Moore went on to talk about how Cuba's health care system is amazing. He took a trip to cuba and documented their health care, pristine offices, amazing clinics, etc.
Turns out that's all for show. Cuban citizens REALLY get healthcare in dirty shacks full of maggots and flies. The rich get the pristine hospitals.
Moore is most famous for releasing a film called Farenheit 9/11, a "documentary" about Bush and 9/11 or something... it was 10 years ago, I stopped caring before he released it. Anyway, it was full of hyperbole, misrepresentation, and sensationalism. One fact that got a large amount of attention was that the President was informed of the first attack on his way to a grade school; and that he told the CIA to keep him informed. He spent 7 minutes reading a kid's book to first graders during the attack. This was covered in the film... as if the appropriate response would be to announce to a bunch of first graders that the nation has come under attack, or something; more to the point, canceling the president's visit can be done cleanly, but at that point in time there wasn't much of a nuclear imperative to mobilize the president immediately. No world leaders were calling. Nothing seriously needing George W. Bush's attention was actually happening.
Other such shit in that film was commentary on the Iraqi war. Seriously? Moore showed the world that the Iraqis were quite happy and carefree under Saddam, and that deposing him destroyed their lives. If you believe that, I've got a brook in bridgeland to sell you....
Moore is a flaming psycho with a warped view of reality and a strong desire to push his views regardless of facts. He doesn't want people to think; he wants people to side with him like sheep. We have enough bullshit artists in the media; we don't need more.
Yeah, we need people to challenge all the laws, pretty much. Laws that are good need to be tempered in court; laws that suck need to be thrown out.
I only called on the NCLB thing because it interests me. The school system across America universally sucks: parts are broken, other parts are "working" and the definition of "working" is pretty bad. I mean we still teach math as discrete subjects-- Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus... and we run students through as quick as we can, in set blocks. You did algebra 1 in 7th grade, now it's algebra 2, now geometry, now calculus... oh, we should blend algebra and trig and calc?... "pre-calculus" is now a discrete subject. What crap.
No, what we need is common sense and tolerance of differening opinions.
Yes but that's what we have judges for.
We need common sense enough that if 6 crazies come in and challenge a perfectly upstanding, constitutional law, the judge sends them home. If 1 crazy comes in and challenges a bullshit law, the judge throws it out.
If 6 MILLION crazies show up at the courthouse to challenge a perfectly upstanding, constitutional law, the judge needs to inform Congress of the complete lack of authority of the Courts to order the angry mob (legal authority does not affect huge, coherent groups), and the complete lack of authority of Congress to deploy its military against its own people, and the complete lack of ability of the police to control the angry mob (this is WHY legal authority does not affect huge, coherent groups). Congress will quickly realize the next stop of a very large group of millions of angry people is... congress. With torches.
6 million people isn't a lot of people in a country with 300 million people in it; but if you see 6 million people standing outside the senate, something is wrong. 6 thousand people is one thing, that happens; 6 million people means you seriously need to go out there and ask them what you screwed up. Possibly behind a bullet shield. With lots of apologies.
The crowd does not need common sense. It does not need to be rational. It only needs to get its point across. At a certain point you realize that many people by definition can't be wrong about what they want.
(BTW, the economist Adam Smith said in Wealth of Nations that those who benefit more from society should pay proportionately more in taxes for the costs of running society -- in other worlds Adam Smith believed in progressive taxation. Unfortunately conservatives today don't know the difference between Adam Smith and Karl Marx.)
If we flat-tax everyone 20%, and you make $100 a week, you pay $20/week in taxes. If I make $1000 a week, I pay $200/week in taxes. I make a 10 times bigger proportion of money from you and pay 10 times more in taxes. That's proportionally more.
he should get over it and realise that overall, he's paying less for his own care than under a private system, and as a bonus gets to help out his poor neighbour who now gets the same coverage as the rich guy, but would otherwise be uninsured under a private system.
Logical disconnect here: the people who can't afford healthcare are often unhealthy because A) they're poor; or B) they're just unhealthy and the health insurance costs scale up against them to reduce insurer statistical risk. The entire premise of insurance is that the less at-risk pay for the more at-risk; while the most at-risk get screwed (insurance costs a hell of a lot more, or they just won't insure them).
