PLEASE, with the govt quit trying to come up with new and creative ways to waste and spend our tax dollars!??!!? What good is getting rid of old cars for new, if we don't have dependable bridges to drive over? (Remember that one that collapsed a couple years ago?).
I'm also afraid a little over this required scrap clause. It might cause us to lose more of some classic cars that can and SHOULD be restored.
Someone might have what is currently a 'junker' GTO or Camaro...and with this, the car is scrapped, and a piece of history is lost.
If they have to do this law, maybe they can make some provisions that antique and historically valuable cars can be saved if they are to be restored.
FYI the I-35 bridge collapse was due to a design flaw, not lack of maintenance. Furthermore, looking at a list of bridge disasters on wikipedia, out of 28 incidents in the United States only 4 seem to be maintenance related (most of them are due to ship collisions).
Other benefits to 9/80 are that you can take a week vacation on the friday off week if there is a monday holiday (like the upcoming MLK) and only use three days of vacation. And if a holiday is on your friday off, you get a floating holiday which is just an extra vacation day you can use whenever you want.
I dislike the Aero interface BECAUSE it uses the video card's acceleration. What this means for me is that alt-tabbing out of games, something I do frequently, takes 5-10 seconds instead of being instant. Also, for my HTPC, every time I play a Blu-Ray movie which also requires the video card's acceleration, Vista has to disable Aero anyway.
But real time motion blur requires that you generate double the number of frames, and then blend them together. So you still need hardware capable of rendering 60 fps to get 30 fps with motion blur.
"The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical."
This statement is incorrect, a reactor has to be critical to produce power.
Criticality refers to the rate at which the chain reaction of fission is occurring. If the reactor is sub-critical, then more neutrons are absorbed then causing new fissions. In this state, the reactor power exponentially decreases to zero. When the reactor is critical, exactly 1 fission is caused on average for each neutron released, which means the reactor is at a constant power. Super-critical means the reactor is increasing in power. A special case of criticality related to nuclear bombs is called prompt-super-critical. For more info, see the wiki article.
I am not sure of the details of these designs, but I bet they use a fuel type similar to university research reactors. This fuel is a uranium-hydride mixture. The moderation for the neutrons is built into the fuel itself, but it has an extremely strong negative temperature coefficient. This means that any increase in power, and thus temperature, reduces the reactivity, which lowers the power back to the equilibrium level. It is physically impossible for the reactor to overpower.
For a neat demonstration of this effect, see this youtube video. It is the research reactor at Penn State performing a pulse. Basically, a control rod is hydraulically ejected from the core, causing the power to spike to thousands of times the rated power, but only for a microsecond. The power just as quickly goes back down to normal by itself, because of the intrinsic safety of the fuel design.
Newtonian mechanics are not "wrong", they are an approximation that matches the relativistic equations when the gamma is small. The error is far far less then any uncertainty in your measurement.
For example, try finding the length contraction of a 3 meter long car traveling at 60 kph using google calculator: The result just gives you 3 m!:)
This is taken grossly out of context. Adam Smith's point was that the rich can afford bigger houses as a proportion of their income because the percent of their income spent on food is much smaller. Therefore, they pay a higher proportional property tax.
He is in favor of a progressive property tax only insomuch as it comes as a natural consequence of the rich spending more on their houses then the poor since they can afford to. He did not say he is in favor of a government-forced progressive income tax.
It is similar to the arguments in favor of a national sales tax to replace the income tax--It is naturally progressive because rich people buy more stuff, as opposed to forced-progressive income taxes where rich people are taxed in higher proportion based on their income.
Full quote from your link by the way, with my relevent point bolded:
The inequality with which a tax of this kind might fall upon the owners of different ground-rents would arise altogether from the accidental inequality of this division. But the inequality with which it might fall upon the inhabitants of different houses would arise not only from this, but from another cause. The proportion of the expense of house-rent to the whole expense of living is different in the different degrees of fortune. It is perhaps highest in the highest degree, and it diminishes gradually through the inferior degrees, so as in general to be lowest in the lowest degree. The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
We have one candidate that opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, and another that still insists it was a rousing success. This isn't even a contest.
It's convenient that Obama wasn't in a position to vote for or against the war in 2003 so that he could claim he held whichever position turned out to be more popular in hindsight.
For what it's worth, Obama repeatedly vowed to immediately withdraw from Iraq during the primaries when he was competing against Hillary for leftist votes, but once the real campaign began he morphed his view into some sort of "phased withdrawal as conditions permit"; which is essentially the same as McCain and the DoD's position of "stay until the job is done". When Obama was asked about his position change, he basically claimed that he never changed his stance, and that the journalists were too dumb to understand his positions on the issue.
So we have one candidate that says whatever is politically prudent, depending on what audience he is speaking to, and one candidate whom takes a leadership role and holding a consistent position which he believes is correct. You're right, this isn't even a contest.
