Some clarifications - geeks tend to not take Economics or sleep through them...
T-Bill refers to short term US Treasury instruments of a duration less than a year. T-bills are sold at a discount, do not earn interest, and pay off at face value. T-Notes have a maturity of from 2-10 years. T-Notes pay interest every six months. T-Bonds (> 10 years) have not been sold for a long time, but recently it was announced that two sales of 30 year bonds will happen in 2006. http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indep th/res_indepth.htm
As others have pointed out, the US Treasury has no obligation to buy back the debt prior to its maturity (no more than your mortgage company can demand you pay off the mortgage today).
If China (or any other entity) tried to flood the secondary markets with debt, several things would happen:
The price of the traded debt would initially drop. This would increase the yield to maturity to the purchaser. It would raise interest rates. This would cause money to move out of other currencies into the US Dollar, increase the value of the US Dollar against the Euro, for instance.
Most exchanges have daily limits on trading ranges - if the strategy actually caused a panic, trading stops for the day. The US and other forces would have overnight to develop a strategy to counter the attack.
Futures and Options markets would likely interpret that the action would fail in the long run, and the cash market would be offset with futures and options contracts based on the presumption that the market will restablize at the "normal" levels. One of the benefits of the futures and options markets are they allow arbitrage against irrational market behavior in the cash market.
If China was able to liquidate their holdings in US debt, they are still holding US Dollars, which are basiscally just another form of US debt (Federal Reserve note). After taking a beating on selling their Treasury Notes, now they have to flood the currency markets to turn the dollars into some other currency with stability. Let's say they dump dollars like mad and buy Euros. European interest rates plummet, and European money floods to the US to buy up the now low priced, high interest US Treasuries.
Playing this game is like trying to raise the ocean level by putting your dinghy into the water. The markets are inherently self-correcting.
You want to destroy the US? Undermine our common culture, our national identity, our manufacturing infrastructure, our education system and our faith in representative government.
Perception of US Debt having value is based on the belief that Americans in the future will have the ability and desire to pay the taxes from their productive activities necessary to finance the debt. It's that simple.
After going to your city using the (NPX) NXX-xxxx search, click on the Complete POP list by access number. It will nicely show you all of the ISPs grouped by the shared access numbers.
Just because two ISPs share the same access numbers does not mean the companies have any connection other than they use the same wholesalers (ikano, Globalpops, YNP, CISP.CC, Qwest, Megapop being the main players). The wholesaler is noted in the listing where I believe I have determined the information.
Note that recently "nationwide" ISPs for which I had no contact information were cut back to only show them in the state where they reside. The bloat for the redundant "virtual ISP" listings was not adding any value to the searches.
But if they share the same customer support phone numbers, or are very vague about where the business is located, they may just be a template web site - being paid a referral commission and not even the legal entity you are entering into a contract with.
These days - primarily due to the Telecom Reform Act of 1996 and the introduction of CLECs (Level3 being the most important player) - very few ISPs actually run their own dialup equipment. It just makes no economic sense for most ISPs. They can migrate their existing customers to one of those wholesalers, and cut the access cost from maybe $15/month to $4/month, plus give up the headaches of running their own 24x7 operations.
Who is going to turn the hand crank on the WiFi Access Point?
Re:A news article with a press release cool
on
Webhost Sues Google
·
· Score: 1
I've been both a Google AdWords advertiser and a publisher.
AIT has no clue what they are doing.
I have custom built in metrics far beyond any "package" someone runs against web logs.
Flaws in AIT's argument:
1) Just because a customer arrived from Google does not mean that you are -charged- for the click. Their anti-fraud logic lets the click through on the odd chance it may be a real visitor, but does not charge you for the click.
2) Google applies a click quality factor to the clicks if they come from publisher web sites (as opposed to searches on the Google Site). Just because you bid $.50 for a click does not mean you paid $.50 (even after the automatic adjustment to $.01 above the next highest bid). If the publisher generates low quality traffic, Google adjusts the click cost to compensate.
