Totally unscientific survey: my 4-year old daughter prefers to browse YouTube than television. Admittedly she tends to follow pop videos. But she prefers the mouse to the TV remote.
If it's true that people use YouTube to watch clips from TV programs, then Viacom are even stupider than I thought...
That's actually a very important point. Viacom's old business model is based on controlling what you watch and when you watch it (pre-scheduled TV).
People (including your daughter) prefer to control what they watch. They want to watch what they want, when they want. VCRs, DVRs, and now YouTube and downloadable video are all shifting this control from the copyright holder to the viewer. The big media companies have opposed all of these improvements to viewer convenience because it represents a loss of control for them.
At some point they, and our legal system, will have to come to grips with this. Which should take precedence - viewer convenience, or media control? That's the real issue here, not copyright. If the media companies were making strides in delivering content at the viewers' convenience, then copyright would be the issue. But for the most part they're not, so copyright just becomes a means to try to retain control. They initially opposed VCRs for this reason, but once the court forced them to get comfortable with the idea that people could "own" copies of their copyrighted works, they made a fortune.
No, actually it does not scale proportionately. The fuel requirements grow exponentially with the mass of the payload for all self-propelled spacecraft due to the rocket equation.
I double-checked the rocket equation before I posted. It says fuel requirement grows exponentially with desired delta-v, but is proportional to payload mass (approximation when fuel mass >> payload mass).
Then there's the situation of the Hubble Telescope. That telescope would still be a floating piece of space junk if not for the repairs carried out by the manned space program.
"I can say unequivocally, that if it weren't for the human space program, Hubble would be a piece of orbiting space junk." --Ed Weiler, Chief Scientist, Hubble
If there were no manned space program, NASA could've easily afforded to build and put a dozen HSTs in orbit.
At the end of the day, humans are more adaptable to situations, and can do the job better than automated systems.
The question isn't what can do the job better, the question is what can do the job most efficiently: i.e. effectiveness / cost. An unmanned Mars mission designed to return samples would probably also need to return a hundred kg in support equipment. A manned Mars mission would probably need to return several tons of equipment, people, and active life support equipment. Fuel requirements scale proportionately to payload weight so you've just increased the mission cost by one if not two orders of magnitude. Sure a person could do the job better, but is it really worth paying 10x-100x more for something a little better?
At this point in time, putting people in space is mostly a symbolic gesture, meant to inspire the population (or at least give them a sense of superiority over other nations). As much as we want the romantic notion of people traveling to the other planets, the technology just isn't there yet. Should we continue pouring most of our money into inflated mission costs just so we can say we have people up there? Or should we concentrate our money on cost-effectively experimenting and improving technology which could eventually be used to get people out to the planets and stars?
Nobody wants to kill off manned space travel. The goal of even an unmanned space program is to pave the way for people eventually going out there. What the anti-manned program people want is an increased emphasis on cost-effective research and experimental technology, and less on symbolic gestures. IMHO there is substantial PR value in having some sort of manned space program. A lot of people working in astronautics and the space program today wouldn't be there if there hadn't been a manned program that inspired them as a kid. But the NASA budget currently 3:1 in favor of manned space travel needs to swing the other way if we're really serious about developing space travel technology.
Ultimately the government has the final say. All those cable TV, DSL, and fiber wires need to go through public utility easements for the system to be feasible. If the government really wanted to impose network neutrality it could simply say, "Either make it neutral, or in all future projects you'll have to buy access rights from every individual property owner in order to string up your cable, no more access to public easements."
True, however a significant difference is that far more of US debt (especially government debt) is held overseas. It's even still increasing, which finances the trade deficit. If/when more countries move away from a pure dollar peg that will hurt the US economy significantly.
If you're worried about debt owed to foreigners (again, in proportion to GDP), the U.S. is doing much better than pretty much all of Europe. The U.S. would need less than a year's worth of GDP to pay off all its foreign debt. Most of Europe would need 1.5 to 4 years.
I would argue it's kind of a meaningless statistic since it makes a xenophobic country with no foreign contact at all look peachy, while a country with lots of rich and beneficial foreign trade looks bad (prolly the reason why EU nations have so much "foreign" debt). But for some reason people keep pointing to it as Yet Another Reason the U.S. is supposedly going down the toilet. If you look at the amount of foreign trade each country does (normalized to the size of their economy), the U.S. is way down near the bottom. In other words, the U.S. economy is one of the least dependent on foreign trade in the world. That its trade deficit reaches dollar figures which would bankrupt most nations despite this is a testament to how big the U.S. economy is, not how weak it is.
