Should sell well in India: Condoms 'too big' for Indian men (although I don't really see how being shorter than international norms is a problem: I just doesn't unroll as far, but it still unrolls snugly all the way).
The problem is that replacing the dollar doesn't solve any problem to the individual.
I am not aware of any other country replacing its smaller notes with coins for the good of individuals, their central banks/mints did it simply because the cost of keeping high turnover paper money in circulation (by replacing damaged notes) was far higher than maintaining the same volume in coins (usable life measured in decades). Other places typically have a note/coin $2 equivalent that helps reduce the number of coins in a pocket, while the US eschews its own $2 note. Inflation and production costs also doomed the 1 and 2 cent coin equivalents in many places. As an aside, polymer notes, used in some places, last about four times as long as their paper cousins.
BTW: Why is that United States continues to think of it self at 300+ million individuals flying in close formation while the rest of the world lives in societies?
The difference being that the government does not require that you purchase non-bald tyres, car insurance, or clothing from a particular (monopoly) retailer.
The ice-strengthened vessel is within 100nm of Dumont D'Urville with a typical December daytime temperature hovering around freezing (http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDT60803/IDT60803.89642.shtml). This ice did not suddenly appear in clear water because it got cold, the ship was sailing through broken ice floes when weather conditions pushed the ice and the ship into tight formation. The water between the sheets froze and the rest, as they say, is history.
Just to qualify, this is on virtual machines that are mostly up-to-date but get bitten by the 100% CPU once a month on patch Tuesday. I've not tried on a clean XP SP3 install for a while.
Undermining the US economy is really the LAST thing the Chinese would want to do.
In the immortal words of Sherman T Potter, "Horse hockey!"
The ability to mass disrupt the US economy is of great utility to the Chinese government in the event that the US and China are on opposite sides of a war. Just the same as the United States would seek to destroy the economy of China in the same circumstances. Even without the war, the threat of being able to do this to the US is the same threat the US relies on every time it claims nuclear weapons are a deterrent: don't pick a fight with us because we will cripple you.
Remember, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
This has been happening on and off for more than a year. I found the last couple of times that it was helped if I manually fetched and installed the latest "Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer" for version 8 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-088 at time of writing). Never understood why; perhaps it allows a serious chunk of the search tree to be pruned quickly avoiding the exponential stupidity.
If you need to stop the 100% CPU while you fetch this then Start -> Run, "Services.msc", locate and stop "Automatic Updates".
If we are discounting prehistoric claimants (much as the Europeans did at the time in discounting the native population)... the continent of Australia. Dutch, French, Portuguese and other groups had found parts of the continent prior to Cook's flag planting and claim of the eastern regions in 1770. The first British colony exploiting the explicit claim was established in 1788 (Sydney). The British claim stuck and it was not challenged in any substantive way. The French claimed western Australia (1772) and the Dutch Van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania, 1642) but neither nation settled or defended these claims in material ways when challenged by British settlement.
New Zealand is an another example that comes close, although the French did manage to create a settlement on purchased land there (Akaroa) and Mori settlement occurred inside the time span of documented European history.
Lets us, just for argument sake, accept your maths as to the total high-level spent fuel at 861 tons for the global generated power at 2010, and let's pretend we can transport and densely store it on hypothetical football fields without encasing it much larger volumes of other material to stop it getting too hot. From your reference site we see that the world electricity consumption increased from 16391 billion kwH to 18466 billion kWh over five years (2006-2010). That's exponential growth at 3% and new generating capacity will have to match that for the foreseeable future. So you start with 861 tons (2430 cu ft) next year you will need to find storage for another 887 tons (2500 cu ft), the next for 913 tons (2580 cu ft)... In 10 years time you will need to find space for an extra 1157 tons (3270 cu ft), after 20 add 1555 tons (4390 cu ft), after 50 the annual addition will be 3774 tons (10600 cu ft) and total under storage will be a shade over 100000 tons (285000 cu ft). I trust you start to see the problem of exponential growth. I don't think 50 years of sustained growth at 3% while places like Africa or India "catch up" with the profligate west is unreasonable (even if the west cuts back). Taken to an absurd extreme; in the exceptionally unlikely event consumption does not plateau in the meantime, by the time your first fuel is expiring at 300 years the current year's waste will be 6.11 million tons and the total mass under storage will be ~203 million ton (~575 million cu. ft, or 30000 hot American football fields).
