It's not WHERE your population does its urbanizing, it's how much it is urbanized. The actual figure is 75% of the Canadian population lives within 200 mi. of the US border: but if we were EVENLY spread through that area, we would be totally non-urbanized and hugely expensive to network. (It would be less than 15 houses per square mile.)
The population of Canada is 79.4% urbanized (living in centres of >=10,000 population).
The difference is not statistically significant to this issue; to whatever extent it is significant, the USA should have slightly better broadband than Canada. (Significantly higher average income, slightly greater urbanization, 10X the economies of scale for the more-centralized parts of the infrastructure).
That took me 4 minutes with Google. I could have avoided doing the work AGAIN if you'd done the same. I was hoping to avoid it by posting early and stupidly assumed that nobody would just flatly say my assertions were incorrect without bothering to do any research or math.
Debate this one as you will, but, PLEASE, just this once, don't anybody write, "Of course Korea and Japan and Europe have better broadband than the US, they're all a big urban beehive, we're all rural and spread out."
Somebody says that every time the 3rd-rate US broadband comes up, and every time I or somebody has to point out that Canada is even more spread out than the US and has way higher broadband penetration. Some European countries with spectacular broadband offerings (Finland) have lower persons/sq km than the US has. (US: 30 persons/sq.km, Finland, 14.7, Sweden 20)
Now check out Finland & Sweden vs. the US position on this chart:
Even Canada is way ahead of you, and two countries could hardly be more alike in their respective fractions of population in large cities, small cities, large towns, and small towns. We, too, have privatized, not government-run, phone companies, but we lean on them a little harder to compete with cable and satellite, and to invest profits, not keep them.
Face it: networked infrastructures like water, power and communications are "natural monopolies"; monopolies require either outright government ownership, or at least tight regulation to not exploit their customers for maximum profit at minimum service. For a long list of reasons, the US doesn't do it as well as some.
Korea and Finland in particular have no ideological barriers to large government investments in this particular basic infrastructure, the way the US has no ideological barriers to large government investments in defense. The US is well-defended, Korea is well-networked; get used to it.
Actually, there's been a number of hackers in SF
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 1
The oldest I could name would be Thomas J. Ryan and his 1977 "The Adolesence of P-1" about an evolving AI amongst the network of IBM mainframes; Ryan was a "computer troubleshooter" mostly on IBM mainframes and the tech was correct. He hardly published anything else, he was mostly a programmer.
Two years later, (Professor) Vernor Vinge published a short novel called "True Names" (the message in the title is about the first realization of the meaning of "ID Theft"). "True Names" envisaged Gibson's cyberspace, basically, five years earlier. Vinge wrote about getting the idea from a "talk" encounter with another minicomputer modem user in the early 70's.
And then there's Marc Steigler, an experienced IT developer who co-wrote, with Joseph Delany, "Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" in 1984, with realistic depictions of a development process and future computer networks. Steigler has also done numerous short stories in which programming work appears...correctly.
And in 1989, programmer Rick Cook wrote "Wizard's Bane" that sent programmer "Wiz" Zumwalt on a multi-book series of adventures in a D&D alternate world. Wiz's powers come from his programming, and C development environments and especially, Wiz's slow trial-and-error creation of a FORTH development environment out of, well, magic in the air, get many pages of exposition...because they're crucial to the plot. (It's complete with references to cartoons in Brodie's classic "Starting FORTH" that only a small subset of programmers would even get.)
Longtime programmer Ellen Ullman is mostly known as an essayist about the process of programming and inner lives of programmers, (cf. "Close to the Machine") but she did one novel, "The Bug".
And Stephenson has been much-addressed already, so that's my top-of-the-head list complete of published SF writers that have gotten programming, systems development, or operation / hacking correct because they're actually in the business.
Not to take anything away from this new guy, but every decade brings us a few. It's just a shame it's a few. Any of them could get it right with some research.
I agree this should be a matter of national or regional standards and not a school-to-school decision; but as you're stuck with the situation, I have to recommend a netbook. The interface issue is significant and tablets would be really cool, but with cunning programming that can be overcome for many lesson needs.
The thing about netbooks is that they're cheap, dirt cheap - in bulk, $250 US buys a reasonable screen and 1GB of RAM these days. Schools are constantly shying away from spending on *people*, so they spend on expensive hardware and software instead in the belief that these will minimize maintenance and support costs, which, generally, they don't.
Instead, save tens of thousands on netbooks, and spend it on programming, support, and server-side lesson setup that make them a snap to use for reading E-books, accessing lessons, doing quizzes, the "Top 5" uses.
At $250 each, most of your distribution problems (everybody just gets one), repair and loss problems (toss out and replace) simply go away and let you get to work.
Sure I read it. But the discussion here is about large-scale implementation, competition with 5 cts/kWh coal, saving the world from global warming, etc. Relieving the atmosphere of the army field emissions in Iraq is nice, but about 0.01% of the world-wide carbon load. (0.05% of the US population...)
As with many things, this may become a proven technology courtesy of the military being willing to pay 10X the competitive rate for it. But it will never be *larger* than the military field market unless it can drop prices down below a dime or so per kWh.
I read the Economist article and noted the name of the scientist ("Mankins") who researched it.
I typed "mankins microwave transmission efficiency loss" into Google and the second link was an IEEE article with the abstract appended below.
Your number is 45% for DC-to- DC.
So not assuming that solar-cell efficiency can make it to 50%, but cheerfully assuming that the kind of cells that will do well in an industrial setting space for long periods can reach today's in-the-lab max of 40%, your area comes to:
560 km^2 / 40% / 45% = 3111 km^2.
And so what? There's a lot more space than that out there. (See opening paras of Hitchhiker's Guide for how much.) The question is the available money, not the available space. Those 556GW of nuclear had a total capital cost of well over a trillion. (And a land area sucked up of well over 3111 km^2 by the way, add up all the mines and waste dumps and reprocessing facilities, not just the plants. And that's area we can use for other things, down here; not a lot of other things to do with 3111 km^2 of orbit.)
The Economist article is unequivocal: SSP would cost FIFTY CENTS per kWh. That's just awful, way worse than earth-based solar or wind, even backed up with 85 watts per 100W so that they are base-load capable.
But one lives, and allocates research dollars, in hope. I'd bump the fusion budget from $300M to $500M, and match that with SSP research funds...about $400M of which would go to "cheaper lift costs", the truly key barrier.
Space solar power programs and microwave wireless power transmission technology McSpadden, J.O.; Mankins, J.C. Microwave Magazine, IEEE Volume 3, Issue 4, Dec 2002 Page(s): 46 - 57 Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MMW.2002.1145675 Summary: Future large-scale space solar power (SSP) will form a very complex integrated system of systems requiring numerous significant advances in current technology and capabilities. Ongoing technology developments have narrowed many of the gaps, but major technical, regulatory, and conceptual hurdles remain. Continuing systems concept studies and analyses will be critical to success, as will following a clear strategic R&T road map. This road map must assure both an incremental and evolutionary approach to developing needed technologies and systems is followed, with significant and broadly applicable advances with each increment. In particular, the technologies and systems needed for SPS must support highly leveraged applicability to needs in space science, robotic and human exploration, and the development of space. Considerable progress has been made in the critical area of microwave power transmission. At 5.8 GHz, DC-RF converters with efficiencies over 80% are achievable today. Rectennas developed at 5.8 GHz have also been measured with efficiencies greater than 80%. With optimized components in both the transmitter and rectenna, an SPS system has the potential of a DC-to-DC efficiency of 45%.
