Wow, what an awful example. If the tobacco industry meant to hide it's health effects from the American public, it did an awful job of it. As an example, the term Cancer Stick in reference to cigarettes was coined in 1898. The term Coffin Nails was coined some thirty years earlier.
Despite what some juries in Mississippi decided, no one in the U.S. has ever thought smoking was a healthy habbit.
You site a website that may be funded by someone with financial gain if global warming is found to be a fairy tale. On the other hand, you hold up research scientists whose entire living, wages, salaries, and grants are based on getting headlines with new Global Warming predicitions. Remember that the same data they are using to show global warming today was used to show the start of a new ice age in 1970. The hottest year of the century was 1938, and the bulk of warming in the 20th century occurred prior to 1950, while the bulk of the increase in CO2 occurred after 1950.
You are quick to point out the ulterior motives of the anti-global warming crowd, but gloss over the motives of the global warming crowd. Twenty years ago the only place a climate scientist could get a job was with a sock-puppet and a weather map on a morning news program. Now they're the "rock stars" of the science world. But I'm sure they have no ulterior motives. Notice that most of their predictions can't be proven or disproven until after they're dead.
I think this is an exaggeration: the costs were considered--in fact, the majority of the debate around Kyoto is centered on that very issue.
And the decision that was reached was, "Let the U.S. pay for it." One of the main reasons that the U.S. backed out of Kyoto was that the most conservative estimates put the cost of compliance at 2 TRILLION (and that's a U.S. Trillion, 10^12) DOLLARS. That represents the entire U.S. federal budget. So, to comply with Kyoto, we could have cut all government services for a year, or doubled the national debt, or collapsed our economy in the middle of a recession.
So, the original point is still valid. How many jobs, industries, services, and lives are you willing to sacrifice to cut.1 degree C over two decades?
The question no one ever asks is: Warmer than what?
And I'll put 100% trust in NASA, who receives nearly $1 Billion dollars a year in funding for further Global Warming research. Surely their climate model is totally accurate and doesn't ignore the 25 years of data from their own satellites and weather baloons showing that the ground station measurements that show warming trends are abberent.
PIxels are almost always counted as a triplet of red green and blue. The individual colors are never broken apart for resolution statistics. That would mean a 7120x4000 display resolution, which is not outside the possibility for OLED, since they are made with a process similar to lithography which can cram half a billion transistors into half an inch.
To put it another way, "Where can I get one of these!"
Uhm, it has pure white (Red+Green+BLUE) on the screen, and the white looks white, so it's not like the blue is failing. As a prototype, maybe they had issues with getting the blue into the bottom corners of the screen, and that's why they chose the particular image that they did, but I don't think you can say there is "no discernable blue" in the image. It's just hidden in the white.
But, OLEDs will eventually simply be printed on thin films (they require no solid backing or precise positioning like LCD panels do) and you will just buy a new "film" to drop in. The old one, with about the same thickness and texture as cellophane will be returned to the store where it can be dropped into a bucket of solvent and turned back into base polymers for re-use. Unlike LCDs (which use incredibly poisonous liquid crystal material) everything in an OLED film will be organic (other than the transparent power traces, which will be gallium arsenides or something similar) that can be broken down.
The OLED will make the screen replacable and the power supply and supporting hardware can be re-used. This could very well cut down on pollution.
Re:A test for whether UML is right for you
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How Do You Use UML?
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You missed the painfully obvious Point #8.
Our ISO 9001 certification REQUIRES us to do it.
Speaking as someone who just wrote 700+ pages of doc to update 134 lines of code...
Conservatives don't want to lower taxes, by the way - they just want to take more of the money from the people who hardly have any money, and spend it on invading third world countries instead of providing for americans.
Boy, I hate to point this out, but you should really check the facts first. The fact is that the Bush tax cut skewed more taxes to the wealthy and took more low income earners off the tax rolls. Currently the top 50% of wage earners pay over 96% of the taxes in America. The real numbers.
Also, during W's first term, social spending has increased in almost every area, including a huge new prescription drug benefit. So, your premise about conservatives and spending is wrong.
As a pretty staunch conservative myself, I can concisely say that I am not against video games with violence, crime, murder and mayhem in them. I am against minors being exposed to these games which are clearly not tailored for their experience level or moral maturity. For a parent to hand this game over to a child is to provide tacit approval of the actions that the game contains.
Children don't have rights for a reason, namely that they aren't mature enough to accept the responsibilites that go with them. In this country I have the right to own a gun, with that comes the responsibility of A) knowing *how* to use it, B) knowing *when* to use it, C) knowing *why* to use it, and D) knowing that there are consequences, many severe, for that gun's use. As an adult, I can see beyond the immediate gratification to the consequences. Children do not have this ability.
I have two children, I know that the consequences of their actions don't go through their mind until they start hitting them between the eyeballs.
Yes, we sometimes choose to prosecute children as adults, but usually only in very specific cases, such as when they are very near the age of majority (17+ years of age) or when they demonstrate to a psychiatrist that they have a clear understanding that their action was wrong and would have consequences, but they took the action anyway.
Personally I don't like the idea that something just happens when you turn 18 that makes you an adult. I know a bunch of 12 year olds who are more mature than some of the 20-somethings that I work with. Why do we give rights to the 20 year olds instead of the 12 year olds? The answer is tradition, but it's not the best answer. How many 25 year olds do you know who get stone drunk every weekend? Is that showing a level of responsibility?
Besides, the prosecution of minors as adults is relatively rare in this country, probably less than 1 in a 100 cases. And it's usually only used in the case of major felonies. Even then, children convicted as adults are often sentenced as juveniles, which means a maximum imprisonment age of 25. Now that's a privilege without a responsibility. It cuts both ways.
Since I was the author of the RPG game they tried to blame it on, here's my 2 cents.
The game is not the problem. The kids are about half the problem. The other half is the parents. These parents care more about watching the latest episode of E.R. then they care about keeping an eye on their kids. So when the kids nag them for a video game, they buy it and never look at it or the kids again.
There is not a single video game that my (10 year old) son has that I have not played and know the exact content of. Yes, my 10 year old has a few "T" rated games. No, he does not have an M rated game, nor will I ever buy him one, not even when he's 18. If he wants it, he'll have to earn the money for it.
What should happen is very simple. The courts should sentence these kids to clean every inch of the graffitti by hand. No power tools, no power-washers or sand-blasters. By hand with brushes and elbow grease.
At the same time, the parents should be taken into a counseling session and taught that the word "NO" exists. Then they should be taught that having kids is about *responsibility*. Then they should be fined about $500 each, and have all video game consoles removed from their home for six months.
All I can say is that if my son did this, he'd be limping into court, and he sure as hell wouldn't be sitting down. And I'd be burning his video games. He'd come home to a room devoid of toys with nothing but books and a desk.
