There are projects that are necessarily in the scope of a federal government. These include but are not necessarily limited to: a military for national defence (the #1 goal of a national government should always be to have a nation to govern), infrastructure (possibly), and regulation of interstate trade. Two of those are specifically spelled out in the constution.
My point was that whether the government spends resources on national defense or medicare or roads, that is blood, sweat, treasure that is not being reinvested into the economy and producing new real wealth. Defense and roads are reasons to slow down the economy however (there would be no economy at all without them) so are justifiable at the national level.
The nefarious accounting was not the buying of T-Bills. It is perfectly acceptable to invest the SS revinue overages in whatever products will secure that money for the future. Though it may not be acceptable to collect those overages in the first place. On an individual basis saving for retirement makes sense but on a national basis this makes less sense as the services and products are not being saved. Only the money which ultimately is just a number is being saved. The nefarious accounting came in when the T-Bill purchases were counted as general revinue rather than incurred debt. Although upon further reflection, though this seems egregious, it is an accurate reflection of what is actually happening to the extra wealth collected beyond the necessary: it is being destroyed along with all other general revinue. A question you should ask yourselves is this: when the T-Bill is exercised, who pays for it? answer: taxpayers will.. those same taxpayers who are paying higher taxes to buy those T-Bills in the first place. (or rather, their children)
My second paragraph was in my opinion the most profound and also most ignored. There will be fewer workers to retiree in the future producing the services and products that will be used. The money that is being saved in the form of T-Bills now will be worth less in the future since it will be used to purchase from the same supply of man-hours. There are only a few solutions when that time comes: Reduce benefits to all retirees, reduce the number of retirees (by increasing the age or other requirements), demanding more (on a % basis) from available workers and increasing the number of available workers through immigration or policy incentives for having more children.
I'll certainly want to watch now that they've included the least interesting hanger's on from the old cast. When is Frakes gonna get a real job and stop ruining the even Trek movies?
Ok, is it supposed to take place in the future of the old series.. after they traveled through space and found earth and repopulated, with cmdr. Adama being the apollo from before? 'cause there's a new Apollo, Starbuck, Boomer. and the bad guy is Balzar again. I mean is this supposed to be a big history repeating itself thing or a slightly different account type thing?
Also, I know judaism and middle-eastern mythology were influences on the original show (kind of like stargate I guess), but robots that believe in God murdering people who pay lip service to many gods? i'm very confused.
Exactly Correct, except that it's even more insideous.. they are currently collecting MORE than they need to pay for your grandpa's retirement and using nefarious accounting, count that as additional general revenue.
The population problem is more serious than simply having enough bodies to pay for retirement. History has shown that more affluent nations tend to reproduce less than less affluent ones. Followed to the extreme, this suggests that no advanced culture can continue indefinately without being overwhelmed by less advanced cultures. How we solve that problem (or ignore it) will say much about who we are.
That said, I'm not as convinced that the governmental budget deficit is really that alarming. Whether government takes wealth out of the economy through taxes or inflation, that wealth is still removed from the economy (where it was relatively efficiently increasing standard of living for everyone) to the government (where it almost by definition is being spent on things no one really wants--if they did, they wouldn't need to be forced to pay no?)
The real problem is: what projects are so necessary that they justify removing wealth at the national level?
You are aware that different frequencies are usefull for different types of communications.. right? This is why Amateur radio has little pockets of bandwidth all over the spectrum. Some frequencies are usefull becase they will propagate around the curvature of the earth, allowing you to hear signals over the horizon pretty reliably (AM broadcast for instance does this OK) Other frequencies bounce off the ionosphere, enabling you to communicate over vast distances on low power, or observe qualities of the ionosphere. Other frequencies don't bounce off the ionosphere, making satellite communication possible. Some physical properties can only be observed at certain resonance frequencies. It would be nice to have radar that can detect water vapor for weather prediction.
not to mention the difficulity of designing a super mega ultra broadband oscillator and amplifier to tune across the entire spectrum.