3) Just because more than one click arrived from the same IP address does not mean the click is fraudulent. Not only may the IP be a shared IP (like a proxy server - for example AOL), in the normal course of "backing up" back to Google, or the person hitting refresh, multiple web log records can be created with the same referring URL and IP - but it was only one click.
4) At least in the article, the claim is being made for $500k of "Lost Revenue" - not that they are due $500k of their "spend" back. If it hadn't been for the bad clicks, we would have made gazillions in sales on the people who never found out about us. Good luck on that claim.
I used keyword based ads extensively and both Google and Overture (now Yahoo!) did as good a job as you could hope filtering out the nonsense traffic. It was very rare to spot clicks through open proxies, or where the graphics were not loaded immediately (indicating a non-browser visitor).
Sure it is possible for a competitor to click your links - but with all of the tools google has (tracking cookies, Google Toolbar, Gmail login), that's a very risky thing to do.
Perversely, one of the things that used to be necessary on Google was to click your own ads. If the click rate fell below a certain rate, they stopped showing the ads, even if there were no other ads to show and the ad was cost-effective even with a low conversion rate.
Since I'm fighting the same kind of issues, my theory here is this was done by GoDaddy to protect its servers from stupid DoS attacks, or the folks currently trying to spam web log reports with bogus referring URLs for gambling or pharmaceutical product web sites.
The first GET request gets the redirect response with a CGI string ?ABCD[...] appeneded, a real browser will follow that redirect request (albeit perhaps an invalid request). Spiders and most other things will not, or at least not immediately.
Someone *spoofing* an IP address on the request would not get back a response, and therefore be unable to get the real server to return a page and the real server is protected.
When the firewall server sees the redirect request - WITH THE CORRECT CGI TAG - it enables that requesting IP address temporarily so that on the next (3rd) request for / it is a valid request from a real visitor, and the real http server returns the correct 200 response. (this approach would cause issues for AOL users or people behind multiple IP proxy cache servers however)
By changing the value contained in the CGI string, they can invalidate any stored requests, hard coded scripts or brute force attacks.
This would explain why a subsequent request from a different browser from the same IP works the first time without a redirect.
Think outside of the RFC box.
If you take the Broken browser, clear its cache, restart it and try the request again, does it work? That test would sort out whether this is an issue of the caching behavior - or if the later request succeeds because the IP has been validated so the GET request skips the first 2 steps.
Also, regarding the server responding before the second/n/r is entered, your telnet session is holding up that thread on what probably is a frontend DoS protection server if my theory is correct - if the firewall sat there and waited for the request to finish (typing an HTTP request by hand is not normal), then that firewall would crash when it had all of its threads tied up with partially received HTTP requests.
I don't know if that remark was intended as funny or not, but many of the songs in the hymnals at Church *are* copyrighted, and if you did start running off copies of the arrangements from the hymnal, the result would be a copyright infringement and make the copier subject to civil litigation.
Except that in addition you will have to deal with rationalizing away Exodus 20:15.
"We have determined that Titan's methane is not of biological origin, so it must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan, perhaps venting from a supply in the interior that could have been trapped there as the moon formed," said Dr. Hasso Niemann of Goddard, principal investigator for the GCMS and lead author of a paper on this research to appear in Nature on Dec. 8.
Other publications on this topic include:
Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil Authors: Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. and Craig R. Smith
The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels Author: Thomas Gold - Copernicus Books, 1998
It will be interesting to see how the peer review process works on December 8th or whether the notion that petroleum and natural gas are "fossil fuels" will just be accepted as a matter of scientific "faith".
The only important statistic in that study is in section is in section 2.4.1.1.4
"One MJ of biodiesel requires an input of 1.2414 MJ of primary energy,"
Which means you consume more primary energy (ie Oil) than the process creates as an output, which results in a net loss.
The study compares Biodiesel and Petroleum based Diesel to try to build its case - how much energy it takes to float oil tankers is irrelevant to the science of whether growing soybeans to make biodiesel results in a net loss or net gain in energy. That by itself is a huge clue to the motives of the publishers of the study.
Would the price of aluminum [aluminium] go up or down if every car needed 200 kg in the tank, and maybe another 500 kg in transit to and from the reprocessing facility?