The Yucca Mountain facility has a statutory limit of 85,000 short tons. Even by your no-growth estimate Yucca mountain is already too small to hold 300 year's worth of thorium waste (let alone 300 years of current fuel wastes). At 3% consumption growth it will be full in less than 50 years. Of course, political reality means there will never be a single repository (or indeed universal nuclear power) but the requirement to manage the global total amount of waste would remain.
NSA employees operate in a strictly compartmentalised environment where the need to know is enforced. Some people are in positions of extreme trust, but the vast majority are not. We all need to understand that the revelations coming from Snowden's leaks are just as surprising to the vast majority of NSA employees as they are to the public at large. A good number of these people will be equally dismayed at the actions of their employer. We don't need to hound the individuals. The organisation is fair game though.
So the small amount of waste (from a commercial reactor that doesn't exist yet) stored today needs to be stored until 2313 to be safe (for some definition of safe). What about the small but slightly larger amount of waste produced next year, and the year after, and the year after? The nuclear waste dump does not become safe until 300 years after the last thorium waste product is added to the pile and the pile has grown exponentially in the meantime. There's also the mounting pile of lower level nuclear waste that exists regardless of primary fuel type. Don't get me wrong, it's a better option than 10000 years and bigger piles, but "only ~300 years" is deliberately deceptive.
Phone books, yes, maybe, no, sometimes: Goodbye to copyright for databases? Federal Court finds no copyright in phone directories. TV guides too: The High Court Decision in IceTV and Nine Network. Both cases resolved against the purported copyright holder but not as a result of unambiguous law and not setting a clear precedent either. The copyright law in this country regarding compilations (there isn't database-specific law) is such an unmitigated morass that it takes thousands of dollars just to get a worthless opinion, and millions to go to court because you will end up arguing all the way to the High Court. The big players are now lobbying for compilation specific laws, but only if the laws enshrine their "rights". For the smaller player (myself included) the legal costs of fighting for what I consider right utterly dwarf the (still) ludicrous licensing fees some parties charge for simple lists of facts; a not dissimilar situation to patent troll demand letters.
What killed the National Broadband Network as a progressive fibre-based infrastructure project was the politicisation of a technical project. The Parliament (not the Government), having decided to do the project should have allocated the money to the project for the next ten years, got the **** out of the way, and stayed there. However, at the time we had a corrosive opposition party that saw an opportunity to pester an internally fragile, and later minority, government. They could not let cheap political points lie for the greater good. That they had the help of certain vested commercial interests is not surprising, but that was only possible while the political division continued. Had the same politcial effort been put into constructive endeavours aimed at furthering the project we would still have a fibre-to-the-home network project, that was not in danger of being canned entirely (my prediction), and Murdoch and the shock-jocks would have been neutered.
This is the MPAA, they will not do anything unless someone is paying them to do it. What do you think the MPAA's per-click charge would be? Seriously though, the message is probably court approved and cannot be seen to be commercially preferential to non-parties in the action.
Current copyright in the US exists from the time of creation but the 70 year expiry period does not start until the author dies, which clearly has nothing to do with either publication or creation dates. The assumed death of the author and periods for works-for-hire do not kick in until 95 years after publication or 125 years after creation, whichever occurs first. Publish something in your twenties and the world can expect it to be locked away for at least the next 125 years.
It seems reasonable to assume the AC's great public policy contribution would apply from publication (i.e. the point at which the work ceased to also be a trade secret) but I do not hold much hope of any elaboration on the AC's part.
Australian law, for example, does not require artistic merit (i.e. not a slavish copy) for a new copyright to exist in the photograph. An artistic work is defined as, "a painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving or photograph, whether the work is of artistic quality or not." (Copyright Act 1968 Sect 10). Whether it is a slavish copy of a public domain work or not is irrelevant in determining the rights pertaining to the image of the object. Other provisions covering databases of works would also come into play under Australian law if you tried to harvest a substantial portion of the image library.
