I want to know if the rates are going to increase or decrease. Often, companies will replace people with computers to save money, but initially raise prices (or implement a fee) to "cover the cost of the technology." Once the customer gets used to paying for technology and the company recognizes the high profit it generates (you don't have to pay a computer a salary), they often just decide to pay the executives bonuses instead of lowering prices. Even when we outsource to cheaper countries, the extra profits from laying off americans are simply soaked up by board members and CEOs. Examples of this happening are ATM fees ($3.75 to withdraw money?!?), Movie theathers ($9.50 a ticket), dealership mechanics*.
To have a truly integrated system, the city would have to continue buying all its equipment from Siemens AG, effectively giving it a monopoly.
This also raises a red flag. One company that will in effect control the whole parts system? How can we know we won't get hosed with the price?
You bring up a very good point. In some cases, it is abundently clear that technology has made the price of many goods dirt cheap. Examples include online stores (little overhead), web-based customer service (FAQs, forums, etc), and credit cards (all electronic). But in all of these cases, there has been lots of competition to drive the price down (usually to the point of disallowing ANY profit to be made from said technology). When there is so much competition, the revenue from automated technology often goes away because competitors will lower their prices to attract customers. Many business will start to just give away their computerized services for free.
But back to my point... If the only place NYC can obtain new parts and service from is Siemens AG, you can bet that the state is going to pay a premium for ANYTHING because they are locked in. The competition to force lower prices is eliminated, and it basically becomes another government beurocracy that just drains money from an otherwise good system. They need open standards for the new subway, so they change suppliers without a problem.
*Dealership mechanics will chagre $75 for computer-chiped keys, and also charge a fortune to diagnose the car's problem. A regular mechanic can tell you "its this, this, or this," but because they don't have the software and access to the car's computer, they can't tell you the exact problem the car is reporting. They usually want $50-100 just to plug your car into the computer to tell you the problem.
At what point in my post did I say they were evil greedy corporate bastards? I simply stated that a high sodium diet is not healthy for people, and the premade PBJ's they sell have a high amount of sodium.
Out of curiousity I went into my closet and found Super Chunk Skippy PB and Market Basket Giant White bread. The PB has 140mg sodium and 190 Calories, and the bread has 138mg sodium and 60 Calories. When we multiply the bread times 2 we get 276mg sodium (or 69 Cal) and 120 Cal total.
So the final results...
Homemade Sandwich: 104 Cal from Sodium, 310 Calories Total = 33.5% from Sodium
Their Sandwich: 65 Cal from Soduim, 210 Calories Total = 31% from Sodium
It's not a huge difference, but I stand corrected as the premade PBJ is lower in sodium. FYI, I picked Jelly by chance, although I admit I should have checked the PB and Bread too. I guess both are okay for you (25-35% is the healthy range for sodium content in foods).
Yeah but it feels good to tell a major corporation to go fuck themselves after screwing you over. Especially when a judge sends the letter on your behalf. For some people (myself included), thats far more important than money.
Those things aren't very healthy. They are high in sodium (260mg), as most prepackaged foods are. You're much better off making a PBJ from scratch. The regular jar of Smuckers Jelly has 0mg sodium in it.
And FYI, we should be getting about 500-2400mg of sodium a day, but the average American consumes something like 3000-6000mg per day, because we eat so much prepackaged food.
What I would like to know is if you or this guy got their fingerprints taken. If it was truly a false arrest, the information should be purged from police records. I know somebody who was held for Parental Contact, and while they were never charged with anything or even arrested, their prints were still recorded on file. FYI, PC is basically when they hold minors at the station until their parents come get you.
It's the sad truth, and FYI there's a name for it too. It's called the Iron Triangle. Congress works to pass laws for agencies who employ lobbyiests who persuade congress. In return, the agencies pay for re-election campaigns of said congressmen. The key principle of the triangle idea is that it is a closed system where the people are left out.
My American Gov't teacher told me that several years ago the teachers union was trying to get congress to pass laws to increase their wages (They had gone several years without a wage increase). After lots of pleading, letter writing, and then being ignored, the union voted to hire a lobbyiest. Within a few weeks, they got their bill passed.
I hear ya. I would like to be told when something is an advertisement or actual reporting. All Media should be required to disclose if the producers of the content were paid to write it. In a blog it doesn't really make as much of a difference though, because there are many fact checkers to call BS when a reporting agency is lying. Still a good law to have though, provided it can be consistant with the first ammendment.