By the way, is new oil being created (not just discovered) today, or have the processes that create oil stopped?
>>they do try to put it out basically the same way: by smothering it.
Which is exactly the problem that is the basis of this entire concept. If you try to smother the fire by putting water on it, the reaction with the magnesium creates its own oxygen from the water (plus hydrogen!) and no amount of water will ever stop the fire.
There are three basic ways to stop a fire:
1) Remove the heat 2) Remove the oxygen 3) Remove the fuel
A class D extinguisher works mostly by removing the heat and reducing it below the ignition temperature, and forming a crust that blocks the generated oxygen and heat from migrating to other parts of the "fuel". One type uses copper to dissipate the heat, the other uses Sodium Chloride powder (that's salt to you and me)
It sounds like the firemen had not been trained in the proper use of a class D extingusher. The idea is you spray on a small amount and wait until it crusts over, and repeat until the fire goes out - you don't try to smother it by emptying the entire contents at once.
For just this reason, it seems to me this grocery delivery business model is backwards. The store should transport you to the store, let you shop, and then return you and the food to your home. Much less labor for them, a better shopping result for you.
People today without transit would use a taxicab for this, but taxis are a more general purpose solution, and not necessarily sympathetic that your ice cream is melting. A specialized service could store the highly perishable items while waiting for the pickup or as it drops off several people on a route to make more efficient use of the vehicle and the driver's time.
Most people's impression about the nature of hydrogen comes from the film of the Hindenberg burning (not blowing up)... The Hindenberg was such a disaster because the skin was coated with iron oxide and aluminum paint, not because that hyrdogen is so inherently dangerous.
Hydrogen does not burn without the presence of oxygen, so just like gasoline the process is self-limiting by the amount of oxygen in the vicinity of the fuel. The only way an explosion occurs is if the fuel is vaporized and widely dispersed before ignition - but the same is also true of flour in a grain storage facility, and we don't ban use of flour.
and have reiterated again that this practice won't be tolerated. Of course, once the UN and/or EU "takes over the internet", we can look forward to paying $2 a minute again to make an overseas call.
When I lost connectivity to my web server (from home on Adelphia cable - which routed through Level(3)), I attempted to connect via dialup to see if the problem was the network or my server crashing.
These days, a very very large part of dialup internet access is on Level(3) soft switches - AOL, Earthlink, Juno/Netzero and MSN all use Level(3) as their primary network - so do the wholesalers like GlobalPops, Ikano and DialupUSA (recently acquired by Ikano) that provide "nationwide" internet access to your hometown mom and pop ISPs.
Dialing into any Level(3) POP number got a fast busy - so probably most dialup access in the US was also down during this time (except California - which is "owned" by O1 and Pacwest). I eventually dialed into a ChoiceOne POP (a smaller CLEC/LD provider) and was able to connect and verify that the problem was just a connectivity issue (albeit a huge one)
Forgotten by many is that the Bay Bridge to Oakland (mentioned in another thread) was built with 2 tracks to carry the Key System rail cars between San Francisco and Oakland. Up into that point, they ran part way across on the bay on a pier, and then people road a ferry the rest of the way to San Francisco.
Is it possible that the 50-70% mortality rate is the rate of those taken to a medical facility for treatment - skewed heavily towards those who died - and that many more people have come in contact with the virus, but not gotten sick enough to seek treatment? Especially in rural areas with minimal health care facilities?
Sample a population in the affected area for exposure to the virus, and then count up the fatalities, and then I'll begin to believe this statistic.
Fear and "bags of free government money" have a way of corrupting objective science. Extrapolating pandemics based on 120 of a relatively unrepresentative sample and then misallocating health care resources is not responsible science or public policy.
Remember the "We're all going to die from ebola" scare from 10 years ago? It never happened. One of the characteristics for diseases is if that one is truly this virulent (50% mortality), then it will be locally contained. Widespread outbreaks occur with weak strains.
The way the stock market works these days, there is little correlation between profit and stock price. That has not been true for decades.