Then YOU hire him and YOU pay him more. Or, YOU give him a big tip. If the janitor wants a better place to live, he should get 2 jobs, or go to night school or tech school to be able to get a better job. It sounds cruel, but that is life.
Government forcing business to pay him what he needs to live as comfortably as the middle class means he will never strive to improve himself, save retirement money, or encourage his children to stay in school and go to college.
Essentially, you are advocating a government-sponsored permanent slave class to do your dirty work for you.
So I guess these are all just crazy GOP conspiracy theories?
-ACORN, Democrat organization repeatadly found criminally responsible for voter fraud in many states.
-Washington State 2004 Gubernatorial Election, where after the Republican candidate won after 2 recounts, on the third recount the voting committee "found" enough extra votes for the Democrat candidate to win.
Need I even go into the shenanigans of the Florida 2004 election? Gore calling for recounts in only democrat-heavy counties against state law? Not to mention Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell's lobbying to have military absentee votes discounted. Let's not forget Jimmy Carter, whom traveled to Venezuela to support socialist Hugo Chavez's recall election, whom even the EU observers refused to participate.
Democrats (and socialists/communists in general) only care about free speech and voting when you say what they want you to say and vote for their candidates.
Oh, and by the way, blacks in the south after the civil war were able to vote for decades, under Republican-of-the-day leadership. It wasn't until the Democrats-of-the-day took over that blacks were prevented from voting through Jim Crowe laws, etc. And don't forget, it was the Republicans whom passed the 1965 civil rights act, it was Democrats who filibustered against it.
No, GP is right. Your time would pass normal for you, but the time of everything outside the black hole would pass faster and faster, meaning you'd get more and more radiation and faster and faster star movement, until the sky is completely white. But I guess you'd be dead by then.
I think that would only be the case if you stood stationary (using an infinite amount of energy to do so) on the surface of the event horizon. Once you are inside the event horizon, you move inevitably forward towards the singularity in proper time, which means you have a finite amount of time to see events happening outside the event horizon (and this amount of time would be fairly short).
Time is only moving slowly as viewed by an outside observer. An observer would see you take an infinite amount of time to cross the event horizon. But from your point of view, time continues on as normal.
As you cross the event horizon you wouldn't notice anything unusual, you would still see the outside universe behind you and the event horizon would still appear in front of you. In fact, from your own point of view, you would never reach the event horizon, it always appears in front of you at the same distance, until you hit the singularity.
But black holes exist within the universe. If time inside a black hole is stopped relative to the rest of the universe, then shouldn't a black hole take infinitely long to form?
As a corollary, shouldn't you be able to look behind you and watch the end of the universe?
Yes. Suppose you are watching a star collapse into a black hole. First you will see the star get smaller and smaller. At the same time, the light coming from the star will become increasingly more red shifted. As the star reaches its Schwarzchild radius, it will slow down indefinitely and be infinitely red shifted. So it does take infinitely long to form from an outside observer. The Event horizon happens to be the infinitely red-shifted surface of the star. See here for a better explanation and some animated gifs: http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/collapse.html
Passive cooled video cards are notorious for dying due to memory/chip heat failure. That being said, I bought this gigabyte 8600 GT for my HTPC, and it actually doesn't even get very hot to the touch.
Wow, this thing is only $50 after rebate now. And it runs most games just fine at medium settings.
It seems Microsoft got lazy, and instead of writing their own password change code, they just ripped off Lotus Notes. When someone found out about it, they decided to call it a bug in order to cover up the copyright infringement.
That's total crap. If the world were made up entirely of geniuses, they would invent robots to do all the ditch digging for them.
100 years ago, something like 30% of the population were farmers. Now, it's more like 3%. Technology has increased productivity and allowed people to spend their time in other endeavors, like inventing the automated production line so that workers could move from assembly line to being engineers.
It's not until the engineers/scientists invent a computer so smart it can do our thinking for us that we have to worry.:)
Workers are the union. If they are getting abused, it is their own fault.
That is total garbage. It's akin to saying "the people are the government. If the government does something bad, it's the people's fault".
Unions, like the government, are entrenched bureaucracies whose sole purpose is to increase the size of the bureaucracy.
The companies aren't hurting because of the unions. The are hurting because they have incompetent management.
If by incompetent management, you mean "management that allows union thugs to boss them around" then I might agree. It would be more accurate to say "Companies aren't hurting simply by being unionized; they are hurting because they are unionized by the UAW, which is just as much of a greedy, corrupt organization as the companies they claim to fight against."
Maybe the cows know global warming is an imminent danger, and are trying to avert the situation by providing a net thrust on the Earth to push us into a higher orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
PLEASE, with the govt quit trying to come up with new and creative ways to waste and spend our tax dollars!??!!? What good is getting rid of old cars for new, if we don't have dependable bridges to drive over? (Remember that one that collapsed a couple years ago?).