As for Wikimedia Commons, "Wikimedia Commons only accepts media that are explicitly freely licensed, or that are in the public domain in at least the United States and in the source country of the work." (emphasis and reformat mine) Assuming there is some validity to the copyright claims over the images from the Vatican under Vatican law then you could not post them to the Commons. Similarly, "Media licensed under non-commercial only licenses are not accepted either", which would preclude many (all) the images created of the Bodleian's collection which carry a Creative Common Non-commercial licence.
I am not saying Australian law applies to this specific case, just reinforcing that the United States is not the World no matter how much they assert it is. I am also not saying that Australian copyright law is not an arse.
Here is the logic. The image is a work carrying copyright: you cannot reproduce the image without permission or staying within fair use/fair dealing provisions of relevant laws. The words on the pages in the are a public domain work: you can quote from the book with impunity. Logical in some minds, but copyright assertions by gatekeepers has a long history of abuse.
I wish I held your optimism. The area I live in has had digital TV broadcasts since before 2004, with the analogue signal being discontinued entirely in May 2013. Since 2004 the three commercial stations (in particular) have stopped sourcing the little 1080i material they broadcast in the early days, cannibalised the bit rate for the HD stream they are obliged to transmit, and opened low bit rate SD streams for tv shopping (e.g. 4Me, Extra, Extra 2 (timeshifted Extra), 7 Two, 2 x TV Shopping Network, Spree TV). Gem, a notionally HD stream, is also about 50% TV shopping and all upscaled.
Would not be so bad if the streams were H.264 encoded rather than MPEG: bits would not be so tight. At least our SD streams are anamorphic 16:9, pillarboxed for 4:3 material.
Slashdot Mirror
Should sell well in India: Condoms 'too big' for Indian men (although I don't really see how being shorter than international norms is a problem: I just doesn't unroll as far, but it still unrolls snugly all the way).
The problem is that replacing the dollar doesn't solve any problem to the individual.
I am not aware of any other country replacing its smaller notes with coins for the good of individuals, their central banks/mints did it simply because the cost of keeping high turnover paper money in circulation (by replacing damaged notes) was far higher than maintaining the same volume in coins (usable life measured in decades). Other places typically have a note/coin $2 equivalent that helps reduce the number of coins in a pocket, while the US eschews its own $2 note. Inflation and production costs also doomed the 1 and 2 cent coin equivalents in many places. As an aside, polymer notes, used in some places, last about four times as long as their paper cousins.
BTW: Why is that United States continues to think of it self at 300+ million individuals flying in close formation while the rest of the world lives in societies?
Up there with belly button fluff studies IMHO
The difference being that the government does not require that you purchase non-bald tyres, car insurance, or clothing from a particular (monopoly) retailer.
The ice-strengthened vessel is within 100nm of Dumont D'Urville with a typical December daytime temperature hovering around freezing (http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDT60803/IDT60803.89642.shtml). This ice did not suddenly appear in clear water because it got cold, the ship was sailing through broken ice floes when weather conditions pushed the ice and the ship into tight formation. The water between the sheets froze and the rest, as they say, is history.
Just to qualify, this is on virtual machines that are mostly up-to-date but get bitten by the 100% CPU once a month on patch Tuesday. I've not tried on a clean XP SP3 install for a while.
Absolutely fixes the problem every time here.
Download and manually install Microsoft Security Bulletin MS13-097 - Critical, Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (2898785) for IE8 and turn updates back on
Undermining the US economy is really the LAST thing the Chinese would want to do.
In the immortal words of Sherman T Potter, "Horse hockey!"
The ability to mass disrupt the US economy is of great utility to the Chinese government in the event that the US and China are on opposite sides of a war. Just the same as the United States would seek to destroy the economy of China in the same circumstances. Even without the war, the threat of being able to do this to the US is the same threat the US relies on every time it claims nuclear weapons are a deterrent: don't pick a fight with us because we will cripple you.