If you net up all of the profits and losses of AOL during its pre-T/W run up from 1995-2000 in the stock market, they had an accumulated net loss of over a billion dollars. They had almost no cash left, and close to a negative net worth. However, they "owned" around 25 million sets of eyeballs, which are not measurable as profit on the P&L statement. At the peak of the speculation, each subscriber's future revenue stream was being valued at around $2000, giving AOL an actual value of $50 billion.
The result was multiple stock splits, and a market valuation where AOL was considered more valuable than GM - to the point they had enough clout to take over Time Warner.
The "powers to be" eventually realized that having AOL management trying to run Time / Warner was a really bad idea, since Time Warner's empire is much more diverse than AOL's, and can't as easily be goosed up each quarter by fudging with a few accounting numbers. Pretty much all of the AOL management has since been booted out, and Time Warner would like to divest itself of what they perceive as AOL's "reputation" in the business community and the public, but do it in a way that still makes them money.
The AOL takeover was largely finananced by debt which still needs to be paid off (TWX has $20 billion in long term debt). $93B of TWX's total $123B assets consist of "goodwill" and "intangible assets", while the debt is real. Since 2001, the Stockholder Equity has dropped from $152 billion to $60 billion. (in 2002, they had to write off close to $100B due to accounting changes and problems with AOL)
Since dialup use is rapidly fading, the intangible and goodwill value of that AOL dialup subscriber base is fading fast - not to mention that convential media is under intense pressure from Internet competition. The clock is ticking.
Near the equator, are the sun's rays less diffused and stronger in Syracuse, Sicily (15 degrees North latitude) than in Massachusetts (71 degrees North)?
What is the ignition point of human flesh? (as opposed to wood) Or the temperature at which a human would flee?
How much focused light would it take to blind the vision of attackers trying to fire arrows on your position (one can safely assume they did not have Coolray sunglasses with them)...
What is the orientation of the sea vs land at the place the battle took place? (Syracuse faces East).. At what time of day might this technique work? (Morning)
Just for the record, the Romans did end up winning this battle and captured Syarcuse and took Archimedes prisoner...
The DC3 era is over. 15,000 feet is about the point at which loss of pressure starts to cause a problem. Modern jet airliners typically cruise at 35,000 feet +/- a few thousand.
Very few air routes go directly over mountains 15,000+ feet tall.
The reason the plane in Greece hit a mountain was it ran out of fuel.
Most incidents where a plane hits a mountain are during takeoff or landing, far below the 15,000 ft threshold - or they are prop / turboprop planes that fly low enough that they don't have to rely on cabin pressurization to maintain consciousness of the pilot.
Sec. 121.333 of the FAA rules requires that the co-pilot put on the oxygen mask above 25,000 feet if the pilot leaves the controls (and vice versa).
The printing company that has the contract with the MTA to print the maps... While they are "free" to people who ask them, they are not "free" to the MTA.
Of course, it may also be an attempt to prevent "terrorists" from knowing where they are in the subway system.
You know, if we took down all the road signs and street signs, we could -really- confuse the terrorists.
Course then we would be more like what the Soviet Union used to be.
When the RedHat linux kernel decides to kill mySQL because it is the largest user of memory (even though the system still has a GB of available swap space) and killing mySQL corrupts all of the open mySQL tables - that is hardly a useful feature or a clever algorithm
Slashdot Mirror
Some clarifications - geeks tend to not take Economics or sleep through them...
p th/res_indepth.htm
T-Bill refers to short term US Treasury instruments of a duration less than a year. T-bills are sold at a discount, do not earn interest, and pay off at face value.
T-Notes have a maturity of from 2-10 years. T-Notes pay interest every six months.
T-Bonds (> 10 years) have not been sold for a long time, but recently it was announced that two sales of 30 year bonds will happen in 2006.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/inde
As others have pointed out, the US Treasury has no obligation to buy back the debt prior to its maturity (no more than your mortgage company can demand you pay off the mortgage today).
If China (or any other entity) tried to flood the secondary markets with debt, several things would happen:
The price of the traded debt would initially drop. This would increase the yield to maturity to the purchaser. It would raise interest rates. This would cause money to move out of other currencies into the US Dollar, increase the value of the US Dollar against the Euro, for instance.
