Apple trees don't breed true from seed. If you have a tree that produces nice-tasting apples, trees grown from its seeds are unlikely to produce nice-tasting apples. For that reason, apples are always propagated by cuttings.
So why did Johnny plant apple seeds? Because you can use any old sour-tasting apple to make cider.
That's right. Johhny Appleseed was a one-man booze promoter.
You're not paying for the external cost of generating the electricity, which is the problem.
Those external costs include mercury and CO2 emissions from coal-fired plants.
I suppose if those costs were tacked on to your power bill you'd have a case.
This isn't Europe, and you can't necessarily repeat the same things that work in Europe and expect them to work here also.
That's not correct. Parts of the US - especially in the north-east - are very much like Europe, and both heavy rail and light rail are viable in those areas. That's also where the bulk of the population lives.
You live in a very big and diverse country. Just because something won't work in rural Arizona or Nebraska doesn't mean it won't work anywhere else.
This was outlawed here in Australia a few years ago, so merchants are now free to charge a fee for credit card purchases (which some would call offering a discount for cash).
The main reason for doing this was to make the costs of buying by credit card transparent. Under the old system, credit card providers charged a fee to the merchant, but the fee was hidden from the consumer. The merchants had to absorb this cost by raising prices slightly across the board. That meant that the banks were effectively applying a small sales tax to nearly all retail sales. Estimates varied, but it was generally thought to be around 1% to 2%. It doesn't sound like much, but across every sale in the country, it's a huge amount.
Most big retailers continue to do this, but smaller retailers either have a mimimum amount for credit card purchases, or tack on a fee of around 3%.
Your observations are right but your conclusions are not, because power is produced and distributed over a broad geographic area.
Solar varies, but over a wide area, it varies very slowly. If you want a simple way to think about it, consider that the total output over a single region is determined by the total cloud cover across that region. That cover might change quite a bit over an hour, but it won't change much in 5 minutes. A well-managed grid will be able to cope with this rate of change.
A similar argument applies to wind. If the wind falls in one region, it generally picks up in another. Again, the grid manages this.
Incidentally, this argument ignores the use of these energy sources in ways other than just feeding power into the grid. For example, the Australian government has researched the use of solar power to pre-heat water fed into the boilers of conventional power stations. This doesn't provide energy directly, but it does reduce the amount of fuel they burn. Systems like that are even easier to manage than direct solar.
You're thinking of neutrinos. Neutrons interact with matter fairly easily, so they don't travel very far, even in in air. A neutron detector, therefore, has to be quite close to a neutron source to work.
The finely finished blocks are only on the outside. Inside, the blocks are quite rough and don't fit together tightly.
This is pretty common in ancient stonework. For example, the famous Inca stonework at sites like Sacsayhuaman look fantastic - the joints look almost organic, they're so close - but that's just the outer edges of the blocks. Behind the surface, the block edges are quite rough.
The real engineering miracles in large structures like the pyramids are of social organisation and agricultural production.
I think it would be great if professional, experienced programmers wrote commented, clear code. As it stands, most of them *don't*. Seeing 1,000 line PL/SQL packages with zero comments, random indenting, single-letter variable names and hard-coded constants is an almost daily experience for me.
As for keeping constants in a database table or a file: well, yeah, sure, but how are you going to look them up? You'll need some kind of human-readable identifier value to find them in the table. I guess you'll be using a constant for that.
But the US is just bigger and that means its more difficult to create and maintain a public transportation system.
Area of Europe: 10,180,000 square km. Area of the USA: 9,631,420 square km.
Population of Europe: 710,000,000. Population of the USA: 301,711,000.
So you're wrong either way.
The main reasons the USA has crap public transport and Europe has good public transport are: culural acceptance; and the fact that Europe kept a lot of the system that it built back in the 1800s, whereas the USA removed its 19th-century system during the 20th century.
but perhaps a good enough reason to move beyond simple printed ballots where fraudulent ballots might be a little easier to slip into the ballot box.
