Renewal every year doubling every year. First filing cost 1 cent. After 10 years it will cost $10.24 20 years $5242.88 30 years $5,368,709.12 40 years $5,497,558,138.88 By the time we get to the 100 year mark we are at $6,338,253,001,141,150,000,000,000,000.00 There we have provided the "Forever minus a day"
I like the double-each-year method. Let the "valuable" ones be retained by the owners, let the rest of us have everything else in a reasonable time.
It is nice to have an automatic first few years free so that I can do things like write a blog and then compile it into a book after a while without having to worry that someone else will do so with my unregistered work before I make use of it.
Ten year for free, $10 for the 11th year and double each year after that gives similar numbers to the 1-cent start.
no. Stuff takes time to develop and make available. You need to be able to protect yourself before other people have access, so it's tricky. 14 years with a 7 extension cost 10k and doubling ever 5 years.
This means that authors have time to deal with the business aspect. It's long enough where a corporation wont just wait 5 years and take the material, and if someone is making money, they can continue to make money, be eventually the cost to renew will be more then they make.
Double the price for a one year extension every year is what I prefer (each decade goes up by a factor of 1024) with a very low ($10 or even $1) initial price, but your five year system works too.
Fixed, reasonable length, and COMPLETELY unextendable copyright terms are needed for copyright to have any hope whatsoever of still having any relevance in the future.
I like the idea of extendable terms at a price that doubles annually. Anyone who has something that is a big enough money maker can keep extending it, but the vast vast vast majority of stuff would get into the public domain quickly. Double every year and a few decades will quickly price it into the public domain.
I'd rather just a straight up term of 30 years (or whatever number is most reasonable), regardless of whether or not the author is still alive.
First decade for free, $10 registration for the next year, doubling every year after that, in perpetuity. This allows the "owner" to extract any economic value they can see in the item, and very quickly puts the vast majority of works into the public domain. Central registration also makes it easy to find the owner if you actually do want access to the work for licensing or the like, or to find out if the work has been registered. Each ten years the cost go up by a factor of 1024.
Year 11 - $10 (total $10) Year 12 - $20 (total $30) Year 13 - $40 (total $70) Year 14 - $80 (total $150) etc.
Price for year "n" = $10 x 2^(n-10) Total price to pay for every year up to and including year "n" = $10 x ( 2^(n-9) - 1)
Year 20 costs $10240, total cost $20470 Year 30 costs $10,485,760, total costs $20,971,510
The details of the free period length or the first yearly amount can of course be changed, but the doubling rate is what makes this type of system work. Make it five years free and one dollar for the 6th year, and it works great too. Heck, one penny for the first year gets you to the ten bucks level in a decade, so maybe that's the way to go.
Err, did you just try to prove the research wrong by quoting from the numbers that the research proved wrong? Here's a clue: those numbers on wikipedia are wrong. That's what the article is about.
I realise it's tradition not to read the article, but to completely ignore the point of even the summary seems excessive, no?
OK, I'll try to do this as disdainfully as the AC:
Err, did you just try to claim that "the research" on future trends "proved wrong" historical demographics data? Here's a clue: those numbers quoted on the historical population and its growth rate were not questioned by the UN/UW research. That's not what the article is about.
I realize it's a tradition not to understand anyone's comments, but to completely fail to understand that even the summary is talking about projections while my comments were talking about historical demographics seem excessive, no?
The research did not prove that the Wikipedia numbers are wrong. Nobody has questioned the current and historical numbers, all the research quoted in the article was about possible future trends. The Wikipedia numbers quoted were all historical, and contradict the assertion that the population has been increasing at an accelerating rate. The population has been increasing at a decelerating rate since 1963, when the rate of increase was the highest. The current world population growth rate is about 1%, which has a doubling time of a bit less than 77 years, and over the 87 years till 2100 would bring us to (1.01)^87 = 2.377 times the current population (resulting in a population of about 16.6 billion). Thus to reach 11 billion, the average growth rate will need to be LESS than 1%
Thus the UN/UW article is in no way asserting that the population has been increasing at an accelerating rate, and in fact require that the growth rate decrease from its present 1% growth rate in order to match the numbers that they arrive at.
Well, there's the problem with trends. Assuming they go on forever means that, for example, everyone should now have about 52 model-Ts in their garage. That said... the population has been increasing at an accelerating rate and there's no sign that it's going to slow down.