Remember, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
This has been happening on and off for more than a year. I found the last couple of times that it was helped if I manually fetched and installed the latest "Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer" for version 8 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-088 at time of writing). Never understood why; perhaps it allows a serious chunk of the search tree to be pruned quickly avoiding the exponential stupidity.
If you need to stop the 100% CPU while you fetch this then Start -> Run, "Services.msc", locate and stop "Automatic Updates".
No, not "Mori", "Maori" with a macron on the a... it's just that Slashdot is too 1970's to realise that ASCII just doesn't cut it in the Internet age.
If we are discounting prehistoric claimants (much as the Europeans did at the time in discounting the native population)... the continent of Australia. Dutch, French, Portuguese and other groups had found parts of the continent prior to Cook's flag planting and claim of the eastern regions in 1770. The first British colony exploiting the explicit claim was established in 1788 (Sydney). The British claim stuck and it was not challenged in any substantive way. The French claimed western Australia (1772) and the Dutch Van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania, 1642) but neither nation settled or defended these claims in material ways when challenged by British settlement.
New Zealand is an another example that comes close, although the French did manage to create a settlement on purchased land there (Akaroa) and Mori settlement occurred inside the time span of documented European history.
I Don't Own a TV
Elsewhere in the world of dead tree consumption: White Elephant
Lets us, just for argument sake, accept your maths as to the total high-level spent fuel at 861 tons for the global generated power at 2010, and let's pretend we can transport and densely store it on hypothetical football fields without encasing it much larger volumes of other material to stop it getting too hot. From your reference site we see that the world electricity consumption increased from 16391 billion kwH to 18466 billion kWh over five years (2006-2010). That's exponential growth at 3% and new generating capacity will have to match that for the foreseeable future. So you start with 861 tons (2430 cu ft) next year you will need to find storage for another 887 tons (2500 cu ft), the next for 913 tons (2580 cu ft)... In 10 years time you will need to find space for an extra 1157 tons (3270 cu ft), after 20 add 1555 tons (4390 cu ft), after 50 the annual addition will be 3774 tons (10600 cu ft) and total under storage will be a shade over 100000 tons (285000 cu ft). I trust you start to see the problem of exponential growth. I don't think 50 years of sustained growth at 3% while places like Africa or India "catch up" with the profligate west is unreasonable (even if the west cuts back). Taken to an absurd extreme; in the exceptionally unlikely event consumption does not plateau in the meantime, by the time your first fuel is expiring at 300 years the current year's waste will be 6.11 million tons and the total mass under storage will be ~203 million ton (~575 million cu. ft, or 30000 hot American football fields).
The Yucca Mountain facility has a statutory limit of 85,000 short tons. Even by your no-growth estimate Yucca mountain is already too small to hold 300 year's worth of thorium waste (let alone 300 years of current fuel wastes). At 3% consumption growth it will be full in less than 50 years. Of course, political reality means there will never be a single repository (or indeed universal nuclear power) but the requirement to manage the global total amount of waste would remain.
NSA employees operate in a strictly compartmentalised environment where the need to know is enforced. Some people are in positions of extreme trust, but the vast majority are not. We all need to understand that the revelations coming from Snowden's leaks are just as surprising to the vast majority of NSA employees as they are to the public at large. A good number of these people will be equally dismayed at the actions of their employer. We don't need to hound the individuals. The organisation is fair game though.
So the small amount of waste (from a commercial reactor that doesn't exist yet) stored today needs to be stored until 2313 to be safe (for some definition of safe). What about the small but slightly larger amount of waste produced next year, and the year after, and the year after? The nuclear waste dump does not become safe until 300 years after the last thorium waste product is added to the pile and the pile has grown exponentially in the meantime. There's also the mounting pile of lower level nuclear waste that exists regardless of primary fuel type. Don't get me wrong, it's a better option than 10000 years and bigger piles, but "only ~300 years" is deliberately deceptive.