By "Sony decision", I mean the one where the VCR was OK if it had a single non-infringing use.
If a computer application or data source has a single educational use, it's in. That lets out all the sites and programs that will get a wide majority agreeing it's unacceptable (porn, extreme violence, etc). But demolition-derby or star-wars fan sites could be the subject of a legitimate paper. Teachers are often desperate to engage kids of that age by allowing subjects they're interested in to be the subject of book reports or social studies.
As a bonus, that cuts YOUR job down to a legally-required minimum, and minimizes the "they don't trust me" backlash, while covering your ass sufficiently.
Appears to have vanished. The smallest MP3 at samsung.com now is about 50mmx50mm - but has no screen, and only a uni-button like the shuffle, audio output.
Not sure I'd be interested in video and all that. (And, I mean, video on a 62x37mm screen? Why?)
I avoided the iPod brand through 10 years of MP3 players, because of price and lock-in, etc; then fell for the current generation of shuffles, for the
reasons I
detailed in my
presentation to the Calgary Unix User's Group about the EeePC. It's 30g, just barely larger than the only button I frequently use on it, the Play/Pause.
Virtually all of my portable music listening is done on a bike or running. Every previous generation of MP3 player eventually bounced off my belt or tugged annoyingly as it bounced up & down on my shirt, or required an annoying band or harness. The shuffle, at 30g, can't be noticed, and with that clip that exerts about a pound of force, it just can't fly off. Hell, if it does (because I was hasty & incompetent clipping it on), the friction of the 1/8" jack in the socket will keep it from going off the sound cable, and the friction of the buds in my ears will hold it from pulling them out. It winds up swinging back & forth from my earbuds, unharmed.
Any multi-function device must necessarily be larger, to have any user interface bigger than one button. It must weigh more, enough to go back to the annoyances I have gratefully left. That's why my cell phone is in my pack en route to the train: I hate little weights bouncing up & down on my waist as I run.
Long live single-function and UI that is utterly minimal - preferably a single button. You don't have to push it for me at the factory, I can take it from there.
I am grateful for the topical ads beside my Gmail messages, they remind me constantly what not to use Gmail for. Gmail is very convenient for 99% of my E-mail. But it's not my ONLY access to E-mail.
You're like a guy "concerned about safety" that is wearing padding and a helmet - to walk down a sidewalk in clear weather. But "risk" - in safety or privacy - is consequence multiplied by probability. You can put whatever number you like on the probability of Gmail or Facebook data being snooped - set it at 100% if you think so. Then multiply by consequence - how hurt or embarrassed you would be. With most things, not so much.
You've decided to keep your clothes on at a nudist resort, and being out-of-step is uncomfortable, so clearly you are feeling a "consequence" of your decision. Obviously, you need to open up on a FEW things (I have a facebook account I barely use and has nothing I don't have on my home page) until the risks are balanced on each side.
PS: I, too, recommend Daniel J. Solove on the "Nothing to Hide" argument - it not only demolishes the argument, but helps you clarify what privacy really means, what it's "for", why we all need it - along the way. Super short version: privacy is just a human need, always has been, every society has it that can afford it. (First thing people get when they can afford one: their own family home. First thing they expend added space on when they can enlarge it: separate bedrooms for kids.) Society must respect privacy so that people can STAND to live so close to everybody else and participate in society at all.
Oh, sheesh, slashdot. No, I wasn't thinking of faster downloads or gaming. I was thinking of some of that stuff WiReD promised us ten years ago: most office jobs done from home via telecommuting, equipment managed from home by telepresence.
Telecommuting didn't take off for the same reason we have business travel in a world of phones and faxes and E-mail: because people doing business want to connect personally. 80% of human communication, we're told, is in voice tones, facial expressions, body language. If we all had "VR" from multiple cameras on us at our home offices, each doing 1080p or better with CD-grade sound and zero latency, would that be tele-present enough to bridge the gap? Could you hold "meetings" between a dozen people and feel you were connecting to all of them in VR? I don't know, but only a nation with at least 100Mbps to the home is going to find out on any large scale.
A half-decent SF writer could probably think up more things, but telepresence alone would eliminate the need for hundreds of billions of dollars in transportation infrastructure; imagine the "rush hour" a thing of the past. The car completely changed the concept of the city from a very compact thing to one very spread out. Telepresence could be as big a change again, or larger. The effects on an industrial economy beggar the imagination.
And if it turns out not to be SF, you want to be left behind on it?
He was writing about the decline of "social conservatism" in America and what the voters seem to be hungering for now:
== It's the infrastructure, stupid! The Reagan era (which predated Reagan and probably began with Nixon in 1968) had all manner of effects on the nation, but among the key long-lasting legacies has been a neuralgic reaction to taxation. Many Americans have allowed themselves to think you might be able to run a modern economy on the proceeds from slot machines. As Jim Callaghan once said, in a different context: "I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists!"
Americans hunger for mobile phone networks that work. For rapid transport that whizzes. For bridges that don't fall down. They do not hunger for government but they do hunger for efficiency, for a governing infrastructure that serves a modern economy; for a health system that delivers medicine without bankrupting companies and individuals. Both John McCain and Barack Obama know this. Each is under pressure to deliver. ==
Maybe one of them should promise fiber-to-the-home...
It must be almost 10 years now since I wrote (Ethernet inventor) Bob Metcalfe when he was an Infoworld columnist, to ask why the hell North America was building an Internet system out of wires installed for completely different purposes: a 1930's POTS network and a 1970's cable-TV network. There was much talk about the "unaffordable" trillions it would take to run fiber to every home.
This begged the question of how we managed to run phone to every home with the much-smaller 1920's-1940's economy to draw on, then did it all again with more-expensive cable in a decade over the 1970's. And, you see, I work for a water and sewer utility and KNOW what it costs to run big, heavy, iron 6" diameter pipes both to and from your street and get payback on the capital out of the $40/month water bill, even after operating costs.
Metcalfe had no reply, he tossed it to his readers; none of whom had an answer either, save those who wrote me by E-mail to rail against telephone monopolies and lobbyist-ruined governance.
What's Japan going to DO with 1Gbps? By the time we find out, it'll take us over a decade to catch up, even if all the monopolies and lobbies are broken the next day. (In my business, we used to get a few gallons per day of water out of wells and have a shower once a week or so; now consumption can be a ton of water per day per person and we shower all we want, we have hot tubs and pools, kids in Nevada learn to swim, we irrigate gardens, and fill our cities with trees in arid climates: trust me, uses for bandwidth WILL arise, and our kids will wonder how we got by without.)
Americans might want to start getting advice from the British on how you handle it, psychologically, when you wake up a decade or so into a new century and realize that you just aren't the most important nation on Earth anymore.
If, by "sum up to", you meant not their total mass, but total mass of carbon - since that's what you're comparing to in the rocks - then your bucknerweb reference actually sums up the oil and coal carbon weights to 619.7 Pg (petagrams), or as I'd prefer to call it, 619.7 teratonnes. (The carbon in natural gas is so much smaller as to raise the grand total to only 619.8 Pg)
Where you get the 9 Pg from would seem to be a mystery.
I didn't check your second reference, but if you got that one straight, the ratio is a "mere" 48,000:1 rather than 3 million: 1 -- still entirely large enough to make your point!
Also, 77% more CO2 takes you from 0.01% to 0.0177%, not to 0.07%. You're confusing "77% more" with "times seven".
Come to think of it, maybe I'd better check your math on the second reference. It says that the total mass of CaC03 is 350 Pt. And the total molecular weight of CaC03 = 40+12+16x3 = 100 so it's 12% Carbon. 0.12 * 350 = 42 Pt of Carbon, or 4.2E22 grams. Again, I'm unclear where in that link your 3E22 grams comes from.