There are some that would argue that the US is already broke. The creditors just hadn't started calling yet. But they are now.
As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. debt situation is about the same as Germany, France, and Canada, and is considerably better than Japan and Italy's. It's a common misconception that the U.S. is badly in debt. For some reason people keep looking at the raw dollar values. In raw dollars, the U.S. has huge economic figures because its population is significantly larger than all the other G8 nations, and its per worker productivity is the highest in the world. Once you account for this (by dividing by GDP), its debt load is pretty much in the middle of the other G8 nations.
Take a look at the S&P 500 over the past couple months, then zoom out and compare it to 2001. Yes, friend, right here is the abyss. Not later - right now.
While you're doing that, you might want to look at the FTSE 100 (UK), the DAX (Germany), and the CAC 40 (France). They all do pretty much the same thing as the S&P 500.
While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called 'dirty bomb' -- a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material -- it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast.
So the primary hazard is mass panic.. exactly the same as a (uranium based) radiological dispersion device (dirty bomb) then. Also not too dissimilar to what the US have been doing for the last 5 years - shooting uranium all over the place.
No, the primary hazard is mass panic disproportionate to the actual risk. Remember, the primary goal of terrorism is terror, physical damage is a secondary (sometimes even a non-) factor. So an attack which doesn't do much real damage (and thus is cheap to carry out) but causes widespread mass panic is ideal from a terrorist's perspective. A yellowcake "dirty bomb" is a good possible candidate for that. DU shells so far have been ho-hummed by the public.
If we were making decisions about radioactivity based on real risk, the first thing we'd do is shut down all the coal power plants. Not only do they release more radiation than nearly anything else we do, but they release it in the most dangerous form - microscopic particles in the atmosphere which can be breathed in and lodge in our lung tissues where the alpha and beta decay processes can cause maximum damage.
A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could release as much as 5.2 tons/year of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons/year of thorium. The radioactive emission from this coal power plant is 100 times greater than a comparable nuclear power plant with the same electrical output; including processing output, the coal power plant's radiation output is over 3 times greater.
As long as it has crumple zones (remember---what you really care about is the acceleration of your own body (which gives the force on you), and that's inversely proportional to the distance you have to travel, given an initial and final velocity), I don't see how it's any less safer than a bulkier car with identical length of crumple zone.
The physics of collisions dictates that the final velocity is weighted in favor of the larger mass (momentum balance). So the larger mass experiences a small velocity change, while the smaller mass "bounces" and actually experiences a greater velocity change than its initial speed relative to the road. So if the crumple zones were identical in length, the bulkier car experiences smaller accelerations than the smaller car. (This is for vehicle-vehicle collisions. Vehicle mass does not matter as much in vehicle-barrier collisions since most barriers are designed so their effective mass is >>> than any vehicle.)
The problem with mpg is that it's inverted in terms of gas saved. Pretty obvious if you think of it as a fraction: miles / gallon with the gallons on the bottom, meaning any comparison wrt gallons consumed is inverted. That is, as the amount of gas consumed gets smaller, the any changes in gas consumed are exaggerated and appear bigger.
e.g. say I have a 100 mile daily commute. If my SUV got 12.5 mpg and I switched to a sedan which gets 25 mpg, I went from burning 8 gallons per 100 miles to 4 gallons - a savings of 4 gallons.
If I then switch from a the sedan to a hybrid which gets 50 mpg, well 25-12.5 = 12.5, while 50-25 = 25, so you'd think I'd be doing twice as well switching sedan -> hybrid as I did switching from SUV -> sedan, right?
Unfortunately no. The hybrid uses 2 gallons on the route, meaning I've gone from burning 4 gallons per 100 miles to burning 2 gallons - a savings of just 2 gallons. In fact, just based on this simple example, you can see that short of going purely electric, it's impossible to save as much gas / money as you did switching from the SUV to a sedan. 8 -> 4 was a 4 gallon savings. To save another 4 gallons, you would need to go from 4 -> 0.
Put another way, say you changed your driving habits in each vehicle and saved 1 gallon during the commute. That is, you saved about $4.10 in gas per day for each of the three vehicles. In terms of mpg, the mileage change looks like this:
So even though the amount of gas and money saved in each car was exactly the same, at first glance at the mpg figures it looks like the hybrid did 28 times better than the SUV. It really didn't, it's an illusion created by having gallons in the denominator of mpg. A 1.8 mpg improvement in an SUV is equal in fuel savings to a 50 mpg improvement in a hybrid.
