In California it is. See Prop 65, which means anything and everything can cause cancer, but only in California.
I don't think its too much of a reach to say that manufacturers could make stickers that say "WARNING: This product contains produce known to the State of California to be genetically modified" and just slap it on everything.
An entry-level U.S. pilot job with a legacy carrier earns less than a fresh school bus driver gets in the school district where I live.
I know that is true, but the senior crew (pilots AND flight attendants) fly once or twice a month, and make a healthy 6 figures for their trouble. No exaggeration. The most senior crew get themselves the long trans-atlantic or trans-pacific routes and work 4 or 5 days a month.
What encourages or demands that kind of policy? It seems to be the union interactions. You can blame the union leaders or the execs at the company, but I don't see that kind of pay lopsidedness vs experience in most other industries. In my industry, a senior guy might make 3-4 times what a junior guy makes, if he is really experienced. In the airline business, a senior crew member can make 10x what the junior guys get.
Unfortunately, airlines aren't exactly struggling to find young pilots either, despite the low pay. It is a lifestyle that appeals to some people despite the poor compensation, and you have the chance to make big $$$ later in your career if you keep at it. Junior pay is set by the market. Senior pay is set by ??? Since there are plenty of junior guys chomping at the bit to take their place, I can only assume the union is responsible for the imbalance in pay.
Catastrophic? I hardly think you can blame all the airline troubles on deregulation. Read up on what it meant to fly before deregulation- routes pricing was set by the government. It is a clear example of government price controls of a service commodity. Some people would call that communist. I would only call it unnecessary.
Talk to anyone in the airline industry and they will tell you the unions are the problem. Airline unions, especially pilot and flight attendant unions, are crazy. Just in the last couple weeks the pilot union of bankrupt American airlines rejected an arguably reasonable offer (given the circumstances), which was designed to keep all the pilots onboard. Since the union can't agree, now it gets litigated and many pilots will probably lose their jobs. And they will probably take the concessions they were asked to take anyway, since their company is bankrupt.
,' who was required to attend nightly 1 a.m. video conference calls
Is this some sort of joke? I do a lot of conference calls with Japan and the latest we go is 8PM EST (but I live in CST so it is only 7PM for me.
Bangalore is a little tougher, but they could still do 10PM central US, 8:30AM Bangalore. Is google so inflexible that they refuse to reschedule a meeting to be more convenient for everyone involved?
Also- this is a good reminder for me to never do business with India if I want to remain sane. The meeting times in Japan and Korea overlap not terribly bad with awake hours in the US, but once you go that extra hour or two to India it seems to become very inconvenient.
I can imagine it would help with driverless or computer-driven cars. It makes collision avoidance easier when moving objects you are likely to hit are broadcasting a signal you can detect. This doesn't have speed or position information, but a computer could at least detect them and then start looking harder for "large truck, diesel powered" using other collision detection methods.
Its a national standard so you only need 1 radio receiver for all cars. I don't know how the signal is set up, but maybe it could be expanded (like ODB-II) to include other information like position/speed.
Government loan guarantees started coming through in the last few years, including low-interest loans. Financing $8 billion dollars over 25 years carries a huge amount of cost in interest- enough to make or break the profitability of a plant. The NRC stopped being total pricks and shortened and simplified some types of design reviews, and there hadn't been a nuclear incident (until last year anyway) so the anti-nuclear people had all fallen asleep or forgotten about their cause. Rising energy costs helped too. It was really a number of things.
The thing that terrifies me is the huge number of natural gas plants that are being built. They are springing up by the dozens. I can count on 1 hand the number of coal plants which were built in the last 5 years, and far far more coal plants are being decommissioned than being built. We are in a recession now so the electrical demand is lower than normal (actually demand decreased for the first time ever). For various reasons natural gas is cheaper than ever before. But what happens in 10 years? 15 years? Demand will come back, and natural gas will get more expensive. Gas is at all-time lows, it has basically nowhere to go but upwards. I hope we can pivot away from natural gas quickly enough.
The intent of the penal system is to demonstrate to the rest of society that those who transgress societies rules will be punished, and therefore deter future events by people other than the people being punished.
