been an earlier cell-based wireless phone system in Finland in 1971, but it didn't have seamless handoffs between cells. I consider handoffs a requirement to qualify as a "cell phone" - if you say handoffs aren't required, then the first mobile phones date to the 1950s.
US and motorola was very late to adopt to cellphones and only started building cellphones when the third generation of technology was used in europe, NMT900.
After this came the digital GSM system that also ran initially on the 900 band. This is when the US started deploying cellphones,
Actually, Motorola made the world's first hand-holdable cell phone in 1973, based on what eventually became AMPS. And as I explained above the U.S. was at the forefront of analog cell phone development. Where the U.S. fell behind was during the switch from analog to digital. The analog network was so built-up and entrenched in the U.S. that there was considerable resistance and lack of frequencies to switch to digital. Japan and Europe, with denser population centers serviceable by fewer digital cells, made the switch to digital first.
though they decided to implement some semi-broken-by-design CDMA crap when the rest of the world had already switched to proper digital GSM.
CDMA has some important bandwidth advantages over TDMA (which GSM is based on). With TDMA (time division multiple access), each operating phone gets a timeslice and so eats up a fixed slice of bandwidth regardless of whether it's transmitting voice or silence. With CDMA (code division multiple access), the orthogonality is in the codes, not in timeslices or frequency, so the phone only uses bandwidth if it's transmitting voice. This gave CDMA enough of an advantage that in the U.S. they (Verizon, Sprint) easily beat out the TDMA networks (AT&T, T-Mobile). This is also why CDMA networks in the U.S. and Japan were able to roll out 3G data speeds years before the GSM networks. The CDMA networks could just transmit data the same way they did voice. The GSM/TDMA networks had to design an entirely new transmission system (HSDPA) to get around the bandwidth limitations.
It's enough of an advantage that UMTS (3GPP or 3GSM), the European successor to GSM, is based on wideband CDMA. So eventually all the GSM networks will be using CDMA. If fact, if your GSM phone has HSDPA, you're already using CDMA for data.
Americans PAY to receive cellphone calls? Can someone confirm that? Do people find this ridiculous, or is this commonly accepted?
The vast majority of American phone plans are a flat rate for a fixed number of minutes, not a per-minute charge. For home phone service, it's usually a flat rate for an unlimited number of minutes (some plans even give unlimited long distance). Apparently, given a choice, people prefer paying the same amount every month instead of a variable amount depending on the calls they make and take. So a "caller pays" system doesn't work since someone with unlimited home service could call 24/7 to someone with a cell phone.
It's one of those "fairness vs. simplicity" things, like no-fault insurance. In this case, simplicity won out. On the flip side, Americans don't need to keep track of which numbers are home or mobile (because calling them costs the same), and we're free to port our home phone number to our cell phone or vice versa when changing service.
Another contributing factor is probably due to cell phones being invented in the U.S. Way back when they were new and phone calls cost like $5/min, there was a "rich bastard" stigma associated with them. The feeling was that if some rich bastard wanted to flaunt his wealth by walking around talking on a cell phone, he damn well better be the one paying for those minutes, not the person who might call him.
The precedent they likely want to use is the WoW / Glider case that we discussed yesterday, if you don't follow the EULA then the copy-to-ram that's part of running the software is apparently a copyright violation.
What if you buy two copies and don't open the second one?
Yes I realize this is a silly thing to do. I'm just pointing out that the copyright violation issue is separate from the EULA issue.
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We tried that. They blamed their drop in sales on piracy and used it as an excuse to get more anti-piracy legislation passed.
Hey, if the Feds are involved, does that mean the 4th Amendment now applies? They need to get a warrant, none of this surreptitious monitoring and demanding ISPs hand over log files based on a fishing expedition?
Just change it so only registered voters can contribute to political campaigns / political groups. If a company wants to spend $100,000 lobbying for a political change, they can just give it to their employees, stress to the employees the importance of contributing it to this effort so the company can survive and they can keep their jobs. If the employees agree and contribute the money, everything is fine. If the employees disagree and spend the money on a new TV, then the company has problems that aren't going to be solved by donating to a political campaign.
Well then girls doing as well as boys in math could just as easily be interpreted as boys being hamstrung as it could be interpreted as girls no longer being held back.
I dunno if there's hamstringing going on. But girls used to score better than boys on reading and verbal tests under the old system (which you claim discriminated against them). And they still score better than boys under the current system. That would seem to contradict your hypothesis that the genders are equally capable and that the school system has merely gone from being unequal to equal.
