OCSE observers have been present at elections in Texas for ten years, without incident. OCSE can and does recruit watchers who meet the eligibility requirements for registered observers under Texas state law.
This is purely a manufactured issue, to entertain the masses.
If the show aired without the necessary performance and sync clearances, then they already have legal issues. Simply removing it from on-line archives does not make them go away, but it does mitigate damages.
On the other hand, they may have secured the necessary clearances and paid royalties for the original airing, but found that the royalties for on-line distribution were too high. In particular, since the music was integral to the storyline in a skit, as opposed to a standalone musical performance, one or more of the publishers may have demanded "grand rights" (performance, sync _and_ dramatic use), which carry heavy royalties for rebroadcast or distribution. That's a particular hassle because a dramatic use license must be negotiated with each publisher individually--it isn't handled automatically by the performance rights organizations--and the publisher may deny it altogether. Conceivably, one of the publishers may have raised the dramatic use claim after the show was aired, in which case, the video of this skit may be dead forever.
But why are all the planets and moons so round? Why do we not see some that are odd shapes?
Self-gravity. With sufficient mass and radius, gravitational forces overcome the yield strength of the materials and cause even solid bodies to assume a spherical shape. This occurs at about 300km radius. The surface may still be irregular, but overburden pressure causes rocks at depth to undergo plastic or ductile deformation. For a mathematical derivation, Google "potato radius".
The Moon has a radius of over 1,700 km. Bear in mind, also, that much of it and the Earth would have be molten material after being separated by a collision, so both would have returned to a spherical shape rather quickly.
Well, in this case, it happens to be both. The lack of hard currency to back up the rial is causing inflation, which causes people to have to carry bigger wads of physical currency, so now there's a shortage of that.
I'm not sure who the "we" in your comment might be, but the International Energy Agency estimates that Iranian oil exports are down 60% this year. The only countries which are buying oil from Iran appear to be China, India, South Korea, Japan and Turkey.
The EU banned imports of crude oil from Iran, starting in July. The ban also prohibits European insurance companies from covering Iranian export shipments, which makes it difficult for many countries outside of Europe to import Iranian oil.
The oil embargo is the primary reason for the fall in value of the Iranian rial. Without dollars flowing into Iran, their own currency becomes worthless. The current exchange rate is 12265 IRR/USD. That makes the price of imports out of reach for most businesses and consumers in Iran. Inflation in Iran is estimated to be about 30%.
The Iranian people are increasingly pointing the finger of blame at Ahmadinejad and no one else. Iran's parliament wants to throw him out, but they don't have the power (yet). I think his days are numbered.
Making you try to build anything interesting with NOT gates would be a pretty good joke, really. Especially if they made you do it for three years!
Now if they had only let you use NOR gates...
The SBP9900 (a bipolar, radiation-hardened version of the TMS9900 16-bit microprocessor) was designed in 1976 using nothing but inverters. Pretty interesting, I would say, considering there were no other 16-bit microprocessors on the market at that time.
No one has ever before mistaken the framers of the US Constitution for fundamentalists. They considered these liberties to be the natural rights of man, not dependent upon any religious belief, and, yes, they considered those rights to be absolute. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, despise the philosophical naturalism from which the rights of man are derived; they consider such irreligious philosophy "secular humanism". Fundamentalists would gladly discard the Rights of Man in favor of the Law of God.
European governments have never embraced the concept of absolute Freedom of Speech. It is a peculiarly (U.S.) American idea, which never caught on, elsewhere. Not even in Canada, as a matter of fact.
TFS makes no sense at all; TFA is not much better. It seems that, rather than asking, "Why is there so little xenon in the atmosphere" and coming up with a purely speculative answer, the researchers might have questioned why anyone expected to find more.
...I find that one has the right to own and use a printing press. That does not imply that anyone is entitled to have the printing press given to him.
Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is possibly the most liberal definition of "human rights" currently imaginable, seems to concur. It is difficult, given the reality of life on this planet, to see how mobile broadband can be included as a requirement for "a standard of living adequate for... health and well-being" (Article 25).
[...] there is a significant number of Georgia residents that do not actually believe that evolution, the big bang [...] and genetics are not, in fact, tricks and lies of Satan.