So our ratio is now 4.2E22 / 619.8E15 = 67,700:1.
Apologies if I'm missing something here; I just followed your links, skimmed them very quickly, and spent 5 minutes checking the arithmetic.
Nobody's mentioned "FOIP" yet. The "Freedom of Information and Privacy" Act in Canada is both an FOI act when it comes to forcing the government (and some private companies) to reveal all non-classified information upon request, and a privacy-enforcement act that requires government and private business alike to safeguard any personal information for which they are custodian.
I work for a municipal government in Canada, and I have explicitly heard, from IT management in meetings, that we cannot give any contracts for data entry, data storage, data reduction and analysis, etc, to American firms, since the Patriot Act. This only applies to data classified a "private" under the FOIP rules, but here's the rub: the really simple way to handle some large data sets is to just duplicate the whole thing, all the tables. Going over them all to determine the FOIP status of every column and carefully remove, say, any column for "phone number" of your own staff or your customers, is a pain.
What's not a pain is going to a Canadian firm, having them sign a boilerplate FOIP-compliant privacy protection agreement. Various other countries with privacy legislation can be dealt with as well. Americans, alas, must hand over any and all data that the justice system asks for under the Patriot Act, so we can't give them the work.
I haven't heard of us going so far as to avoid transmission of FOIP-covered data through any network that will go through the USA, but after the FISA bill, I would say it's merely a matter of time.
I will admit from the start to be working from a stereotype, but here goes: The stereotype is that Japanese culture leans - more than most Oriental cultures and far more than any Western culture - to group norms, group *homogeneity*.
This initiative would be a total non-starter in Canada, which has, alas, the same obesity problems as the US.
I've never heard of such a thing out of the many European countries with universal health coverage, either.
So although your health care scheme may provide an incentive towards these kind of requirements, the fact that it is public - and ultimately accountable to the public - also restricts it to cultural standards embraced by the majority.
Or in short, any politician that wants to keep his job in the West is not even going to mention this. It's NOT a "slippery slope". On the contrary, pushing for higher general culture-wide health standards is a long, slow, UPHILL plod.
Ask the anti-cigarette activists; 54 years now since the surgeon general's report and while progress has been significant, it hasn't been fast.
Not my field of expertise, but isn't it Mr. Scalia - who was so much in opposition to the recent decision - that is regarded as one of the great "Constitutional Originalists" who DON'T believe in re-interpreting the row of words every generation but sticking to their meaning as understood at the time of writing?
I saw a big magazine article on him years ago pointing out that he seems to forsake this position every time it comes into conflict with the most conservative political preference, but I had no way to evaluate that opinion at the time as being fair vs. poltically-biased against him. Perhaps this is a case.
As you can tell, I'm somewhat - if not thoroughly - aware of the whole "we get to read it how we want to" argument, but I stand by my point. The specific choice of "invasion" over "war" in the document would seem to preclude saying "well, we're in a tough fight of some sort, we can toss out habeas". Mere "dire existential danger to the Union" STILL isn't enough, or they would have just written the word "WAR" in there. I still read it - and I wasn't born in 1787 - as specifying that you must have the problem of arresting and detaining entire armies before you can skip the "present them to a Court" step.
Can you toss out the whole document if the Supreme Court hands down a decision that says "we read those words to mean, 'Scooby Dooby Doo, Where Are You?', in code!" - sure you can. Everybody just has to say "Dred Scott" or whatever to point out how flexible the whole thing is in the end. But decisions that have constancy over time will be the ones that hold true to the basic intent of respect for individual rights. and the maximization of them despite their high costs.
I'm still shaking my head in disgust over a "warring talking heads" commentary on Canada's CTV network last night on this one. On the left, a Canadian professor who'd taught at Harvard. For the right, some guy I regret not catching the name of, from the conservative Hudson Institute. If it weren't the umpteenth time I'd seen it, I'd call it a classic example of the kind of brazen lying I've come to expect of these "think tanks".
I'll skip details on the other ways the guy embarrassed himself to any thinking audience - he tried maligning the Canadian's credentials at American law until the guy mentioned teaching at Harvard, for instance.
But towards the end, he actually said that the American constitution provides an exception to "for the Executive to suspend Habeas Corpus in time of WAR or insurrection" (emphasis mine). It doesn't. And there's no way a professional at that level made that big a mistake.
The framers chose all their words carefully, and it says:
The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
INVASION, not War. What do Invasion and Rebellion have in common? Only then do you have entire armies on American soil harming its public. Only when you'd have to give whole armies habeas corpus can you suspend it. If you have few enough enemies to manage with a court system, they all get the court system.
I guess I'm steamed because it was just the night before I learned the stat that not only did 70% of Americans at one point believe Saddam personally set up 9/11, but 80% of those supporting the Iraw war did so because of that belief. Which means that terrible damage can be done to America, not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocents, by lies such as the one I heard, espoused on TV, last night.
I leave it to the Americans on/. to decide what you'd call a guy who'd lie about the content of your constitution to encourage and support the breaking of it.
Oh, yeah, and one other part of the lie, one in support of their endless reaching for Executive power: the exception to habeas corpus is for the CONGRESS, not the Executive. The Executive can't suspend it at ALL, not unless Congress passes a law allowing it. The Executive simply can't break the law, period. Not under the Constitution.
Thanks; I guess it was "non-PC", it sure didn't get modded up. I'm not sure what insult it is to base a dumb joke on the simple fact that India has a very high population, but insult it was, I guess - live and learn.
It's like the Chinese causing earthquakes by all jumping off a chair at the same time: you just need a teeter-totter and 127-million Indians all jumping on the other end at once...
Except for the one valid complaint that the government had helped this company along with a lot of support, I don't think anybody's even pretending that this is a justified intervention in the free market. (Whether Canadians have ever bought a US company that previously received lots of US government grants, contracts and other support, would be interesting; I'd be surprised if it *hadn't* happened, though).
But alas, it was tin-eared in the extreme to announce this just as Dextre was being installed and everybody's nationalistic pride in the company was at a peak. We've been smiling with pride every time a shuttle image showed the flag and name on the CanadArm for 20 years or so; and Dextre, another order of magnitude more impressive a technology, had us all rubbing our hands with pride and glee.
Then the owners do their best to give everybody an image of them saying "Thanks for the free help, suckers! We're selling out and off to Brazil with your cash!" This result was then predictable.
If they'd waited a year or two, perhaps couched it in terms of allowing the company to go on to greater achievements through partnering, maybe tossed out a few promises of continued location in Canada and all Canadian jobs totally safe (promises you can always break a few years later, it's not like PR is legally binding), they could have gotten away with it.
Now, they can't wait a few years and try again because the issue's been raised and the media will hype it up again unless they wait at least 10 years. And this was, by the way, our *Conservative*, pro-business party. Any chance of a future Liberal government allowing this one is much dimmer still.
Pardon me for asking for an apology for my factual statements being called bullshit, also for wanting the courtesy of a reply. I won't ask for either again.
I'm glad to hear you've done so much research. Care to share any?
You don't have to go on at length, just pass on the names of several north american water and/or sewer utilities that are tax-supported rather than self-supporting.
Well - in the event that they have declared themselves to be self-supporting and you believe the opposite because of hidden subsidies, a sentence describing these subsidies in each case, and a link or paper reference to supporting research about that, will prevent readers from thinking you pulled the names of the utilities from your phone book.