The myriad of different uses (not all of which involve actual communication) and the extremely limited amount of available resource makes radio spectrum one of the few resources that actually warrents regulation.
Wait wait.. Everyone here seems to be supporting the notion that Jobs manipulates the timing of events to get up to a 10% or more boost in stock price surrounding Mac World. Once the truth is out, it will be priced into the stock, regardless of whatever blips occur on the day of. So who cares when it comes out except the people who want to make profit on pre-existing knowledge of said truth? Certainly not Apple (unless they're planning a new issue of stock to raise more capital). This is the definition of insider trading
This result can be derived from the van der waals state equation. There is a famous non-microwave case in which a teapot exploded in the kitchen injuring a housewife when her husband slammed the door.
The problem is that with an extremely smooth container (ceramic or glass perhaps) there are no nucleation sites (essencially rough spots) for the phase transition to occur, allowing the liquid to become superheated. The other way to force this to happen would be to disturb the fluid in some way, (such as slamming a door) which would start the process, the bubbles themselves would be sufficient for keeping the process going.
If pockets of water became superheated, then there would be no problem, the uneven heating would be enough of a distrubance to trigger the boiling process.
The solution is that you should never heat water (microwave or not) in a smooth container.
Even this might be ok if the water has high mineral content, but it's best to avoid the possiblity altogether.
on a slightly more on topic note however,
I'd rather not like to think of my microwave oven leaking enough RF to interfere with radio communications several apartments over.
Why do people studying BIG THINGS always use rediculuously tiny units. cxample: I took an astronomy course once where all the units were ergs, centimeters and grams.. we were talking about size and distances of PLANETS!
I'd like to see a project that uses all of the things that "must" go into a Do-it-yourself project, and nothing else. Perhaps as a contest of some sort.
With the volume of a standard minitower and few enough obstructions, convection might be enough. It wasn't that long ago that computers used air convection to cool their processors with no fans at all. I haven't done the math, but by convection alone, water removes heat significantly faster than air, by at least an order of magnitude.
actually, like most good-governance ideas, (and most bad ones too- how else would we learn) it has already been implemented on wall street. I believe, but am too lazy to check, that proxy voting has existed since well before computers were available, though it enabled a large number of small shareholders to consolidate their influence. In fact, many movies have been written (and watched) in which the plot swung on the correct tallying of proxy votes.
The recoverable part is, in my notably inexpert, opinion, a really revolutionary idea that I would like to see.
The interesting thing to note about the investment model though is that every share gets a vote, so some people are more represented by others according their stake in the company. (sometimes stakeholders -- people not holding shares but affected by decisions -- are alotted votes as well)
how this would transfer over to our republic is an interesting question: Should some people have more influence than others...
1. Should someone who doesn't pay any taxes at all have the same representation as someone who pays enough taxes to fund five salaries?
2. Should people who live in Connecticut be able to decide environmental issues in Arizona? Even on issues that clearly do not affect Connecticut-ers in any way? i.e. amount of water to remove from colorado river.. What if connectut-ites are concerned about the fate of creatures that live on the banks while arizonans are concerned about irrigating farms to feed their babies..
I think you're missing the point that the counties that were using electronic voting were predominantly Democrat 'controlled' counties and as such would have democrat-leaning elections supervisor (they're elected in FL). Therefore the decision to use electronic voting and control of the machines would have been in the hands of Democrats. If the machines were tampered with, the logical beneficiary would be Kerry.
You are all wrong. The solution is not necessarily more technology. It's more accountability--Everyone gets a secret number at the poll. They can match this to their vote in the database, through a gov't website or shared through many private websites or share it with vote checking organisations or throw it away and forget about it.
Call me crazy, but I think there ARE people that shouldn't be voting. There should also be people who shouldn't be driving, people who shouldn't be surgeons, etc. We should decide who gets to vote and we already do:
The very young (and presumeably inexperienced) are not allowed to vote.