It doesn't balance risk among EVERYBODY; insurance leaves the flat-out sick and misfortuned to die, and takes those who are in "decent" condition (good drivers, healthy people, etc) and ties them all together so none of them will fall. Nobody is dead weight; dead weight won't be cut while it's still kicking and screaming, but it won't be ADDED on. So if you have a serious medical problem in the future, your insurance takes care of you for life; if you have a serious medical problem now, nobody will insure you.
Take on everybody and you have enough dead weight to drag the whole population down with it.
How about lawsuits filed against Bush's "No Child Left Behind" legislation?
As I said, we need some crazies to attack some laws and other crazies to attack other laws. This is a good thing.
I still don't see what's wrong with NCLB though, in principle (legality etc I can't argue on). The argument I always hear is they yank money from underperforming schools and give it to better performing districts. I've seen the opposite (pouring money on underperforming schools) and the result is always the same: you get a $3000/student-year school struggling but doing "okay" (barely) and a $13000/student-year churning out 8th graders that can't read and write.
It's obvious that a struggling but performing school needs more money; but a well-funded school with 30 year old books and no computers needs something wholly different. All the arguments I saw for NCLB seemed to run under the assumption that an underperforming school was always underbudget-- even if it's underbudget at $10000 per student per year and can't get them to add 3 numbers because the text books are 40 years old and they have 4 left for a 30 student class. NCLB to me looked like a plan to force these schools to die off, which means administrative costs vanish, which means administrators have less pork money... which means they have to improve the quality of the schools to get federal funding. I mean the stubborn case isn't great, but it's not really worse than the existing case.
Not a perfect plan, but I think it was a good try; the principles it's attacked for seem hugely maladjusted though, as if people actually believe that sending more money to bad schools is going to help.
Yes but we need those guys. We need the flaming crazies that will go to court and FORCE the judges to look at every little issue and say, "No, stfu," or "Holy hell how did this get to be law?!" We NEED someone to challenge every little thing the government does and make the one balance we have-- the courts-- stand up and tell the executive and legislative branch where to shove it when they overstep their bounds.
What we don't need is these people becoming judges or congressmen.
Yes, exactly this. Dealing with a DDOS is like dealing with snow. You make better snow tires and AWD... except mother nature is a cuntbitch and just dumps 40 times more snow on you.
My life has many more pressing goals to achieve then mastering a game.
How about go here and try to master this game... you can't; nobody has in over 4000 years. But I can guarantee you that any sufficient progress will enhance your life...
The problem with multiplayer is it's inherently a lifeless, impersonal experience.
Try playing Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, 10, 12... and Final Fantasy 11.
In all of those games you have a deep storyline to weave your way through, you get to associate with the characters, you have a series of quests that fit into the bigger picture, you have an antagonist to chase down, goals that fall only to reveal bigger goals in an expanding scope...
Except Final Fantasy 11.
In Final Fantasy 11, you might get miniature stories, maybe, just to make the quests interesting. You get quests that fall into the bigger picture of leveling up and finding rare items. You have goals that fall down only to reveal other unrelated goals of similar size, but occasionally of bigger numbers (i.e. the monsters have more HP and ATK so you have to be level 20 instead of level 15).
If they implement something with a massive storyline, coherent, attention-grabbing, emotional, fulfilling, then it's just another single-player game except your party members are 4 other players and the stats are unbalanced because you entered with a character at level 30. Oh, and also, you're paying monthly for the privilege of playing, without so much replay value, and without the privilege of playing privately when your friends aren't around, without the privilege of playing for free, without the privilege of spending 300 hours just exploring unless you want to pay for the 300 hours you're online (or the span of months that 300 hours is spent in).
Online play today appeals to exactly the part of the brain that lets the TSA get away with what they're doing. It's not that online play is bad-- oh, this is a nice feature, and was a good genre in the day of Ultima Online, Battle.net, and EVO-- it's that people who work at GameStop or own XBoxes are now telling me that single player gaming is dead AND BELIEVE IT. They think online play is now the only way to make a game worth buying. They have been successfully sheepified, and the companies that moved from $50 complete games to 30% of the $50 game for $50 and the rest for $100 more (expensive shareware-- DLC == shareware) are now moving to "just pay us to keep playing" models.