Most exchanges have daily limits on trading ranges - if the strategy actually caused a panic, trading stops for the day. The US and other forces would have overnight to develop a strategy to counter the attack.
Futures and Options markets would likely interpret that the action would fail in the long run, and the cash market would be offset with futures and options contracts based on the presumption that the market will restablize at the "normal" levels. One of the benefits of the futures and options markets are they allow arbitrage against irrational market behavior in the cash market.
If China was able to liquidate their holdings in US debt, they are still holding US Dollars, which are basiscally just another form of US debt (Federal Reserve note). After taking a beating on selling their Treasury Notes, now they have to flood the currency markets to turn the dollars into some other currency with stability. Let's say they dump dollars like mad and buy Euros. European interest rates plummet, and European money floods to the US to buy up the now low priced, high interest US Treasuries.
Playing this game is like trying to raise the ocean level by putting your dinghy into the water. The markets are inherently self-correcting.
You want to destroy the US? Undermine our common culture, our national identity, our manufacturing infrastructure, our education system and our faith in representative government.
Perception of US Debt having value is based on the belief that Americans in the future will have the ability and desire to pay the taxes from their productive activities necessary to finance the debt. It's that simple.
I'll be convinced when the dolphins arrive at the Moon on the spacecraft they built themselves.
Why, yes there is - a similar "aha!" moment of my own was why I created it 8 years ago.
http://www.findanisp.com/
After going to your city using the (NPX) NXX-xxxx search, click on the Complete POP list by access number. It will nicely show you all of the ISPs grouped by the shared access numbers.
Just because two ISPs share the same access numbers does not mean the companies have any connection other than they use the same wholesalers (ikano, Globalpops, YNP, CISP.CC, Qwest, Megapop being the main players). The wholesaler is noted in the listing where I believe I have determined the information.
Note that recently "nationwide" ISPs for which I had no contact information were cut back to only show them in the state where they reside. The bloat for the redundant "virtual ISP" listings was not adding any value to the searches.
But if they share the same customer support phone numbers, or are very vague about where the business is located, they may just be a template web site - being paid a referral commission and not even the legal entity you are entering into a contract with.
These days - primarily due to the Telecom Reform Act of 1996 and the introduction of CLECs (Level3 being the most important player) - very few ISPs actually run their own dialup equipment. It just makes no economic sense for most ISPs. They can migrate their existing customers to one of those wholesalers, and cut the access cost from maybe $15/month to $4/month, plus give up the headaches of running their own 24x7 operations.
Who is going to turn the hand crank on the WiFi Access Point?
I've been both a Google AdWords advertiser and a publisher.
AIT has no clue what they are doing.
I have custom built in metrics far beyond any "package" someone runs against web logs.
Flaws in AIT's argument:
1) Just because a customer arrived from Google does not mean that you are -charged- for the click. Their anti-fraud logic lets the click through on the odd chance it may be a real visitor, but does not charge you for the click.
2) Google applies a click quality factor to the clicks if they come from publisher web sites (as opposed to searches on the Google Site). Just because you bid $.50 for a click does not mean you paid $.50 (even after the automatic adjustment to $.01 above the next highest bid). If the publisher generates low quality traffic, Google adjusts the click cost to compensate.
3) Just because more than one click arrived from the same IP address does not mean the click is fraudulent. Not only may the IP be a shared IP (like a proxy server - for example AOL), in the normal course of "backing up" back to Google, or the person hitting refresh, multiple web log records can be created with the same referring URL and IP - but it was only one click.
4) At least in the article, the claim is being made for $500k of "Lost Revenue" - not that they are due $500k of their "spend" back. If it hadn't been for the bad clicks, we would have made gazillions in sales on the people who never found out about us. Good luck on that claim.
I used keyword based ads extensively and both Google and Overture (now Yahoo!) did as good a job as you could hope filtering out the nonsense traffic. It was very rare to spot clicks through open proxies, or where the graphics were not loaded immediately (indicating a non-browser visitor).