This just reminds me of the week prior to Christmas when I watched a mother at a video-game store buy her 8 year old son a copy of Halo 2 because he said, "I waaaaant this!" Never looked at the box, never asked the two guys behind the counter, never even considered it. The two guys behind the counter tried to point out that it was M rated and she wouldn't listen. I finally stepped up and said, "Maam, would you let your child watch a slasher horror film?"
She said, "Of course not!"
I said, "Then why are you buying him a game with graphic violence and mutilation?"
"Oh my goodness, really? But there's no warning label."
All right, I can shoot your point down in one simple example. Right now, I am writing a book on my computer. Since I have no unique intellectual property, please send me your copy of my book. Since I can't know anything unique to me (say, drawing on my experiences or events in my life) according to you, surely you can write the same book.
No?
Then obviously I do posess some unique intellectual property.
And, for the record, the Constitution does not "enumerate" our rights, it bans the Congress from abridging the rights we already posess. Amendment 10 specifically states that all rights not enumerated are owned by the people and it is up to the states to adjudicate them. Thus, the Congress cannot create a right, it can only abridge those that already exist.
That's rather short-sighted as a view. Just because a publisher stops publishing something, it does not (and should not) instantly become public domain.
For example, Disney has just pulled Beauty and the Beast from it's production schedule after printing it on DVD for the first time. By your definition, they are no longer selling it to the public, and therefore it should become public domain. Wrong.
Peter Jackson has not yet released the extended version of Return of the King, does that mean it should be public domain? It's not for sale at this time. Does that make it "Abandoned"?
Copyright is a codification of a natural right, that right being the right of property in the case of an intellectual pursuit. Consider that without writing, a teacher could reach perhaps a few dozen people at once with their knowledge (be it a story, a method of accounting, or quantum physics). By writing their knowledge in the form of a book, it vastly improves society because it can now be distributed to the public.
But that also "cheapens" the knowledge. Consider the large sums of money you pay for the "privilige" of sitting in a classroom with a professor at college. The professor is compensated for his time and teaching and knowledge by your tuition money.
This is often a high rate because it requires the "teacher's" physical presence. When he codifies his knowledge in a written form (or video, audio, or 3-d hologram) he spends his time up front in order to not have to spend it later. The transfer no longer requires his physical presence.
The knowledge is the same in either case. He owns it, and, given the chance, could deliver it to you in person. By putting it in a book, he "discounts" the cost of the knowledge by making you work your way through it yourself. Very few books approach the cost of one semester of a college course.
Copyright is a protection of that knowledge. You wouldn't argue that the professor needs to be paid in college (well, I had a few professors that...never mind) but here you argue that because a publisher stops publishing new copies of the book, or software, or what have you, that the knowledge has suddenly lost all intrinsic value and should be handed out for free.
You are still capable of purchasing a used book, or a valid copy without infringing on the author's rights to their knowledge.
The part you should be complaining about is the length of time they are protected. I would argue that "Life of the Author" should be the longest copyright available, with the caveat that this term be about 20-25 years as a minimum. Software copyright should be 25 years maximum, and book copyright should be renewable every 10 years after the death of the author.
I would agree with the "non-production" argument only after a sufficient period of time has passed. For example, books would pass out of copyright if they were not produced for 20 years. Same with movies.
In the meantime, Libraries are a wonderful thing. They have lots of books and music and videos. Perhaps what we really need is a software *library* concept where old programs go to live and be rented (or borrowed.)
Simply discounting copyright is not the answer. Saying that I don't have a right to make a profit off of my knowledge or work borders on insanity, or communism, your choice.
You are correct, I insinuated that you were in favor of Saddam. Mostly because I have spent weeks with the people who continuously refer to Bush (a born-again christian, whose largest infraction of the law was a DUI arrest in college) as the second coming of Hitler, while wondering why we ever attacked poor Saddam (a brutal dictator known as "The Butcher of Bagdhad" for the slaughter of over 400,000 of his own citizens, and the attempted genocide of the Kurds using WMDs) who they now say was just a poor, misunderstood guy.
Those same people continuously tell me that Bush somehow stole enough votes to not only win the election but win in a huge fashion.
I also don't understand people who continue to say "Bush Lied" about the WMDs. We now know that he (and John Kerry, who sat on the security committee and got the same briefings as President Bush) took the best information that was out there, namely the information from the CIA (and 50 other nation's intelligence, *and the reports of Hans Blix from UNSCOM*) and determined that every single source said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Did Bush ever say that a war in Iraq was going to be easy? No, from the very first time he brought it up, he said it would be long and hard.
If you oppose the war on some fundamental "there should never be war" stance, that's fine. But all of the evidence said that Saddam sponsored terrorism (Remember his $25,000 bonus paid to Palestinian suicide bombers?), and that he had a program to develop and, most likely, distribute WMDs to those terrorists. Given that evidence, what choice did we have? Waiting for more inspections, even as Hans Blix called the inspection process "a joke of misdirection and lies?"
Remember that John Kerry was in favor of the war until he saw that Howard Dean was leading the polls with an anti-war stance. His line, "Anyone who is against the war in Iraq, has no business becoming the President of the United States." He was right.
I'm also somewhat shocked by your view that Bush has "shoved Christian interests down [your] throat". Me, I'm an Agnostic at the best of times, and I haven't had any crosses burned into my forehead or been rounded up and put through the Inquisition. I don't think anyone else has either. I'm always surprised to see people talking about Concentration Camps and Jack-booted thugs on left-leaning web sites, because every conservative I've ever met would be absolutely appalled at the concept, much less the practice of such an abhorrant idea.
As for stuffing Big Business down your throat, I've often wondered where people like you think jobs come from? Do you really think we should disband all these corporations and have nothing but Mom & Pop shops across the country? What has he done that is so "Big Business"? His tax cuts? Well, guess what, when you give a tax cut, the people who pay the most taxes, get the largest dollar-wise percentage of the cut. The fact is that the highest 50% now pay proportionally more taxes than before his tax cut.
So, what is the issue? Cutting the dividend tax? That affects everyone who owns stock in this country, and given the proliferation of 401Ks, that represents something like 70% of he population now. Cutting the Death Tax (which is blatantly immoral as a double tax anyway [see also, Constitution, The])? I got to watch 60% of the farmers in the town I grew up with have to sell their farms when the death tax gobbled up 55% of their "vast wealth" in excess of $1,000,000. 99.9% of which is tied up in real estate and equipment. Wisconsin used to be America's Dairyland, and is now filled with farms that aren't being run any more, with fields left to go to seed.