Not quite every state. There are about 20 unique gasoline formulation requirements in the US. Most of the requirements for unique formulations do not follow state boundaries; they are designated for specific metropolitan areas. In the vast majority of the _area_ of the US, which is outside of any metropolitan areas, conventional, fungible, gasoline can still be sold. Some areas are more strict than others and compatibility is rarely symmetric; for example, gasoline formulated for Atlanta is compatible with the requirements for Charlotte, but the reverse is not true. Also, some (re)formulations can be mixed at the distributor and do not require region-specific production runs at the refinery (although that is certainly not the case in California). In recent years, there has been a trend away from some of these "boutique" formulations, but the trend is very slow. The environmental bureaucracy in California would consider the suggestion of conforming to a national standard as a challenge to its existence.
What's special about CA that made them have a higher increase than the rest of us?
California has different gasoline formulation standards than the rest of the country, so gasoline cannot be brought in from other states. At this time of year, they are switching from the state-mandated "summer formulation" to "winter formulation", so inventories are low. Then, there was a refinery fire in August, which shut down some of the state's gasoline production. Combine those factors and you have all the necessary conditions for shortages.
Seems perfectly normal, to me. A temporary shortage of feed (corn), due to weather in the Midwest, has caused an imbalance. There is currently an over-production of hogs, which must be cleared by sending them to market. When the supply of feed returns to normal, input costs will decline, and hog production will return to equilibrium with input costs and demand. The invisible hand seems to be working just fine.
Corn producers and hog producers _can_ hedge their risk (TFA not withstanding). Much of the price spike that is predicted has already occurred at the retail level; hog futures reacted to the Midwest drought months ago. The effect of input costs propagates through the markets faster than the physical commodities, so it's quite efficient.
The morality of burning food to make transportation fuel is a separate issue.
But, it is hard to imagine an individual having any need to amass that much data. A rough estimate tells me that the breakeven point is somewhere north of $200k.
Contrary to TFS, Knight was not running algorithmic trading. They are a "market maker" for retail brokerages, like Fidelity, Vanguard, E-Trade and, in particular, Scottrade. (About 40% of Scottrade's traffic was going through Knight). The NYSE had just brought a new retail trading interface on-line, and Knight's software did not conform correctly to the protocol. As a result, it kept re-entering the same orders, over and over. These were small retail orders, just a few hundred shares each, but they were submitted to the exchange thousands of times.
The two outstanding questions are: Why was their interface not tested properly and why did it take them over 30 minutes to pull the plug?
One suggestion to Slashdot readers. If you're in a situation like this, do your best to use your phone to record what's happening without being noticed. That'll help the good guy in the dispute.
Of course, if the "good guy" turns out to be the employee of a designated "evil corporation", you should delete the recording, immediately.
I would add that the title of this Slashdot article bears no reference to the crummy International Business Times article. At no point in TFA is anyone quoted as saying "we're dealing with malware the wrong way." That's just a Slashdot editor passing off his own conclusions as those of the article.
Go read the last paragraph (and the title) of the IBT article, again.
Over the last 30 years, electric distribution has become much more automated and fault-tolerant. It is designed to route around local faults almost instantaneously. However, that same design makes it much less tolerant of widespread faults. When there are numerous hits to the distribution grid, entire substations must be taken offline, both to protect the substation equipment (which is very expensive and can take weeks to replace) and to maintain stability on the transmission grid.
Once repairs are underway, it is much safer for the people working on the lines to keep large sections of the distribution grid powered down than to have individual circuits coming on-line as they are cleared.
Following Hurricane Ike in September 2008, we were without power for 10 days while Centerpoint Energy put the distribution grid back together. Everyone needs to be aware that this is the nature of the automated distribution grid and it is wise to plan for such situations.
Slashdot Mirror
OCSE observers have been present at elections in Texas for ten years, without incident. OCSE can and does recruit watchers who meet the eligibility requirements for registered observers under Texas state law.
This is purely a manufactured issue, to entertain the masses.
If the show aired without the necessary performance and sync clearances, then they already have legal issues. Simply removing it from on-line archives does not make them go away, but it does mitigate damages.