Sure it is possible for a competitor to click your links - but with all of the tools google has (tracking cookies, Google Toolbar, Gmail login), that's a very risky thing to do.
Perversely, one of the things that used to be necessary on Google was to click your own ads. If the click rate fell below a certain rate, they stopped showing the ads, even if there were no other ads to show and the ad was cost-effective even with a low conversion rate.
Since I'm fighting the same kind of issues, my theory here is this was done by GoDaddy to protect its servers from stupid DoS attacks, or the folks currently trying to spam web log reports with bogus referring URLs for gambling or pharmaceutical product web sites.
/n/r is entered, your telnet session is holding up that thread on what probably is a frontend DoS protection server if my theory is correct - if the firewall sat there and waited for the request to finish (typing an HTTP request by hand is not normal), then that firewall would crash when it had all of its threads tied up with partially received HTTP requests.
The first GET request gets the redirect response with a CGI string ?ABCD[...] appeneded, a real browser will follow that redirect request (albeit perhaps an invalid request). Spiders and most other things will not, or at least not immediately.
Someone *spoofing* an IP address on the request would not get back a response, and therefore be unable to get the real server to return a page and the real server is protected.
When the firewall server sees the redirect request - WITH THE CORRECT CGI TAG - it enables that requesting IP address temporarily so that on the next (3rd) request for / it is a valid request from a real visitor, and the real http server returns the correct 200 response. (this approach would cause issues for AOL users or people behind multiple IP proxy cache servers however)
By changing the value contained in the CGI string, they can invalidate any stored requests, hard coded scripts or brute force attacks.
This would explain why a subsequent request from a different browser from the same IP works the first time without a redirect.
Think outside of the RFC box.
If you take the Broken browser, clear its cache, restart it and try the request again, does it work? That test would sort out whether this is an issue of the caching behavior - or if the later request succeeds because the IP has been validated so the GET request skips the first 2 steps.
Also, regarding the server responding before the second
I don't know if that remark was intended as funny or not, but many of the songs in the hymnals at Church *are* copyrighted, and if you did start running off copies of the arrangements from the hymnal, the result would be a copyright infringement and make the copier subject to civil litigation.
Except that in addition you will have to deal with rationalizing away Exodus 20:15.
For some of the details:
http://www.pcusa.org/legal/Copyright/
Oh, and some of the newer translations / interpretations of the Bible are copyrighted.
This case has been bolstered by the conclusion that the seas of liquid methane on Titan are not of biological origin:
0
I CLE_ID=47650
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=1841
"We have determined that Titan's methane is not of biological origin, so it must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan, perhaps venting from a supply in the interior that could have been trapped there as the moon formed," said Dr. Hasso Niemann of Goddard, principal investigator for the GCMS and lead author of a paper on this research to appear in Nature on Dec. 8.
Other publications on this topic include:
Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil
Authors: Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. and Craig R. Smith
The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels
Author: Thomas Gold - Copernicus Books, 1998
Some more details of the theory to peruse at:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ART
It will be interesting to see how the peer review process works on December 8th or whether the notion that petroleum and natural gas are "fossil fuels" will just be accepted as a matter of scientific "faith".
The only important statistic in that study is in section is in section 2.4.1.1.4
"One MJ of biodiesel requires an input of 1.2414 MJ of primary energy,"
Which means you consume more primary energy (ie Oil) than the process creates as an output, which results in a net loss.
The study compares Biodiesel and Petroleum based Diesel to try to build its case - how much energy it takes to float oil tankers is irrelevant to the science of whether growing soybeans to make biodiesel results in a net loss or net gain in energy. That by itself is a huge clue to the motives of the publishers of the study.
95 years is a long lead time during which those Boat Ramps can be moved. Life evolves, the universe changes.
Stop thinking like a Creationist.
Is there a mod for Unintentionally Ironic?
Perhaps this was intended as funny, but I don't think so.
Would the price of aluminum [aluminium] go up or down if every car needed 200 kg in the tank, and maybe another 500 kg in transit to and from the reprocessing facility?
By the way, is new oil being created (not just discovered) today, or have the processes that create oil stopped?
>>they do try to put it out basically the same way: by smothering it.