Most of the rest of the world lists fuel economy in terms of liters per 100 km for this reason. If we compared all the above in gallons per 100 miles:
Changing cars: SUV -> Sedan = 8 -> 4 = improvement of 4 gphm Sedan -> Hybrid = 4 -> 2 = improvement of 2 gphm Hybrid -> Microcar = 2 -> 0.425 = improvement of 1.575 gphm Microcar -> SAE winner = 0.425 -> 0.032 = 0.393 gphm
Changing driving habits: SUV = 8 -> 7 = improvement of 1 gphm Sedan = 4 -> 3 = improvement of 1 gphm Hybrid = 2 -> 1 = improvement of 1 gphm
It's similar to the situation with pollution controls on newer cars. The cleaner the newer cars are, the less benefit you get from making them even more cleaner. Your emphasis should instead shift to getting the older dirtier cars off the road.
You just know when Viacom finishes sifting through the logs, their "X% of the videos were illegal" claim will include every excerpt, every instructional/educational clip, every re-mix, and every satire clip, even though such things are supposed to be fair use.
IIRC, while the sequence of notes is out of copyright the design and layout of the page on which they're printed isn't. So technically the publisher could well be in the right. IANAL, though.
So if you read the sheet music, and transcribed the notes into music publishing software like Lilypond, the copyright wouldn't apply anymore, right?
I bought a cheap (~$400) used tablet PC for this. The 12.1" screen is a bit small, but since I specifically got one with 1400x1050 resolution, a full page of sheet music is easily readable. It's got several programmable buttons next to the screen which I've mapped to page forward / page back / next song / previous song. Ideally I'd like some sort of USB foot switch (I've tried a mouse, but it's too easy to click on something or pop up a menu), but for now I can live with tapping a button to turn pages.
The biggest problem is battery life. It only lasts about 3 hours, and a practice session can easily exceed that. Other issues are navigation between songs (I use the pen, but it still feels a bit clumsy), and inability to write on the music to make notes.
I think a 2-page e-paper sheet music viewer would do really well. Size is not an issue so it won't have to have all the electronics crammed into a paperback book size. Make it the size of most music books, with good navigation and markup capabilities, and able to view scanned sheet music, and I think just about every music student out there would buy one. My music books tend to fall apart quickly compared to regular books because I often have to turn the pages quickly and violently, and I'm constantly cracking the spine to try to get it to stay on the current page.
After having lived in Saudi Arabia for a year (admittedly 14 years ago, but I doubt the view has changed hugely since then) I can tell you that the primary gripe the population have there is the U.S. propping up an unpopular monarchy that is mismanaging and/or stealing the country's wealth. The U.S. could make friends of the Saudi people by simply telling the Saudi government that they're on their own. Then the Saudi royal family would need to either make the people happy, or prepare to be overthrown as soon as the last shipment of U.S. supplied weapons started rusting.
It's never that simple. I'm not trying to excuse the terrible things the U.S. has done (or is doing). But part of the problem is people's unrealistic expectations of the U.S.. You say the Saudi people blame (some of) their problems on the U.S. for propping up the current Saudi government. The Cuban people blame their problems on the U.S. for refusing to have any contact (political or economic) with their government. It can't be both, which is it? Many people who are mad at the U.S. for meddling with the internal affairs of certain countries (e.g. Iraq), also get mad at the U.S. for not meddling with the internal affairs of other countries (e.g. Sudan).
In order to exist, any nation must advance policies which are advantageous to itself. It is irrational and unrealistic to expect otherwise. A country which regularly advances policies disadvantageous to itself, or wastes resources chasing policies which provide it no advantage, will soon cease to exist. In other words, you cannot judge another's actions based on what you would like them to do. You must judge them based on what you would do if you were in their place. Or put another way, you can't fault someone for doing what they want to do instead of doing what you want them to do.
The U.S. is heavily dependent on petroleum imports to drive its economy. It is unrealistic to expect it to unilaterally stop seeking friendly relations with the largest petroleum-producing country in the world. Sucks, but that's just the way it currently is. As long as the Saudi government manages to not offend the moral sensibilities of U.S. citizens too much, that government will continue to have U.S. support. If the Saudi people do not like their current government, they need to vote / rebel / whatever and replace it. If that new government does not offend the moral sensibilities of U.S. citizens too much, it too will enjoy U.S. support. In fact, if the rebels advocate a socio-political structure similar to a Western democracy, I'm pretty sure you'll find that the U.S. and other Western nations will do what they can politically to protect those rebels from the current Saudi government.