Well if you attach a pad to your shoulder so that the electric current would only be running from the gun to the pad, you would be safe. If you're holding two guns and the current flows from one gun to the other across your chest, then you have a problem. IANAMD (Medical Doctor), but I remember sitting in electricity class and the teacher told us always to use one hand when dealing with electricity because if we get shocked, it will still hurt but it probably won't go through our heart (like it would if we grabbed it with 2 hands).
"The article point out that 60% of the country's electricity comes from burning dirtier coal"
So? You have limited emissions to a very few sources, instead of having to worry about tens of thousands of catalytic converters and pollution control systems. It is a lot easier to deal with one or very few sources.
Granted, but pollution is still a global problem. The carbon dioxide molecules (and other undesirables pollutants) from power plants can end up in China, Antarctica, or Ohio, even if they were emitted in California. They have proved this by finding that Volcanoes which have erupted have left ash all the way in the North pole. All of Earth's air is circulated via the three cell model.
You might not be aware of this, but our national parks have a pollution problem. Have a look at this link: http://www.npca.org/across_the_nation/visitor_expe rience/code_red/default.asp. Even though there are no factories, their pollution levels rival or even exceed that of our most polluted cities, such as Atlanta and Los Angeles.
On a side note, I remember reading a report in Scientific American that said when we had the northeast blackout, CO2 levels were reduced by half and visibility was the best that pilots had ever seen it... it increased by an incredible amount. This is obviously due to the fact that power plants were not running, but also because people probably did not use their vehicles because they had no where to go.
Free Speech was great in the 1700s, before we had companies controlling all the speech that enters our homes. These days, I'd prefer to focus on Free Thought.
Obviously there is no use (yet) for this in a cell phone. The time it would take you to find a flat surface and get the pen ready would be too long - it's easier to just punch in the letters on your keypad. I maybe could see this maybe having an impact on PDAs or something which requires more typing, but the miniature wireless keyboards for PDAs are cheap, portable, and you get to strike an actual key, so I don't think there's a really a good reason to use this system.
If you RTFA though, you'd see that this is just a prototype and Siemens have not decided if the technology is worth putting in a phone.
Did you actually read his profile and journal entries? He seems more like a morbid goth brat than a normal kid.
He listened to Johnny Cash and John Lennon... not exactly hard core satan warshipping goth music. He seemed to just be bitching a lot like many kids I knew in school. None of them ever shot up a school.
His LiveJournal can be found here, and his user info with a list of friends is here.
The article on thesmokinggun.com that MSNBC mentions is here, which includes an archived link to the flash clip Weise made about shooting people.
Also, his band's message board was located at http://6sik6.proboards25.com/, but it has since been taken down. No Google Cache of it either.
Kind of scary stuff... for the most part he seemed like a fairly normal kid.
We can also use the leftover bones from the dino dinners to produce oil. We can currently convert chicken bones and other trash into petroleum, but dinosaur bones are huge and would probably yield more of the black stuff.
I agree. The museums should take this free publicity and run with it... get people interested while there is a story. People are naturally curious to seek out the truth, but only for a short time. If there is some nut job ranting on about how "the theory of evolution is against god" or whatever, open-minded people will go to the museum and check it out. This is especially true for young people who are generally open to a lot more. Once they get there, they may agree with the lunatic or agree with the museum, but at least that person made up their own mind. If you close the doors, you let the lunatic win, and lead everyone believe he was right. So instead of hurting yourself and science, why not make some money off it? This is a great opportunity for free publicity and public attraction ("we have a museum in our town?").
I would take this one step further and argue that this is exactly why our school systems are doing so poorly. Every time a controversial issue comes up in history class, teachers are forced to back off of it because a student's mom might get her panties wet and sue the school. Talk about some god damn current events and why they're important, and maybe students will be interested! Unless you can make it relevant to students, then its not going to matter what happened x years ago. "Prohibition of the 1920's is just like the war on drugs today because...". Now you have a topic to argue about that matters to kids. Now discuss it.
I recieved an email this morning from WesPAC asking me to sign a petition to tell the FCC to stop being censorship nazis. I remember reading a post on here somewhere about./ members not having anywhere to complain about oversensorship to the FCC, so I figure this is somewhat relevant.
If you're interested in signing the petition, please do so here: http://ga4.org/campaign/fcc/step1.tcl. It only takes a second and if the FCC gets a few million signatures that could only mean good news for Americans.