Foreigners (who presumeably may have interests other than the well being of American citizens)are also excluded from voting.
We should also exclude:
People who have not paid attention (watching ads doesn't count, you should read something with..say.. facts) -- the ignorant
People who don't understand what's going on anyway -- the incompetent
The ones we've already taken care of are easy, those last two are trickier.. how do you prove that someone is incompetent without disenfranchising perfectly capable voters who just can't pass some arbitrary test?
Maybe the you should have to write in every candidate for every position with no cheat sheet provided (you could bring your own)-- that would prove you're aware of who's running, but how that would affect resolutions, ammendments, etc. I have no idea.
everyone gets a number that corresponds to their ballot at the polls. The numbers are attached to the ballot, not the voter so the ballot would still be secret.
After the election is over and the votes are tallied, allow voters to check their votes online. They could even give their reg. numbers to partisan/non-partisan vote-checking organisations that mass-verify votes if they choose.
If everyone can review their vote, then miscounts will be irrelevant: too many people (i.e. a signifiant portion of the vote-difference) complain about wrong/lost votes, either have another vote or solve the problem some other way. The important thing is to know if it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
There are projects that are necessarily in the scope of a federal government. These include but are not necessarily limited to: a military for national defence (the #1 goal of a national government should always be to have a nation to govern), infrastructure (possibly), and regulation of interstate trade. Two of those are specifically spelled out in the constution.
My point was that whether the government spends resources on national defense or medicare or roads, that is blood, sweat, treasure that is not being reinvested into the economy and producing new real wealth. Defense and roads are reasons to slow down the economy however (there would be no economy at all without them) so are justifiable at the national level.
The nefarious accounting was not the buying of T-Bills. It is perfectly acceptable to invest the SS revinue overages in whatever products will secure that money for the future. Though it may not be acceptable to collect those overages in the first place. On an individual basis saving for retirement makes sense but on a national basis this makes less sense as the services and products are not being saved. Only the money which ultimately is just a number is being saved. The nefarious accounting came in when the T-Bill purchases were counted as general revinue rather than incurred debt. Although upon further reflection, though this seems egregious, it is an accurate reflection of what is actually happening to the extra wealth collected beyond the necessary: it is being destroyed along with all other general revinue. A question you should ask yourselves is this: when the T-Bill is exercised, who pays for it? answer: taxpayers will.. those same taxpayers who are paying higher taxes to buy those T-Bills in the first place. (or rather, their children)
My second paragraph was in my opinion the most profound and also most ignored. There will be fewer workers to retiree in the future producing the services and products that will be used. The money that is being saved in the form of T-Bills now will be worth less in the future since it will be used to purchase from the same supply of man-hours. There are only a few solutions when that time comes: Reduce benefits to all retirees, reduce the number of retirees (by increasing the age or other requirements), demanding more (on a % basis) from available workers and increasing the number of available workers through immigration or policy incentives for having more children.
I'll certainly want to watch now that they've included the least interesting hanger's on from the old cast. When is Frakes gonna get a real job and stop ruining the even Trek movies?
Ok, is it supposed to take place in the future of the old series.. after they traveled through space and found earth and repopulated, with cmdr. Adama being the apollo from before? 'cause there's a new Apollo, Starbuck, Boomer. and the bad guy is Balzar again. I mean is this supposed to be a big history repeating itself thing or a slightly different account type thing?
Also, I know judaism and middle-eastern mythology were influences on the original show (kind of like stargate I guess), but robots that believe in God murdering people who pay lip service to many gods? i'm very confused.
Exactly Correct, except that it's even more insideous.. they are currently collecting MORE than they need to pay for your grandpa's retirement and using nefarious accounting, count that as additional general revenue.