Actually, it's interesting, when you "Invest in Exxon-Mobil stock," you don't actually send money to Exxon-Mobil. You send it to a brokerage house that has a ton of Exxon-Mobil.
Funny thing though, the brokerage often hands out loans or buys IPOs for expanding companies-- that's how they survive, after all. With your invested money. Make no mistake, you still own the security you bought-- 200 shares of Exxon-Mobile-- but the brokerage you bought it from might not be able to buy it back if everyone sold it all back to the brokerage. So sell it to Scott Trade instead or something, who knows. Also these brokerages occasionally are parts of holding companies, which increase their holdings by venture capital investments-- meaning the money eventually moves that way as well.
The money they have on hand goes into banks as well. The banks again use this money to hand out small business loans, or invest in other companies. ETrade nearly dropped out, but Bank of America Bancorp threw them $2Billion to keep them afloat. Now they're back from $2.50/share to $20/share, wow.
You're quite right that most of your "investing" hits clearing houses and trading houses. You fail to understand that the trading houses and banks initially get their hands on those securities by buying IPOs and buying huge interests in small companies.
By investing his money he drives the economy. By sitting it in the bank, he lets the bank invest it, driving the economy. Either way, he's creating jobs and opportunities.
Years later, that money he invested... some of it poofed. Some of it grew by 10%. Some of it doubled. Some of it is 10 times bigger. Instead of 3 billion, he has 30 billion, plus another 200 billion from further income and investment of said income.
Now he has about 100 billion to give away, instead of 3 billion, to people who wouldn't ever have been born if their parents had starved in the street due to lack of jobs from all these start-up companies getting no VC or grants or loans. And most of those people went on to get jobs as well, so only a small percentage of these fortuned by his investment efforts now require direct aid.
Probably Google cared a bit more when they blew it up in the start of Buzz that had a privacy problem, than Facebook, that when they disclose something, they just redefine privacy as something you don't need to have or have something dangerous to hide. And still is to be seen privacy regarding popular "apps" providers.
In any case, when is released we could have reasons to complain, or not, but i would wait till that moment to judge.
YOU WOULD BE SAYING WITH YOUR HAPPINESS THIS IF YOU HAD TAKEN ALL EVERYTHING.
Yes but what you don't understand is the cost associated with pushing down, say, 1 stream of HD video to every household at the same time. And some households have 2, 3 TVs... so your kids are watching cartoons and you're watching Showgirls.
For perspective, the HD stream for Netflix is 3800kbit/s. A pair of T1 connections is 1.544 x 2 == 3.088Mbit/s. An OC12 is 601Mbit/s payload, and so can carry about 161.95 of these signals at once. A quick google finds an ad for "OC12 from $14,999 / Month" so a little over $93/mo is enough to give you the bandwidth to watch exactly 1 HD video at the time, assuming you're not using the Internet for anything else. If you want to be able to watch two shows at once (i.e. TV in your kid's room and in your room), you're looking at a bit under $190/mo for internet service. Plus whatever additional fee the ISP adds i.e. so they can make a profit.
All this assumes that roughly 161 customers would all be watching TV at around the same time, say between 5pm and 9pm. If you want enough downstream to watch one (1) show without lag AND we can guarantee that 50% of the customers are watching between 5 and 7 and 50% between 7 and 9, they can oversell their bandwidth by 100% and you can have a base cost of about $47, with the caveat that if more than half the people on your street are watching at least 1 TV show or movie at the same time as you then you'll experience network congestion and the HD video quality will degrade (or it'll lag, skip, and REBUFERING...)
Embryonic adult stem cells are a grenade topic under much political (moral, ethical, religious) fire; adult stem cell research is universally free game. Which is this?
The article doesn't say anything about the US losing, and talks about the US expansion in the region. Lacking any other analysis, the facts presented do not indicate any form of losing. Basic reasoning would tie expanding fronts to winning by converse of being squeezed out of the war (if you invade 5 cities and months later you have control of 2, you are losing; if you invade 5 cities and months later you're shelling 15, it's hard to argue that they're steadily beating you back).
The argument that "this says we were losing" is a clear mental disconnect in this case; and even more, seems to entirely avoid what the papers were actually about-- that several administrations were lying, top-down, to the public AND congress, saying they weren't engaging in certain acts of war while at the same time ordering those very acts of war.