Do I think the analysis at Berkeley was more in depth than my linear graph, hell yes. Do I think that makes it any more valid? Hell no. All, and I find it hard to believe that, with 25 elections in the 20th century alone, I can use the word "all" to refer to two, of their data points are from elections where democrats had a majority of
You should read what I wrote. The counties that had electronic machines were those most likely to have the largest population of "Dixiecrats" or "Reagan D emocrats" because they were the most Democratic counties last election. Thus they were likely to have the largest swing. My whole point is that we wouldn't know since the people doing the analysis did not include in their data set the elections where republicans won the state (and thus the Dixiecrats voted republican.)
I do not disagree that paperless voting is not a good idea. I disagree that rampant fraud of the type you postulate was taking place. There was no reason for it to do so. Kerry's 3000+ lawyer team reviewed the voting and told him, "nope, no fraud." The idea that you can extrapolate the future action of the electorate from two data points is absurd. They chose data where the democrats won the election and then said, "Bush shouldn't have won."
I once had a graph in a chemistry class that I knew was linear. I plotted the graph after finding two data points. The teacher wrote a great big "F" on the top of the paper. That's what should go on the top of this one. It proves absolutely nothing.
Do we need a paper trail in elections? Yes. Do I think the Diebold machines use a good design or even good software practices? Absolutely not. Do I really think that the voting machines in counties run by Democrats, with Democrat County Clerks, and Democrat controlled polling places decided to rig their machines with an extra 130,000 votes for Bush? Boy, that's a tough one...
Like I said, give it up. You're probably in with the crowd who grasped at the single straw (counting illegal votes and over-votes for Gore) where Gore won the Florida election in 2000.
Remember, Bush got 52% of the vote, and you scream "Fraud". But Saddam Hussein got 99.8% of the vote, and you call Bush a fascist and thought he should have left Saddam in power.
If Bush is Hitler for stealing 0.5% of the vote, then Saddam would have to have been Satan himself. I wonder which one you side with?
The simpler case to have made would be to simply point out that the two previous data points used by the analysis were 2000 and 1996. In 1996, Dole (the republican) lost the popular vote. In 2000, Bush, (the republican) lost the popular vote, and squeaked out a.01% margin in Florida. In 2004, Bush won a 5% margin on the popular vote, and won Florida by a large margin.
The students at Berkeley use the two data points in 1996 and 2000, where the republicans lost the popular vote, as a comparison to a voting pattern where the republicans *won* the popular vote. That is the error in the analysis. Had they gone back to 1980, 1984, or 1988 when republicans won the popular vote (i.e. a comparable data source) they would have, IMHO, seen that the voting patterns fell within the statistical margins.
Of course more votes would come from democratic counties, because to win, democrats would have to vote republican, the fact that these counties are the ones with electronic voting is no surprise as these counties would also have been the ones screaming the loudest after 2000 for voting reform and electronic voting.
As someone else has already pointed out, the same analysis was run on other states, without finding any anomolies.
Apart from the fact that I no longer live in Wisconsin, and that what you are talking about is Solar *ASSISTED* homes (i.e. homes that get some partial energy from solar), I'd really prefer not to schedule over a year out for some specialty homes clustered in a certain area.
What I stated in my first message is that Wisconsin receives between 60-90 clear, sunny, days a year. That is simply insufficient to build a completely solar DEPENDENT home. In other words, a home that has no electrical wires running to it (and maybe no gas line either, because I'm sure you'll claim you can achieve 100% solar heating as well.) If you are going to claim that such a home exists in the Wisconsin climate and is inhabitable 365 days a year, then you are either a liar, or you live in a fur parka all winter long.
The farcical idea that solar panels work better when snowing borders on the insane. Snow loads in Wisconsin far exceed snow loads in the Rocky Mountain states (Colorado is my current residence) because snow melts in the Rocky Mountain States. Where I live, we have 280-310 clear sunny days per year, and we don't even try to push a truly solar dependent home here. The very fact that Solar provides at best a 65% duty cycle, and gives out exactly when use peaks (i.e. the sun goes down just about the same time you want to turn on the lights) points at the problem with solar power.
Yes, I've seen the Greenpeace brochure that says if we only put in enough solar panels to cover New Mexico we could rid ourselves of all other power sources. Great idea, who's going to build the batteries the size of Arizona? And who's going to pay the 20 TRILLION (with a T) dollars to build it all?
The DOE studies compare average daylight. So what? What do you do when it's nearly pitch black in the middle of the day (something I've experienced in Wisconsin blizzards.) Where's the power going to come from. Again, right when you need it the most (peak heating time) the power goes lacking.
And gee, your data comes from the study done by the National Center for Photovoltaics. For some reason I think they'd have a vested interest in showing that solar is a viable energy source. Add to that, that your original posting didn't mention that all of your units were in kWh/m^2 per DAY. So, at about $1000 a square meter, I can generate an average of 4.4kWh per day in Eau Claire, WI. That saves me about 15 cents a day. That's nearly $55 a year, and since PV panels last at most 20 years, you could just about pay for one before you needed to replace it. Of course, the buy in to run a normal house is huge. Let's see, I'd guess that my house uses about 75 kWh every day, so even in Colorado (average of about 8.9 with a 2 axis tracker), I'd need 10 square meters of panels. Ignoring the questionable asthetics of a set of panels half the size of my roof footprint, and the fact that my neighbors would sue me for blocking the view of Pike's Peak, I could expect to spend in the neighborhood of 15-20,000 to put in that kind of system.
All this ignores the fact that I need a massive set of batteries to store power during the day so I can use it at night. A good LiOn system would run in the $100,000 range, but you'd need it because A) Lead-acid would violate EPA regulations, and B) no other battery supports the charge-discharge cycle.
So, now I'm in for about $120,000 all to save $85 a month. So, in about 150 years, I can make up the cost. Of course, by then I'll have had to replace the panels a half-dozen times or so.
Now, you're going to reply that going off the grid isn't the point, but that is the point of this whole thread. What do we do to replace coal plants belching filth into the sky? Distrbuted solar isn't the answer. Neither is centralized solar, unless you plan on paying a 99% energy tax for the next 20 years to subsidize it.
Not to mention that the production of solar panels produces far worse byproducts than coal does. Wonderful heavy metal toxics and arsenic compounds t
Uh-huh, and what's the efficiency with three feet of snow on it? Or when all the conductors start to rust because of the vicious humidity/heating/cooling/dew cycle you get in Wisconsin? Sorry, I lived there and there's no way that you get 4-5 kWh/m^2 on some of those winter days, and even then, at peak efficiencies in the 20% range, you couldn't lay down enough solar panels to run a house if you used every inch of roof space. Add to that the lousy southern exposure angles and short days in winter, and I think you're living in a pipe dream.