Thanks! Good to hear that it's at least possible for electronic to be cheaper than paper. Canada may switch one day, but the US experience will, I hope, make us very shy of the move.
And after a look at your income distribution on gapminder.org (see my presentation about cheap new computers and world development at
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc - Brazil shows up around slide #48...I can see people have to quit calling you a 3rd-world country. There's a real need to uplift a lot of Brazil to the higher income standards of your middle/upper classes, but that's just a matter of time, now. Time and rural education.
Perhaps an American/. reader can explain to the rest of us why you use machines at all? I don't mean just electronic voting, I mean all its predecessors - pulling levers, "butterfly ballots", punch cards and their infamous hanging chads.
In the middle of that 35-day recount thing in 2000, the Canadian electorate finished their (six week, from declaration of the election to the vote) national election with a vote that was over in 24 hours, from first poll open to last vote counted. The mechanism: pencil and paper.
I once volunteered for a local political party in a provincial election to "scrutineer" the ballots. It looked awfully foolproof to me, as all the scrutineers from all the parties watched each vote being counted in each box, some of us keeping our own tallies as they were added up. We were done in an hour or less.
Needless to say, the ratio of ballots to humans in the room was in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. We just employ a lot of humans in our elections, paid and volunteer. Few of our neighbourhood polling stations record more than 1000 ballots, and they have 3-4 employees, plus "N" volunteer scrutineers, depending on the number of parties running.
So why doesn't America just do that, is it the money? Somebody gave me the opinion that it's because Americans vote for so many offices - judges, DA's, sheriffs, local officials at the same time as federal. That this all came from previous centuries, farmers having to walk 10 miles to vote, so they only wanted to do it once every four years, and then register 25 votes at that time, making it hard to do on paper.
That didn't fly with me. Farmers have to come to town every week or three for supplies and so forth anyway. And if you want to vote for 25 offices instead of trusting one elected party to appoint them all, what's wrong with realizing that has COSTS and paying for more people to count them by hand with scrutineers from the campaigns watching every piece of paper go by? To turn around the old phrase, you can't take your choice without paying your money.
The paid human time (the N scrutineers are volunteers) to count one vote on paper is a second or so. One penny at $36.00 per hour, even, and most elections temporary staff are retirees making half that, giving you two seconds to the penny. Isn't counting one vote worth one penny to you? (Needless to say, the piece of paper is way under a penny, and the cost of the metal boxes is amortized over 20 elections; the high school gyms are free to use.)
I'm not saying the total cost of our elections is a penny per vote, that's the incremental cost of the counting process. We probably spend a buck per vote or more on the whole thing, organizing the operation, paying the permanent staff at Elections Canada to hire the retirees, print the ballots, etc. But the difference between having everybody pull a lever on some complicated counting machine or just putting an X on paper and putting it in a box, after all the setup is done, can't be over a penny per vote as far as I can see.
I guess you're never going to reply...you're off to do the next bit of sharply-worded commentary and "calling bullshit" and so forth.
Hey, "evilviper", when a 20-year veteran of an industry takes an hour out of his day to educate you, it's a common courtesy to reply. Key words recommended for the reply content are "Oh, I guess I was wrong" and "Thank you".
By the way, a quick way to have educated yourself on the relative numbers of tax- and self-supported utilities would have been to google the phrase "self-supporting utility" (394 pages of results) and "tax-supported utility" (10 pages of results), hinting at a 39:1 ratio of the former to the latter. That sounds about right to me. I have heard of tax-supported utilities, but I don't have any colleagues who work for one, not that I've met with at conferences or corresponded with or read papers by over the last 20 years.
Oh, and I did forget to address one claim you made without supporting references. When a water or sewer main leaks and damages a road, the utility pays for the repairs to the public infrastructure.
Laws running back a century or more were passed to keep utilities from being hit up by private landowners every time they believe there's been damage. (It can be hard to tell whether soil erosion or water infiltrating a basement was from natural flows or a water main leak.) As long as we can show we've been maintaining the infrastructure to commonly-held industry standards we are "saved harmless" from lawsuit when they, inevitably, do break or leak. The private landowners insurance has to handle it. If they can show we reasonably could have predicted the break or otherwise were negligent at maintenance, they have a case -- buy there aren't many such.
This is also why you get no compensation when your internet or phone or TV or even power goes out, even for longish periods in real weather disasters (Katrina), not even a reduction in your bill; not unless you have some specific language in your contract to that effect, as some industrial power and water consumers do have.
If you want perfect reliability, you have to go around doubling the number of connections to the building, providing alternate network paths to the building, and so on. At least doubles the bill, and most people would rather have $40/month and 0.1% outage time (~ 8 hrs/year) than $80/month and 0.001% outage time and an $800 refund per hour lost. (Just thought I'd drag the content back in the direction of the original topic.)
I have worked for what was Waterworks, (now called "Water Resources" since we merged with the Sewer dept.) for the City of Calgary, for 20 years.
We are a fully self-supporting utility. Utilities in Calgary pay "franchise fees" for the use of the public right-of-way to bury their pipes or cables in. The City-owned utilities in lieu of that, paid a "return on equity", I think being changed to a "return on capital", an accounting distinction that escapes me. But whatever the payments are called, they are a significant portion of our total income from sending out water/sewer bills. It's not a "profit", as such, indeed we are forbidden to make one; but it's the same return-on-investment of the huge capital invested that the City would otherwise get if it put it in good bank funds, something like that.
Control of the overall watershed of the Bow and Elbow Rivers from which we abstract our water is indeed a provincial responsibility, but it doesn't benefit the City of Calgary any more than anybody else who lives in the watershed, protected from floods, their consumption for irrigation uses recorded, any substance releases checked, and so on.
The Glenmore Dam that provides us with a 30-day retention of water for clarification, etc, was built by the City of Calgary using a special loan bylaw in 1930. But the debt was paid off entirely by the utility from utility bills, no money crossed the other way from the tax-supported side of the corporation.
All of the accounting for this is traceable through public documents; our budget is published in our annual report, showing all income from utility bills, and how we balance that with expenses, debt service, etc. You can get all the detail documents with a Freedom of Information request, but we wouldn't put you to the trouble of filing one, if you came into the office and just asked to see them, like as not.
You can get a good start just by going to calgary.ca , then "city hall", "business units" and "water services", browse around and look at the Rates section.
I've worked with those budget documents for many years, and there are no kinds of subsidies from our own, or other, levels of government in them.
From American Waterworks Association conferences, I've met a lot of my opposite numbers and this is all the same across at least the prairie provinces of Canada, and several more in the US that I've swapped notes with. Basically, we're all "uni-cities", as opposed to amalgamations of smaller separate municipalities, the most extreme of which has got to be Phoenix. Conurbations can have complex arrangements of sharing costs for plants, or buying/selling water at city limits, and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if tax money crept into some of the arrangements. I'd be much less surprised to hear that the tax-supported side of some municipal corporations "made money" on the deals; that's the more common case, at least with large cities, as utility rate increases usually have less backlash than tax increases.
The situation is even clearer with the Calgary-owned Electrical utility, now called "Enmax" and run like a private corporation, not using the City IT, Fleet, HR or Finance departments, buildings, etc. There's one share and the City owns it, but otherwise it runs as a private corporation, supported entirely by utility bills; that's carefully regulated as competition to private electrical suppliers is open and the competition must be fair. Any competitor suspecting any kind of subsidy could have it investigated.