Saying that these papers basically said we were losing the war is... I don't even know how to categorize that. A fantasy? It's not a misrepresentation of fact (that statement has no bearing on the contents of these papers). Maybe we could call it a lie, but it seems more like delusion to me. The kind of self-inflicted illusion you get when you have a political opinion and believe anything that touches the topic must only serve to justify that opinion, rather than either opposing it or talking about some other aspect of the topic entirely.
Apparently the reports, as Wikipedia states, were basically an outline saying that the president lied to the public and was expanding the war. I see no evidence of the US "losing" and, in fact, given the nature of "expanding" the fronts of a war, I'm inclined to believe we were actually "Winning" and lying about it.
I've ignited shirts in 4 seconds with an 18 inch mirror. Sails are large canvas things and will ignite quite quick if you can deliver the needed energy. It's only a few hundred degrees; realize that the 90 degree weather outside comes entirely from the sun, not from the Goddess of Summer. What are you, Wiccan? Is our winter so cold because of the Calliach Bleuhr or however it's spelled?
Being not-silver doesn't magically mean the damn thing doesn't reflect the HUGE amount of IR thermal radiation coming from the sun. Hint: if the object doesn't heat up, it's not absorbing the energy. The fact that copper absorbs certain wavelengths of light is interesting, and it will warm more than a silver mirror; the fact that copper absorbs photons at one frequency and emits them at another is also interesting, and it will not reach 3000 degrees and melt into a boiling puddle of molten copper just by sitting in direct sunlight. All light is thermal radiation, by the way; infra-red just happens to be invisible and also the majority of energy coming from the sun (see black body... the sun isn't quite it, but holy shit).
Slashdot Mirror
Moore went on to talk about how Cuba's health care system is amazing. He took a trip to cuba and documented their health care, pristine offices, amazing clinics, etc.
Turns out that's all for show. Cuban citizens REALLY get healthcare in dirty shacks full of maggots and flies. The rich get the pristine hospitals.
Moore is most famous for releasing a film called Farenheit 9/11, a "documentary" about Bush and 9/11 or something... it was 10 years ago, I stopped caring before he released it. Anyway, it was full of hyperbole, misrepresentation, and sensationalism. One fact that got a large amount of attention was that the President was informed of the first attack on his way to a grade school; and that he told the CIA to keep him informed. He spent 7 minutes reading a kid's book to first graders during the attack. This was covered in the film... as if the appropriate response would be to announce to a bunch of first graders that the nation has come under attack, or something; more to the point, canceling the president's visit can be done cleanly, but at that point in time there wasn't much of a nuclear imperative to mobilize the president immediately. No world leaders were calling. Nothing seriously needing George W. Bush's attention was actually happening.
Other such shit in that film was commentary on the Iraqi war. Seriously? Moore showed the world that the Iraqis were quite happy and carefree under Saddam, and that deposing him destroyed their lives. If you believe that, I've got a brook in bridgeland to sell you....
Moore is a flaming psycho with a warped view of reality and a strong desire to push his views regardless of facts. He doesn't want people to think; he wants people to side with him like sheep. We have enough bullshit artists in the media; we don't need more.
Yeah, we need people to challenge all the laws, pretty much. Laws that are good need to be tempered in court; laws that suck need to be thrown out.
I only called on the NCLB thing because it interests me. The school system across America universally sucks: parts are broken, other parts are "working" and the definition of "working" is pretty bad. I mean we still teach math as discrete subjects-- Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus... and we run students through as quick as we can, in set blocks. You did algebra 1 in 7th grade, now it's algebra 2, now geometry, now calculus... oh, we should blend algebra and trig and calc? ... "pre-calculus" is now a discrete subject. What crap.
No, what we need is common sense and tolerance of differening opinions.
Yes but that's what we have judges for.
We need common sense enough that if 6 crazies come in and challenge a perfectly upstanding, constitutional law, the judge sends them home. If 1 crazy comes in and challenges a bullshit law, the judge throws it out.
If 6 MILLION crazies show up at the courthouse to challenge a perfectly upstanding, constitutional law, the judge needs to inform Congress of the complete lack of authority of the Courts to order the angry mob (legal authority does not affect huge, coherent groups), and the complete lack of authority of Congress to deploy its military against its own people, and the complete lack of ability of the police to control the angry mob (this is WHY legal authority does not affect huge, coherent groups). Congress will quickly realize the next stop of a very large group of millions of angry people is ... congress. With torches.