Except that the growth rate has been decreasing for a while now.
Globally, the growth rate of the human population has been declining since peaking in 1962 and 1963 at 2.20% per annum. In 2009, the estimated annual growth rate was 1.1%.[5] The CIA World Factbook gives the world annual birthrate, mortality rate, and growth rate as 1.915%, 0.812%, and 1.092% respectively.[6] The last 100 years have seen a rapid increase in population due to medical advances and massive increase in agricultural productivity[7] made possible by the Green Revolution.[8][9][10]
The actual annual growth in the number of humans fell from its peak of 88.0 million in 1989, to a low of 73.9 million in 2003, after which it rose again to 75.2 million in 2006. Since then, annual growth has declined. In 2009, the human population increased by 74.6 million, which is projected to fall steadily to about 41 million per annum in 2050, at which time the population will have increased to about 9.2 billion.[5] Each region of the globe has seen great reductions in growth rate in recent decades, though growth rates remain above 2% in some countries of the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, and also in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.[11]
How is Alice worse off for telling that she was on the drive, compared to remaining silent?
I agree that it looks like Alice is in deep trouble, but I don't see how her statements are going to be used against her, or that if she had remained silent how she would be better off. If she remains silent and they finally come around and arrest her based on Carol's testimony, and Alice gets a chance to talk to her lawyer about it, is her lawyer going to not tell the police that she was out for the drive?
The British right to silence is interesting in that they tell you that if you don't tell them something (like "I was out for a drive") that you later use at trial for your defense, the jury may be allowed to consider it negatively that you held that information back.
Without the 5th Amendment, the witness would be compelled to admit to committing an unrelated crime, so would self-incriminate himself.
To be fair, that is the type of situation that some people don't particularly like. "Why should we care if the thief self-incriminates?" they would ask.
The reason is that there are many valid reasons that an innocent person might want to keep quiet. Maybe they told their spouse they were at the gym rather than the bar, or maybe they were there due to a sexual fetish they have about alleys. Maybe they were taking a short-cut home from a meeting of AA, the White-Race Party, the Black-Race Party, or the local LGBTA. Nothing illegal, but potentially embarrassing, or politically dangerous. The principle is not to protect those who are guilty, but rather to ensure that NONE of those who are innocent will have to suffer.
"Better that 100 guilty go free than one innocent be jailed" is the type of thing we are looking at here. The "protection" of the guilty is an unfortunate side-effect rather than a feature of the system.
You make the assumption that 5th amendment protects people from self-incriminating against just and constitutional laws, and as such it doesn't make a positive difference. The 5th amendment exists to protect people from self-incriminating against the unjust and unconstitutional laws which the ratifiers knew would probably be written.
Additionally, being subject to investigation in a case where you are innocent is common. Not wanting to reveal that you are sleeping with the chief of police's daughter or that you were at a gay bar or at a protest against police brutality or at any other of a number of legal activities that you do not want to share with the police or the courts or your neighbours, is certainly a possibility.
Helping to solve crimes is probably good for the "average citizen" to try to do. Making it a legal requirement to do so is opening up such a large potential for negative consequences that I don't think it is a good idea.
There are ranges where every integer is represented, other ranges where every other one is missing.
The real smoking gun is that several grades just below a passing grade appear to be promoted up to pass.
If you recognize that your evaluation system only has an accuracy of +/- 3% it does make some sense to bump up those below the passing grade by that much to the level of the passing grade. It also saves a whole lot of resources by not having to field requests for regrades and reevaluations from all of those students who are just barely below the cutoff.
When your tools are imperfect (and they all are), there is no absolutely "fair" way of dividing a large group into two mutually exclusive categories. You might be able to say with high confidence "Those who scored a 60 or above know their stuff" and "Those who scored 40 or below do not know enough", but the ones closer to the cutoff are much harder to judge with confidence.
Politically it is easier to bump up the marginal ones. People well below the cutoff line generally do not ask for special treatment as they know they did very poorly, and those who got bumped up won't complain about it because they benefited and they don't even know that they got special treatment. As always, it sucks to be just shy of the "new" line, but if you don't know that the line is there, it doesn't hurt as much.
That bounty would have to be pretty high to have any chance of succeeding. 7 figures at least, I would think... Stealing cars, especially high end cars with no damage at all, can be extremely profitable.