Enmax' financials are on the web, here's a link to the page about their profits, with links to quarterly and annual reports:
Slashdot Mirror
It's not WHERE your population does its urbanizing, it's how much it is urbanized. The actual figure is 75% of the Canadian population lives within 200 mi. of the US border: but if we were EVENLY spread through that area, we would be totally non-urbanized and hugely expensive to network. (It would be less than 15 houses per square mile.)
The population of Canada is 79.4% urbanized (living in centres of >=10,000 population).
http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/canadian_cities.html
The population of the USA is 81% urbanized:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
The difference is not statistically significant to this issue; to whatever extent it is significant, the USA should have slightly better broadband than Canada. (Significantly higher average income, slightly greater urbanization, 10X the economies of scale for the more-centralized parts of the infrastructure).
That took me 4 minutes with Google. I could have avoided doing the work AGAIN if you'd done the same. I was hoping to avoid it by posting early and stupidly assumed that nobody would just flatly say my assertions were incorrect without bothering to do any research or math.
I don't know why I bother.
Debate this one as you will, but, PLEASE, just this once, don't anybody write, "Of course Korea and Japan and Europe have better broadband than the US, they're all a big urban beehive, we're all rural and spread out."
Somebody says that every time the 3rd-rate US broadband comes up, and every time I or somebody has to point out that Canada is even more spread out than the US and has way higher broadband penetration. Some European countries with spectacular broadband offerings (Finland) have lower persons/sq km than the US has. (US: 30 persons/sq.km, Finland, 14.7, Sweden 20)
Now check out Finland & Sweden vs. the US position on this chart:
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg
Even Canada is way ahead of you, and two countries could hardly be more alike in their respective fractions of population in large cities, small cities, large towns, and small towns. We, too, have privatized, not government-run, phone companies, but we lean on them a little harder to compete with cable and satellite, and to invest profits, not keep them.
Face it: networked infrastructures like water, power and communications are "natural monopolies"; monopolies require either outright government ownership, or at least tight regulation to not exploit their customers for maximum profit at minimum service. For a long list of reasons, the US doesn't do it as well as some.
Korea and Finland in particular have no ideological barriers to large government investments in this particular basic infrastructure, the way the US has no ideological barriers to large government investments in defense. The US is well-defended, Korea is well-networked; get used to it.
Two years later, (Professor) Vernor Vinge published a short novel called "True Names" (the message in the title is about the first realization of the meaning of "ID Theft"). "True Names" envisaged Gibson's cyberspace, basically, five years earlier. Vinge wrote about getting the idea from a "talk" encounter with another minicomputer modem user in the early 70's.
And then there's Marc Steigler, an experienced IT developer who co-wrote, with Joseph Delany, "Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" in 1984, with realistic depictions of a development process and future computer networks. Steigler has also done numerous short stories in which programming work appears...correctly.
And in 1989, programmer Rick Cook wrote "Wizard's Bane" that sent programmer "Wiz" Zumwalt on a multi-book series of adventures in a D&D alternate world. Wiz's powers come from his programming, and C development environments and especially, Wiz's slow trial-and-error creation of a FORTH development environment out of, well, magic in the air, get many pages of exposition...because they're crucial to the plot. (It's complete with references to cartoons in Brodie's classic "Starting FORTH" that only a small subset of programmers would even get.)
Longtime programmer Ellen Ullman is mostly known as an essayist about the process of programming and inner lives of programmers, (cf. "Close to the Machine") but she did one novel, "The Bug".
And Stephenson has been much-addressed already, so that's my top-of-the-head list complete of published SF writers that have gotten programming, systems development, or operation / hacking correct because they're actually in the business.
Not to take anything away from this new guy, but every decade brings us a few. It's just a shame it's a few. Any of them could get it right with some research.
I agree this should be a matter of national or regional standards and not a school-to-school decision; but as you're stuck with the situation, I have to recommend a netbook. The interface issue is significant and tablets would be really cool, but with cunning programming that can be overcome for many lesson needs.
The thing about netbooks is that they're cheap, dirt cheap - in bulk, $250 US buys a reasonable screen and 1GB of RAM these days. Schools are constantly shying away from spending on *people*, so they spend on expensive hardware and software instead in the belief that these will minimize maintenance and support costs, which, generally, they don't.
Instead, save tens of thousands on netbooks, and spend it on programming, support, and server-side lesson setup that make them a snap to use for reading E-books, accessing lessons, doing quizzes, the "Top 5" uses.
At $250 each, most of your distribution problems (everybody just gets one), repair and loss problems (toss out and replace) simply go away and let you get to work.
Sure I read it. But the discussion here is about large-scale implementation, competition with 5 cts/kWh coal, saving the world from global warming, etc. Relieving the atmosphere of the army field emissions in Iraq is nice, but about 0.01% of the world-wide carbon load. (0.05% of the US population...)
As with many things, this may become a proven technology courtesy of the military being willing to pay 10X the competitive rate for it. But it will never be *larger* than the military field market unless it can drop prices down below a dime or so per kWh.
I read the Economist article and noted the name of the scientist ("Mankins") who researched it.
I typed "mankins microwave transmission efficiency loss" into Google and the second link was an IEEE article with the abstract appended below.
Your number is 45% for DC-to-
DC.
So not assuming that solar-cell efficiency can make it to 50%, but cheerfully assuming that the kind of cells that will do well in an industrial setting space for long periods can reach today's in-the-lab max of 40%, your area comes to:
560 km^2 / 40% / 45% = 3111 km^2.
And so what? There's a lot more space than that out there. (See opening paras of Hitchhiker's Guide for how much.) The question is the available money, not the available space. Those 556GW of nuclear had a total capital cost of well over a trillion. (And a land area sucked up of well over 3111 km^2 by the way, add up all the mines and waste dumps and reprocessing facilities, not just the plants. And that's area we can use for other things, down here; not a lot of other things to do with 3111 km^2 of orbit.)
The Economist article is unequivocal: SSP would cost FIFTY CENTS per kWh. That's just awful, way worse than earth-based solar or wind, even backed up with 85 watts per 100W so that they are base-load capable.
But one lives, and allocates research dollars, in hope. I'd bump the fusion budget from $300M to $500M, and match that with SSP research funds...about $400M of which would go to "cheaper lift costs", the truly key barrier.
Space solar power programs and microwave wireless power transmission technology
McSpadden, J.O.; Mankins, J.C.
Microwave Magazine, IEEE
Volume 3, Issue 4, Dec 2002 Page(s): 46 - 57
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MMW.2002.1145675
Summary: Future large-scale space solar power (SSP) will form a very complex integrated system of systems requiring numerous significant advances in current technology and capabilities. Ongoing technology developments have narrowed many of the gaps, but major technical, regulatory, and conceptual hurdles remain. Continuing systems concept studies and analyses will be critical to success, as will following a clear strategic R&T road map. This road map must assure both an incremental and evolutionary approach to developing needed technologies and systems is followed, with significant and broadly applicable advances with each increment. In particular, the technologies and systems needed for SPS must support highly leveraged applicability to needs in space science, robotic and human exploration, and the development of space. Considerable progress has been made in the critical area of microwave power transmission. At 5.8 GHz, DC-RF converters with efficiencies over 80% are achievable today. Rectennas developed at 5.8 GHz have also been measured with efficiencies greater than 80%. With optimized components in both the transmitter and rectenna, an SPS system has the potential of a DC-to-DC efficiency of 45%.
By "Sony decision", I mean the one where the VCR was OK if it had a single non-infringing use.
If a computer application or data source has a single educational use, it's in. That lets out all the sites and programs that will get a wide majority agreeing it's unacceptable (porn, extreme violence, etc). But demolition-derby or star-wars fan sites could be the subject of a legitimate paper. Teachers are often desperate to engage kids of that age by allowing subjects they're interested in to be the subject of book reports or social studies.