6 million people isn't a lot of people in a country with 300 million people in it; but if you see 6 million people standing outside the senate, something is wrong. 6 thousand people is one thing, that happens; 6 million people means you seriously need to go out there and ask them what you screwed up. Possibly behind a bullet shield. With lots of apologies.
The crowd does not need common sense. It does not need to be rational. It only needs to get its point across. At a certain point you realize that many people by definition can't be wrong about what they want.
(BTW, the economist Adam Smith said in Wealth of Nations that those who benefit more from society should pay proportionately more in taxes for the costs of running society -- in other worlds Adam Smith believed in progressive taxation. Unfortunately conservatives today don't know the difference between Adam Smith and Karl Marx.)
If we flat-tax everyone 20%, and you make $100 a week, you pay $20/week in taxes. If I make $1000 a week, I pay $200/week in taxes. I make a 10 times bigger proportion of money from you and pay 10 times more in taxes. That's proportionally more.
he should get over it and realise that overall, he's paying less for his own care than under a private system, and as a bonus gets to help out his poor neighbour who now gets the same coverage as the rich guy, but would otherwise be uninsured under a private system.
Logical disconnect here: the people who can't afford healthcare are often unhealthy because A) they're poor; or B) they're just unhealthy and the health insurance costs scale up against them to reduce insurer statistical risk. The entire premise of insurance is that the less at-risk pay for the more at-risk; while the most at-risk get screwed (insurance costs a hell of a lot more, or they just won't insure them).
It doesn't balance risk among EVERYBODY; insurance leaves the flat-out sick and misfortuned to die, and takes those who are in "decent" condition (good drivers, healthy people, etc) and ties them all together so none of them will fall. Nobody is dead weight; dead weight won't be cut while it's still kicking and screaming, but it won't be ADDED on. So if you have a serious medical problem in the future, your insurance takes care of you for life; if you have a serious medical problem now, nobody will insure you.
Take on everybody and you have enough dead weight to drag the whole population down with it.
even that is a stretch given the number of books O'Reilly has put out.
No kidding, they make some excellent books. Check out Sed and Awk if you're even in Unix.
How about lawsuits filed against Bush's "No Child Left Behind" legislation?
As I said, we need some crazies to attack some laws and other crazies to attack other laws. This is a good thing.
I still don't see what's wrong with NCLB though, in principle (legality etc I can't argue on). The argument I always hear is they yank money from underperforming schools and give it to better performing districts. I've seen the opposite (pouring money on underperforming schools) and the result is always the same: you get a $3000/student-year school struggling but doing "okay" (barely) and a $13000/student-year churning out 8th graders that can't read and write.
It's obvious that a struggling but performing school needs more money; but a well-funded school with 30 year old books and no computers needs something wholly different. All the arguments I saw for NCLB seemed to run under the assumption that an underperforming school was always underbudget-- even if it's underbudget at $10000 per student per year and can't get them to add 3 numbers because the text books are 40 years old and they have 4 left for a 30 student class. NCLB to me looked like a plan to force these schools to die off, which means administrative costs vanish, which means administrators have less pork money... which means they have to improve the quality of the schools to get federal funding. I mean the stubborn case isn't great, but it's not really worse than the existing case.
Not a perfect plan, but I think it was a good try; the principles it's attacked for seem hugely maladjusted though, as if people actually believe that sending more money to bad schools is going to help.
What do you mean? We're all pointing fingers from our armchairs and complaining loudly at the TV. Isn't that doing something?
Obviously; but why aren't you out there challenging the law then?
Yes but we need those guys. We need the flaming crazies that will go to court and FORCE the judges to look at every little issue and say, "No, stfu," or "Holy hell how did this get to be law?!" We NEED someone to challenge every little thing the government does and make the one balance we have-- the courts-- stand up and tell the executive and legislative branch where to shove it when they overstep their bounds.
What we don't need is these people becoming judges or congressmen.
Yes, exactly this. Dealing with a DDOS is like dealing with snow. You make better snow tires and AWD... except mother nature is a cuntbitch and just dumps 40 times more snow on you.