I usually download the cds from bittorrent and if I like the music I'll go out and buy the CD. I prefer the cd over a digital file because of the DRM stuff. When I buy something, I don't want somebody telling me how to use it. Granted, I can burn an iTunes song 7 times, but its still a limitation that does not exist with CDs. The way I see it, I can spend an extra $1 and get the CD AND the mp3s. Probably not a logical reason, but more psychological.
I also like the artwork included with the cd, and its nice to go back and listen to music you listened to 5 years ago. I can usually remember my thoughts and feelings at the time listening to it and see how I've changed. With MP3's, I don't think the connection would be as strong.
And on a further note, when you burn CDs, the labels peel off after a long period of time. I wouldn't want my data being lost.
To be completely honest with you, who gives a fuck that some guy scores a news station liberal or conservative. None of the major news companies present a compelling argument for either side. They put up two ignoramuses against each out with no insightful comments or logical reasoning whatsoever. Instead of finding bias in journalism, how about trying to measure how accurate each side feels their side was represented. You could measure this by going to the person's house that was represented in the story and ask, "How well do you feel that represented you?" If any major US station scores above a 50%, then the test isn't hard enough.
Blogs are better journalism anyways because your actively discussing issues with a real person, not listening some washed out paraphrased reporting.
A lot of shows do this now with On-Demand, but its usually only premium stations like HBO and Showtime. I think if cable or satellite companies made all of their content available on On-Demand, people would shift to that medium.
But the way I see it, why should customers be forced to pay for something that was already on TV? Making somebody pay $1 or $2 when they are paying $60 a month for a subscription isn't really fair. The station would be much smarter to insert new commercials into the show each time it ran. They could have different commercials for different crowds of people, or everyday they offered the show they could sell new advertising space. Companies would no longer be limited to 30 minutes either, so they could sell more advertising time.
Slashdot Mirror
I apolgize. It was 2:30 in the morning when I wrote that, I wasn't thinking clearly. But you are right.
This also raises a red flag. One company that will in effect control the whole parts system? How can we know we won't get hosed with the price?
You bring up a very good point. In some cases, it is abundently clear that technology has made the price of many goods dirt cheap. Examples include online stores (little overhead), web-based customer service (FAQs, forums, etc), and credit cards (all electronic). But in all of these cases, there has been lots of competition to drive the price down (usually to the point of disallowing ANY profit to be made from said technology). When there is so much competition, the revenue from automated technology often goes away because competitors will lower their prices to attract customers. Many business will start to just give away their computerized services for free.
But back to my point... If the only place NYC can obtain new parts and service from is Siemens AG, you can bet that the state is going to pay a premium for ANYTHING because they are locked in. The competition to force lower prices is eliminated, and it basically becomes another government beurocracy that just drains money from an otherwise good system. They need open standards for the new subway, so they change suppliers without a problem.
*Dealership mechanics will chagre $75 for computer-chiped keys, and also charge a fortune to diagnose the car's problem. A regular mechanic can tell you "its this, this, or this," but because they don't have the software and access to the car's computer, they can't tell you the exact problem the car is reporting. They usually want $50-100 just to plug your car into the computer to tell you the problem.
Out of curiousity I went into my closet and found Super Chunk Skippy PB and Market Basket Giant White bread. The PB has 140mg sodium and 190 Calories, and the bread has 138mg sodium and 60 Calories. When we multiply the bread times 2 we get 276mg sodium (or 69 Cal) and 120 Cal total.
So the final results...
Homemade Sandwich: 104 Cal from Sodium, 310 Calories Total = 33.5% from Sodium
Their Sandwich: 65 Cal from Soduim, 210 Calories Total = 31% from Sodium
It's not a huge difference, but I stand corrected as the premade PBJ is lower in sodium. FYI, I picked Jelly by chance, although I admit I should have checked the PB and Bread too. I guess both are okay for you (25-35% is the healthy range for sodium content in foods).
Yeah but it feels good to tell a major corporation to go fuck themselves after screwing you over. Especially when a judge sends the letter on your behalf. For some people (myself included), thats far more important than money.
And FYI, we should be getting about 500-2400mg of sodium a day, but the average American consumes something like 3000-6000mg per day, because we eat so much prepackaged food.
What I would like to know is if you or this guy got their fingerprints taken. If it was truly a false arrest, the information should be purged from police records. I know somebody who was held for Parental Contact, and while they were never charged with anything or even arrested, their prints were still recorded on file. FYI, PC is basically when they hold minors at the station until their parents come get you.