On the other hand, they may have secured the necessary clearances and paid royalties for the original airing, but found that the royalties for on-line distribution were too high. In particular, since the music was integral to the storyline in a skit, as opposed to a standalone musical performance, one or more of the publishers may have demanded "grand rights" (performance, sync _and_ dramatic use), which carry heavy royalties for rebroadcast or distribution. That's a particular hassle because a dramatic use license must be negotiated with each publisher individually--it isn't handled automatically by the performance rights organizations--and the publisher may deny it altogether. Conceivably, one of the publishers may have raised the dramatic use claim after the show was aired, in which case, the video of this skit may be dead forever.
I would be even more skeptical if they claimed that it creates more energy than it consumes.
cause that having too much CO2 thing was bothering me...
FTFY.
But why are all the planets and moons so round? Why do we not see some that are odd shapes?
Self-gravity. With sufficient mass and radius, gravitational forces overcome the yield strength of the materials and cause even solid bodies to assume a spherical shape. This occurs at about 300km radius. The surface may still be irregular, but overburden pressure causes rocks at depth to undergo plastic or ductile deformation. For a mathematical derivation, Google "potato radius".
The Moon has a radius of over 1,700 km. Bear in mind, also, that much of it and the Earth would have be molten material after being separated by a collision, so both would have returned to a spherical shape rather quickly.
Well, in this case, it happens to be both. The lack of hard currency to back up the rial is causing inflation, which causes people to have to carry bigger wads of physical currency, so now there's a shortage of that.
I'm not sure who the "we" in your comment might be, but the International Energy Agency estimates that Iranian oil exports are down 60% this year. The only countries which are buying oil from Iran appear to be China, India, South Korea, Japan and Turkey.
The EU banned imports of crude oil from Iran, starting in July. The ban also prohibits European insurance companies from covering Iranian export shipments, which makes it difficult for many countries outside of Europe to import Iranian oil.
The oil embargo is the primary reason for the fall in value of the Iranian rial. Without dollars flowing into Iran, their own currency becomes worthless. The current exchange rate is 12265 IRR/USD. That makes the price of imports out of reach for most businesses and consumers in Iran. Inflation in Iran is estimated to be about 30%.
The Iranian people are increasingly pointing the finger of blame at Ahmadinejad and no one else. Iran's parliament wants to throw him out, but they don't have the power (yet). I think his days are numbered.
Making you try to build anything interesting with NOT gates would be a pretty good joke, really. Especially if they made you do it for three years!
Now if they had only let you use NOR gates...
The SBP9900 (a bipolar, radiation-hardened version of the TMS9900 16-bit microprocessor) was designed in 1976 using nothing but inverters. Pretty interesting, I would say, considering there were no other 16-bit microprocessors on the market at that time.
There's that running EE joke that you can build any logic circuit with nothing but NOT gates.
It's not a joke. That's what I did for the first three years of my career.
No one has ever before mistaken the framers of the US Constitution for fundamentalists. They considered these liberties to be the natural rights of man, not dependent upon any religious belief, and, yes, they considered those rights to be absolute. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, despise the philosophical naturalism from which the rights of man are derived; they consider such irreligious philosophy "secular humanism". Fundamentalists would gladly discard the Rights of Man in favor of the Law of God.
European governments have never embraced the concept of absolute Freedom of Speech. It is a peculiarly (U.S.) American idea, which never caught on, elsewhere. Not even in Canada, as a matter of fact.
TFS makes no sense at all; TFA is not much better. It seems that, rather than asking, "Why is there so little xenon in the atmosphere" and coming up with a purely speculative answer, the researchers might have questioned why anyone expected to find more.
...I find that one has the right to own and use a printing press. That does not imply that anyone is entitled to have the printing press given to him.
Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is possibly the most liberal definition of "human rights" currently imaginable, seems to concur. It is difficult, given the reality of life on this planet, to see how mobile broadband can be included as a requirement for "a standard of living adequate for... health and well-being" (Article 25).
So am I.
[...] there is a significant number of Georgia residents that do not actually believe that evolution, the big bang [...] and genetics are not, in fact, tricks and lies of Satan.
Please check your double negative.