I knew a family who installed $20,000 of solar panels when they built their new house and had to install another $20,000 sun-tracking system for them and finally tore it all out and recouped $5000 by shipping it to someone in Arizona. They determined that in the best year (of the five they had it) they made back about $200 on the cost of operating the system. They ditched it when the snow-load cracked one panel and they were looking at a 2-3000 dollar replacement cost.
You need to take in all the factors, not just the sunny vs. cloudy argument. You're argument is like the first climate models where they simulated day and night by just having a 50% light on all the time.
Educate yourself to the real state of affairs when it comes to nuclear accidents.
Chernobyl - Designed from the ground up as a disaster waiting to happen. Single walled reactor vessel means that there is only 18 inches of concrete between an active nuclear core and the outside world. When this archaic (nearly 40 year old) reactor was being run by a collapsing soviet government with a skeleton staff of poorly trained individuals, they decided to run an unscheduled "safety test" and ran the reactor core dry (no coolant). Result, instant meltdown and steam explosion. Secondary result, steam explosion rips the single containment vessel apart and the core vents directly to the atmosphere.
Three Mile Island - The ractor is designed from day one with safety in mind. It is dual-walled, meaning that even if the intenal pressure vessel ruptures, there is a second vessel to contain any debris or vented steam or radiation. Both pressure vessels are over 36" of reinforced concrete. The Accident: Due to a series of blunders, a broken control rod, design issues, and miscalculations, it becomes impossible to reinsert the control rods back into the core. Result: runaway-meltdown of the core. However, the reactor has several features that the Russian reactor does not. The melting Uranium core falls into a bed of Cadmium spheres, instantly spreading out the molten uranium and simultaneously moderating the reaction. Secondary Result: Despite steam explosion, the internal pressure vessel holds, venting less than 2000 cubic feet of steam into the secondary vessel, where some of it is accidentally bled to the atmosphere. This steam is equivalent to about 8 gallons of mildly radioactive water. The worst exposure at the plant and it's vacinity is 300 millirems. This is roughly equivalent to the radiation exposure you'd get from flying to L.A. and back from New York City.
Net result: Neither pressure vessel ruptures, and the core meltdown (vilified forever in the movie "The China Syndrome") is contained because of the physical design of the plant. There is no possible way for the reactor to have continued to melt down, since the cadmium safety bed stopped the reaction. The safety systems worked exactly as designed, and in a worst case scenario the reactor released a negligible amount of radiation.
Let me say that again. What happened at Three Mile Island was the absolutely worst possible failure of the system. Yet no one died, no one was hurt and almost no radiation was released. Compare that to a windmill losing one of those 100 foot blades, or a turbine engine disintegrating itself.
The engineers who designed the control rod system that failed because a single control rod couldn't insert correctly (and prevented all the rest from inserting) were dutifully punished and the design was fixed. However, the engineers who knew that the rods might not be foolproof had come up with contingency plans, thus saving the day. They knew all about those ingenious fools out there.
As for saying renewables are cheaper and safer, I need only point at the fact that every single windfarm in America that I know of has been built with huge government subsidies. Geothermal energy frightens me to death (Gee, we're drilling steam holes in an active volcanic area. What happens if we puncture a lava tube under pressure?) Hydroelectric is great, but there aren't exactly a lot of natural waterways where we need the power (California is a freaking desert people.)
Wind power is unproven at large scales, yes there's a few 45MW wind farms out in California and Nevada. When I was working at ISO in California (that's the Independent Service Operators, or the guys who run the power grid for all of the Western U.S. for those who don't know) all I heard was that they hated the wind farms because A) they could go on and off-line at any time, and B) they could never predict in advance what kind of power they'd be providing. So, they ended up basically having to ignore the wind farms when trying to determine how much
Hate to burst your bubble, but 40ppm is 40/1,000,000 or 0.000040, or 0.004%, not 0.04% as you state above. All of your further figures are off by an order of magnitude. You also ignore the fact that the antarctic and arctic have shown an increase in snowfall that makes up (largely) for the ice sheets that have detached and melted in the oceans.
It was my belief that one of the requirements on slashdot was the capability of using a search engine. Since that seems to be beyond you, here is a link to the text of the bill:
McCain Feingold specifically struck down an attempt to restrict 527 groups, making them the only avenue for political speech in America. These 527 groups are also allowed to create "get-out-the -vote" or "voter motivation groups" These groups are the ones currently registering thousands upon thousands of voters. This activity was specifically brought under consideration by the courts, but they decided that at this "late date" in the elections, any decision about the legality of 527 activities should be deferred for 90 days (i.e. past the election).
The part of McCain Feingold that allows these groups to register voters without providing ID information back to the clerks for the county is one of thse lovely little "in section 23(A) strike "." and replace with ";". One of these innocuous lines changed the entire meaning of a clause in the law and made the people out collecting registrations also able to verify ID.
Which clause was it ? I have no idea, IANAL, nor do I have hours to parse this legalese. But, again, two minutes on google or dogpile should answer your question.
Wow, you must be one of those peace-loving, compassionate democrats I hear so much about, like the one who let the air out of my truck tires after they keyed my Bush bumper sticker.
Here's your citations:
Number of registered voters in Franklin County, OH as of October 6th: 820,000 MSNBC
Census Data for Franklin Co. Ohio.
2003 estimated population: 1,088,944
3 year growth rate = 1.9%
Additional year of growth =.64%
Population in 2004: 1,095,913
Percentage of county under the age of 5: 7.2%
Percentage of county under the age of 18: 25.1%
Total population uneligible to vote: 32.3%
Population eligible to vote: 741,933
According to the census an additional 6% of those in the 742,000 are foreign born and likely not citizens (it's impossible to determine the actual number that are or are not citizens from the census data) but we have to assume that the number would therefore be even lower.
That's a net of nearly 80,000 "phantom" voters. Are you actually trying to claim that somehow a bunch of people running a "get out the vote" campaign registered every eligible voter in the county, and then found another 80,000 voters that were somehow missed? You're telling me the census is off by almost 15%? The largest estimate I've ever heard is in the 2-3% range.
Blame a little thing called the "McCaine/Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act" for these lovely little "get out the vote groups" that were specifically created and deputized by McCaine/Feingold.
These groups are allowed to distribute, collect *and validate* new voters without ever presenting anything other than the completed form to election officials. They basically answer to no one, and are even allowed to pay money for each registration collected.
There is now a county in Ohio where several thousand more voters are registered than the population of the county.
Thanks to John McCaine, Russ Feingold, and the rest of our congressmen for "fixing the system".
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, what an awful example. If the tobacco industry meant to hide it's health effects from the American public, it did an awful job of it. As an example, the term Cancer Stick in reference to cigarettes was coined in 1898. The term Coffin Nails was coined some thirty years earlier.
Despite what some juries in Mississippi decided, no one in the U.S. has ever thought smoking was a healthy habbit.