As a bonus, that cuts YOUR job down to a legally-required minimum, and minimizes the "they don't trust me" backlash, while covering your ass sufficiently.
Appears to have vanished. The smallest MP3 at samsung.com now is about 50mmx50mm - but has no screen, and only a uni-button like the shuffle, audio output.
Not sure I'd be interested in video and all that. (And, I mean, video on a 62x37mm screen? Why?)
I just want my music.
Virtually all of my portable music listening is done on a bike or running. Every previous generation of MP3 player eventually bounced off my belt or tugged annoyingly as it bounced up & down on my shirt, or required an annoying band or harness. The shuffle, at 30g, can't be noticed, and with that clip that exerts about a pound of force, it just can't fly off. Hell, if it does (because I was hasty & incompetent clipping it on), the friction of the 1/8" jack in the socket will keep it from going off the sound cable, and the friction of the buds in my ears will hold it from pulling them out. It winds up swinging back & forth from my earbuds, unharmed.
Any multi-function device must necessarily be larger, to have any user interface bigger than one button. It must weigh more, enough to go back to the annoyances I have gratefully left. That's why my cell phone is in my pack en route to the train: I hate little weights bouncing up & down on my waist as I run.
Long live single-function and UI that is utterly minimal - preferably a single button. You don't have to push it for me at the factory, I can take it from there.
I am grateful for the topical ads beside my Gmail messages, they remind me constantly what not to use Gmail for. Gmail is very convenient for 99% of my E-mail. But it's not my ONLY access to E-mail.
You're like a guy "concerned about safety" that is wearing padding and a helmet - to walk down a sidewalk in clear weather. But "risk" - in safety or privacy - is consequence multiplied by probability. You can put whatever number you like on the probability of Gmail or Facebook data being snooped - set it at 100% if you think so. Then multiply by consequence - how hurt or embarrassed you would be. With most things, not so much.
You've decided to keep your clothes on at a nudist resort, and being out-of-step is uncomfortable, so clearly you are feeling a "consequence" of your decision. Obviously, you need to open up on a FEW things (I have a facebook account I barely use and has nothing I don't have on my home page) until the risks are balanced on each side.
PS: I, too, recommend Daniel J. Solove on the "Nothing to Hide" argument - it not only demolishes the argument, but helps you clarify what privacy really means, what it's "for", why we all need it - along the way. Super short version: privacy is just a human need, always has been, every society has it that can afford it. (First thing people get when they can afford one: their own family home. First thing they expend added space on when they can enlarge it: separate bedrooms for kids.) Society must respect privacy so that people can STAND to live so close to everybody else and participate in society at all.
Oh, sheesh, slashdot. No, I wasn't thinking of faster downloads or gaming. I was thinking of some of that stuff WiReD promised us ten years ago: most office jobs done from home via telecommuting, equipment managed from home by telepresence.
Telecommuting didn't take off for the same reason we have business travel in a world of phones and faxes and E-mail: because people doing business want to connect personally. 80% of human communication, we're told, is in voice tones, facial expressions, body language. If we all had "VR" from multiple cameras on us at our home offices, each doing 1080p or better with CD-grade sound and zero latency, would that be tele-present enough to bridge the gap? Could you hold "meetings" between a dozen people and feel you were connecting to all of them in VR? I don't know, but only a nation with at least 100Mbps to the home is going to find out on any large scale.
A half-decent SF writer could probably think up more things, but telepresence alone would eliminate the need for hundreds of billions of dollars in transportation infrastructure; imagine the "rush hour" a thing of the past. The car completely changed the concept of the city from a very compact thing to one very spread out. Telepresence could be as big a change again, or larger. The effects on an industrial economy beggar the imagination.
And if it turns out not to be SF, you want to be left behind on it?
But now that I deliberately poked a stick into the American cage with the "not the greatest nation" comment, let me end on a happier thought. I just read a great article from (here's some irony) Britain, in today's "Times Online", by Justin Web.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4735147.ece
He was writing about the decline of "social conservatism" in America and what the voters seem to be hungering for now:
==
It's the infrastructure, stupid! The Reagan era (which predated Reagan and probably began with Nixon in 1968) had all manner of effects on the nation, but among the key long-lasting legacies has been a neuralgic reaction to taxation. Many Americans have allowed themselves to think you might be able to run a modern economy on the proceeds from slot machines. As Jim Callaghan once said, in a different context: "I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists!"
Americans hunger for mobile phone networks that work. For rapid transport that whizzes. For bridges that don't fall down. They do not hunger for government but they do hunger for efficiency, for a governing infrastructure that serves a modern economy; for a health system that delivers medicine without bankrupting companies and individuals. Both John McCain and Barack Obama know this. Each is under pressure to deliver.
==
Maybe one of them should promise fiber-to-the-home...
It must be almost 10 years now since I wrote (Ethernet inventor) Bob Metcalfe when he was an Infoworld columnist, to ask why the hell North America was building an Internet system out of wires installed for completely different purposes: a 1930's POTS network and a 1970's cable-TV network. There was much talk about the "unaffordable" trillions it would take to run fiber to every home.
This begged the question of how we managed to run phone to every home with the much-smaller 1920's-1940's economy to draw on, then did it all again with more-expensive cable in a decade over the 1970's. And, you see, I work for a water and sewer utility and KNOW what it costs to run big, heavy, iron 6" diameter pipes both to and from your street and get payback on the capital out of the $40/month water bill, even after operating costs.
Metcalfe had no reply, he tossed it to his readers; none of whom had an answer either, save those who wrote me by E-mail to rail against telephone monopolies and lobbyist-ruined governance.
What's Japan going to DO with 1Gbps? By the time we find out, it'll take us over a decade to catch up, even if all the monopolies and lobbies are broken the next day. (In my business, we used to get a few gallons per day of water out of wells and have a shower once a week or so; now consumption can be a ton of water per day per person and we shower all we want, we have hot tubs and pools, kids in Nevada learn to swim, we irrigate gardens, and fill our cities with trees in arid climates: trust me, uses for bandwidth WILL arise, and our kids will wonder how we got by without.)
Americans might want to start getting advice from the British on how you handle it, psychologically, when you wake up a decade or so into a new century and realize that you just aren't the most important nation on Earth anymore.
If, by "sum up to", you meant not their total mass, but total mass of carbon - since that's what you're comparing to in the rocks - then your bucknerweb reference actually sums up the oil and coal carbon weights to 619.7 Pg (petagrams), or as I'd prefer to call it, 619.7 teratonnes. (The carbon in natural gas is so much smaller as to raise the grand total to only 619.8 Pg)
Where you get the 9 Pg from would seem to be a mystery.
I didn't check your second reference, but if you got that one straight, the ratio is a "mere" 48,000:1 rather than 3 million: 1 -- still entirely large enough to make your point!
Also, 77% more CO2 takes you from 0.01% to 0.0177%, not to 0.07%. You're confusing "77% more" with "times seven".
Come to think of it, maybe I'd better check your math on the second reference. It says that the total mass of CaC03 is 350 Pt. And the total molecular weight of CaC03 = 40+12+16x3 = 100 so it's 12% Carbon. 0.12 * 350 = 42 Pt of Carbon, or 4.2E22 grams. Again, I'm unclear where in that link your 3E22 grams comes from.
So our ratio is now 4.2E22 / 619.8E15 = 67,700:1.
Apologies if I'm missing something here; I just followed your links, skimmed them very quickly, and spent 5 minutes checking the arithmetic.