I'd also like to suggest that perhaps your assessment of what is best for the Saudi people is wrong. You seem to have concluded that if the Saudi government has no external support, it will collapse thus allowing the Saudi people to replace it with something better. This runs counter to current Western political thinking. Governments which collapse on their own tend to send their country into a downward spiral of civil war, mass refugee exodus, and increasingly despotic dictators. Modern Western nations seem to have decided the best way to effect progressive change in other countries is to improve their economic conditions. If it works, eventually enough of that money filters through to the regular populace that they have enough economic clout to demand progressive change (they end up controlling enough of the country's economy that the government can't wantonly jail everyone espousing change). If it doesn't work, the populace gets outraged enough at the economic disparity to rebel and overthrow their current government. Either way, the government changes.
Anyhow, I don't know if the above methods are in fact the best methods, just that Western nations currently seem to th
Most commercial aircraft can't land at their fully-loaded takeoff weight. They need to dump fuel to lower their weight prior to an emergency landing. A full dump can require upwards of an hour. Many of the smaller planes can't dump fuel, and may need to fly around for a few hours to burn enough off prior to an emergency landing. Taking engine control out of the hands of the pilot mid-flight is a really bad idea.
Seriously - what's wrong with wanting e-mail, IM, VoIP or other packets to be ranked as higher priority? So this device the guy is fronting can detect encrypted P2P traffic - is that what is now equal to "gagging the Internet?"
What you're describing is prioritizing (QoS, bandwidth shaping). Unfortunately, Comcast, Bell, et al have been engaging in unnecessary traffic throttling, and lying about it saying that they were merely prioritizing. So it's understandable that people are now getting upset any time they hear that prioritizing is going on. It could be just prioritizing. Or it could be another lie to take your money without providing you the service (bandwidth) you contracted and paid for.
It's that governments need to realize that their decisions have consequences.
But businesses have consequences to their decisions, as well.
The difference is businesses are generally not in control of their environment. They don't need to be taught that their decisions have consequences - they already know it and can never forget it. If their budget is short one quarter, they have to make adjustments to compensate for it, taking into consideration all the consequences that budget-tightening has.
Government on the other hand is in control of their environment. They frequently make decisions based on the assumption that their subjects are captive. Have a budget shortfall? Just raise property taxes. It's not like people can move their houses, right? So it's relatively easy for a government to get into the mindset of making decisions with the assumption that those decisions will have no consequences.
It's like the relationship between gamers and online game developers. Gamers know everything they do within the game will have consequences. That's just the nature of their state of being. The developers OTOH will frequently start thinking that their players are a captive audience and that they can tweak their game however they feel like. Then one day they tweak the wrong thing and players quit in droves, and they learn that their decisions have consequences too.
Sure, they could just shut them all down to "punish" the states,
That assumes the situation is zero-sum. In a zero-sum game, every winner has a corresponding loser. Economics is not zero-sum. It is positive sum. When two parties make a good economic transaction, it is mutually beneficial and the individual net worth of both parties increases. Essentially they create wealth out of nothing (it's really coming from improved economic efficiency and distribution - kind of the opposite of entropy).
The common example is a chicken farmer and a cow farmer who live next to each other. The chicken farmer has more eggs than he knows what to do with. The cow farmer has more milk than he can use. One day, they look at each other, and agree to swap a dozen eggs for a pail of milk. The total amount of goods in the system (number of eggs + amount of milk) remains the same. But their net value increases because now the chicken farmer has something to wash down the eggs he eats, and the cow farmer has something solid to eat. To the chicken farmer, the pail of milk is worth more than a dozen eggs. For the cow farmer, the dozen eggs are worth more than a pail of milk.
So if Amazon were to make a sound business decision to move their distribution center out of a state, the "punishment" for that state is outweighed by the "reward" reaped by the receiving state and Amazon for making the move. Businesses already know this so make decisions that optimize their economic situation. Government often forgets this, and frequently makes decisions which end up harming their economic situation because they often assume their constituents are captive and thus they fail to consider the consequences.
Where is the accountability for this kind of thing? Is it a matter of the information not being readily available, or is it just that people don't bother to do the research and find out just who is lining their leaders' pockets?
You get a chance to hold them accountable in November. But for some reason everyone always figures their Congressman or Senator is just fine, it's all the other ones who are corrupt.