You site a website that may be funded by someone with financial gain if global warming is found to be a fairy tale. On the other hand, you hold up research scientists whose entire living, wages, salaries, and grants are based on getting headlines with new Global Warming predicitions. Remember that the same data they are using to show global warming today was used to show the start of a new ice age in 1970. The hottest year of the century was 1938, and the bulk of warming in the 20th century occurred prior to 1950, while the bulk of the increase in CO2 occurred after 1950.
You are quick to point out the ulterior motives of the anti-global warming crowd, but gloss over the motives of the global warming crowd. Twenty years ago the only place a climate scientist could get a job was with a sock-puppet and a weather map on a morning news program. Now they're the "rock stars" of the science world. But I'm sure they have no ulterior motives. Notice that most of their predictions can't be proven or disproven until after they're dead.
I think this is an exaggeration: the costs were considered--in fact, the majority of the debate around Kyoto is centered on that very issue.
.1 degree C over two decades?
And the decision that was reached was, "Let the U.S. pay for it." One of the main reasons that the U.S. backed out of Kyoto was that the most conservative estimates put the cost of compliance at 2 TRILLION (and that's a U.S. Trillion, 10^12) DOLLARS. That represents the entire U.S. federal budget. So, to comply with Kyoto, we could have cut all government services for a year, or doubled the national debt, or collapsed our economy in the middle of a recession.
So, the original point is still valid. How many jobs, industries, services, and lives are you willing to sacrifice to cut
The question no one ever asks is: Warmer than what?
And I'll put 100% trust in NASA, who receives nearly $1 Billion dollars a year in funding for further Global Warming research. Surely their climate model is totally accurate and doesn't ignore the 25 years of data from their own satellites and weather baloons showing that the ground station measurements that show warming trends are abberent.
Oops, dripped a little sarcasm there...
Oops, bad math on my part, it's 3400x1900 or thereabouts.
PIxels are almost always counted as a triplet of red green and blue. The individual colors are never broken apart for resolution statistics. That would mean a 7120x4000 display resolution, which is not outside the possibility for OLED, since they are made with a process similar to lithography which can cram half a billion transistors into half an inch.
To put it another way, "Where can I get one of these!"
Uhm, it has pure white (Red+Green+BLUE) on the screen, and the white looks white, so it's not like the blue is failing. As a prototype, maybe they had issues with getting the blue into the bottom corners of the screen, and that's why they chose the particular image that they did, but I don't think you can say there is "no discernable blue" in the image. It's just hidden in the white.
But, OLEDs will eventually simply be printed on thin films (they require no solid backing or precise positioning like LCD panels do) and you will just buy a new "film" to drop in. The old one, with about the same thickness and texture as cellophane will be returned to the store where it can be dropped into a bucket of solvent and turned back into base polymers for re-use. Unlike LCDs (which use incredibly poisonous liquid crystal material) everything in an OLED film will be organic (other than the transparent power traces, which will be gallium arsenides or something similar) that can be broken down.
The OLED will make the screen replacable and the power supply and supporting hardware can be re-used. This could very well cut down on pollution.
You missed the painfully obvious Point #8.
Our ISO 9001 certification REQUIRES us to do it.
Speaking as someone who just wrote 700+ pages of doc to update 134 lines of code...
I love ISO 9001, I love ISO 9001...
Conservatives don't want to lower taxes, by the way - they just want to take more of the money from the people who hardly have any money, and spend it on invading third world countries instead of providing for americans.
Boy, I hate to point this out, but you should really check the facts first. The fact is that the Bush tax cut skewed more taxes to the wealthy and took more low income earners off the tax rolls. Currently the top 50% of wage earners pay over 96% of the taxes in America. The real numbers.
Also, during W's first term, social spending has increased in almost every area, including a huge new prescription drug benefit. So, your premise about conservatives and spending is wrong.
As a pretty staunch conservative myself, I can concisely say that I am not against video games with violence, crime, murder and mayhem in them. I am against minors being exposed to these games which are clearly not tailored for their experience level or moral maturity. For a parent to hand this game over to a child is to provide tacit approval of the actions that the game contains.
Children don't have rights for a reason, namely that they aren't mature enough to accept the responsibilites that go with them. In this country I have the right to own a gun, with that comes the responsibility of A) knowing *how* to use it, B) knowing *when* to use it, C) knowing *why* to use it, and D) knowing that there are consequences, many severe, for that gun's use. As an adult, I can see beyond the immediate gratification to the consequences. Children do not have this ability.
I have two children, I know that the consequences of their actions don't go through their mind until they start hitting them between the eyeballs.
Yes, we sometimes choose to prosecute children as adults, but usually only in very specific cases, such as when they are very near the age of majority (17+ years of age) or when they demonstrate to a psychiatrist that they have a clear understanding that their action was wrong and would have consequences, but they took the action anyway.
Personally I don't like the idea that something just happens when you turn 18 that makes you an adult. I know a bunch of 12 year olds who are more mature than some of the 20-somethings that I work with. Why do we give rights to the 20 year olds instead of the 12 year olds? The answer is tradition, but it's not the best answer. How many 25 year olds do you know who get stone drunk every weekend? Is that showing a level of responsibility?
Besides, the prosecution of minors as adults is relatively rare in this country, probably less than 1 in a 100 cases. And it's usually only used in the case of major felonies. Even then, children convicted as adults are often sentenced as juveniles, which means a maximum imprisonment age of 25. Now that's a privilege without a responsibility. It cuts both ways.
Too late...
In Wisconsin (Milwaukee at least) you have to be over 21 to purchase spray-paint.
Since I was the author of the RPG game they tried to blame it on, here's my 2 cents.
The game is not the problem. The kids are about half the problem. The other half is the parents. These parents care more about watching the latest episode of E.R. then they care about keeping an eye on their kids. So when the kids nag them for a video game, they buy it and never look at it or the kids again.
There is not a single video game that my (10 year old) son has that I have not played and know the exact content of. Yes, my 10 year old has a few "T" rated games. No, he does not have an M rated game, nor will I ever buy him one, not even when he's 18. If he wants it, he'll have to earn the money for it.
What should happen is very simple. The courts should sentence these kids to clean every inch of the graffitti by hand. No power tools, no power-washers or sand-blasters. By hand with brushes and elbow grease.
At the same time, the parents should be taken into a counseling session and taught that the word "NO" exists. Then they should be taught that having kids is about *responsibility*. Then they should be fined about $500 each, and have all video game consoles removed from their home for six months.
All I can say is that if my son did this, he'd be limping into court, and he sure as hell wouldn't be sitting down. And I'd be burning his video games. He'd come home to a room devoid of toys with nothing but books and a desk.