I'm also afraid a little over this required scrap clause. It might cause us to lose more of some classic cars that can and SHOULD be restored.
Someone might have what is currently a 'junker' GTO or Camaro...and with this, the car is scrapped, and a piece of history is lost.
If they have to do this law, maybe they can make some provisions that antique and historically valuable cars can be saved if they are to be restored.
FYI the I-35 bridge collapse was due to a design flaw, not lack of maintenance. Furthermore, looking at a list of bridge disasters on wikipedia, out of 28 incidents in the United States only 4 seem to be maintenance related (most of them are due to ship collisions).
My record speed with comcast on my motorolla surfboard was ~40 mbps. I usually get 15-20 mbps at peak times and ~30 mbps at off times.
I think I get such good speeds because I live in a poor urban area--close to the comcast NOC but not to many neighbors have cable modems.
See that's what I tried to tell my co-workers! I'm NOT paranoid, it's just that everyone thinks I am!
Did it just get draftier in here?
Hey...where did my underpants go?
Other benefits to 9/80 are that you can take a week vacation on the friday off week if there is a monday holiday (like the upcoming MLK) and only use three days of vacation. And if a holiday is on your friday off, you get a floating holiday which is just an extra vacation day you can use whenever you want.
I dislike the Aero interface BECAUSE it uses the video card's acceleration. What this means for me is that alt-tabbing out of games, something I do frequently, takes 5-10 seconds instead of being instant. Also, for my HTPC, every time I play a Blu-Ray movie which also requires the video card's acceleration, Vista has to disable Aero anyway.
But real time motion blur requires that you generate double the number of frames, and then blend them together. So you still need hardware capable of rendering 60 fps to get 30 fps with motion blur.
"The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical."
This statement is incorrect, a reactor has to be critical to produce power.
Criticality refers to the rate at which the chain reaction of fission is occurring. If the reactor is sub-critical, then more neutrons are absorbed then causing new fissions. In this state, the reactor power exponentially decreases to zero. When the reactor is critical, exactly 1 fission is caused on average for each neutron released, which means the reactor is at a constant power. Super-critical means the reactor is increasing in power. A special case of criticality related to nuclear bombs is called prompt-super-critical. For more info, see the wiki article.
I am not sure of the details of these designs, but I bet they use a fuel type similar to university research reactors. This fuel is a uranium-hydride mixture. The moderation for the neutrons is built into the fuel itself, but it has an extremely strong negative temperature coefficient. This means that any increase in power, and thus temperature, reduces the reactivity, which lowers the power back to the equilibrium level. It is physically impossible for the reactor to overpower.
For a neat demonstration of this effect, see this youtube video. It is the research reactor at Penn State performing a pulse. Basically, a control rod is hydraulically ejected from the core, causing the power to spike to thousands of times the rated power, but only for a microsecond. The power just as quickly goes back down to normal by itself, because of the intrinsic safety of the fuel design.
The purpose of a factory is to produce goods, not to supply jobs.
Corporations are not welfare programs. Their goal is to make a profit.
Newtonian mechanics are not "wrong", they are an approximation that matches the relativistic equations when the gamma is small. The error is far far less then any uncertainty in your measurement.
For example, try finding the length contraction of a 3 meter long car traveling at 60 kph using google calculator: The result just gives you 3 m! :)
I suppose I could part with one of my doomsday devices and still be feared.
This is taken grossly out of context. Adam Smith's point was that the rich can afford bigger houses as a proportion of their income because the percent of their income spent on food is much smaller. Therefore, they pay a higher proportional property tax.
He is in favor of a progressive property tax only insomuch as it comes as a natural consequence of the rich spending more on their houses then the poor since they can afford to. He did not say he is in favor of a government-forced progressive income tax.
It is similar to the arguments in favor of a national sales tax to replace the income tax--It is naturally progressive because rich people buy more stuff, as opposed to forced-progressive income taxes where rich people are taxed in higher proportion based on their income.
Full quote from your link by the way, with my relevent point bolded:
It's convenient that Obama wasn't in a position to vote for or against the war in 2003 so that he could claim he held whichever position turned out to be more popular in hindsight.
For what it's worth, Obama repeatedly vowed to immediately withdraw from Iraq during the primaries when he was competing against Hillary for leftist votes, but once the real campaign began he morphed his view into some sort of "phased withdrawal as conditions permit"; which is essentially the same as McCain and the DoD's position of "stay until the job is done". When Obama was asked about his position change, he basically claimed that he never changed his stance, and that the journalists were too dumb to understand his positions on the issue.
So we have one candidate that says whatever is politically prudent, depending on what audience he is speaking to, and one candidate whom takes a leadership role and holding a consistent position which he believes is correct. You're right, this isn't even a contest.