And wondering if you're affected, the compromised PINs seem to have been used at ATMs in 7-Eleven stores. Reposting here since the summary didn't mention it and it was buried near the end of the article.
Citibank emphasizes that customers aren't responsible for fraudulent withdrawals. But the bank won't say how many consumers had their information stolen in the attack. Court documents suggest the breach is limited to those who made withdrawals during the period that the server was actively compromised. But the bank won't reveal what that period was.
Also unclear is who was responsible for the server that was attacked, and why PIN codes, which are supposed to be transmitted only in encrypted form, were vulnerable. An FBI affidavit in the case blames a Citibank-owned server responsible for processing transactions from 7-Eleven convenience stores. But Citibank blames an unnamed "third party" transaction processing firm.
Take a lesson from the idiots. Many times I have seen/.r's mocking end users for using the search feature on their homepage to get to another website, instead of using the address bar. I don't find that feature idiotic at all, and I use that behavior myself.
When I need to go to a new site for a financial transaction (e.g. opening a new bank account), I always get there via a Google search instead of typing it directly. If I enter the address directly and make a subtle typo, I could end up at some scammer's site made to look like the real thing so they can steal my personal info. If I go through Google and make a typo, Google usually suggests the correct name. Even when it doesn't, I can usually tell by the search results that I've made a typo.
The volumetric comparison is even more compelling. 163 pounds of uranium is slightly more than one gallon. And if you reprocessed you could theoretically extract 10x as much energy.
Re:average daily temperature
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Water Ice On Mars
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· Score: 5, Funny
Could we have this important information in units used by, I don't know, the rest of the world?
Hah! With this announcement, NASA has predicated that Fahrenheit is now used on the surface of two worlds, thus re-establishing its dominance over that other temperature unit which is only used in part of one world. We will wrest control of this universe back from you metric heathens, even if we have to do it one planet at a time!
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If "gatekeepers" are the problem, what you should be asking for are quotas on managers and HR, not on scientists and engineers.
That's actually a very important point. Viacom's old business model is based on controlling what you watch and when you watch it (pre-scheduled TV).
People (including your daughter) prefer to control what they watch. They want to watch what they want, when they want. VCRs, DVRs, and now YouTube and downloadable video are all shifting this control from the copyright holder to the viewer. The big media companies have opposed all of these improvements to viewer convenience because it represents a loss of control for them.
At some point they, and our legal system, will have to come to grips with this. Which should take precedence - viewer convenience, or media control? That's the real issue here, not copyright. If the media companies were making strides in delivering content at the viewers' convenience, then copyright would be the issue. But for the most part they're not, so copyright just becomes a means to try to retain control. They initially opposed VCRs for this reason, but once the court forced them to get comfortable with the idea that people could "own" copies of their copyrighted works, they made a fortune.
I double-checked the rocket equation before I posted. It says fuel requirement grows exponentially with desired delta-v, but is proportional to payload mass (approximation when fuel mass >> payload mass).
Hubble cost about $2.5 billion to build and launch.
The Shuttle costs $1.3 billion per launch at the rate of ~7 launches a year.
If there were no manned space program, NASA could've easily afforded to build and put a dozen HSTs in orbit.
The question isn't what can do the job better, the question is what can do the job most efficiently: i.e. effectiveness / cost. An unmanned Mars mission designed to return samples would probably also need to return a hundred kg in support equipment. A manned Mars mission would probably need to return several tons of equipment, people, and active life support equipment. Fuel requirements scale proportionately to payload weight so you've just increased the mission cost by one if not two orders of magnitude. Sure a person could do the job better, but is it really worth paying 10x-100x more for something a little better?
At this point in time, putting people in space is mostly a symbolic gesture, meant to inspire the population (or at least give them a sense of superiority over other nations). As much as we want the romantic notion of people traveling to the other planets, the technology just isn't there yet. Should we continue pouring most of our money into inflated mission costs just so we can say we have people up there? Or should we concentrate our money on cost-effectively experimenting and improving technology which could eventually be used to get people out to the planets and stars?
Nobody wants to kill off manned space travel. The goal of even an unmanned space program is to pave the way for people eventually going out there. What the anti-manned program people want is an increased emphasis on cost-effective research and experimental technology, and less on symbolic gestures. IMHO there is substantial PR value in having some sort of manned space program. A lot of people working in astronautics and the space program today wouldn't be there if there hadn't been a manned program that inspired them as a kid. But the NASA budget currently 3:1 in favor of manned space travel needs to swing the other way if we're really serious about developing space travel technology.