Which is exactly the problem that is the basis of this entire concept. If you try to smother the fire by putting water on it, the reaction with the magnesium creates its own oxygen from the water (plus hydrogen!) and no amount of water will ever stop the fire.
There are three basic ways to stop a fire:
1) Remove the heat
2) Remove the oxygen
3) Remove the fuel
A class D extinguisher works mostly by removing the heat and reducing it below the ignition temperature, and forming a crust that blocks the generated oxygen and heat from migrating to other parts of the "fuel". One type uses copper to dissipate the heat, the other uses Sodium Chloride powder (that's salt to you and me)
It sounds like the firemen had not been trained in the proper use of a class D extingusher. The idea is you spray on a small amount and wait until it crusts over, and repeat until the fire goes out - you don't try to smother it by emptying the entire contents at once.
For just this reason, it seems to me this grocery delivery business model is backwards. The store should transport you to the store, let you shop, and then return you and the food to your home. Much less labor for them, a better shopping result for you.
People today without transit would use a taxicab for this, but taxis are a more general purpose solution, and not necessarily sympathetic that your ice cream is melting. A specialized service could store the highly perishable items while waiting for the pickup or as it drops off several people on a route to make more efficient use of the vehicle and the driver's time.
Not a scientist, but...
Most people's impression about the nature of hydrogen comes from the film of the Hindenberg burning (not blowing up)... The Hindenberg was such a disaster because the skin was coated with iron oxide and aluminum paint, not because that hyrdogen is so inherently dangerous.
http://www.hydrogennow.org/Facts/Safety-1.htm
Hydrogen does not burn without the presence of oxygen, so just like gasoline the process is self-limiting by the amount of oxygen in the vicinity of the fuel. The only way an explosion occurs is if the fuel is vaporized and widely dispersed before ignition - but the same is also true of flour in a grain storage facility, and we don't ban use of flour.
The FCC quickly ruled at the first chance that came along that telecom companies may not block VoIP:
6 6
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/34874
and have reiterated again that this practice won't be tolerated. Of course, once the UN and/or EU "takes over the internet", we can look forward to paying $2 a minute again to make an overseas call.
When I lost connectivity to my web server (from home on Adelphia cable - which routed through Level(3)), I attempted to connect via dialup to see if the problem was the network or my server crashing.
These days, a very very large part of dialup internet access is on Level(3) soft switches - AOL, Earthlink, Juno/Netzero and MSN all use Level(3) as their primary network - so do the wholesalers like GlobalPops, Ikano and DialupUSA (recently acquired by Ikano) that provide "nationwide" internet access to your hometown mom and pop ISPs.
Dialing into any Level(3) POP number got a fast busy - so probably most dialup access in the US was also down during this time (except California - which is "owned" by O1 and Pacwest). I eventually dialed into a ChoiceOne POP (a smaller CLEC/LD provider) and was able to connect and verify that the problem was just a connectivity issue (albeit a huge one)
Forgotten by many is that the Bay Bridge to Oakland (mentioned in another thread) was built with 2 tracks to carry the Key System rail cars between San Francisco and Oakland. Up into that point, they ran part way across on the bay on a pier, and then people road a ferry the rest of the way to San Francisco.
http://world.nycsubway.org/us/sf/keysystem.html
The system lasted until 1958.
Of course, this is commuter rail, not heavy freight rail. The dead weight of a train requires a much more sturdy bridge.
Another reason would be that railroads in the US are privately owned businesses and vehicle bridges are built by the government.
Is it possible that the 50-70% mortality rate is the rate of those taken to a medical facility for treatment - skewed heavily towards those who died - and that many more people have come in contact with the virus, but not gotten sick enough to seek treatment? Especially in rural areas with minimal health care facilities?
Sample a population in the affected area for exposure to the virus, and then count up the fatalities, and then I'll begin to believe this statistic.
Fear and "bags of free government money" have a way of corrupting objective science. Extrapolating pandemics based on 120 of a relatively unrepresentative sample and then misallocating health care resources is not responsible science or public policy.