Eggplants are fun to throw at people!
This is especially more important now in the UK after the goverment has screwed all the students.
Oh, is that where Clinton is these days?
My life has many more pressing goals to achieve then mastering a game.
How about go here and try to master this game... you can't; nobody has in over 4000 years. But I can guarantee you that any sufficient progress will enhance your life...
The problem with multiplayer is it's inherently a lifeless, impersonal experience.
Try playing Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, 10, 12... and Final Fantasy 11.
In all of those games you have a deep storyline to weave your way through, you get to associate with the characters, you have a series of quests that fit into the bigger picture, you have an antagonist to chase down, goals that fall only to reveal bigger goals in an expanding scope...
Except Final Fantasy 11.
In Final Fantasy 11, you might get miniature stories, maybe, just to make the quests interesting. You get quests that fall into the bigger picture of leveling up and finding rare items. You have goals that fall down only to reveal other unrelated goals of similar size, but occasionally of bigger numbers (i.e. the monsters have more HP and ATK so you have to be level 20 instead of level 15).
If they implement something with a massive storyline, coherent, attention-grabbing, emotional, fulfilling, then it's just another single-player game except your party members are 4 other players and the stats are unbalanced because you entered with a character at level 30. Oh, and also, you're paying monthly for the privilege of playing, without so much replay value, and without the privilege of playing privately when your friends aren't around, without the privilege of playing for free, without the privilege of spending 300 hours just exploring unless you want to pay for the 300 hours you're online (or the span of months that 300 hours is spent in).
Online play today appeals to exactly the part of the brain that lets the TSA get away with what they're doing. It's not that online play is bad-- oh, this is a nice feature, and was a good genre in the day of Ultima Online, Battle.net, and EVO-- it's that people who work at GameStop or own XBoxes are now telling me that single player gaming is dead AND BELIEVE IT. They think online play is now the only way to make a game worth buying. They have been successfully sheepified, and the companies that moved from $50 complete games to 30% of the $50 game for $50 and the rest for $100 more (expensive shareware-- DLC == shareware) are now moving to "just pay us to keep playing" models.
Actually, it's interesting, when you "Invest in Exxon-Mobil stock," you don't actually send money to Exxon-Mobil. You send it to a brokerage house that has a ton of Exxon-Mobil.
Funny thing though, the brokerage often hands out loans or buys IPOs for expanding companies-- that's how they survive, after all. With your invested money. Make no mistake, you still own the security you bought-- 200 shares of Exxon-Mobile-- but the brokerage you bought it from might not be able to buy it back if everyone sold it all back to the brokerage. So sell it to Scott Trade instead or something, who knows. Also these brokerages occasionally are parts of holding companies, which increase their holdings by venture capital investments-- meaning the money eventually moves that way as well.
The money they have on hand goes into banks as well. The banks again use this money to hand out small business loans, or invest in other companies. ETrade nearly dropped out, but Bank of America Bancorp threw them $2Billion to keep them afloat. Now they're back from $2.50/share to $20/share, wow.
You're quite right that most of your "investing" hits clearing houses and trading houses. You fail to understand that the trading houses and banks initially get their hands on those securities by buying IPOs and buying huge interests in small companies.
By investing his money he drives the economy. By sitting it in the bank, he lets the bank invest it, driving the economy. Either way, he's creating jobs and opportunities.
Years later, that money he invested ... some of it poofed. Some of it grew by 10%. Some of it doubled. Some of it is 10 times bigger. Instead of 3 billion, he has 30 billion, plus another 200 billion from further income and investment of said income.
Now he has about 100 billion to give away, instead of 3 billion, to people who wouldn't ever have been born if their parents had starved in the street due to lack of jobs from all these start-up companies getting no VC or grants or loans. And most of those people went on to get jobs as well, so only a small percentage of these fortuned by his investment efforts now require direct aid.
Obviously a net loss, what with overpopulation.
Probably Google cared a bit more when they blew it up in the start of Buzz that had a privacy problem, than Facebook, that when they disclose something, they just redefine privacy as something you don't need to have or have something dangerous to hide. And still is to be seen privacy regarding popular "apps" providers.
In any case, when is released we could have reasons to complain, or not, but i would wait till that moment to judge.