The population problem is more serious than simply having enough bodies to pay for retirement. History has shown that more affluent nations tend to reproduce less than less affluent ones. Followed to the extreme, this suggests that no advanced culture can continue indefinately without being overwhelmed by less advanced cultures. How we solve that problem (or ignore it) will say much about who we are.
That said, I'm not as convinced that the governmental budget deficit is really that alarming. Whether government takes wealth out of the economy through taxes or inflation, that wealth is still removed from the economy (where it was relatively efficiently increasing standard of living for everyone) to the government (where it almost by definition is being spent on things no one really wants--if they did, they wouldn't need to be forced to pay no?)
The real problem is: what projects are so necessary that they justify removing wealth at the national level?
You are aware that different frequencies are usefull for different types of communications.. right? This is why Amateur radio has little pockets of bandwidth all over the spectrum. Some frequencies are usefull becase they will propagate around the curvature of the earth, allowing you to hear signals over the horizon pretty reliably (AM broadcast for instance does this OK) Other frequencies bounce off the ionosphere, enabling you to communicate over vast distances on low power, or observe qualities of the ionosphere. Other frequencies don't bounce off the ionosphere, making satellite communication possible. Some physical properties can only be observed at certain resonance frequencies. It would be nice to have radar that can detect water vapor for weather prediction.
not to mention the difficulity of designing a super mega ultra broadband oscillator and amplifier to tune across the entire spectrum.
The myriad of different uses (not all of which involve actual communication) and the extremely limited amount of available resource makes radio spectrum one of the few resources that actually warrents regulation.
Wait wait.. Everyone here seems to be supporting the notion that Jobs manipulates the timing of events to get up to a 10% or more boost in stock price surrounding Mac World. Once the truth is out, it will be priced into the stock, regardless of whatever blips occur on the day of. So who cares when it comes out except the people who want to make profit on pre-existing knowledge of said truth? Certainly not Apple (unless they're planning a new issue of stock to raise more capital). This is the definition of insider trading
This result can be derived from the van der waals state equation. There is a famous non-microwave case in which a teapot exploded in the kitchen injuring a housewife when her husband slammed the door.
The problem is that with an extremely smooth container (ceramic or glass perhaps) there are no nucleation sites (essencially rough spots) for the phase transition to occur, allowing the liquid to become superheated. The other way to force this to happen would be to disturb the fluid in some way, (such as slamming a door) which would start the process, the bubbles themselves would be sufficient for keeping the process going.
If pockets of water became superheated, then there would be no problem, the uneven heating would be enough of a distrubance to trigger the boiling process.
The solution is that you should never heat water (microwave or not) in a smooth container.
Even this might be ok if the water has high mineral content, but it's best to avoid the possiblity altogether.
on a slightly more on topic note however,
I'd rather not like to think of my microwave oven leaking enough RF to interfere with radio communications several apartments over.
Why do people studying BIG THINGS always use rediculuously tiny units. cxample: I took an astronomy course once where all the units were ergs, centimeters and grams.. we were talking about size and distances of PLANETS!
1 erg = 1.0 × 10-07 Joules or 1 erg = 2.39 × 10-11 kilocalories A good light beer might be about 140ish kcal.
Conversion from earthquake magnitude to beers drunk is left as an exercise to the reader.
I'd like to see a project that uses all of the things that "must" go into a Do-it-yourself project, and nothing else. Perhaps as a contest of some sort.
Now all we need to do is figure out how to get the users to sue their peers...
so.. say the server's in boston and you're in miami,
1500 mi*2 = 2,414 kilometer * 2 = 4,828 kilometers
4,828 kilometers + 40 km = 4,868 km or a difference of 0.8%
(40 kilometers) / the speed of light = 0.13 milliseconds
so it probably won't be a significant amount of lag at all.
--
all figures calculated using google.