My American Gov't teacher told me that several years ago the teachers union was trying to get congress to pass laws to increase their wages (They had gone several years without a wage increase). After lots of pleading, letter writing, and then being ignored, the union voted to hire a lobbyiest. Within a few weeks, they got their bill passed.
Thank you both. It's an interesting and different system from what I am used to, so I'll need to keep my mind open to let it absorb.
What exactly is a 'snap election'?
I hear ya. I would like to be told when something is an advertisement or actual reporting. All Media should be required to disclose if the producers of the content were paid to write it. In a blog it doesn't really make as much of a difference though, because there are many fact checkers to call BS when a reporting agency is lying. Still a good law to have though, provided it can be consistant with the first ammendment.
Well if you attach a pad to your shoulder so that the electric current would only be running from the gun to the pad, you would be safe. If you're holding two guns and the current flows from one gun to the other across your chest, then you have a problem. IANAMD (Medical Doctor), but I remember sitting in electricity class and the teacher told us always to use one hand when dealing with electricity because if we get shocked, it will still hurt but it probably won't go through our heart (like it would if we grabbed it with 2 hands).
So? You have limited emissions to a very few sources, instead of having to worry about tens of thousands of catalytic converters and pollution control systems. It is a lot easier to deal with one or very few sources.
Granted, but pollution is still a global problem. The carbon dioxide molecules (and other undesirables pollutants) from power plants can end up in China, Antarctica, or Ohio, even if they were emitted in California. They have proved this by finding that Volcanoes which have erupted have left ash all the way in the North pole. All of Earth's air is circulated via the three cell model.
You might not be aware of this, but our national parks have a pollution problem. Have a look at this link: http://www.npca.org/across_the_nation/visitor_expe rience/code_red/default.asp. Even though there are no factories, their pollution levels rival or even exceed that of our most polluted cities, such as Atlanta and Los Angeles.
On a side note, I remember reading a report in Scientific American that said when we had the northeast blackout, CO2 levels were reduced by half and visibility was the best that pilots had ever seen it... it increased by an incredible amount. This is obviously due to the fact that power plants were not running, but also because people probably did not use their vehicles because they had no where to go.
Yeah, I remember back in the good old days...
Oh wait, I wasn't born yet.
If you RTFA though, you'd see that this is just a prototype and Siemens have not decided if the technology is worth putting in a phone.
Yeah, You're right. I hadn't read his MSN profile, only his Live Journal.
He listened to Johnny Cash and John Lennon... not exactly hard core satan warshipping goth music. He seemed to just be bitching a lot like many kids I knew in school. None of them ever shot up a school.
The article on thesmokinggun.com that MSNBC mentions is here, which includes an archived link to the flash clip Weise made about shooting people. Also, his band's message board was located at http://6sik6.proboards25.com/, but it has since been taken down. No Google Cache of it either.
Kind of scary stuff... for the most part he seemed like a fairly normal kid.
We can also use the leftover bones from the dino dinners to produce oil. We can currently convert chicken bones and other trash into petroleum, but dinosaur bones are huge and would probably yield more of the black stuff.
I would take this one step further and argue that this is exactly why our school systems are doing so poorly. Every time a controversial issue comes up in history class, teachers are forced to back off of it because a student's mom might get her panties wet and sue the school. Talk about some god damn current events and why they're important, and maybe students will be interested! Unless you can make it relevant to students, then its not going to matter what happened x years ago. "Prohibition of the 1920's is just like the war on drugs today because ...". Now you have a topic to argue about that matters to kids. Now discuss it.
If you're interested in signing the petition, please do so here: http://ga4.org/campaign/fcc/step1.tcl. It only takes a second and if the FCC gets a few million signatures that could only mean good news for Americans.
I also like the artwork included with the cd, and its nice to go back and listen to music you listened to 5 years ago. I can usually remember my thoughts and feelings at the time listening to it and see how I've changed. With MP3's, I don't think the connection would be as strong.
And on a further note, when you burn CDs, the labels peel off after a long period of time. I wouldn't want my data being lost.
Blogs are better journalism anyways because your actively discussing issues with a real person, not listening some washed out paraphrased reporting.
But the way I see it, why should customers be forced to pay for something that was already on TV? Making somebody pay $1 or $2 when they are paying $60 a month for a subscription isn't really fair. The station would be much smarter to insert new commercials into the show each time it ran. They could have different commercials for different crowds of people, or everyday they offered the show they could sell new advertising space. Companies would no longer be limited to 30 minutes either, so they could sell more advertising time.
Don't forget Ashcroft!