I must be some sort of commie idealist then. I thought the point of a penal system is to rehabilitate people into being productive members of society.
The US system has not been following this philosophy for a long time, if ever. But the point of a penal system should not be punishment. Most people should agree that a person in prison is a drag on the country's GDP. They are counted as population, but produce basically nothing. For a healthier and more productive society, the goal should be to get the person out of prison as soon as possible, and give them skills to be productive and socially acceptable in society.
The only countries that do this successfully are branded as "communist" and the prisons are labeled as "resort prisons". It is hard to argue with their relapse rate statistics however.
Monolingual zealots (typically of the borderline racist kind). Seriously, YMMV, but the only type of people I've ever seen making this claim are the type not typically happy with people speaking a foreign language around them. I don't understand what they are talking about, so they must be talking about me!!!". It feels like a long time ago, the early 90's when you could still see the bigotry the hatred. It was regular topic in the news, of employers firing their employees because they were talking Spanish or Vietnamese or Creole, or f* Klingon in the parking lot on the way home or during lunch (not on the clock, mind you, not on the clock.)
Now, the rhetoric has shifted from language to immigration status, and to a somewhat lesser degree to Islamic fundamentalism. The later two are based real issues - illegal immigration and Islamic terrorism. However, a significant number of people who bring these issues up do so to rationalize Anti-Hispanic or Islamophobic sentiments, regardless of their connections (or lack thereof) with illegal immigration or Islamic terrorism.
It is a generalization, I know, to say these claims are only made by people uncomfortable with foreign-language speakers. But it has been a generalization that holds true in my experience. YMMV obviously.
I don't think you need to be any kind of zealot to think that multiple languages confuses a child. My wife's first language is not English. Many of her immigrant friends have children who are learning to speak English and another language. They are slower at first. Sometimes they are confused about who speaks what language. Many times one of their children has come up to me and started babbling in a language I don't understand. Since small children are basically psychopaths (don't know right from wrong) they can't tell who understands or not. Over the long term they catch up, but if you were trying bilingual children without *needing* to, or if both parents spoke only one language, it would be pretty easy to just say "it confuses the children" and give up. My own son is only 4 months so he isn't saying much of anything, but based on the experience of our friends, he will be a little slower than his single-language peers at first.
There is a pretty good argument in the US that you don't need more than one language. I can get in my car, drive 12 hours, stop for the night, drive for 12 hours the next day, stop for the night again and drive for 12 hours on a third day. I live in the middle of the country, but a 36 hour drive would only put me in California somewhere. The US is VAST and monolingual. There are English "dialects" but you can generally understand people without any problem. I know of no other country on the planet where this is the case except the US. If I lived as an expat (I'm trying to do this, but my company won't cooperate) I would try to learn the local language, but for now it would be a huge time sink for no reward.
I've noticed that in general it's cheaper to buy a new bookcase than to buy the wood to build your own of the same quality, _if_ you're that good - it's hard to match the precision with which even Ikea furniture is made.
It depends on the quality you are shooting for. If you want a cheap bookcase made of cheap material, then buying a complete unit is better. Spending time working with cheap materials usually isn't cost effective. There is a point where if you have premium materials, you can turn out something which would normally have a very premium price. I made a set of Japanese room dividers (oak) for about $200; the professional one of the same materials was more than $400. Now, you could buy some cheap room dividers for $100, but the ones I made are oak with replaceable paper. Unless they are sold or destroyed in a flood or fire, my great-great grandchildren will probably inherit them.
There is a separate discussion about having something which is too overbuilt, but for me, sturdy and long-lasting furniture is worth the cost.
I recently bought a pair of those glove-like shoes (where each toe gets its own slot) that doesn't fit my feet very well.
First of all, make sure you didn't get a knock-off [birthdayshoes.com]. The Vibram five finger shoes are cloned so much that they've been used as a case study for how counterfeiting (ehm, counterfeeting?) starts & how to prevent it.