You don't need to convince the "bad guy hackers" to send in the fix, you just need to encourage any "good guy hacker" to send it in. Yes, the "underworld" might pay more for the info, but most people do not have contacts with them, while a bug bounty program is easily found and you have a reasonable expectation that you will get paid and little risk that you might end up in jail.
A murder that is not related to child porn. For him to decrypt those drives, he would be incriminating himself for the murder.
As said before, that's tough. Same if the police comes to your house with a search warrant looking for stolen goods, you can't say "sorry, can't let you in, there's a dead body in the kitchen". If the police is in a place legally, then they can use anything they can see.
However it is not illegal to truthfully say "I don't have the key" or "I don't know the combination" - or for that matter to not say anything at all. It is not illegal to not be physically able to "help the police" by opening doors for them.
I saw my housemate write out records of their illegal gambling operation, or the jewelry I think they stole from the shop down the street and lock it in a briefcase. The same briefcase I use last month so it is filled with my fingerprints and DNA. I can certainly claim that they used it last, and anything in it is not my stuff. I may or may not know the combination as it might have been changed since I used it last. Should I be compelled to say "I can open it"? That sounds like self-incrimination. I was just walking out the door on my way to the police station to let them know my roommate was up to something fishy, but making that testimony now that I am under suspicion would seem to be pretty dangerous to myself.
If you can come up with reasonable examples of situations where an innocent person would be better off not to testify, you're probably looking at a legitimate use of the 5th amendment.
Your force balance is off- work = force x distance, and at the point of contact with the ground, the wheels are moving at 0 relative velocity. This means any friction between the ground and the wheels does 0 work (aka it is not a factor in your force balance). Instead, the balancing going on is the forward push generated by the propeller and the backwards drag from the air on the vehicle (this drag is 0 when the vehicle is moving the same speed as the wind, and increases as it gains speed from there).
The rolling resistance of the wheels and the transmission resistances all are modeled by forces in the opposite direction to the motion, and also act to extract energy calculated by force x distance traveled. Balls rolling along are slowed by rolling resistance, even though the point of contact has no relative velocity by your analysis.
The wind pushes any part of the vehicle to get it going.
You are correct that it could be a problem to have it self-start depending on the wheel/transmission friction and the air friction against the stationary vehicle.
Since basic groceries are currently non-GST taxed in Canada, we could get a bit more than $5 billion per tax percentage point. From ( http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/03/america-food-getting-cheaper-unless-youre-poor/4923/ ) we see that Canadians as a whole spend about 10% of their family budget on food at home. Since the $5 billion per percentage point does not include these groceries purchases, it only represents about 90% of purchases. If we taxed that food too, we should generate about $5.6 billion per percentage point. To generate $270 billion we would need to charge a rate of 48.2% on total purchases of about $560 billion.
If you make exemptions for "necessities" the rate would need to be higher. How much higher? Well, if we want to exempt the necessities, one way would be to in some way not collect taxes on "basic needs", or give a rebate on the taxes paid for those amounts. We can get a figure for what these "basic needs" might cost ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Canada#Basic_needs_poverty_measure and http://www.fraserinstitute.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=3443 for 2006 data) . Not taxing these "basic needs" would be "better" than just excepting categories like "food, gas, utilities" in that we would be able to collect taxes on food and gas and utilities beyond the "necessary" level - people buying "rice and beans" end up getting them without being taxed while those buy8ing caviar and foie gras get dinged by the tax-man. Yeah this might be hard to administer, but we are trying for the best possible argument for this type of system.
In 2006 this seemed to be about $16,000 per couple or for the whole population of a bit under 32 million, this would to about $256 billion in exempted purchases. Gosh, that's a big fraction of all purchases! Maybe the average family size is bigger than that? Actually, it seems to be about 2.5 for the whole country, b
They offer the plea only to avoid the trial and the cost of the trial. This kind of tractation is usual and the goal is to close the cases quickly and avoid the extra costs of running a trial when appropriate. You cannot conclude anything beyond this.
Generally however, the offered plea is made based on what they think the "perp" will plea to, and based on what they think they could get at trial. If they are offering a slap on the wrist, then they clearly do not think they can prove much beyond that, or that the accused will accept much beyond that.