FISA represents a shift of power from the people to the government. So politicians are more for it than the general population.
Ultimately the government has the final say. All those cable TV, DSL, and fiber wires need to go through public utility easements for the system to be feasible. If the government really wanted to impose network neutrality it could simply say, "Either make it neutral, or in all future projects you'll have to buy access rights from every individual property owner in order to string up your cable, no more access to public easements."
If you're worried about debt owed to foreigners (again, in proportion to GDP), the U.S. is doing much better than pretty much all of Europe. The U.S. would need less than a year's worth of GDP to pay off all its foreign debt. Most of Europe would need 1.5 to 4 years.
I would argue it's kind of a meaningless statistic since it makes a xenophobic country with no foreign contact at all look peachy, while a country with lots of rich and beneficial foreign trade looks bad (prolly the reason why EU nations have so much "foreign" debt). But for some reason people keep pointing to it as Yet Another Reason the U.S. is supposedly going down the toilet. If you look at the amount of foreign trade each country does (normalized to the size of their economy), the U.S. is way down near the bottom. In other words, the U.S. economy is one of the least dependent on foreign trade in the world. That its trade deficit reaches dollar figures which would bankrupt most nations despite this is a testament to how big the U.S. economy is, not how weak it is.
As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. debt situation is about the same as Germany, France, and Canada, and is considerably better than Japan and Italy's. It's a common misconception that the U.S. is badly in debt. For some reason people keep looking at the raw dollar values. In raw dollars, the U.S. has huge economic figures because its population is significantly larger than all the other G8 nations, and its per worker productivity is the highest in the world. Once you account for this (by dividing by GDP), its debt load is pretty much in the middle of the other G8 nations.
While you're doing that, you might want to look at the FTSE 100 (UK), the DAX (Germany), and the CAC 40 (France). They all do pretty much the same thing as the S&P 500.
No, the primary hazard is mass panic disproportionate to the actual risk. Remember, the primary goal of terrorism is terror, physical damage is a secondary (sometimes even a non-) factor. So an attack which doesn't do much real damage (and thus is cheap to carry out) but causes widespread mass panic is ideal from a terrorist's perspective. A yellowcake "dirty bomb" is a good possible candidate for that. DU shells so far have been ho-hummed by the public.
If we were making decisions about radioactivity based on real risk, the first thing we'd do is shut down all the coal power plants. Not only do they release more radiation than nearly anything else we do, but they release it in the most dangerous form - microscopic particles in the atmosphere which can be breathed in and lodge in our lung tissues where the alpha and beta decay processes can cause maximum damage.
The physics of collisions dictates that the final velocity is weighted in favor of the larger mass (momentum balance). So the larger mass experiences a small velocity change, while the smaller mass "bounces" and actually experiences a greater velocity change than its initial speed relative to the road. So if the crumple zones were identical in length, the bulkier car experiences smaller accelerations than the smaller car. (This is for vehicle-vehicle collisions. Vehicle mass does not matter as much in vehicle-barrier collisions since most barriers are designed so their effective mass is >>> than any vehicle.)
The problem with mpg is that it's inverted in terms of gas saved. Pretty obvious if you think of it as a fraction: miles / gallon with the gallons on the bottom, meaning any comparison wrt gallons consumed is inverted. That is, as the amount of gas consumed gets smaller, the any changes in gas consumed are exaggerated and appear bigger.
e.g. say I have a 100 mile daily commute. If my SUV got 12.5 mpg and I switched to a sedan which gets 25 mpg, I went from burning 8 gallons per 100 miles to 4 gallons - a savings of 4 gallons.
If I then switch from a the sedan to a hybrid which gets 50 mpg, well 25-12.5 = 12.5, while 50-25 = 25, so you'd think I'd be doing twice as well switching sedan -> hybrid as I did switching from SUV -> sedan, right?
Unfortunately no. The hybrid uses 2 gallons on the route, meaning I've gone from burning 4 gallons per 100 miles to burning 2 gallons - a savings of just 2 gallons. In fact, just based on this simple example, you can see that short of going purely electric, it's impossible to save as much gas / money as you did switching from the SUV to a sedan. 8 -> 4 was a 4 gallon savings. To save another 4 gallons, you would need to go from 4 -> 0.