Well of course they are cloned to death. They have an Apple Iphone-like markup but are not nearly as complicated. Just because Vibram got the idea first doesn't mean they can charge $100 for $5 worth of materials. If I had a shoe-making shop with a rubber sole-forming machine, I would start cranking them out too.
Are you being serious here? I work in an industry where we have tiny clearances on huge rotating equipment parts. The number of places we need 0.001" accuracy is not large. 0.01" or 0.02" is usually good enough for all but the most critical dimensions.
Most US states don't have bottle deposit programs. Traveling to a state that does is usually cost-prohibitive with today's fuel prices. Even when Seinfeld did a similar scheme back in 1996 with a postal van, it wasn't really worthwhile. Gas averaged around $1.30 then.
Assuming any particular pump technology would give you a number for MPa/MJ that you could apply, but it doesn't help you understadn the performance of the filter itself.
I don't believe this is a linear relationship (without digging up a book, and I'm lazy today). Putting the first 10 PSI in a tire is easy, but the higher the pressure the harder it is to pump, and the more energy expended per unit of pressure.
So if there is a technology which requires super high pressure, and another which can get by fine with a low pressure, the L/cm2/day/MPa values may not be usable for comparison.
Because ears are a miracle of engineering, and the signal processing the brain does is similarly brilliant. The shape of the pinner - the fleshy bit - means that sounds sound different if they get into your ear canal from different directions - otherwise (and I used to wonder this as a kid) how could you tell whether a sound source was directly ahead or directly behind?
As I recall, your brain can also use the tiny timing difference (on the order of 1/3000s) to determine distance and direction
I think this might be a little bit suspect. I have had hearing in only 1 ear for all of my life. I have a very difficult time determining where sounds are coming from sometimes. In a noisy room, it is often impossible. I don't think you can determine sound direction from one ear only, based on the difficulties that I have. I am pretty sure that this capability comes from having 2 good ears and the 5-7" space between them which results in slightly different sounds hitting each ear. With just one ear, you have no point of reference. A sound is a sound and while I have full range hearing, I can not appreciate any difference between mono and stereo, or a sound from the left or the right.
As far as disabilities go, this is pretty mild. I can't appreciate stereo (or other multichannel) sound . Big deal. But the "virtual haircut" illusion does nothing for me. No illusion. There are volume changes but that's about it.
I've seen this a lot with year-round firework stores. Firework stores (aside from the 3 weeks before the 4th of July, and the 2 weeks before Christmas) are generally not busy places. The employees part right in front to make it seem that other people are there. Many people don't like to go into a store with nobody else inside.
At least our passwords expire every 90 days / 3 months
You think this is a good thing? It is a terrible policy. It pretty much guarantees that the password is a standard phrase with some sequential element to it (squirrel1, squirrel2, squirrel3, etc) or just written down somewhere.
After all evidence points in China they are doing just this, as they did with Nortel routers with a backdoor.
Does it? This malware targets machines in the middle east only. What big stake does China have there that would make them go to all this trouble? I could see them doing this to the US, Japan, Korea, Philippines, or Taiwan, but the middle east doesn't make a lot of sense to poke around with for China. You could probably make a case for something, sure, but as another poster said it makes a lot more sense that Israel did it.
Actually, the GP is pretty spot on. There are two types of sales people generally, the Hustlers that tend to act like a hairdryer at management, playing buzzword bingo to provide the required level of synergy with the current corporate strategy, or the sales types that tend to understand what they are selling, and explain the benefits of the products.
In some industries, such as pharmaceutics and IT, there is a third type. The attractive female saleswoman. She shows up and the men buy whatever she is selling.
Both the United States and Japan actually have considerable unexploited hydroelectric capacity, but construction of major new dams has been effectively discontinued for several decades now, because of a mixture of local opposition and environmental worries. It's renewable, but not sure it's really "green", since it requires a massive, permanent change to a river basin. Nuclear is probably greener, despite not being renewable.
Not only that, but until last year, Japan had been decommissioning a lot of their hydro units since they were fish choppers. Some of them had to be brought out of mothball status because of the power crunch.