Except the 'simple printed ballots' have to be stolen from a secure facility. And filled in (by the thousand). And initialled by an electoral official whose identity isn't known until polling day. And then placed in a secure ballot box that's being watched by different electoral officials. And then counted by other electoral officials who check the initials on the ballots.
Believe it or not, the problem you're talking about was resolved decades ago in other countries. Switching to a machine just introduces a different set of problems.
1. All prices are specified to the cent. 2. At the checkout, the exact prices are added up. 3. If paying with cash, the total is rounded to the nearest 5 cents. 4. If paying by credit card, debit card, cheque, or some other means, the exact amount is paid.
The most you'll ever see rounded is 3 cents, and half the time it'll be in your favour.
Re:If the Republicans own the elections...
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
The Democrats lost in 2004 because they had a crappy candidate, and let the republicans control the debate. Get over it already.
Let's see now... Bush won by a tiny margin: 2.5%. Based on that, the Democrat candidate was almost exactly as crappy as the Republican candidate. What's more, even the Republicans acknowledge that the church vote was crucial in getting them over the line, so a church vote of around 3% is the only explanation required for Bush's tiny majority. No excess crappiness is needed.
I've seen a few posts here asking "why use such an obvious method of killing someone?"
The answer is: it's very, very far from obvious. The mere fact that it's taken so long to work out what the poison was indicates how subtle Polonium poisoning is.
1. Based on the Wikipedia entry for Polonium, the dosage required is incredibly small. We're not talking milligrams, here; we're talking micrograms, or less. Just detecting such a tiny quantity distributed throughout the victim's body is going to be incredibly hard.
2. The poison won't produce discernable radiation outside the victim's body, either, because alpha radiation is so readily absorbed by tissue. (That's also what makes it such a good poison, of course.)
3. The thing with poisons is that you have to actually look for them. Polonium is such an unlikely poison - given its rarity and inherent handling hazards - that even considering it is far-fetched. The fact that the victim's urine contained helium was the only clue the pathologists had, and I think they deserve a huge amount of credit for getting from that result to polonium as the cause.
My interpretation of "We've synthesized a mixture of the two mirror-image compounds, the idea being we can take the mirror image of the natural one" is that they have produced the substance in the lab, but the product is racemic - i.e., the molecule exists in two isomers that are mirror images of each other.
Biological processes tend to produce isomers that have the same symmetry. (Right-handed, I think, but I could be wrong.) Inorganic lab processes produce both. Sometimes, both isomers have the same biological effect, but often, they have different effects. Sounds to me like this substance may fall into the latter category.
Last year I travelled extensively by train in Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Italy, and only the Italians wanted me to reserve seats. The rest of the time I just bought a ticket and got on the train. Even the German ICE didn't require a reservation.
Also, I fail to see why you describe "cancellation fees, price depending on booking time and day of the week" as intransparent. There are a lot of businesses that do exactly the same thing. Just off the top of my head: doctors, dentists, plumbers, taxis, airlines and restuarants. Their reasons for doing so are obvious, and probably result in a nett benefit to consumers.
I wasn't, but you're mistaken if you think that a trade tariff isn't a tax on citizens. Ultimately, the burden of the tariff is passed to the purchaser, because the tariff makes the imported product more expensive, and the locally made product is more expensive because of reduced competition.
Buffet owns billions in Berkshire Hathaway shares. If he needs to pay a bill, he can sell one, and the capital gains tax payable will be less than the income tax on an equivalent salary payment.
(Yes, I said "he can sell one". The current price for BRK-A is around US$92K.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Please name one Oppressive state/Tyranny without any gun control laws." The United States of America.
Apple trees don't breed true from seed. If you have a tree that produces nice-tasting apples, trees grown from its seeds are unlikely to produce nice-tasting apples. For that reason, apples are always propagated by cuttings. So why did Johnny plant apple seeds? Because you can use any old sour-tasting apple to make cider. That's right. Johhny Appleseed was a one-man booze promoter.