Cell phones operate at 800-900 MHz and 1.8-1.9 GHz.
Bluetooth operates at 2.4 GHz
Microwave ovens operate at 2.45 GHz because that frequency resonates with water molecules.
While Bluetooth puts out fewer watts, I suspect that a much greater portion of those watts are absorbed by the body than for regular cell phone signals.
Fixed that for you.
Lemme invoke Godwin's law and get this over with. If you had a chance to go back and kill Hitler before WWII, would you? There are lots of situations where it's morally ambiguous whether you should kill or not. The only moral paradigm where killing is always wrong is one in which you ignore all consequences, and disallow self-defense.
Passenger vehicle occupant fatality rate by type of car (PDF warning)
Fatalities per 100,000 registered vehicles:
17.76 Compact Cars
16.87 Compact Pickups
16.85 Subcompact Cars
16.16 Midsize SUVs
13.87 Standard Pickups
12.34 Full-size SUVs
12.16 Full-size Cars
11.49 Midsize Cars
11.09 Minivans
9.34 Large Vans
SUVs are not safer than mid- and full-sized cars. If you read the PDF, you'll see this is primarily due to lack of maneuverability and penchant to roll over, and a higher fatality rate in rollovers. Those increased risk factors more than swamp out any benefit of "passive safety." Yes compact and subcompact cars do worse, but I would argue anyone who could afford an SUV would be buying a mid- or full-size sedan, not a compact or subcompact.
While the power you're getting may not directly be from fossil fuels, that's not the way the power grid works. A certain level of capacity is generated by always-on power sources such as hydro and nuclear. When additional capacity beyond that is required, in North America it almost always comes from coal.
e.g. Say you plug your electric car in Quebec without an equivalent drop in electricity use elsewhere in your life. The car will take a little more electricity from the hydro plant. The hydro plant now has a little less electricity to send across the grid to a neighboring region. That neighboring region now has a shortfall in electricity that they need to make up, and they'll crank up the coal plant to do it.
So any increase in electricity use results in a nearly 100% corresponding increase in the amount of coal burned regardless of the cleanliness of your local power source. The only way to avoid this is to maintain your total electricity use at a constant level, or to increase the generating capacity of non-coal energy sources.
Life expectancy in France and Italy is only 2.5 and 2 years longer than in the U.S. respectively. Given the age distribution of the population, that probably only translates into a 0.5%-1.5% difference in employment figures. Retirement age seems 2-5 years earlier than in the U.S., which while significant would probably only account for half of the difference (and paradoxically, Italy fares worse than France even though its employment figures are lower). That second link as lots of other interesting stats by the way.
Not that it makes a difference in the overall argument (that none of the EU nations are anywhere close to 35% unemployment). But due to differing definitions of "unemployed" in different countries, perhaps a better measure of overall employment is per capita work force (basically, number of employed workers divided by total population). France and especially Italy do markedly worse by this measure than their unemployment figures would indicate (approx 8% and 11% lower than the U.S.). But it's still nowhere near supporting the initial 35% claim.
If you project their emissions levels out to first-world status, they're on route to be much, much dirtier than even the U.S. The fact that their coal plants don't have any emissions controls at all is a pretty good indication of where they're headed. For this reason I never understood why China and India were left off of Kyoto. All the treaty needed to do was set their CO2 quotas at first-world levels. That would've been way higher than what they're currently emitting, giving them lots of room to grow. But it would've been hanging over them as ceiling, thus discouraging the total disregard for air quality they've shown thus far. It's baffling that a treaty which was based on concern for the future would miss such an obvious future development. So I suspect the reasons were political, and not "they're not emitting enough to worry about" as is so commonly given.
While public transport use is definitely a plus, moving the factories is probably a net negative. The factories were probably initially located there for a reason - availability of labor, proximity to customers. Moving them doesn't reduce the pollution, it simply shifts it to a different location. Forcing workers into longer commutes and increasing transport distance to customers causes an overall increase in pollution.
It sinks to the bottom, and gets silted over. Gradually over time it gets converted into oil, which holds the CO2 trapped until someone pumps it out and burns it for energy, releasing the CO2.
Of course algae causes other problems.
You realize it typically takes less fuel to transport something by container ship from China than it does to truck it from cross-country? Barges are 9x more fuel efficient per ton-mile than trucks, and container ships are even more fuel efficient than barges. If you're on the US or Canadian West coast, stuff coming from China burned less fuel in transport than stuff coming by truck from more than a couple states/provinces over.
Or it was an aide who worked handled IT for the PM.