Anyone who proposes hydro as a solution to Japan hasn't been there. Pretty much any piece of land which is even slightly flat has buildings or rice paddies on it. They don't have enough space as it is. in the US, we call them "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) people who just want to oppose anything. The local opposition in Japan to such large projects is more like "don't displace me, bro". I'll exclude nuclear from those people though, as the current nuclear opposition in Japan is about as fanatical and misinformed as the US antinuclear movement was in the 1970's.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, matters more at winning wars than logistics. The lethal fighting force is but the edge of a vast engineering and distribution network. Or, if it is not the edge of such a network, it is soon a defeated lethal fighting force.
I spent six years in the U.S. Air Force flying a desk. To this day people are shocked that the only time I flew on a plane was a civilian airliner, and I never saw combat.
When I was in, the USAF was around 300,000 Airmen. Around 10% was aircrew, which includes: pilots, navigators, crew chiefs, AWACS computer guys, etc. It took the rest of the USAF to handle the rest: feed the troops, get them to where they need to go, ensure their computers were working correctly, tracking millions of bullets, bombs and missiles, tending to medical needs, paychecks, etc.
Just goes to show how bloated the US military is and how the military budget could stand to take a slashing.
I was going to bring up some figures to show that you are totally wrong and that the ratio has been improving as the military gets leaner, but you are correct. The trend is more and more support troops. According to the military's figures, it is more like 25% fighters, 75% nonfighters, but the Air Force might be skewed a bit since a jet has a lot more power than 1 man on the ground.
Long PDF here. Too long for me so I just read the conclusions starting at page 77.
It wouldn't take a whole lot to put up some cheap, but durable statues or other outdoor art, and build the equipment cabinet into the pedestal base. There are probably artists who would be happy to get their work on public display for little or no cost.
Or you could build the cabinet really long, and make it look like a bench. It would be warm too.
Maybe you need to look harder or very slightly older? My workplace is filled with people in their mid to late 20's who work their asses off, and 50+ year old workers who are coasting on reputation and resume alone, doing the minimum work required in the most lazy and error-prone way possible. Our industry boomed in the 1970's but has been largely stagnant for the last 25 years with relatively few hirings. The old guys fear the "great turnover" but I see it as a good thing.
Unless you work for Goldman Sachs or have some other sensitive position, please get an account. You're writing too many smart things to remain the anonymous coward.
Even if you moved it in with a station wagon full of tapes or disks and your provider let you import it, I'm sure your provider will not be so helpful when you need to move it back out.
Why not? You are paying for their services right? Even a particularly scummy company would be swayed by the request "my pre-production server crashed hard. Can you mail me the disks?". I am not familiar with all these companies, but Crashplan charges you a fee to put your data on a disk and mail it to you. Unless you are a huge customer on a contract, most places probably charge to deal with disks.
That's one part of Econ that I never did understand... WHY should there always be a little inflation? What possible good could there be for my daily gallon of Red Bull to cost an extra 20 cents this year than it did last year? (Higher prices provide incentive to cut back, but that's a health benefit not an economic benefit.)
Deflation makes sense - less money moving around, vendors make less, so they have less to pay in wages. The whole thing spirals down. But where's the problem with no inflation?
In theory, there is no problem with 0 inflation. The problem is attaining it. The Federal Reserve has powers, but unlike the powers of congress and the president and the supreme court, it takes a long time to see the affect of any policy they put in place. The economy is a supertanker and the Fed is a little bow thruster. It is difficult to know precisely what effect Fed policies will have, and how long it will take to get there.
That being said, we need a small amount of inflation in order to keep up with other countries. Most other counties subscribe to the "small amount of inflation" theory. If we had 0 inflation, prices overseas would rise (purchasing power would decrease) but our currency would stay the same (ie, a very strong dollar). This would be great for American tourists traveling abroad, but the companies in the US that make things would have a hard time selling things overseas. Most Japanese companies that export are having a difficult time with this. The Yen was roughly 110 Yen/Dollar about 4 years ago and now it hovers around 80 Yen/Dollar. This is a substantial difference and since most big Japanese companies source things and do machining inside Japan (their costs are mostly fixed to the Yen) some are really struggling to sell abroad.