According to my quick research, yes the top 7% own about 63% of the wealth, but that also means that 93% own 37% of the wealth. These numbers are discouraging, but it dosn't mean that 63% of the wealth should pay almost 90% of the taxes.
It also doe not mean that 63% of the wealth should pay just 63% of the taxes either.
If "Chris" does not earn enough to feed the family, should we be taxing Chris at all? Most would set the tax rate for Chris' family pretty low if not zero. If there are enough families in this situation, even though collectively they might own a significant fraction of the wealth of the nation, on a per-family basis they are barely making by, and while we might be able to squeeze out a few shekels from each of them, it probably is not good public policy to take much.
Since we use our tax system to do more than raise operating costs (we use it for social and economic direction purposes too), and we do not completely understand how tax policy ultimately effects the economy at a fundamental basis, and we don't all agree on what those social and economic principles should be in the first place, I don't have any simple solution (other than giving me absolute power - I promise to be fair....)
There are three countries that are not officially metric: Liberia, Myanmar (formerly Burma), and the USA. Liberia seems to be moving towards full metrification faster than the US, but what would we expect from such a forward thinking nation?
Slashdot Mirror
Renewal every year doubling every year. First filing cost 1 cent. After 10 years it will cost $10.24 20 years $5242.88 30 years $5,368,709.12 40 years $5,497,558,138.88 By the time we get to the 100 year mark we are at $6,338,253,001,141,150,000,000,000,000.00 There we have provided the "Forever minus a day"
I like the double-each-year method. Let the "valuable" ones be retained by the owners, let the rest of us have everything else in a reasonable time.
It is nice to have an automatic first few years free so that I can do things like write a blog and then compile it into a book after a while without having to worry that someone else will do so with my unregistered work before I make use of it.
Ten year for free, $10 for the 11th year and double each year after that gives similar numbers to the 1-cent start.
no. Stuff takes time to develop and make available. You need to be able to protect yourself before other people have access, so it's tricky. 14 years with a 7 extension cost 10k and doubling ever 5 years.
This means that authors have time to deal with the business aspect. It's long enough where a corporation wont just wait 5 years and take the material, and if someone is making money, they can continue to make money, be eventually the cost to renew will be more then they make.
Double the price for a one year extension every year is what I prefer (each decade goes up by a factor of 1024) with a very low ($10 or even $1) initial price, but your five year system works too.
Fixed, reasonable length, and COMPLETELY unextendable copyright terms are needed for copyright to have any hope whatsoever of still having any relevance in the future.
I like the idea of extendable terms at a price that doubles annually. Anyone who has something that is a big enough money maker can keep extending it, but the vast vast vast majority of stuff would get into the public domain quickly. Double every year and a few decades will quickly price it into the public domain.
I'd rather just a straight up term of 30 years (or whatever number is most reasonable), regardless of whether or not the author is still alive.
First decade for free, $10 registration for the next year, doubling every year after that, in perpetuity. This allows the "owner" to extract any economic value they can see in the item, and very quickly puts the vast majority of works into the public domain. Central registration also makes it easy to find the owner if you actually do want access to the work for licensing or the like, or to find out if the work has been registered. Each ten years the cost go up by a factor of 1024.
Year 11 - $10 (total $10)
Year 12 - $20 (total $30)
Year 13 - $40 (total $70)
Year 14 - $80 (total $150)
etc.
Price for year "n" = $10 x 2^(n-10)
Total price to pay for every year up to and including year "n" = $10 x ( 2^(n-9) - 1)
Year 20 costs $10240, total cost $20470
Year 30 costs $10,485,760, total costs $20,971,510
The details of the free period length or the first yearly amount can of course be changed, but the doubling rate is what makes this type of system work. Make it five years free and one dollar for the 6th year, and it works great too. Heck, one penny for the first year gets you to the ten bucks level in a decade, so maybe that's the way to go.
Err, did you just try to prove the research wrong by quoting from the numbers that the research proved wrong? Here's a clue: those numbers on wikipedia are wrong. That's what the article is about.
I realise it's tradition not to read the article, but to completely ignore the point of even the summary seems excessive, no?
OK, I'll try to do this as disdainfully as the AC:
Err, did you just try to claim that "the research" on future trends "proved wrong" historical demographics data? Here's a clue: those numbers quoted on the historical population and its growth rate were not questioned by the UN/UW research. That's not what the article is about.