Phone books, yes, maybe, no, sometimes: Goodbye to copyright for databases? Federal Court finds no copyright in phone directories. TV guides too: The High Court Decision in IceTV and Nine Network. Both cases resolved against the purported copyright holder but not as a result of unambiguous law and not setting a clear precedent either. The copyright law in this country regarding compilations (there isn't database-specific law) is such an unmitigated morass that it takes thousands of dollars just to get a worthless opinion, and millions to go to court because you will end up arguing all the way to the High Court. The big players are now lobbying for compilation specific laws, but only if the laws enshrine their "rights". For the smaller player (myself included) the legal costs of fighting for what I consider right utterly dwarf the (still) ludicrous licensing fees some parties charge for simple lists of facts; a not dissimilar situation to patent troll demand letters.
What killed the National Broadband Network as a progressive fibre-based infrastructure project was the politicisation of a technical project. The Parliament (not the Government), having decided to do the project should have allocated the money to the project for the next ten years, got the **** out of the way, and stayed there. However, at the time we had a corrosive opposition party that saw an opportunity to pester an internally fragile, and later minority, government. They could not let cheap political points lie for the greater good. That they had the help of certain vested commercial interests is not surprising, but that was only possible while the political division continued. Had the same politcial effort been put into constructive endeavours aimed at furthering the project we would still have a fibre-to-the-home network project, that was not in danger of being canned entirely (my prediction), and Murdoch and the shock-jocks would have been neutered.
This is the MPAA, they will not do anything unless someone is paying them to do it. What do you think the MPAA's per-click charge would be? Seriously though, the message is probably court approved and cannot be seen to be commercially preferential to non-parties in the action.
Current copyright in the US exists from the time of creation but the 70 year expiry period does not start until the author dies, which clearly has nothing to do with either publication or creation dates. The assumed death of the author and periods for works-for-hire do not kick in until 95 years after publication or 125 years after creation, whichever occurs first. Publish something in your twenties and the world can expect it to be locked away for at least the next 125 years.
It seems reasonable to assume the AC's great public policy contribution would apply from publication (i.e. the point at which the work ceased to also be a trade secret) but I do not hold much hope of any elaboration on the AC's part.
Australian law, for example, does not require artistic merit (i.e. not a slavish copy) for a new copyright to exist in the photograph. An artistic work is defined as, "a painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving or photograph, whether the work is of artistic quality or not." (Copyright Act 1968 Sect 10). Whether it is a slavish copy of a public domain work or not is irrelevant in determining the rights pertaining to the image of the object. Other provisions covering databases of works would also come into play under Australian law if you tried to harvest a substantial portion of the image library.
As for Wikimedia Commons, "Wikimedia Commons only accepts media that are explicitly freely licensed, or that are in the public domain in at least the United States and in the source country of the work." (emphasis and reformat mine) Assuming there is some validity to the copyright claims over the images from the Vatican under Vatican law then you could not post them to the Commons. Similarly, "Media licensed under non-commercial only licenses are not accepted either", which would preclude many (all) the images created of the Bodleian's collection which carry a Creative Common Non-commercial licence.
I am not saying Australian law applies to this specific case, just reinforcing that the United States is not the World no matter how much they assert it is. I am also not saying that Australian copyright law is not an arse.
The few images I have seen carry a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence.
Here is the logic. The image is a work carrying copyright: you cannot reproduce the image without permission or staying within fair use/fair dealing provisions of relevant laws. The words on the pages in the are a public domain work: you can quote from the book with impunity. Logical in some minds, but copyright assertions by gatekeepers has a long history of abuse.
I wish I held your optimism. The area I live in has had digital TV broadcasts since before 2004, with the analogue signal being discontinued entirely in May 2013. Since 2004 the three commercial stations (in particular) have stopped sourcing the little 1080i material they broadcast in the early days, cannibalised the bit rate for the HD stream they are obliged to transmit, and opened low bit rate SD streams for tv shopping (e.g. 4Me, Extra, Extra 2 (timeshifted Extra), 7 Two, 2 x TV Shopping Network, Spree TV). Gem, a notionally HD stream, is also about 50% TV shopping and all upscaled.
Would not be so bad if the streams were H.264 encoded rather than MPEG: bits would not be so tight. At least our SD streams are anamorphic 16:9, pillarboxed for 4:3 material.