This just reminds me of the week prior to Christmas when I watched a mother at a video-game store buy her 8 year old son a copy of Halo 2 because he said, "I waaaaant this!" Never looked at the box, never asked the two guys behind the counter, never even considered it. The two guys behind the counter tried to point out that it was M rated and she wouldn't listen. I finally stepped up and said, "Maam, would you let your child watch a slasher horror film?"
She said, "Of course not!"
I said, "Then why are you buying him a game with graphic violence and mutilation?"
"Oh my goodness, really? But there's no warning label."
That's the level of people who raised these kids.
Just to nit-pick, the U.S. was taken off the gold standard by FDR in 1933 as part of his plan to get the U.S. out of the Great Depression.
All right, I can shoot your point down in one simple example. Right now, I am writing a book on my computer. Since I have no unique intellectual property, please send me your copy of my book. Since I can't know anything unique to me (say, drawing on my experiences or events in my life) according to you, surely you can write the same book.
No?
Then obviously I do posess some unique intellectual property.
And, for the record, the Constitution does not "enumerate" our rights, it bans the Congress from abridging the rights we already posess. Amendment 10 specifically states that all rights not enumerated are owned by the people and it is up to the states to adjudicate them. Thus, the Congress cannot create a right, it can only abridge those that already exist.
That's rather short-sighted as a view. Just because a publisher stops publishing something, it does not (and should not) instantly become public domain.
For example, Disney has just pulled Beauty and the Beast from it's production schedule after printing it on DVD for the first time. By your definition, they are no longer selling it to the public, and therefore it should become public domain. Wrong.
Peter Jackson has not yet released the extended version of Return of the King, does that mean it should be public domain? It's not for sale at this time. Does that make it "Abandoned"?
Copyright is a codification of a natural right, that right being the right of property in the case of an intellectual pursuit. Consider that without writing, a teacher could reach perhaps a few dozen people at once with their knowledge (be it a story, a method of accounting, or quantum physics). By writing their knowledge in the form of a book, it vastly improves society because it can now be distributed to the public.
But that also "cheapens" the knowledge. Consider the large sums of money you pay for the "privilige" of sitting in a classroom with a professor at college. The professor is compensated for his time and teaching and knowledge by your tuition money.
This is often a high rate because it requires the "teacher's" physical presence. When he codifies his knowledge in a written form (or video, audio, or 3-d hologram) he spends his time up front in order to not have to spend it later. The transfer no longer requires his physical presence.
The knowledge is the same in either case. He owns it, and, given the chance, could deliver it to you in person. By putting it in a book, he "discounts" the cost of the knowledge by making you work your way through it yourself. Very few books approach the cost of one semester of a college course.
Copyright is a protection of that knowledge. You wouldn't argue that the professor needs to be paid in college (well, I had a few professors that...never mind) but here you argue that because a publisher stops publishing new copies of the book, or software, or what have you, that the knowledge has suddenly lost all intrinsic value and should be handed out for free.
You are still capable of purchasing a used book, or a valid copy without infringing on the author's rights to their knowledge.
The part you should be complaining about is the length of time they are protected. I would argue that "Life of the Author" should be the longest copyright available, with the caveat that this term be about 20-25 years as a minimum. Software copyright should be 25 years maximum, and book copyright should be renewable every 10 years after the death of the author.
I would agree with the "non-production" argument only after a sufficient period of time has passed. For example, books would pass out of copyright if they were not produced for 20 years. Same with movies.
In the meantime, Libraries are a wonderful thing. They have lots of books and music and videos. Perhaps what we really need is a software *library* concept where old programs go to live and be rented (or borrowed.)
Simply discounting copyright is not the answer. Saying that I don't have a right to make a profit off of my knowledge or work borders on insanity, or communism, your choice.
You are correct, I insinuated that you were in favor of Saddam. Mostly because I have spent weeks with the people who continuously refer to Bush (a born-again christian, whose largest infraction of the law was a DUI arrest in college) as the second coming of Hitler, while wondering why we ever attacked poor Saddam (a brutal dictator known as "The Butcher of Bagdhad" for the slaughter of over 400,000 of his own citizens, and the attempted genocide of the Kurds using WMDs) who they now say was just a poor, misunderstood guy.
Those same people continuously tell me that Bush somehow stole enough votes to not only win the election but win in a huge fashion.
I also don't understand people who continue to say "Bush Lied" about the WMDs. We now know that he (and John Kerry, who sat on the security committee and got the same briefings as President Bush) took the best information that was out there, namely the information from the CIA (and 50 other nation's intelligence, *and the reports of Hans Blix from UNSCOM*) and determined that every single source said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Did Bush ever say that a war in Iraq was going to be easy? No, from the very first time he brought it up, he said it would be long and hard.
If you oppose the war on some fundamental "there should never be war" stance, that's fine. But all of the evidence said that Saddam sponsored terrorism (Remember his $25,000 bonus paid to Palestinian suicide bombers?), and that he had a program to develop and, most likely, distribute WMDs to those terrorists. Given that evidence, what choice did we have? Waiting for more inspections, even as Hans Blix called the inspection process "a joke of misdirection and lies?"
Remember that John Kerry was in favor of the war until he saw that Howard Dean was leading the polls with an anti-war stance. His line, "Anyone who is against the war in Iraq, has no business becoming the President of the United States." He was right.
I'm also somewhat shocked by your view that Bush has "shoved Christian interests down [your] throat". Me, I'm an Agnostic at the best of times, and I haven't had any crosses burned into my forehead or been rounded up and put through the Inquisition. I don't think anyone else has either. I'm always surprised to see people talking about Concentration Camps and Jack-booted thugs on left-leaning web sites, because every conservative I've ever met would be absolutely appalled at the concept, much less the practice of such an abhorrant idea.
As for stuffing Big Business down your throat, I've often wondered where people like you think jobs come from? Do you really think we should disband all these corporations and have nothing but Mom & Pop shops across the country? What has he done that is so "Big Business"? His tax cuts? Well, guess what, when you give a tax cut, the people who pay the most taxes, get the largest dollar-wise percentage of the cut. The fact is that the highest 50% now pay proportionally more taxes than before his tax cut.
So, what is the issue? Cutting the dividend tax? That affects everyone who owns stock in this country, and given the proliferation of 401Ks, that represents something like 70% of he population now. Cutting the Death Tax (which is blatantly immoral as a double tax anyway [see also, Constitution, The])? I got to watch 60% of the farmers in the town I grew up with have to sell their farms when the death tax gobbled up 55% of their "vast wealth" in excess of $1,000,000. 99.9% of which is tied up in real estate and equipment. Wisconsin used to be America's Dairyland, and is now filled with farms that aren't being run any more, with fields left to go to seed.