I realize it's a tradition not to understand anyone's comments, but to completely fail to understand that even the summary is talking about projections while my comments were talking about historical demographics seem excessive, no?
The research did not prove that the Wikipedia numbers are wrong. Nobody has questioned the current and historical numbers, all the research quoted in the article was about possible future trends. The Wikipedia numbers quoted were all historical, and contradict the assertion that the population has been increasing at an accelerating rate. The population has been increasing at a decelerating rate since 1963, when the rate of increase was the highest. The current world population growth rate is about 1%, which has a doubling time of a bit less than 77 years, and over the 87 years till 2100 would bring us to (1.01)^87 = 2.377 times the current population (resulting in a population of about 16.6 billion). Thus to reach 11 billion, the average growth rate will need to be LESS than 1%
Thus the UN/UW article is in no way asserting that the population has been increasing at an accelerating rate, and in fact require that the growth rate decrease from its present 1% growth rate in order to match the numbers that they arrive at.
Well, there's the problem with trends. Assuming they go on forever means that, for example, everyone should now have about 52 model-Ts in their garage. That said... the population has been increasing at an accelerating rate and there's no sign that it's going to slow down.
Except that the growth rate has been decreasing for a while now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_population_growth_rate
Globally, the growth rate of the human population has been declining since peaking in 1962 and 1963 at 2.20% per annum. In 2009, the estimated annual growth rate was 1.1%.[5] The CIA World Factbook gives the world annual birthrate, mortality rate, and growth rate as 1.915%, 0.812%, and 1.092% respectively.[6] The last 100 years have seen a rapid increase in population due to medical advances and massive increase in agricultural productivity[7] made possible by the Green Revolution.[8][9][10]
The actual annual growth in the number of humans fell from its peak of 88.0 million in 1989, to a low of 73.9 million in 2003, after which it rose again to 75.2 million in 2006. Since then, annual growth has declined. In 2009, the human population increased by 74.6 million, which is projected to fall steadily to about 41 million per annum in 2050, at which time the population will have increased to about 9.2 billion.[5] Each region of the globe has seen great reductions in growth rate in recent decades, though growth rates remain above 2% in some countries of the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, and also in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.[11]
Maybe we can get it applied wider: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/force-all-law-enforcement-officers-wear-uniform-embedded-cameras/Mx2KDCtl
How is Alice worse off for telling that she was on the drive, compared to remaining silent?
I agree that it looks like Alice is in deep trouble, but I don't see how her statements are going to be used against her, or that if she had remained silent how she would be better off. If she remains silent and they finally come around and arrest her based on Carol's testimony, and Alice gets a chance to talk to her lawyer about it, is her lawyer going to not tell the police that she was out for the drive?
The British right to silence is interesting in that they tell you that if you don't tell them something (like "I was out for a drive") that you later use at trial for your defense, the jury may be allowed to consider it negatively that you held that information back.
Without the 5th Amendment, the witness would be compelled to admit to committing an unrelated crime, so would self-incriminate himself.
To be fair, that is the type of situation that some people don't particularly like. "Why should we care if the thief self-incriminates?" they would ask.
The reason is that there are many valid reasons that an innocent person might want to keep quiet. Maybe they told their spouse they were at the gym rather than the bar, or maybe they were there due to a sexual fetish they have about alleys. Maybe they were taking a short-cut home from a meeting of AA, the White-Race Party, the Black-Race Party, or the local LGBTA. Nothing illegal, but potentially embarrassing, or politically dangerous. The principle is not to protect those who are guilty, but rather to ensure that NONE of those who are innocent will have to suffer.
"Better that 100 guilty go free than one innocent be jailed" is the type of thing we are looking at here. The "protection" of the guilty is an unfortunate side-effect rather than a feature of the system.
Unfortunately, he's not the only one who has forgotten that.
These days the minute you are accused of anything, you're automatically guilty.
In the court of public opinion, it has always been that way, and likely always will. It is human nature to make that leap.
You make the assumption that 5th amendment protects people from self-incriminating against just and constitutional laws, and as such it doesn't make a positive difference. The 5th amendment exists to protect people from self-incriminating against the unjust and unconstitutional laws which the ratifiers knew would probably be written.
Additionally, being subject to investigation in a case where you are innocent is common. Not wanting to reveal that you are sleeping with the chief of police's daughter or that you were at a gay bar or at a protest against police brutality or at any other of a number of legal activities that you do not want to share with the police or the courts or your neighbours, is certainly a possibility.