These are probably melted pingos. http://www.smh.com.au/world/op...
Simple solution: simulate the lower gravity with sand made of a material that's 2.6 times denser.
I wonder how many people use a 54Mbps wireless LAN in their homes to connect to their "super fast" Internet...
You're not paying for the external cost of generating the electricity, which is the problem. Those external costs include mercury and CO2 emissions from coal-fired plants. I suppose if those costs were tacked on to your power bill you'd have a case.
This isn't Europe, and you can't necessarily repeat the same things that work in Europe and expect them to work here also.
That's not correct. Parts of the US - especially in the north-east - are very much like Europe, and both heavy rail and light rail are viable in those areas. That's also where the bulk of the population lives.
You live in a very big and diverse country. Just because something won't work in rural Arizona or Nebraska doesn't mean it won't work anywhere else.
This was outlawed here in Australia a few years ago, so merchants are now free to charge a fee for credit card purchases (which some would call offering a discount for cash).
The main reason for doing this was to make the costs of buying by credit card transparent. Under the old system, credit card providers charged a fee to the merchant, but the fee was hidden from the consumer. The merchants had to absorb this cost by raising prices slightly across the board. That meant that the banks were effectively applying a small sales tax to nearly all retail sales. Estimates varied, but it was generally thought to be around 1% to 2%. It doesn't sound like much, but across every sale in the country, it's a huge amount.
Most big retailers continue to do this, but smaller retailers either have a mimimum amount for credit card purchases, or tack on a fee of around 3%.
"So if this works, a school inoculation program might be the way to prevent smoking."
Only if the vaccine also makes smoking less cool.
Your observations are right but your conclusions are not, because power is produced and distributed over a broad geographic area.
Solar varies, but over a wide area, it varies very slowly. If you want a simple way to think about it, consider that the total output over a single region is determined by the total cloud cover across that region. That cover might change quite a bit over an hour, but it won't change much in 5 minutes. A well-managed grid will be able to cope with this rate of change.
A similar argument applies to wind. If the wind falls in one region, it generally picks up in another. Again, the grid manages this.
Incidentally, this argument ignores the use of these energy sources in ways other than just feeding power into the grid. For example, the Australian government has researched the use of solar power to pre-heat water fed into the boilers of conventional power stations. This doesn't provide energy directly, but it does reduce the amount of fuel they burn. Systems like that are even easier to manage than direct solar.
You're thinking of neutrinos. Neutrons interact with matter fairly easily, so they don't travel very far, even in in air. A neutron detector, therefore, has to be quite close to a neutron source to work.
The finely finished blocks are only on the outside. Inside, the blocks are quite rough and don't fit together tightly.
This is pretty common in ancient stonework. For example, the famous Inca stonework at sites like Sacsayhuaman look fantastic - the joints look almost organic, they're so close - but that's just the outer edges of the blocks. Behind the surface, the block edges are quite rough.
The real engineering miracles in large structures like the pyramids are of social organisation and agricultural production.
A lot of Oracle sites run their listener on a different port. (1521 is just the default.)
I think it would be great if professional, experienced programmers wrote commented, clear code. As it stands, most of them *don't*. Seeing 1,000 line PL/SQL packages with zero comments, random indenting, single-letter variable names and hard-coded constants is an almost daily experience for me.
As for keeping constants in a database table or a file: well, yeah, sure, but how are you going to look them up? You'll need some kind of human-readable identifier value to find them in the table. I guess you'll be using a constant for that.
But the US is just bigger and that means its more difficult to create and maintain a public transportation system.
Area of Europe: 10,180,000 square km.
Area of the USA: 9,631,420 square km.
Population of Europe: 710,000,000.
Population of the USA: 301,711,000.
So you're wrong either way.
The main reasons the USA has crap public transport and Europe has good public transport are: culural acceptance; and the fact that Europe kept a lot of the system that it built back in the 1800s, whereas the USA removed its 19th-century system during the 20th century.
but perhaps a good enough reason to move beyond simple printed ballots where fraudulent ballots might be a little easier to slip into the ballot box.