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In California it is. See Prop 65, which means anything and everything can cause cancer, but only in California.
I don't think its too much of a reach to say that manufacturers could make stickers that say "WARNING: This product contains produce known to the State of California to be genetically modified" and just slap it on everything.
An entry-level U.S. pilot job with a legacy carrier earns less than a fresh school bus driver gets in the school district where I live.
I know that is true, but the senior crew (pilots AND flight attendants) fly once or twice a month, and make a healthy 6 figures for their trouble. No exaggeration. The most senior crew get themselves the long trans-atlantic or trans-pacific routes and work 4 or 5 days a month.
What encourages or demands that kind of policy? It seems to be the union interactions. You can blame the union leaders or the execs at the company, but I don't see that kind of pay lopsidedness vs experience in most other industries. In my industry, a senior guy might make 3-4 times what a junior guy makes, if he is really experienced. In the airline business, a senior crew member can make 10x what the junior guys get.
Unfortunately, airlines aren't exactly struggling to find young pilots either, despite the low pay. It is a lifestyle that appeals to some people despite the poor compensation, and you have the chance to make big $$$ later in your career if you keep at it. Junior pay is set by the market. Senior pay is set by ??? Since there are plenty of junior guys chomping at the bit to take their place, I can only assume the union is responsible for the imbalance in pay.
Catastrophic? I hardly think you can blame all the airline troubles on deregulation. Read up on what it meant to fly before deregulation- routes pricing was set by the government. It is a clear example of government price controls of a service commodity. Some people would call that communist. I would only call it unnecessary.
Talk to anyone in the airline industry and they will tell you the unions are the problem. Airline unions, especially pilot and flight attendant unions, are crazy. Just in the last couple weeks the pilot union of bankrupt American airlines rejected an arguably reasonable offer (given the circumstances), which was designed to keep all the pilots onboard. Since the union can't agree, now it gets litigated and many pilots will probably lose their jobs. And they will probably take the concessions they were asked to take anyway, since their company is bankrupt.
,' who was required to attend nightly 1 a.m. video conference calls
Is this some sort of joke? I do a lot of conference calls with Japan and the latest we go is 8PM EST (but I live in CST so it is only 7PM for me.
Bangalore is a little tougher, but they could still do 10PM central US, 8:30AM Bangalore. Is google so inflexible that they refuse to reschedule a meeting to be more convenient for everyone involved?
Also- this is a good reminder for me to never do business with India if I want to remain sane. The meeting times in Japan and Korea overlap not terribly bad with awake hours in the US, but once you go that extra hour or two to India it seems to become very inconvenient.
I can imagine it would help with driverless or computer-driven cars. It makes collision avoidance easier when moving objects you are likely to hit are broadcasting a signal you can detect. This doesn't have speed or position information, but a computer could at least detect them and then start looking harder for "large truck, diesel powered" using other collision detection methods.
Its a national standard so you only need 1 radio receiver for all cars. I don't know how the signal is set up, but maybe it could be expanded (like ODB-II) to include other information like position/speed.
Government loan guarantees started coming through in the last few years, including low-interest loans. Financing $8 billion dollars over 25 years carries a huge amount of cost in interest- enough to make or break the profitability of a plant. The NRC stopped being total pricks and shortened and simplified some types of design reviews, and there hadn't been a nuclear incident (until last year anyway) so the anti-nuclear people had all fallen asleep or forgotten about their cause. Rising energy costs helped too. It was really a number of things.
The thing that terrifies me is the huge number of natural gas plants that are being built. They are springing up by the dozens. I can count on 1 hand the number of coal plants which were built in the last 5 years, and far far more coal plants are being decommissioned than being built. We are in a recession now so the electrical demand is lower than normal (actually demand decreased for the first time ever). For various reasons natural gas is cheaper than ever before. But what happens in 10 years? 15 years? Demand will come back, and natural gas will get more expensive. Gas is at all-time lows, it has basically nowhere to go but upwards. I hope we can pivot away from natural gas quickly enough.