Helping to solve crimes is probably good for the "average citizen" to try to do. Making it a legal requirement to do so is opening up such a large potential for negative consequences that I don't think it is a good idea.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/force-all-law-enforcement-officers-wear-uniform-embedded-cameras/Mx2KDCtl
There are ranges where every integer is represented, other ranges where every other one is missing.
The real smoking gun is that several grades just below a passing grade appear to be promoted up to pass.
If you recognize that your evaluation system only has an accuracy of +/- 3% it does make some sense to bump up those below the passing grade by that much to the level of the passing grade. It also saves a whole lot of resources by not having to field requests for regrades and reevaluations from all of those students who are just barely below the cutoff.
When your tools are imperfect (and they all are), there is no absolutely "fair" way of dividing a large group into two mutually exclusive categories. You might be able to say with high confidence "Those who scored a 60 or above know their stuff" and "Those who scored 40 or below do not know enough", but the ones closer to the cutoff are much harder to judge with confidence.
Politically it is easier to bump up the marginal ones. People well below the cutoff line generally do not ask for special treatment as they know they did very poorly, and those who got bumped up won't complain about it because they benefited and they don't even know that they got special treatment. As always, it sucks to be just shy of the "new" line, but if you don't know that the line is there, it doesn't hurt as much.
That bounty would have to be pretty high to have any chance of succeeding. 7 figures at least, I would think... Stealing cars, especially high end cars with no damage at all, can be extremely profitable.
You don't need to convince the "bad guy hackers" to send in the fix, you just need to encourage any "good guy hacker" to send it in. Yes, the "underworld" might pay more for the info, but most people do not have contacts with them, while a bug bounty program is easily found and you have a reasonable expectation that you will get paid and little risk that you might end up in jail.
A murder that is not related to child porn. For him to decrypt those drives, he would be incriminating himself for the murder.
As said before, that's tough. Same if the police comes to your house with a search warrant looking for stolen goods, you can't say "sorry, can't let you in, there's a dead body in the kitchen". If the police is in a place legally, then they can use anything they can see.
However it is not illegal to truthfully say "I don't have the key" or "I don't know the combination" - or for that matter to not say anything at all. It is not illegal to not be physically able to "help the police" by opening doors for them.
I saw my housemate write out records of their illegal gambling operation, or the jewelry I think they stole from the shop down the street and lock it in a briefcase. The same briefcase I use last month so it is filled with my fingerprints and DNA. I can certainly claim that they used it last, and anything in it is not my stuff. I may or may not know the combination as it might have been changed since I used it last. Should I be compelled to say "I can open it"? That sounds like self-incrimination. I was just walking out the door on my way to the police station to let them know my roommate was up to something fishy, but making that testimony now that I am under suspicion would seem to be pretty dangerous to myself.
If you can come up with reasonable examples of situations where an innocent person would be better off not to testify, you're probably looking at a legitimate use of the 5th amendment.
Its more like officers are 60% less likely to be DICKS to citizens therefore reducing escalating incidents by 60%.
That's not a bad thing, eh?
Make it mandatory? https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/force-all-law-enforcement-officers-wear-uniform-embedded-cameras/Mx2KDCtl
Your force balance is off- work = force x distance, and at the point of contact with the ground, the wheels are moving at 0 relative velocity. This means any friction between the ground and the wheels does 0 work (aka it is not a factor in your force balance). Instead, the balancing going on is the forward push generated by the propeller and the backwards drag from the air on the vehicle (this drag is 0 when the vehicle is moving the same speed as the wind, and increases as it gains speed from there).
The rolling resistance of the wheels and the transmission resistances all are modeled by forces in the opposite direction to the motion, and also act to extract energy calculated by force x distance traveled. Balls rolling along are slowed by rolling resistance, even though the point of contact has no relative velocity by your analysis.
So how does it start rolling?
The wind pushes any part of the vehicle to get it going.
You are correct that it could be a problem to have it self-start depending on the wheel/transmission friction and the air friction against the stationary vehicle.
I'm sure the proposal is missing a few items, but in theory, it's a good one.