The reason is a bit more insidious. Many of those surcharges and fees are imposed by the phone company. They just tack it on at the end with the taxes and government levies to make you think they're all imposed by the government and thus outside the phone company's control. Sprint's customer service may suck, but this is something they've started being truthful about. At the end of my bill, they break up the surcharges into "Sprint surcharges" and "government surcharges". On my latest bill, 75% of the surcharges were Sprint surcharges.
Depends what kind of bus. If it's the big vehicle on wheels, yeah that'd be boring. But if it's, say, a PCI bus, I think the details of how that could happen would be very interesting. Mr. Plum, in the server room, with a motherboard?
Wireless telephones were invented in the U.S in 1908.
The concept of cells and handoffs between cells were also invented in the U.S. by AT&T / Bell Labs in 1947 and 1971 respectively.
The first commercial cell phone network was rolled out in Chicago in 1978 using AMPS (albeit as a trial - full commercial service didn't begin until 1983). Japan was next in 1979. NMT didn't show up until 1981. There appears to have been an earlier cell-based wireless phone system in Finland in 1971, but it didn't have seamless handoffs between cells. I consider handoffs a requirement to qualify as a "cell phone" - if you say handoffs aren't required, then the first mobile phones date to the 1950s.
Actually, Motorola made the world's first hand-holdable cell phone in 1973, based on what eventually became AMPS. And as I explained above the U.S. was at the forefront of analog cell phone development. Where the U.S. fell behind was during the switch from analog to digital. The analog network was so built-up and entrenched in the U.S. that there was considerable resistance and lack of frequencies to switch to digital. Japan and Europe, with denser population centers serviceable by fewer digital cells, made the switch to digital first.
CDMA has some important bandwidth advantages over TDMA (which GSM is based on). With TDMA (time division multiple access), each operating phone gets a timeslice and so eats up a fixed slice of bandwidth regardless of whether it's transmitting voice or silence. With CDMA (code division multiple access), the orthogonality is in the codes, not in timeslices or frequency, so the phone only uses bandwidth if it's transmitting voice. This gave CDMA enough of an advantage that in the U.S. they (Verizon, Sprint) easily beat out the TDMA networks (AT&T, T-Mobile). This is also why CDMA networks in the U.S. and Japan were able to roll out 3G data speeds years before the GSM networks. The CDMA networks could just transmit data the same way they did voice. The GSM/TDMA networks had to design an entirely new transmission system (HSDPA) to get around the bandwidth limitations.
It's enough of an advantage that UMTS (3GPP or 3GSM), the European successor to GSM, is based on wideband CDMA. So eventually all the GSM networks will be using CDMA. If fact, if your GSM phone has HSDPA, you're already using CDMA for data.
I get the whole Ares -> Mars -> mission to Mars reference, but it's not like the Saturn V went to Saturn.
The vast majority of American phone plans are a flat rate for a fixed number of minutes, not a per-minute charge. For home phone service, it's usually a flat rate for an unlimited number of minutes (some plans even give unlimited long distance). Apparently, given a choice, people prefer paying the same amount every month instead of a variable amount depending on the calls they make and take. So a "caller pays" system doesn't work since someone with unlimited home service could call 24/7 to someone with a cell phone.
It's one of those "fairness vs. simplicity" things, like no-fault insurance. In this case, simplicity won out. On the flip side, Americans don't need to keep track of which numbers are home or mobile (because calling them costs the same), and we're free to port our home phone number to our cell phone or vice versa when changing service.
Another contributing factor is probably due to cell phones being invented in the U.S. Way back when they were new and phone calls cost like $5/min, there was a "rich bastard" stigma associated with them. The feeling was that if some rich bastard wanted to flaunt his wealth by walking around talking on a cell phone, he damn well better be the one paying for those minutes, not the person who might call him.
I guess now we know what that concave indentation on the side of the Apple logo is.
What if you buy two copies and don't open the second one?
Yes I realize this is a silly thing to do. I'm just pointing out that the copyright violation issue is separate from the EULA issue.
If the tax rate is 100%, federal revenue is a low amount (the Soviets tried this).
If the tax rate is somewhere in between, federal revenue is a high amount (we do this).
If the relationship between tax rate and revenue is continuous and you connect those three points with a curve, somewhere in between 0% and 100% taxation, there's a maximum.
If the current tax rate is below that maximum, cutting taxes will decrease federal revenue.
If the current tax rate is above that maximum, cutting taxes will increase federal revenue, as counter-intuitive as it sounds.