Put another way, say you changed your driving habits in each vehicle and saved 1 gallon during the commute. That is, you saved about $4.10 in gas per day for each of the three vehicles. In terms of mpg, the mileage change looks like this:
SUV - 12.5 mpg -> 14.3 mpg (1.8 mpg improvement)
Sedan - 25 mpg -> 33 mpg (8 mpg improvement)
Hybrid - 50 mpg -> 100 mpg (50 mpg improvement)
So even though the amount of gas and money saved in each car was exactly the same, at first glance at the mpg figures it looks like the hybrid did 28 times better than the SUV. It really didn't, it's an illusion created by having gallons in the denominator of mpg. A 1.8 mpg improvement in an SUV is equal in fuel savings to a 50 mpg improvement in a hybrid.
Most of the rest of the world lists fuel economy in terms of liters per 100 km for this reason. If we compared all the above in gallons per 100 miles:
SUV = 8 gphm
Sedan = 4 gphm
Hybrid = 2 gphm
Microcar (235 mpg) = 0.425 gphm
3145 mpg = 0.032 gphm
Changing cars:
SUV -> Sedan = 8 -> 4 = improvement of 4 gphm
Sedan -> Hybrid = 4 -> 2 = improvement of 2 gphm
Hybrid -> Microcar = 2 -> 0.425 = improvement of 1.575 gphm
Microcar -> SAE winner = 0.425 -> 0.032 = 0.393 gphm
Changing driving habits:
SUV = 8 -> 7 = improvement of 1 gphm
Sedan = 4 -> 3 = improvement of 1 gphm
Hybrid = 2 -> 1 = improvement of 1 gphm
It's similar to the situation with pollution controls on newer cars. The cleaner the newer cars are, the less benefit you get from making them even more cleaner. Your emphasis should instead shift to getting the older dirtier cars off the road.
You just know when Viacom finishes sifting through the logs, their "X% of the videos were illegal" claim will include every excerpt, every instructional/educational clip, every re-mix, and every satire clip, even though such things are supposed to be fair use.
So if you read the sheet music, and transcribed the notes into music publishing software like Lilypond, the copyright wouldn't apply anymore, right?
What's needed is some sort of OCR software that will convert scanned sheet music into Lilypond format.
I bought a cheap (~$400) used tablet PC for this. The 12.1" screen is a bit small, but since I specifically got one with 1400x1050 resolution, a full page of sheet music is easily readable. It's got several programmable buttons next to the screen which I've mapped to page forward / page back / next song / previous song. Ideally I'd like some sort of USB foot switch (I've tried a mouse, but it's too easy to click on something or pop up a menu), but for now I can live with tapping a button to turn pages.
The biggest problem is battery life. It only lasts about 3 hours, and a practice session can easily exceed that. Other issues are navigation between songs (I use the pen, but it still feels a bit clumsy), and inability to write on the music to make notes.
I think a 2-page e-paper sheet music viewer would do really well. Size is not an issue so it won't have to have all the electronics crammed into a paperback book size. Make it the size of most music books, with good navigation and markup capabilities, and able to view scanned sheet music, and I think just about every music student out there would buy one. My music books tend to fall apart quickly compared to regular books because I often have to turn the pages quickly and violently, and I'm constantly cracking the spine to try to get it to stay on the current page.
It's never that simple. I'm not trying to excuse the terrible things the U.S. has done (or is doing). But part of the problem is people's unrealistic expectations of the U.S.. You say the Saudi people blame (some of) their problems on the U.S. for propping up the current Saudi government. The Cuban people blame their problems on the U.S. for refusing to have any contact (political or economic) with their government. It can't be both, which is it? Many people who are mad at the U.S. for meddling with the internal affairs of certain countries (e.g. Iraq), also get mad at the U.S. for not meddling with the internal affairs of other countries (e.g. Sudan).
In order to exist, any nation must advance policies which are advantageous to itself. It is irrational and unrealistic to expect otherwise. A country which regularly advances policies disadvantageous to itself, or wastes resources chasing policies which provide it no advantage, will soon cease to exist. In other words, you cannot judge another's actions based on what you would like them to do. You must judge them based on what you would do if you were in their place. Or put another way, you can't fault someone for doing what they want to do instead of doing what you want them to do.