Do I think the analysis at Berkeley was more in depth than my linear graph, hell yes. Do I think that makes it any more valid? Hell no. All, and I find it hard to believe that, with 25 elections in the 20th century alone, I can use the word "all" to refer to two, of their data points are from elections where democrats had a majority of
You should read what I wrote. The counties that had electronic machines were those most likely to have the largest population of "Dixiecrats" or "Reagan D emocrats" because they were the most Democratic counties last election. Thus they were likely to have the largest swing. My whole point is that we wouldn't know since the people doing the analysis did not include in their data set the elections where republicans won the state (and thus the Dixiecrats voted republican.)
I do not disagree that paperless voting is not a good idea. I disagree that rampant fraud of the type you postulate was taking place. There was no reason for it to do so. Kerry's 3000+ lawyer team reviewed the voting and told him, "nope, no fraud." The idea that you can extrapolate the future action of the electorate from two data points is absurd. They chose data where the democrats won the election and then said, "Bush shouldn't have won."
I once had a graph in a chemistry class that I knew was linear. I plotted the graph after finding two data points. The teacher wrote a great big "F" on the top of the paper. That's what should go on the top of this one. It proves absolutely nothing.
Do we need a paper trail in elections? Yes. Do I think the Diebold machines use a good design or even good software practices? Absolutely not. Do I really think that the voting machines in counties run by Democrats, with Democrat County Clerks, and Democrat controlled polling places decided to rig their machines with an extra 130,000 votes for Bush? Boy, that's a tough one...
Like I said, give it up. You're probably in with the crowd who grasped at the single straw (counting illegal votes and over-votes for Gore) where Gore won the Florida election in 2000.
Remember, Bush got 52% of the vote, and you scream "Fraud". But Saddam Hussein got 99.8% of the vote, and you call Bush a fascist and thought he should have left Saddam in power.
If Bush is Hitler for stealing 0.5% of the vote, then Saddam would have to have been Satan himself. I wonder which one you side with?
Get that through your collective heads.
The simpler case to have made would be to simply point out that the two previous data points used by the analysis were 2000 and 1996. In 1996, Dole (the republican) lost the popular vote. In 2000, Bush, (the republican) lost the popular vote, and squeaked out a .01% margin in Florida. In 2004, Bush won a 5% margin on the popular vote, and won Florida by a large margin.
The students at Berkeley use the two data points in 1996 and 2000, where the republicans lost the popular vote, as a comparison to a voting pattern where the republicans *won* the popular vote. That is the error in the analysis. Had they gone back to 1980, 1984, or 1988 when republicans won the popular vote (i.e. a comparable data source) they would have, IMHO, seen that the voting patterns fell within the statistical margins.
Of course more votes would come from democratic counties, because to win, democrats would have to vote republican, the fact that these counties are the ones with electronic voting is no surprise as these counties would also have been the ones screaming the loudest after 2000 for voting reform and electronic voting.
As someone else has already pointed out, the same analysis was run on other states, without finding any anomolies.
Kerry lost, get over it. He has.
Apart from the fact that I no longer live in Wisconsin, and that what you are talking about is Solar *ASSISTED* homes (i.e. homes that get some partial energy from solar), I'd really prefer not to schedule over a year out for some specialty homes clustered in a certain area.
What I stated in my first message is that Wisconsin receives between 60-90 clear, sunny, days a year. That is simply insufficient to build a completely solar DEPENDENT home. In other words, a home that has no electrical wires running to it (and maybe no gas line either, because I'm sure you'll claim you can achieve 100% solar heating as well.) If you are going to claim that such a home exists in the Wisconsin climate and is inhabitable 365 days a year, then you are either a liar, or you live in a fur parka all winter long.
The farcical idea that solar panels work better when snowing borders on the insane. Snow loads in Wisconsin far exceed snow loads in the Rocky Mountain states (Colorado is my current residence) because snow melts in the Rocky Mountain States. Where I live, we have 280-310 clear sunny days per year, and we don't even try to push a truly solar dependent home here. The very fact that Solar provides at best a 65% duty cycle, and gives out exactly when use peaks (i.e. the sun goes down just about the same time you want to turn on the lights) points at the problem with solar power.
Yes, I've seen the Greenpeace brochure that says if we only put in enough solar panels to cover New Mexico we could rid ourselves of all other power sources. Great idea, who's going to build the batteries the size of Arizona? And who's going to pay the 20 TRILLION (with a T) dollars to build it all?
The DOE studies compare average daylight. So what? What do you do when it's nearly pitch black in the middle of the day (something I've experienced in Wisconsin blizzards.) Where's the power going to come from. Again, right when you need it the most (peak heating time) the power goes lacking.
And gee, your data comes from the study done by the National Center for Photovoltaics. For some reason I think they'd have a vested interest in showing that solar is a viable energy source. Add to that, that your original posting didn't mention that all of your units were in kWh/m^2 per DAY. So, at about $1000 a square meter, I can generate an average of 4.4kWh per day in Eau Claire, WI. That saves me about 15 cents a day. That's nearly $55 a year, and since PV panels last at most 20 years, you could just about pay for one before you needed to replace it. Of course, the buy in to run a normal house is huge. Let's see, I'd guess that my house uses about 75 kWh every day, so even in Colorado (average of about 8.9 with a 2 axis tracker), I'd need 10 square meters of panels. Ignoring the questionable asthetics of a set of panels half the size of my roof footprint, and the fact that my neighbors would sue me for blocking the view of Pike's Peak, I could expect to spend in the neighborhood of 15-20,000 to put in that kind of system.
All this ignores the fact that I need a massive set of batteries to store power during the day so I can use it at night. A good LiOn system would run in the $100,000 range, but you'd need it because A) Lead-acid would violate EPA regulations, and B) no other battery supports the charge-discharge cycle.
So, now I'm in for about $120,000 all to save $85 a month. So, in about 150 years, I can make up the cost. Of course, by then I'll have had to replace the panels a half-dozen times or so.
Now, you're going to reply that going off the grid isn't the point, but that is the point of this whole thread. What do we do to replace coal plants belching filth into the sky? Distrbuted solar isn't the answer. Neither is centralized solar, unless you plan on paying a 99% energy tax for the next 20 years to subsidize it.
Not to mention that the production of solar panels produces far worse byproducts than coal does. Wonderful heavy metal toxics and arsenic compounds t
Uh-huh, and what's the efficiency with three feet of snow on it? Or when all the conductors start to rust because of the vicious humidity/heating/cooling/dew cycle you get in Wisconsin? Sorry, I lived there and there's no way that you get 4-5 kWh/m^2 on some of those winter days, and even then, at peak efficiencies in the 20% range, you couldn't lay down enough solar panels to run a house if you used every inch of roof space. Add to that the lousy southern exposure angles and short days in winter, and I think you're living in a pipe dream.