YOU WOULD BE SAYING WITH YOUR HAPPINESS THIS IF YOU HAD TAKEN ALL EVERYTHING.
Yes but what you don't understand is the cost associated with pushing down, say, 1 stream of HD video to every household at the same time. And some households have 2, 3 TVs... so your kids are watching cartoons and you're watching Showgirls.
For perspective, the HD stream for Netflix is 3800kbit/s. A pair of T1 connections is 1.544 x 2 == 3.088Mbit/s. An OC12 is 601Mbit/s payload, and so can carry about 161.95 of these signals at once. A quick google finds an ad for "OC12 from $14,999 / Month" so a little over $93/mo is enough to give you the bandwidth to watch exactly 1 HD video at the time, assuming you're not using the Internet for anything else. If you want to be able to watch two shows at once (i.e. TV in your kid's room and in your room), you're looking at a bit under $190/mo for internet service. Plus whatever additional fee the ISP adds i.e. so they can make a profit.
All this assumes that roughly 161 customers would all be watching TV at around the same time, say between 5pm and 9pm. If you want enough downstream to watch one (1) show without lag AND we can guarantee that 50% of the customers are watching between 5 and 7 and 50% between 7 and 9, they can oversell their bandwidth by 100% and you can have a base cost of about $47, with the caveat that if more than half the people on your street are watching at least 1 TV show or movie at the same time as you then you'll experience network congestion and the HD video quality will degrade (or it'll lag, skip, and REBUFERING...)
Understand?
Embryonic adult stem cells are a grenade topic under much political (moral, ethical, religious) fire; adult stem cell research is universally free game. Which is this?
The article doesn't say anything about the US losing, and talks about the US expansion in the region. Lacking any other analysis, the facts presented do not indicate any form of losing. Basic reasoning would tie expanding fronts to winning by converse of being squeezed out of the war (if you invade 5 cities and months later you have control of 2, you are losing; if you invade 5 cities and months later you're shelling 15, it's hard to argue that they're steadily beating you back).
The argument that "this says we were losing" is a clear mental disconnect in this case; and even more, seems to entirely avoid what the papers were actually about-- that several administrations were lying, top-down, to the public AND congress, saying they weren't engaging in certain acts of war while at the same time ordering those very acts of war.
Saying that these papers basically said we were losing the war is ... I don't even know how to categorize that. A fantasy? It's not a misrepresentation of fact (that statement has no bearing on the contents of these papers). Maybe we could call it a lie, but it seems more like delusion to me. The kind of self-inflicted illusion you get when you have a political opinion and believe anything that touches the topic must only serve to justify that opinion, rather than either opposing it or talking about some other aspect of the topic entirely.
How do I get an "Offtopic" on an article about the Pentagon Papers asking what the Pentagon papers are? That seems to be directly on-topic.
Apparently the reports, as Wikipedia states, were basically an outline saying that the president lied to the public and was expanding the war. I see no evidence of the US "losing" and, in fact, given the nature of "expanding" the fronts of a war, I'm inclined to believe we were actually "Winning" and lying about it.
WTF were the Pentagon Papers? Were they pentagonal?
I've ignited shirts in 4 seconds with an 18 inch mirror. Sails are large canvas things and will ignite quite quick if you can deliver the needed energy. It's only a few hundred degrees; realize that the 90 degree weather outside comes entirely from the sun, not from the Goddess of Summer. What are you, Wiccan? Is our winter so cold because of the Calliach Bleuhr or however it's spelled?
Also: here is a copper mirror. http://www.overclockers.com/wp-content/uploads/images/stories/articles/Tales_of_a_Shade_Tree_Machinist_My_Homemade_Water_Cooled_System/so17.jpg
Being not-silver doesn't magically mean the damn thing doesn't reflect the HUGE amount of IR thermal radiation coming from the sun. Hint: if the object doesn't heat up, it's not absorbing the energy. The fact that copper absorbs certain wavelengths of light is interesting, and it will warm more than a silver mirror; the fact that copper absorbs photons at one frequency and emits them at another is also interesting, and it will not reach 3000 degrees and melt into a boiling puddle of molten copper just by sitting in direct sunlight. All light is thermal radiation, by the way; infra-red just happens to be invisible and also the majority of energy coming from the sun (see black body... the sun isn't quite it, but holy shit).