With the volume of a standard minitower and few enough obstructions, convection might be enough. It wasn't that long ago that computers used air convection to cool their processors with no fans at all. I haven't done the math, but by convection alone, water removes heat significantly faster than air, by at least an order of magnitude.
as in Beer!
actually, like most good-governance ideas, (and most bad ones too- how else would we learn) it has already been implemented on wall street. I believe, but am too lazy to check, that proxy voting has existed since well before computers were available, though it enabled a large number of small shareholders to consolidate their influence. In fact, many movies have been written (and watched) in which the plot swung on the correct tallying of proxy votes.
The recoverable part is, in my notably inexpert, opinion, a really revolutionary idea that I would like to see.
The interesting thing to note about the investment model though is that every share gets a vote, so some people are more represented by others according their stake in the company. (sometimes stakeholders -- people not holding shares but affected by decisions -- are alotted votes as well)
how this would transfer over to our republic is an interesting question: Should some people have more influence than others...
1. Should someone who doesn't pay any taxes at all have the same representation as someone who pays enough taxes to fund five salaries?
2. Should people who live in Connecticut be able to decide environmental issues in Arizona? Even on issues that clearly do not affect Connecticut-ers in any way? i.e. amount of water to remove from colorado river..
What if connectut-ites are concerned about the fate of creatures that live on the banks while arizonans are concerned about irrigating farms to feed their babies..
oops i'm off on a rant.. i'll stop here then.
Is that awful ST:TNG episode based on that "movie"?
"indigo", the coolest
l acementLaw.html
Planck's distribution indicates that higher frequency (shorter wavelength) indigo and violet are WARMER than red.
also.. if you can SEE the green in the plants wouldn't that mean they're NOT absorbing it?
See Wein's Displacement law.
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/WiensDisp
uh.. so how do you do 90/45 lines in gimp then?
"..as well as a optical method for a computer to scan."
If the computer prints it out, why not just use letters that are easy to OCR? that way there won't be an obscured part of the ballot.
Did you get it free?
I think you're missing the point that the counties that were using electronic voting were predominantly Democrat 'controlled' counties and as such would have democrat-leaning elections supervisor (they're elected in FL). Therefore the decision to use electronic voting and control of the machines would have been in the hands of Democrats. If the machines were tampered with, the logical beneficiary would be Kerry.
You are all wrong. The solution is not necessarily more technology. It's more accountability--Everyone gets a secret number at the poll. They can match this to their vote in the database, through a gov't website or shared through many private websites or share it with vote checking organisations or throw it away and forget about it.
Why does everyone neglect the obvious: safeguarding our species against single-event extinction.
Why do we need any more reason than that?
well yeah.. or RTG's (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators) I'm sure the power-plant will well outlast the propellant supply
The very young (and presumeably inexperienced) are not allowed to vote.
Foreigners (who presumeably may have interests other than the well being of American citizens)are also excluded from voting.
We should also exclude:
People who have not paid attention (watching ads doesn't count, you should read something with..say.. facts) -- the ignorant
People who don't understand what's going on anyway -- the incompetent
The ones we've already taken care of are easy, those last two are trickier.. how do you prove that someone is incompetent without disenfranchising perfectly capable voters who just can't pass some arbitrary test?
Maybe the you should have to write in every candidate for every position with no cheat sheet provided (you could bring your own)-- that would prove you're aware of who's running, but how that would affect resolutions, ammendments, etc. I have no idea.
Open up the votes themselves to public scrutiny:
everyone gets a number that corresponds to their ballot at the polls. The numbers are attached to the ballot, not the voter so the ballot would still be secret.
After the election is over and the votes are tallied, allow voters to check their votes online. They could even give their reg. numbers to partisan/non-partisan vote-checking organisations that mass-verify votes if they choose.
If everyone can review their vote, then miscounts will be irrelevant: too many people (i.e. a signifiant portion of the vote-difference) complain about wrong/lost votes, either have another vote or solve the problem some other way. The important thing is to know if it happens.
here you go!