I knew a family who installed $20,000 of solar panels when they built their new house and had to install another $20,000 sun-tracking system for them and finally tore it all out and recouped $5000 by shipping it to someone in Arizona. They determined that in the best year (of the five they had it) they made back about $200 on the cost of operating the system. They ditched it when the snow-load cracked one panel and they were looking at a 2-3000 dollar replacement cost.
You need to take in all the factors, not just the sunny vs. cloudy argument. You're argument is like the first climate models where they simulated day and night by just having a 50% light on all the time.
Boy, when I lived in Wisconsin we had 65 sunny days a year. You're going to need some damned efficient solar cells to make up for the other 300.
Educate yourself to the real state of affairs when it comes to nuclear accidents.
Chernobyl - Designed from the ground up as a disaster waiting to happen. Single walled reactor vessel means that there is only 18 inches of concrete between an active nuclear core and the outside world. When this archaic (nearly 40 year old) reactor was being run by a collapsing soviet government with a skeleton staff of poorly trained individuals, they decided to run an unscheduled "safety test" and ran the reactor core dry (no coolant). Result, instant meltdown and steam explosion. Secondary result, steam explosion rips the single containment vessel apart and the core vents directly to the atmosphere.
Three Mile Island - The ractor is designed from day one with safety in mind. It is dual-walled, meaning that even if the intenal pressure vessel ruptures, there is a second vessel to contain any debris or vented steam or radiation. Both pressure vessels are over 36" of reinforced concrete. The Accident: Due to a series of blunders, a broken control rod, design issues, and miscalculations, it becomes impossible to reinsert the control rods back into the core. Result: runaway-meltdown of the core. However, the reactor has several features that the Russian reactor does not. The melting Uranium core falls into a bed of Cadmium spheres, instantly spreading out the molten uranium and simultaneously moderating the reaction. Secondary Result: Despite steam explosion, the internal pressure vessel holds, venting less than 2000 cubic feet of steam into the secondary vessel, where some of it is accidentally bled to the atmosphere. This steam is equivalent to about 8 gallons of mildly radioactive water. The worst exposure at the plant and it's vacinity is 300 millirems. This is roughly equivalent to the radiation exposure you'd get from flying to L.A. and back from New York City.
Net result: Neither pressure vessel ruptures, and the core meltdown (vilified forever in the movie "The China Syndrome") is contained because of the physical design of the plant. There is no possible way for the reactor to have continued to melt down, since the cadmium safety bed stopped the reaction. The safety systems worked exactly as designed, and in a worst case scenario the reactor released a negligible amount of radiation.
Let me say that again. What happened at Three Mile Island was the absolutely worst possible failure of the system. Yet no one died, no one was hurt and almost no radiation was released. Compare that to a windmill losing one of those 100 foot blades, or a turbine engine disintegrating itself.
The engineers who designed the control rod system that failed because a single control rod couldn't insert correctly (and prevented all the rest from inserting) were dutifully punished and the design was fixed. However, the engineers who knew that the rods might not be foolproof had come up with contingency plans, thus saving the day. They knew all about those ingenious fools out there.
As for saying renewables are cheaper and safer, I need only point at the fact that every single windfarm in America that I know of has been built with huge government subsidies. Geothermal energy frightens me to death (Gee, we're drilling steam holes in an active volcanic area. What happens if we puncture a lava tube under pressure?) Hydroelectric is great, but there aren't exactly a lot of natural waterways where we need the power (California is a freaking desert people.)
Wind power is unproven at large scales, yes there's a few 45MW wind farms out in California and Nevada. When I was working at ISO in California (that's the Independent Service Operators, or the guys who run the power grid for all of the Western U.S. for those who don't know) all I heard was that they hated the wind farms because A) they could go on and off-line at any time, and B) they could never predict in advance what kind of power they'd be providing. So, they ended up basically having to ignore the wind farms when trying to determine how much
Hate to burst your bubble, but 40ppm is 40/1,000,000 or 0.000040, or 0.004%, not 0.04% as you state above. All of your further figures are off by an order of magnitude. You also ignore the fact that the antarctic and arctic have shown an increase in snowfall that makes up (largely) for the ice sheets that have detached and melted in the oceans.
It was my belief that one of the requirements on slashdot was the capability of using a search engine. Since that seems to be beyond you, here is a link to the text of the bill:
McCain-Feingold
McCain Feingold specifically struck down an attempt to restrict 527 groups, making them the only avenue for political speech in America. These 527 groups are also allowed to create "get-out-the -vote" or "voter motivation groups" These groups are the ones currently registering thousands upon thousands of voters. This activity was specifically brought under consideration by the courts, but they decided that at this "late date" in the elections, any decision about the legality of 527 activities should be deferred for 90 days (i.e. past the election).
The part of McCain Feingold that allows these groups to register voters without providing ID information back to the clerks for the county is one of thse lovely little "in section 23(A) strike "." and replace with ";". One of these innocuous lines changed the entire meaning of a clause in the law and made the people out collecting registrations also able to verify ID.
Which clause was it ? I have no idea, IANAL, nor do I have hours to parse this legalese. But, again, two minutes on google or dogpile should answer your question.
You do know those are search engines, right?
Wow, you must be one of those peace-loving, compassionate democrats I hear so much about, like the one who let the air out of my truck tires after they keyed my Bush bumper sticker.
.64%
Here's your citations:
Number of registered voters in Franklin County, OH as of October 6th: 820,000 MSNBC
Census Data for Franklin Co. Ohio.
2003 estimated population: 1,088,944
3 year growth rate = 1.9%
Additional year of growth =
Population in 2004: 1,095,913
Percentage of county under the age of 5: 7.2%
Percentage of county under the age of 18: 25.1%
Total population uneligible to vote: 32.3%
Population eligible to vote: 741,933
According to the census an additional 6% of those in the 742,000 are foreign born and likely not citizens (it's impossible to determine the actual number that are or are not citizens from the census data) but we have to assume that the number would therefore be even lower.
That's a net of nearly 80,000 "phantom" voters. Are you actually trying to claim that somehow a bunch of people running a "get out the vote" campaign registered every eligible voter in the county, and then found another 80,000 voters that were somehow missed? You're telling me the census is off by almost 15%? The largest estimate I've ever heard is in the 2-3% range.
But hey, keep deluding yourself. It's your life.
Blame a little thing called the "McCaine/Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act" for these lovely little "get out the vote groups" that were specifically created and deputized by McCaine/Feingold.
These groups are allowed to distribute, collect *and validate* new voters without ever presenting anything other than the completed form to election officials. They basically answer to no one, and are even allowed to pay money for each registration collected.
There is now a county in Ohio where several thousand more voters are registered than the population of the county.
Thanks to John McCaine, Russ Feingold, and the rest of our congressmen for "fixing the system".