The U.S. is heavily dependent on petroleum imports to drive its economy. It is unrealistic to expect it to unilaterally stop seeking friendly relations with the largest petroleum-producing country in the world. Sucks, but that's just the way it currently is. As long as the Saudi government manages to not offend the moral sensibilities of U.S. citizens too much, that government will continue to have U.S. support. If the Saudi people do not like their current government, they need to vote / rebel / whatever and replace it. If that new government does not offend the moral sensibilities of U.S. citizens too much, it too will enjoy U.S. support. In fact, if the rebels advocate a socio-political structure similar to a Western democracy, I'm pretty sure you'll find that the U.S. and other Western nations will do what they can politically to protect those rebels from the current Saudi government.
I'd also like to suggest that perhaps your assessment of what is best for the Saudi people is wrong. You seem to have concluded that if the Saudi government has no external support, it will collapse thus allowing the Saudi people to replace it with something better. This runs counter to current Western political thinking. Governments which collapse on their own tend to send their country into a downward spiral of civil war, mass refugee exodus, and increasingly despotic dictators. Modern Western nations seem to have decided the best way to effect progressive change in other countries is to improve their economic conditions. If it works, eventually enough of that money filters through to the regular populace that they have enough economic clout to demand progressive change (they end up controlling enough of the country's economy that the government can't wantonly jail everyone espousing change). If it doesn't work, the populace gets outraged enough at the economic disparity to rebel and overthrow their current government. Either way, the government changes.
Anyhow, I don't know if the above methods are in fact the best methods, just that Western nations currently seem to th
Most commercial aircraft can't land at their fully-loaded takeoff weight. They need to dump fuel to lower their weight prior to an emergency landing. A full dump can require upwards of an hour. Many of the smaller planes can't dump fuel, and may need to fly around for a few hours to burn enough off prior to an emergency landing. Taking engine control out of the hands of the pilot mid-flight is a really bad idea.
What you're describing is prioritizing (QoS, bandwidth shaping). Unfortunately, Comcast, Bell, et al have been engaging in unnecessary traffic throttling, and lying about it saying that they were merely prioritizing. So it's understandable that people are now getting upset any time they hear that prioritizing is going on. It could be just prioritizing. Or it could be another lie to take your money without providing you the service (bandwidth) you contracted and paid for.
The difference is businesses are generally not in control of their environment. They don't need to be taught that their decisions have consequences - they already know it and can never forget it. If their budget is short one quarter, they have to make adjustments to compensate for it, taking into consideration all the consequences that budget-tightening has.
Government on the other hand is in control of their environment. They frequently make decisions based on the assumption that their subjects are captive. Have a budget shortfall? Just raise property taxes. It's not like people can move their houses, right? So it's relatively easy for a government to get into the mindset of making decisions with the assumption that those decisions will have no consequences.
It's like the relationship between gamers and online game developers. Gamers know everything they do within the game will have consequences. That's just the nature of their state of being. The developers OTOH will frequently start thinking that their players are a captive audience and that they can tweak their game however they feel like. Then one day they tweak the wrong thing and players quit in droves, and they learn that their decisions have consequences too.
That assumes the situation is zero-sum. In a zero-sum game, every winner has a corresponding loser. Economics is not zero-sum. It is positive sum. When two parties make a good economic transaction, it is mutually beneficial and the individual net worth of both parties increases. Essentially they create wealth out of nothing (it's really coming from improved economic efficiency and distribution - kind of the opposite of entropy).
The common example is a chicken farmer and a cow farmer who live next to each other. The chicken farmer has more eggs than he knows what to do with. The cow farmer has more milk than he can use. One day, they look at each other, and agree to swap a dozen eggs for a pail of milk. The total amount of goods in the system (number of eggs + amount of milk) remains the same. But their net value increases because now the chicken farmer has something to wash down the eggs he eats, and the cow farmer has something solid to eat. To the chicken farmer, the pail of milk is worth more than a dozen eggs. For the cow farmer, the dozen eggs are worth more than a pail of milk.
So if Amazon were to make a sound business decision to move their distribution center out of a state, the "punishment" for that state is outweighed by the "reward" reaped by the receiving state and Amazon for making the move. Businesses already know this so make decisions that optimize their economic situation. Government often forgets this, and frequently makes decisions which end up harming their economic situation because they often assume their constituents are captive and thus they fail to consider the consequences.
You get a chance to hold them accountable in November. But for some reason everyone always figures their Congressman or Senator is just fine, it's all the other ones who are corrupt.
As I said, "When I need to go to a new site for a financial transaction..." You can't use a bookmark to get to a site you've never been to. ;)
The volumetric comparison is even more compelling. 163 pounds of uranium is slightly more than one gallon. And if you reprocessed you could theoretically extract 10x as much energy.