The intent of the penal system is to demonstrate to the rest of society that those who transgress societies rules will be punished, and therefore deter future events by people other than the people being punished.
I must be some sort of commie idealist then. I thought the point of a penal system is to rehabilitate people into being productive members of society.
The US system has not been following this philosophy for a long time, if ever. But the point of a penal system should not be punishment. Most people should agree that a person in prison is a drag on the country's GDP. They are counted as population, but produce basically nothing. For a healthier and more productive society, the goal should be to get the person out of prison as soon as possible, and give them skills to be productive and socially acceptable in society.
The only countries that do this successfully are branded as "communist" and the prisons are labeled as "resort prisons". It is hard to argue with their relapse rate statistics however.
Who the hell thinks this?
Monolingual zealots (typically of the borderline racist kind). Seriously, YMMV, but the only type of people I've ever seen making this claim are the type not typically happy with people speaking a foreign language around them. I don't understand what they are talking about, so they must be talking about me!!!". It feels like a long time ago, the early 90's when you could still see the bigotry the hatred. It was regular topic in the news, of employers firing their employees because they were talking Spanish or Vietnamese or Creole, or f* Klingon in the parking lot on the way home or during lunch (not on the clock, mind you, not on the clock.)
Now, the rhetoric has shifted from language to immigration status, and to a somewhat lesser degree to Islamic fundamentalism. The later two are based real issues - illegal immigration and Islamic terrorism. However, a significant number of people who bring these issues up do so to rationalize Anti-Hispanic or Islamophobic sentiments, regardless of their connections (or lack thereof) with illegal immigration or Islamic terrorism.
It is a generalization, I know, to say these claims are only made by people uncomfortable with foreign-language speakers. But it has been a generalization that holds true in my experience. YMMV obviously.
I don't think you need to be any kind of zealot to think that multiple languages confuses a child. My wife's first language is not English. Many of her immigrant friends have children who are learning to speak English and another language. They are slower at first. Sometimes they are confused about who speaks what language. Many times one of their children has come up to me and started babbling in a language I don't understand. Since small children are basically psychopaths (don't know right from wrong) they can't tell who understands or not. Over the long term they catch up, but if you were trying bilingual children without *needing* to, or if both parents spoke only one language, it would be pretty easy to just say "it confuses the children" and give up. My own son is only 4 months so he isn't saying much of anything, but based on the experience of our friends, he will be a little slower than his single-language peers at first.
There is a pretty good argument in the US that you don't need more than one language. I can get in my car, drive 12 hours, stop for the night, drive for 12 hours the next day, stop for the night again and drive for 12 hours on a third day. I live in the middle of the country, but a 36 hour drive would only put me in California somewhere. The US is VAST and monolingual. There are English "dialects" but you can generally understand people without any problem. I know of no other country on the planet where this is the case except the US. If I lived as an expat (I'm trying to do this, but my company won't cooperate) I would try to learn the local language, but for now it would be a huge time sink for no reward.
I've noticed that in general it's cheaper to buy a new bookcase than to buy the wood to build your own of the same quality, _if_ you're that good - it's hard to match the precision with which even Ikea furniture is made.
It depends on the quality you are shooting for. If you want a cheap bookcase made of cheap material, then buying a complete unit is better. Spending time working with cheap materials usually isn't cost effective. There is a point where if you have premium materials, you can turn out something which would normally have a very premium price. I made a set of Japanese room dividers (oak) for about $200; the professional one of the same materials was more than $400. Now, you could buy some cheap room dividers for $100, but the ones I made are oak with replaceable paper. Unless they are sold or destroyed in a flood or fire, my great-great grandchildren will probably inherit them.
There is a separate discussion about having something which is too overbuilt, but for me, sturdy and long-lasting furniture is worth the cost.
I recently bought a pair of those glove-like shoes (where each toe gets its own slot) that doesn't fit my feet very well.
First of all, make sure you didn't get a knock-off [birthdayshoes.com]. The Vibram five finger shoes are cloned so much that they've been used as a case study for how counterfeiting (ehm, counterfeeting?) starts & how to prevent it.