Not quite every state. There are about 20 unique gasoline formulation requirements in the US. Most of the requirements for unique formulations do not follow state boundaries; they are designated for specific metropolitan areas. In the vast majority of the _area_ of the US, which is outside of any metropolitan areas, conventional, fungible, gasoline can still be sold. Some areas are more strict than others and compatibility is rarely symmetric; for example, gasoline formulated for Atlanta is compatible with the requirements for Charlotte, but the reverse is not true. Also, some (re)formulations can be mixed at the distributor and do not require region-specific production runs at the refinery (although that is certainly not the case in California). In recent years, there has been a trend away from some of these "boutique" formulations, but the trend is very slow. The environmental bureaucracy in California would consider the suggestion of conforming to a national standard as a challenge to its existence.
What's special about CA that made them have a higher increase than the rest of us?
California has different gasoline formulation standards than the rest of the country, so gasoline cannot be brought in from other states. At this time of year, they are switching from the state-mandated "summer formulation" to "winter formulation", so inventories are low. Then, there was a refinery fire in August, which shut down some of the state's gasoline production. Combine those factors and you have all the necessary conditions for shortages.
my contention is there would be no scanners if no one could make a profit on them.
There would be no airlines if no one could make a profit... oh wait.
Seems perfectly normal, to me. A temporary shortage of feed (corn), due to weather in the Midwest, has caused an imbalance. There is currently an over-production of hogs, which must be cleared by sending them to market. When the supply of feed returns to normal, input costs will decline, and hog production will return to equilibrium with input costs and demand. The invisible hand seems to be working just fine.
Corn producers and hog producers _can_ hedge their risk (TFA not withstanding). Much of the price spike that is predicted has already occurred at the retail level; hog futures reacted to the Midwest drought months ago. The effect of input costs propagates through the markets faster than the physical commodities, so it's quite efficient.
The morality of burning food to make transportation fuel is a separate issue.
On a per-petabyte basis, over a 12-year period, tape beats HDD by an order of magnitude, on both cost of media and energy:
http://www.lto-technology.com/pdf/LTO%20TCO%20White%20Paper%20Press%20Release.pdf
But, it is hard to imagine an individual having any need to amass that much data.
A rough estimate tells me that the breakeven point is somewhere north of $200k.
Contrary to TFS, Knight was not running algorithmic trading. They are a "market maker" for retail brokerages, like Fidelity, Vanguard, E-Trade and, in particular, Scottrade. (About 40% of Scottrade's traffic was going through Knight). The NYSE had just brought a new retail trading interface on-line, and Knight's software did not conform correctly to the protocol. As a result, it kept re-entering the same orders, over and over. These were small retail orders, just a few hundred shares each, but they were submitted to the exchange thousands of times.
The two outstanding questions are: Why was their interface not tested properly and why did it take them over 30 minutes to pull the plug?
One suggestion to Slashdot readers. If you're in a situation like this, do your best to use your phone to record what's happening without being noticed. That'll help the good guy in the dispute.
Of course, if the "good guy" turns out to be the employee of a designated "evil corporation", you should delete the recording, immediately.
...imperial units in the US
Easily done. The US never adopted imperial units.
I would add that the title of this Slashdot article bears no reference to the crummy International Business Times article. At no point in TFA is anyone quoted as saying "we're dealing with malware the wrong way." That's just a Slashdot editor passing off his own conclusions as those of the article.
Go read the last paragraph (and the title) of the IBT article, again.
Over the last 30 years, electric distribution has become much more automated and fault-tolerant. It is designed to route around local faults almost instantaneously. However, that same design makes it much less tolerant of widespread faults. When there are numerous hits to the distribution grid, entire substations must be taken offline, both to protect the substation equipment (which is very expensive and can take weeks to replace) and to maintain stability on the transmission grid.
Once repairs are underway, it is much safer for the people working on the lines to keep large sections of the distribution grid powered down than to have individual circuits coming on-line as they are cleared.
Following Hurricane Ike in September 2008, we were without power for 10 days while Centerpoint Energy put the distribution grid back together. Everyone needs to be aware that this is the nature of the automated distribution grid and it is wise to plan for such situations.