I don't know that a sales tax would generate enough revenue at palatable rates. The national Canadian sales tax (the GST) seems to generate a bit under $5 billion per percentage point ( http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2009/06/16/f-gst-cut-estimate-deficit.html ) but that does have various exemptions including groceries. While the total of the federal income tax and consumption tax seems to be a bit under $200 billion per year ($153 billion income tax, $43 billion consumption tax for 2009 for example - http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/govt02a-eng.htm ) For 2011 it looks like the federal budget was about $270 billion ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_budget ).
Since basic groceries are currently non-GST taxed in Canada, we could get a bit more than $5 billion per tax percentage point. From ( http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/03/america-food-getting-cheaper-unless-youre-poor/4923/ ) we see that Canadians as a whole spend about 10% of their family budget on food at home. Since the $5 billion per percentage point does not include these groceries purchases, it only represents about 90% of purchases. If we taxed that food too, we should generate about $5.6 billion per percentage point. To generate $270 billion we would need to charge a rate of 48.2% on total purchases of about $560 billion.
Is this total purchases number reasonable? Stats Canada says ( http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/famil131a-eng.htm) the average family consumption for 2011 was about $55k for 13.3 million households ( http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-312-x/98-312-x2011003_2-eng.cfm ) for $731 billion so this is not an unreasonable number. I'll use the $731 billion as it is probably more accurate than the calculation based on GST collection. So if we have $731 billion in purchases, we will need to collect at a 37% rate to generate $70 billion.
If you make exemptions for "necessities" the rate would need to be higher. How much higher? Well, if we want to exempt the necessities, one way would be to in some way not collect taxes on "basic needs", or give a rebate on the taxes paid for those amounts. We can get a figure for what these "basic needs" might cost ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Canada#Basic_needs_poverty_measure and http://www.fraserinstitute.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=3443 for 2006 data) . Not taxing these "basic needs" would be "better" than just excepting categories like "food, gas, utilities" in that we would be able to collect taxes on food and gas and utilities beyond the "necessary" level - people buying "rice and beans" end up getting them without being taxed while those buy8ing caviar and foie gras get dinged by the tax-man. Yeah this might be hard to administer, but we are trying for the best possible argument for this type of system.
In 2006 this seemed to be about $16,000 per couple or for the whole population of a bit under 32 million, this would to about $256 billion in exempted purchases. Gosh, that's a big fraction of all purchases! Maybe the average family size is bigger than that? Actually, it seems to be about 2.5 for the whole country, b
Well, four down, 99,996 to go....
The link works, but I think it will not be searchable until it gets a few hundred signatures - you gotta promote it widely on your own.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/force-all-law-enforcement-officers-wear-uniform-embedded-cameras/Mx2KDCtl
They offer the plea only to avoid the trial and the cost of the trial. This kind of tractation is usual and the goal is to close the cases quickly and avoid the extra costs of running a trial when appropriate. You cannot conclude anything beyond this.
Generally however, the offered plea is made based on what they think the "perp" will plea to, and based on what they think they could get at trial. If they are offering a slap on the wrist, then they clearly do not think they can prove much beyond that, or that the accused will accept much beyond that.
According to my quick research, yes the top 7% own about 63% of the wealth, but that also means that 93% own 37% of the wealth. These numbers are discouraging, but it dosn't mean that 63% of the wealth should pay almost 90% of the taxes.
It also doe not mean that 63% of the wealth should pay just 63% of the taxes either.
If "Chris" does not earn enough to feed the family, should we be taxing Chris at all? Most would set the tax rate for Chris' family pretty low if not zero. If there are enough families in this situation, even though collectively they might own a significant fraction of the wealth of the nation, on a per-family basis they are barely making by, and while we might be able to squeeze out a few shekels from each of them, it probably is not good public policy to take much.
Since we use our tax system to do more than raise operating costs (we use it for social and economic direction purposes too), and we do not completely understand how tax policy ultimately effects the economy at a fundamental basis, and we don't all agree on what those social and economic principles should be in the first place, I don't have any simple solution (other than giving me absolute power - I promise to be fair....)
http://www.zmescience.com/other/map-of-countries-officially-not-using-the-metric-system/
http://www.ibtimes.com/america-liberia-myanmar-anti-metric-system-holdouts-1109357
There are three countries that are not officially metric: Liberia, Myanmar (formerly Burma), and the USA. Liberia seems to be moving towards full metrification faster than the US, but what would we expect from such a forward thinking nation?