Then YOU hire him and YOU pay him more. Or, YOU give him a big tip. If the janitor wants a better place to live, he should get 2 jobs, or go to night school or tech school to be able to get a better job. It sounds cruel, but that is life.
Government forcing business to pay him what he needs to live as comfortably as the middle class means he will never strive to improve himself, save retirement money, or encourage his children to stay in school and go to college.
Essentially, you are advocating a government-sponsored permanent slave class to do your dirty work for you.
So I guess these are all just crazy GOP conspiracy theories?
-ACORN, Democrat organization repeatadly found criminally responsible for voter fraud in many states.
-Washington State 2004 Gubernatorial Election, where after the Republican candidate won after 2 recounts, on the third recount the voting committee "found" enough extra votes for the Democrat candidate to win.
The 1960 Presidential Election, infamous for ballot box stuffing and dead people voting.
Need I even go into the shenanigans of the Florida 2004 election? Gore calling for recounts in only democrat-heavy counties against state law? Not to mention Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell's lobbying to have military absentee votes discounted. Let's not forget Jimmy Carter, whom traveled to Venezuela to support socialist Hugo Chavez's recall election, whom even the EU observers refused to participate.
Democrats (and socialists/communists in general) only care about free speech and voting when you say what they want you to say and vote for their candidates.
Oh, and by the way, blacks in the south after the civil war were able to vote for decades, under Republican-of-the-day leadership. It wasn't until the Democrats-of-the-day took over that blacks were prevented from voting through Jim Crowe laws, etc. And don't forget, it was the Republicans whom passed the 1965 civil rights act, it was Democrats who filibustered against it.
No, GP is right. Your time would pass normal for you, but the time of everything outside the black hole would pass faster and faster, meaning you'd get more and more radiation and faster and faster star movement, until the sky is completely white. But I guess you'd be dead by then.
I think that would only be the case if you stood stationary (using an infinite amount of energy to do so) on the surface of the event horizon. Once you are inside the event horizon, you move inevitably forward towards the singularity in proper time, which means you have a finite amount of time to see events happening outside the event horizon (and this amount of time would be fairly short).
Time is only moving slowly as viewed by an outside observer. An observer would see you take an infinite amount of time to cross the event horizon. But from your point of view, time continues on as normal.
As you cross the event horizon you wouldn't notice anything unusual, you would still see the outside universe behind you and the event horizon would still appear in front of you. In fact, from your own point of view, you would never reach the event horizon, it always appears in front of you at the same distance, until you hit the singularity.
But black holes exist within the universe. If time inside a black hole is stopped relative to the rest of the universe, then shouldn't a black hole take infinitely long to form?
As a corollary, shouldn't you be able to look behind you and watch the end of the universe?
Yes. Suppose you are watching a star collapse into a black hole. First you will see the star get smaller and smaller. At the same time, the light coming from the star will become increasingly more red shifted. As the star reaches its Schwarzchild radius, it will slow down indefinitely and be infinitely red shifted. So it does take infinitely long to form from an outside observer. The Event horizon happens to be the infinitely red-shifted surface of the star. See here for a better explanation and some animated gifs: http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/collapse.html
Technically, clouds are a suspension of water droplets, not water vapor. I'm not sure how to turn that into an amusing quip though.
Passive cooled video cards are notorious for dying due to memory/chip heat failure. That being said, I bought this gigabyte 8600 GT for my HTPC, and it actually doesn't even get very hot to the touch.
Wow, this thing is only $50 after rebate now. And it runs most games just fine at medium settings.
It seems Microsoft got lazy, and instead of writing their own password change code, they just ripped off Lotus Notes. When someone found out about it, they decided to call it a bug in order to cover up the copyright infringement.
That's total crap. If the world were made up entirely of geniuses, they would invent robots to do all the ditch digging for them.
100 years ago, something like 30% of the population were farmers. Now, it's more like 3%. Technology has increased productivity and allowed people to spend their time in other endeavors, like inventing the automated production line so that workers could move from assembly line to being engineers.
It's not until the engineers/scientists invent a computer so smart it can do our thinking for us that we have to worry. :)
That is total garbage. It's akin to saying "the people are the government. If the government does something bad, it's the people's fault".
Unions, like the government, are entrenched bureaucracies whose sole purpose is to increase the size of the bureaucracy.
If by incompetent management, you mean "management that allows union thugs to boss them around" then I might agree. It would be more accurate to say "Companies aren't hurting simply by being unionized; they are hurting because they are unionized by the UAW, which is just as much of a greedy, corrupt organization as the companies they claim to fight against."
Would that be an African or European pelican?
Maybe the cows know global warming is an imminent danger, and are trying to avert the situation by providing a net thrust on the Earth to push us into a higher orbit.