Except the 'simple printed ballots' have to be stolen from a secure facility. And filled in (by the thousand). And initialled by an electoral official whose identity isn't known until polling day. And then placed in a secure ballot box that's being watched by different electoral officials. And then counted by other electoral officials who check the initials on the ballots.
Believe it or not, the problem you're talking about was resolved decades ago in other countries. Switching to a machine just introduces a different set of problems.
Here in Australia, it works like this.
1. All prices are specified to the cent.
2. At the checkout, the exact prices are added up.
3. If paying with cash, the total is rounded to the nearest 5 cents.
4. If paying by credit card, debit card, cheque, or some other means, the exact amount is paid.
The most you'll ever see rounded is 3 cents, and half the time it'll be in your favour.
The Democrats lost in 2004 because they had a crappy candidate, and let the republicans control the debate. Get over it already.
Let's see now... Bush won by a tiny margin: 2.5%. Based on that, the Democrat candidate was almost exactly as crappy as the Republican candidate. What's more, even the Republicans acknowledge that the church vote was crucial in getting them over the line, so a church vote of around 3% is the only explanation required for Bush's tiny majority. No excess crappiness is needed.
Yeah, the NY Times sucks because one of their journalists did a bad job 4 years ago.
Thank god neither of us screw up, eh? That'd mean we suck, too.
I've seen a few posts here asking "why use such an obvious method of killing someone?"
The answer is: it's very, very far from obvious. The mere fact that it's taken so long to work out what the poison was indicates how subtle Polonium poisoning is.
1. Based on the Wikipedia entry for Polonium, the dosage required is incredibly small. We're not talking milligrams, here; we're talking micrograms, or less. Just detecting such a tiny quantity distributed throughout the victim's body is going to be incredibly hard.
2. The poison won't produce discernable radiation outside the victim's body, either, because alpha radiation is so readily absorbed by tissue. (That's also what makes it such a good poison, of course.)
3. The thing with poisons is that you have to actually look for them. Polonium is such an unlikely poison - given its rarity and inherent handling hazards - that even considering it is far-fetched. The fact that the victim's urine contained helium was the only clue the pathologists had, and I think they deserve a huge amount of credit for getting from that result to polonium as the cause.
My interpretation of "We've synthesized a mixture of the two mirror-image compounds, the idea being we can take the mirror image of the natural one" is that they have produced the substance in the lab, but the product is racemic - i.e., the molecule exists in two isomers that are mirror images of each other.
Biological processes tend to produce isomers that have the same symmetry. (Right-handed, I think, but I could be wrong.) Inorganic lab processes produce both. Sometimes, both isomers have the same biological effect, but often, they have different effects. Sounds to me like this substance may fall into the latter category.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiomer
Last year I travelled extensively by train in Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Italy, and only the Italians wanted me to reserve seats. The rest of the time I just bought a ticket and got on the train. Even the German ICE didn't require a reservation.
Also, I fail to see why you describe "cancellation fees, price depending on booking time and day of the week" as intransparent. There are a lot of businesses that do exactly the same thing. Just off the top of my head: doctors, dentists, plumbers, taxis, airlines and restuarants. Their reasons for doing so are obvious, and probably result in a nett benefit to consumers.
1. If someone votes for a politician with a track record of lying, they can't blame the politician for what happens next.
2. Most of us grew out of name-calling after elementary school.
...if you're referring to taxes on citizens...
I wasn't, but you're mistaken if you think that a trade tariff isn't a tax on citizens. Ultimately, the burden of the tariff is passed to the purchaser, because the tariff makes the imported product more expensive, and the locally made product is more expensive because of reduced competition.
Buffet owns billions in Berkshire Hathaway shares. If he needs to pay a bill, he can sell one, and the capital gains tax payable will be less than the income tax on an equivalent salary payment.
(Yes, I said "he can sell one". The current price for BRK-A is around US$92K.)