Nobody's mentioned "FOIP" yet. The "Freedom of Information and Privacy" Act in Canada is both an FOI act when it comes to forcing the government (and some private companies) to reveal all non-classified information upon request, and a privacy-enforcement act that requires government and private business alike to safeguard any personal information for which they are custodian.
I work for a municipal government in Canada, and I have explicitly heard, from IT management in meetings, that we cannot give any contracts for data entry, data storage, data reduction and analysis, etc, to American firms, since the Patriot Act. This only applies to data classified a "private" under the FOIP rules, but here's the rub: the really simple way to handle some large data sets is to just duplicate the whole thing, all the tables. Going over them all to determine the FOIP status of every column and carefully remove, say, any column for "phone number" of your own staff or your customers, is a pain.
What's not a pain is going to a Canadian firm, having them sign a boilerplate FOIP-compliant privacy protection agreement. Various other countries with privacy legislation can be dealt with as well. Americans, alas, must hand over any and all data that the justice system asks for under the Patriot Act, so we can't give them the work.
I haven't heard of us going so far as to avoid transmission of FOIP-covered data through any network that will go through the USA, but after the FISA bill, I would say it's merely a matter of time.
I will admit from the start to be working from a stereotype, but here goes: The stereotype is that Japanese culture leans - more than most Oriental cultures and far more than any Western culture - to group norms, group *homogeneity*.
This initiative would be a total non-starter in Canada, which has, alas, the same obesity problems as the US.
I've never heard of such a thing out of the many European countries with universal health coverage, either.
So although your health care scheme may provide an incentive towards these kind of requirements, the fact that it is public - and ultimately accountable to the public - also restricts it to cultural standards embraced by the majority.
Or in short, any politician that wants to keep his job in the West is not even going to mention this. It's NOT a "slippery slope". On the contrary, pushing for higher general culture-wide health standards is a long, slow, UPHILL plod.
Ask the anti-cigarette activists; 54 years now since the surgeon general's report and while progress has been significant, it hasn't been fast.
Not my field of expertise, but isn't it Mr. Scalia - who was so much in opposition to the recent decision - that is regarded as one of the great "Constitutional Originalists" who DON'T believe in re-interpreting the row of words every generation but sticking to their meaning as understood at the time of writing?
I saw a big magazine article on him years ago pointing out that he seems to forsake this position every time it comes into conflict with the most conservative political preference, but I had no way to evaluate that opinion at the time as being fair vs. poltically-biased against him. Perhaps this is a case.
As you can tell, I'm somewhat - if not thoroughly - aware of the whole "we get to read it how we want to" argument, but I stand by my point. The specific choice of "invasion" over "war" in the document would seem to preclude saying "well, we're in a tough fight of some sort, we can toss out habeas". Mere "dire existential danger to the Union" STILL isn't enough, or they would have just written the word "WAR" in there. I still read it - and I wasn't born in 1787 - as specifying that you must have the problem of arresting and detaining entire armies before you can skip the "present them to a Court" step.
Can you toss out the whole document if the Supreme Court hands down a decision that says "we read those words to mean, 'Scooby Dooby Doo, Where Are You?', in code!" - sure you can. Everybody just has to say "Dred Scott" or whatever to point out how flexible the whole thing is in the end. But decisions that have constancy over time will be the ones that hold true to the basic intent of respect for individual rights. and the maximization of them despite their high costs.
I'm still shaking my head in disgust over a "warring talking heads" commentary on Canada's CTV network last night on this one. On the left, a Canadian professor who'd taught at Harvard. For the right, some guy I regret not catching the name of, from the conservative Hudson Institute. If it weren't the umpteenth time I'd seen it, I'd call it a classic example of the kind of brazen lying I've come to expect of these "think tanks".
/. to decide what you'd call a guy who'd lie about the content of your constitution to encourage and support the breaking of it.
I'll skip details on the other ways the guy embarrassed himself to any thinking audience - he tried maligning the Canadian's credentials at American law until the guy mentioned teaching at Harvard, for instance.
But towards the end, he actually said that the American constitution provides an exception to "for the Executive to suspend Habeas Corpus in time of WAR or insurrection" (emphasis mine). It doesn't. And there's no way a professional at that level made that big a mistake.
The framers chose all their words carefully, and it says:
http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html
Section 9 - Limits on Congress
The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
INVASION, not War. What do Invasion and Rebellion have in common? Only then do you have entire armies on American soil harming its public. Only when you'd have to give whole armies habeas corpus can you suspend it. If you have few enough enemies to manage with a court system, they all get the court system.
I guess I'm steamed because it was just the night before I learned the stat that not only did 70% of Americans at one point believe Saddam personally set up 9/11, but 80% of those supporting the Iraw war did so because of that belief. Which means that terrible damage can be done to America, not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocents, by lies such as the one I heard, espoused on TV, last night.
I leave it to the Americans on
Oh, yeah, and one other part of the lie, one in support of their endless reaching for Executive power: the exception to habeas corpus is for the CONGRESS, not the Executive. The Executive can't suspend it at ALL, not unless Congress passes a law allowing it. The Executive simply can't break the law, period. Not under the Constitution.
If you can keep it.
Thanks; I guess it was "non-PC", it sure didn't get modded up. I'm not sure what insult it is to base a dumb joke on the simple fact that India has a very high population, but insult it was, I guess - live and learn.
It's like the Chinese causing earthquakes by all jumping off a chair at the same time: you just need a teeter-totter and 127-million Indians all jumping on the other end at once...
Except for the one valid complaint that the government had helped this company along with a lot of support, I don't think anybody's even pretending that this is a justified intervention in the free market. (Whether Canadians have ever bought a US company that previously received lots of US government grants, contracts and other support, would be interesting; I'd be surprised if it *hadn't* happened, though).
But alas, it was tin-eared in the extreme to announce this just as Dextre was being installed and everybody's nationalistic pride in the company was at a peak. We've been smiling with pride every time a shuttle image showed the flag and name on the CanadArm for 20 years or so; and Dextre, another order of magnitude more impressive a technology, had us all rubbing our hands with pride and glee.
Then the owners do their best to give everybody an image of them saying "Thanks for the free help, suckers! We're selling out and off to Brazil with your cash!" This result was then predictable.
If they'd waited a year or two, perhaps couched it in terms of allowing the company to go on to greater achievements through partnering, maybe tossed out a few promises of continued location in Canada and all Canadian jobs totally safe (promises you can always break a few years later, it's not like PR is legally binding), they could have gotten away with it.
Now, they can't wait a few years and try again because the issue's been raised and the media will hype it up again unless they wait at least 10 years. And this was, by the way, our *Conservative*, pro-business party. Any chance of a future Liberal government allowing this one is much dimmer still.
Pardon me for asking for an apology for my factual statements being called bullshit, also for wanting the courtesy of a reply. I won't ask for either again.
I'm glad to hear you've done so much research. Care to share any?
You don't have to go on at length, just pass on the names of several north american water and/or sewer utilities that are tax-supported rather than self-supporting.
Well - in the event that they have declared themselves to be self-supporting and you believe the opposite because of hidden subsidies, a sentence describing these subsidies in each case, and a link or paper reference to supporting research about that, will prevent readers from thinking you pulled the names of the utilities from your phone book.
Thanks!
Thanks! Good to hear that it's at least possible for electronic to be cheaper than paper. Canada may switch one day, but the US experience will, I hope, make us very shy of the move.
...I can see people have to quit calling you a 3rd-world country. There's a real need to uplift a lot of Brazil to the higher income standards of your middle/upper classes, but that's just a matter of time, now. Time and rural education.