Well of course they are cloned to death. They have an Apple Iphone-like markup but are not nearly as complicated. Just because Vibram got the idea first doesn't mean they can charge $100 for $5 worth of materials. If I had a shoe-making shop with a rubber sole-forming machine, I would start cranking them out too.
Are you being serious here? I work in an industry where we have tiny clearances on huge rotating equipment parts. The number of places we need 0.001" accuracy is not large. 0.01" or 0.02" is usually good enough for all but the most critical dimensions.
Most US states don't have bottle deposit programs. Traveling to a state that does is usually cost-prohibitive with today's fuel prices. Even when Seinfeld did a similar scheme back in 1996 with a postal van, it wasn't really worthwhile. Gas averaged around $1.30 then.
Assuming any particular pump technology would give you a number for MPa/MJ that you could apply, but it doesn't help you understadn the performance of the filter itself.
I don't believe this is a linear relationship (without digging up a book, and I'm lazy today). Putting the first 10 PSI in a tire is easy, but the higher the pressure the harder it is to pump, and the more energy expended per unit of pressure.
So if there is a technology which requires super high pressure, and another which can get by fine with a low pressure, the L/cm2/day/MPa values may not be usable for comparison.
Because ears are a miracle of engineering, and the signal processing the brain does is similarly brilliant. The shape of the pinner - the fleshy bit - means that sounds sound different if they get into your ear canal from different directions - otherwise (and I used to wonder this as a kid) how could you tell whether a sound source was directly ahead or directly behind? As I recall, your brain can also use the tiny timing difference (on the order of 1/3000s) to determine distance and direction
I think this might be a little bit suspect. I have had hearing in only 1 ear for all of my life. I have a very difficult time determining where sounds are coming from sometimes. In a noisy room, it is often impossible. I don't think you can determine sound direction from one ear only, based on the difficulties that I have. I am pretty sure that this capability comes from having 2 good ears and the 5-7" space between them which results in slightly different sounds hitting each ear. With just one ear, you have no point of reference. A sound is a sound and while I have full range hearing, I can not appreciate any difference between mono and stereo, or a sound from the left or the right.
As far as disabilities go, this is pretty mild. I can't appreciate stereo (or other multichannel) sound . Big deal. But the "virtual haircut" illusion does nothing for me. No illusion. There are volume changes but that's about it.
I've seen this a lot with year-round firework stores. Firework stores (aside from the 3 weeks before the 4th of July, and the 2 weeks before Christmas) are generally not busy places. The employees part right in front to make it seem that other people are there. Many people don't like to go into a store with nobody else inside.
At least our passwords expire every 90 days / 3 months
You think this is a good thing? It is a terrible policy. It pretty much guarantees that the password is a standard phrase with some sequential element to it (squirrel1, squirrel2, squirrel3, etc) or just written down somewhere.
After all evidence points in China they are doing just this, as they did with Nortel routers with a backdoor.
Does it? This malware targets machines in the middle east only. What big stake does China have there that would make them go to all this trouble? I could see them doing this to the US, Japan, Korea, Philippines, or Taiwan, but the middle east doesn't make a lot of sense to poke around with for China. You could probably make a case for something, sure, but as another poster said it makes a lot more sense that Israel did it.
Cue "I bet the Jews did this" photo meme.
Actually, the GP is pretty spot on. There are two types of sales people generally, the Hustlers that tend to act like a hairdryer at management, playing buzzword bingo to provide the required level of synergy with the current corporate strategy, or the sales types that tend to understand what they are selling, and explain the benefits of the products.
In some industries, such as pharmaceutics and IT, there is a third type. The attractive female saleswoman. She shows up and the men buy whatever she is selling.
Both the United States and Japan actually have considerable unexploited hydroelectric capacity, but construction of major new dams has been effectively discontinued for several decades now, because of a mixture of local opposition and environmental worries. It's renewable, but not sure it's really "green", since it requires a massive, permanent change to a river basin. Nuclear is probably greener, despite not being renewable.
Not only that, but until last year, Japan had been decommissioning a lot of their hydro units since they were fish choppers. Some of them had to be brought out of mothball status because of the power crunch.