Remember the "We're all going to die from ebola" scare from 10 years ago? It never happened. One of the characteristics for diseases is if that one is truly this virulent (50% mortality), then it will be locally contained. Widespread outbreaks occur with weak strains.
The way the stock market works these days, there is little correlation between profit and stock price. That has not been true for decades.
If you net up all of the profits and losses of AOL during its pre-T/W run up from 1995-2000 in the stock market, they had an accumulated net loss of over a billion dollars. They had almost no cash left, and close to a negative net worth. However, they "owned" around 25 million sets of eyeballs, which are not measurable as profit on the P&L statement. At the peak of the speculation, each subscriber's future revenue stream was being valued at around $2000, giving AOL an actual value of $50 billion.
The result was multiple stock splits, and a market valuation where AOL was considered more valuable than GM - to the point they had enough clout to take over Time Warner.
The "powers to be" eventually realized that having AOL management trying to run Time / Warner was a really bad idea, since Time Warner's empire is much more diverse than AOL's, and can't as easily be goosed up each quarter by fudging with a few accounting numbers. Pretty much all of the AOL management has since been booted out, and Time Warner would like to divest itself of what they perceive as AOL's "reputation" in the business community and the public, but do it in a way that still makes them money.
The AOL takeover was largely finananced by debt which still needs to be paid off (TWX has $20 billion in long term debt). $93B of TWX's total $123B assets consist of "goodwill" and "intangible assets", while the debt is real. Since 2001, the Stockholder Equity has dropped from $152 billion to $60 billion. (in 2002, they had to write off close to $100B due to accounting changes and problems with AOL)
Since dialup use is rapidly fading, the intangible and goodwill value of that AOL dialup subscriber base is fading fast - not to mention that convential media is under intense pressure from Internet competition. The clock is ticking.
A few questions to ponder...
Near the equator, are the sun's rays less diffused and stronger in Syracuse, Sicily (15 degrees North latitude) than in Massachusetts (71 degrees North)?
What is the ignition point of human flesh? (as opposed to wood) Or the temperature at which a human would flee?
How much focused light would it take to blind the vision of attackers trying to fire arrows on your position (one can safely assume they did not have Coolray sunglasses with them)...
What is the orientation of the sea vs land at the place the battle took place? (Syracuse faces East).. At what time of day might this technique work? (Morning)
Just for the record, the Romans did end up winning this battle and captured Syarcuse and took Archimedes prisoner...
Don't place all your faith in technology.
If we were really looking ahead, the convention would emcompass planets, solar systems and galaxies...
3 2.milkyway/
http://www.xyzzz.com.us.earth.X757
Of course, that presupposes that everyone in the Milky Way galaxy uses that name for it, and using English words.
And GMT won't do for time keeping. Time for some new RFCs.
Mountains?
n Greece.htm
The DC3 era is over. 15,000 feet is about the point at which loss of pressure starts to cause a problem. Modern jet airliners typically cruise at 35,000 feet +/- a few thousand.
Very few air routes go directly over mountains 15,000+ feet tall.
The reason the plane in Greece hit a mountain was it ran out of fuel.
Most incidents where a plane hits a mountain are during takeoff or landing, far below the 15,000 ft threshold - or they are prop / turboprop planes that fly low enough that they don't have to rely on cabin pressurization to maintain consciousness of the pilot.
Sec. 121.333 of the FAA rules requires that the co-pilot put on the oxygen mask above 25,000 feet if the pilot leaves the controls (and vice versa).
For some more insights, see this editorial:
http://www.airlinesafety.com/editorials/737CrashI
I can think of one entity that cares...
The printing company that has the contract with the MTA to print the maps... While they are "free" to people who ask them, they are not "free" to the MTA.
Of course, it may also be an attempt to prevent "terrorists" from knowing where they are in the subway system.
You know, if we took down all the road signs and street signs, we could -really- confuse the terrorists.
Course then we would be more like what the Soviet Union used to be.
When the RedHat linux kernel decides to kill mySQL because it is the largest user of memory (even though the system still has a GB of available swap space) and killing mySQL corrupts all of the open mySQL tables - that is hardly a useful feature or a clever algorithm