And after a look at your income distribution on gapminder.org (see my presentation about cheap new computers and world development at
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc - Brazil shows up around slide #48
Thanks for writing!
Perhaps an American /. reader can explain to the rest of us why you use machines at all? I don't mean just electronic voting, I mean all its predecessors - pulling levers, "butterfly ballots", punch cards and their infamous hanging chads.
In the middle of that 35-day recount thing in 2000, the Canadian electorate finished their (six week, from declaration of the election to the vote) national election with a vote that was over in 24 hours, from first poll open to last vote counted. The mechanism: pencil and paper.
I once volunteered for a local political party in a provincial election to "scrutineer" the ballots. It looked awfully foolproof to me, as all the scrutineers from all the parties watched each vote being counted in each box, some of us keeping our own tallies as they were added up. We were done in an hour or less.
Needless to say, the ratio of ballots to humans in the room was in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. We just employ a lot of humans in our elections, paid and volunteer. Few of our neighbourhood polling stations record more than 1000 ballots, and they have 3-4 employees, plus "N" volunteer scrutineers, depending on the number of parties running.
So why doesn't America just do that, is it the money? Somebody gave me the opinion that it's because Americans vote for so many offices - judges, DA's, sheriffs, local officials at the same time as federal. That this all came from previous centuries, farmers having to walk 10 miles to vote, so they only wanted to do it once every four years, and then register 25 votes at that time, making it hard to do on paper.
That didn't fly with me. Farmers have to come to town every week or three for supplies and so forth anyway. And if you want to vote for 25 offices instead of trusting one elected party to appoint them all, what's wrong with realizing that has COSTS and paying for more people to count them by hand with scrutineers from the campaigns watching every piece of paper go by? To turn around the old phrase, you can't take your choice without paying your money.
The paid human time (the N scrutineers are volunteers) to count one vote on paper is a second or so. One penny at $36.00 per hour, even, and most elections temporary staff are retirees making half that, giving you two seconds to the penny. Isn't counting one vote worth one penny to you? (Needless to say, the piece of paper is way under a penny, and the cost of the metal boxes is amortized over 20 elections; the high school gyms are free to use.)
I'm not saying the total cost of our elections is a penny per vote, that's the incremental cost of the counting process. We probably spend a buck per vote or more on the whole thing, organizing the operation, paying the permanent staff at Elections Canada to hire the retirees, print the ballots, etc. But the difference between having everybody pull a lever on some complicated counting machine or just putting an X on paper and putting it in a box, after all the setup is done, can't be over a penny per vote as far as I can see.
I guess you're never going to reply...you're off to do the next bit of sharply-worded commentary and "calling bullshit" and so forth.
Hey, "evilviper", when a 20-year veteran of an industry takes an hour out of his day to educate you, it's a common courtesy to reply. Key words recommended for the reply content are "Oh, I guess I was wrong" and "Thank you".
By the way, a quick way to have educated yourself on the relative numbers of tax- and self-supported utilities would have been to google the phrase "self-supporting utility" (394 pages of results) and "tax-supported utility" (10 pages of results), hinting at a 39:1 ratio of the former to the latter. That sounds about right to me. I have heard of tax-supported utilities, but I don't have any colleagues who work for one, not that I've met with at conferences or corresponded with or read papers by over the last 20 years.
Oh, and I did forget to address one claim you made without supporting references. When a water or sewer main leaks and damages a road, the utility pays for the repairs to the public infrastructure.
Laws running back a century or more were passed to keep utilities from being hit up by private landowners every time they believe there's been damage. (It can be hard to tell whether soil erosion or water infiltrating a basement was from natural flows or a water main leak.) As long as we can show we've been maintaining the infrastructure to commonly-held industry standards we are "saved harmless" from lawsuit when they, inevitably, do break or leak. The private landowners insurance has to handle it. If they can show we reasonably could have predicted the break or otherwise were negligent at maintenance, they have a case -- buy there aren't many such.
This is also why you get no compensation when your internet or phone or TV or even power goes out, even for longish periods in real weather disasters (Katrina), not even a reduction in your bill; not unless you have some specific language in your contract to that effect, as some industrial power and water consumers do have.
If you want perfect reliability, you have to go around doubling the number of connections to the building, providing alternate network paths to the building, and so on. At least doubles the bill, and most people would rather have $40/month and 0.1% outage time (~ 8 hrs/year) than $80/month and 0.001% outage time and an $800 refund per hour lost. (Just thought I'd drag the content back in the direction of the original topic.)
Very well, I am your source on that.
I have worked for what was Waterworks, (now called "Water Resources" since we merged with the Sewer dept.) for the City of Calgary, for 20 years.
We are a fully self-supporting utility. Utilities in Calgary pay "franchise fees" for the use of the public right-of-way to bury their pipes or cables in. The City-owned utilities in lieu of that, paid a "return on equity", I think being changed to a "return on capital", an accounting distinction that escapes me. But whatever the payments are called, they are a significant portion of our total income from sending out water/sewer bills. It's not a "profit", as such, indeed we are forbidden to make one; but it's the same return-on-investment of the huge capital invested that the City would otherwise get if it put it in good bank funds, something like that.
Control of the overall watershed of the Bow and Elbow Rivers from which we abstract our water is indeed a provincial responsibility, but it doesn't benefit the City of Calgary any more than anybody else who lives in the watershed, protected from floods, their consumption for irrigation uses recorded, any substance releases checked, and so on.
The Glenmore Dam that provides us with a 30-day retention of water for clarification, etc, was built by the City of Calgary using a special loan bylaw in 1930. But the debt was paid off entirely by the utility from utility bills, no money crossed the other way from the tax-supported side of the corporation.
All of the accounting for this is traceable through public documents; our budget is published in our annual report, showing all income from utility bills, and how we balance that with expenses, debt service, etc. You can get all the detail documents with a Freedom of Information request, but we wouldn't put you to the trouble of filing one, if you came into the office and just asked to see them, like as not.
You can get a good start just by going to calgary.ca , then "city hall", "business units" and "water services", browse around and look at the Rates section.
I've worked with those budget documents for many years, and there are no kinds of subsidies from our own, or other, levels of government in them.
From American Waterworks Association conferences, I've met a lot of my opposite numbers and this is all the same across at least the prairie provinces of Canada, and several more in the US that I've swapped notes with. Basically, we're all "uni-cities", as opposed to amalgamations of smaller separate municipalities, the most extreme of which has got to be Phoenix. Conurbations can have complex arrangements of sharing costs for plants, or buying/selling water at city limits, and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if tax money crept into some of the arrangements. I'd be much less surprised to hear that the tax-supported side of some municipal corporations "made money" on the deals; that's the more common case, at least with large cities, as utility rate increases usually have less backlash than tax increases.
The situation is even clearer with the Calgary-owned Electrical utility, now called "Enmax" and run like a private corporation, not using the City IT, Fleet, HR or Finance departments, buildings, etc. There's one share and the City owns it, but otherwise it runs as a private corporation, supported entirely by utility bills; that's carefully regulated as competition to private electrical suppliers is open and the competition must be fair. Any competitor suspecting any kind of subsidy could have it investigated.
Enmax' financials are on the web, here's a link to the page about their profits, with links to quarterly and annual reports:
http://www.enmax.com/Corporation/About+Enmax/Financials/ENMAX+Earnings+and+You.htm
Where it comes to gas utilities, most of southern Alberta is supplied by "ATCO", a company private but regulated, supposedly to an agreed, fixed pr