Anyone who proposes hydro as a solution to Japan hasn't been there. Pretty much any piece of land which is even slightly flat has buildings or rice paddies on it. They don't have enough space as it is. in the US, we call them "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) people who just want to oppose anything. The local opposition in Japan to such large projects is more like "don't displace me, bro". I'll exclude nuclear from those people though, as the current nuclear opposition in Japan is about as fanatical and misinformed as the US antinuclear movement was in the 1970's.
I spent six years in the U.S. Air Force flying a desk. To this day people are shocked that the only time I flew on a plane was a civilian airliner, and I never saw combat.
When I was in, the USAF was around 300,000 Airmen. Around 10% was aircrew, which includes: pilots, navigators, crew chiefs, AWACS computer guys, etc. It took the rest of the USAF to handle the rest: feed the troops, get them to where they need to go, ensure their computers were working correctly, tracking millions of bullets, bombs and missiles, tending to medical needs, paychecks, etc.
Just goes to show how bloated the US military is and how the military budget could stand to take a slashing.
I was going to bring up some figures to show that you are totally wrong and that the ratio has been improving as the military gets leaner, but you are correct. The trend is more and more support troops. According to the military's figures, it is more like 25% fighters, 75% nonfighters, but the Air Force might be skewed a bit since a jet has a lot more power than 1 man on the ground.
Long PDF here. Too long for me so I just read the conclusions starting at page 77.
It wouldn't take a whole lot to put up some cheap, but durable statues or other outdoor art, and build the equipment cabinet into the pedestal base. There are probably artists who would be happy to get their work on public display for little or no cost.
Or you could build the cabinet really long, and make it look like a bench. It would be warm too.
Maybe you need to look harder or very slightly older? My workplace is filled with people in their mid to late 20's who work their asses off, and 50+ year old workers who are coasting on reputation and resume alone, doing the minimum work required in the most lazy and error-prone way possible. Our industry boomed in the 1970's but has been largely stagnant for the last 25 years with relatively few hirings. The old guys fear the "great turnover" but I see it as a good thing.
Unless you work for Goldman Sachs or have some other sensitive position, please get an account. You're writing too many smart things to remain the anonymous coward.
Even if you moved it in with a station wagon full of tapes or disks and your provider let you import it, I'm sure your provider will not be so helpful when you need to move it back out.
Why not? You are paying for their services right? Even a particularly scummy company would be swayed by the request "my pre-production server crashed hard. Can you mail me the disks?". I am not familiar with all these companies, but Crashplan charges you a fee to put your data on a disk and mail it to you. Unless you are a huge customer on a contract, most places probably charge to deal with disks.
That's one part of Econ that I never did understand... WHY should there always be a little inflation? What possible good could there be for my daily gallon of Red Bull to cost an extra 20 cents this year than it did last year? (Higher prices provide incentive to cut back, but that's a health benefit not an economic benefit.) Deflation makes sense - less money moving around, vendors make less, so they have less to pay in wages. The whole thing spirals down. But where's the problem with no inflation?
In theory, there is no problem with 0 inflation. The problem is attaining it. The Federal Reserve has powers, but unlike the powers of congress and the president and the supreme court, it takes a long time to see the affect of any policy they put in place. The economy is a supertanker and the Fed is a little bow thruster. It is difficult to know precisely what effect Fed policies will have, and how long it will take to get there.
That being said, we need a small amount of inflation in order to keep up with other countries. Most other counties subscribe to the "small amount of inflation" theory. If we had 0 inflation, prices overseas would rise (purchasing power would decrease) but our currency would stay the same (ie, a very strong dollar). This would be great for American tourists traveling abroad, but the companies in the US that make things would have a hard time selling things overseas. Most Japanese companies that export are having a difficult time with this. The Yen was roughly 110 Yen/Dollar about 4 years ago and now it hovers around 80 Yen/Dollar. This is a substantial difference and since most big Japanese companies source things and do machining inside Japan (their costs are mostly fixed to the Yen) some are really struggling to sell abroad.