When I moved from Ontario to Vancouver in '98, ICBC insurance was prohibitively expensive. I had already paid the high-risk $1800/yr premiums in my teens and was down to $70/month, then ICBC expected me to pay the high-risk premiums again, pretty much ignoring my driver training and driving record. I was literally quoted the same rate as a new untrained driver my age when I inquired out of curiosity.
Well, ICBC does not set rate based on age, just on driving record, so you might have been quoted the same rate as a new driver, but that rate is what any new driver would be quoted, no matter what age they were. With that said, I am pretty sure that they can include out-of-province driving records, as there are loads of hits in google searches with people posting how they needed to get letters from their ON insurers to prove various details about their previous driving history, and other responses from people who had no issues. It at least is possible that had you pursued it further you would have been able to get "credit" for your many years of claims-free driving.
Coming from Ontario as a late 20's single male with no accidents or driving infractions, my insurance would have gone from $700 to $2400. I was told 'Everyone pays the same rate'. I guess they do, it's just that it is the highest possible rate.
I haven't lived in BC for quite some time, but the ICBC rate system does seem "fair" in that they classify drivers based solely (or is it just primarily?) on their driving history rather than on their demographics. The things one has at least some control of (ie your driving record) seems less arbitrary than your age, gender, etc. With that said, I don't know how ICBC deals with people who's history is from outside the province, but it seems reasonable to think they should be able to get historical data from other provinces.
In BC the car insurance is run by a government monopoly, so I guess it would be easier to pass them data. Having a well run single insurer is actually pretty efficient, as it lowers a lot of advertising and other overhead, but of course there are challenges in a system without competitive pressures to keep things in line, and a poorly run monopoly can be really terrible.
A friend of mine who is a composer and musician told me he once had someone ask him to autograph a CD full of pirated copies of my friend's works. Now THAT takes chutzpah!
This is one of my favourite videos, a little short film explaining some things about an Arts NonProfit (a choral group):
Ownership of physical items is a "natural" extension of the physical reality of physical items being unique - if I have a nifty stick, it is challenging for you to have that same stick at the same time.
Unless I have a foot and 50 pounds on you, in which case the stick's gonna be mine. The only thing that keeps that from happening are shared values in the community that force the bigger guy, either through overt policing or social stigma, to let the little guy keep his stick. All ownership is based on coercion, I assume most anti-copyright people would be comfortable with this concept, since their entire approach is just reworking of Proudhonian anarchism, except applied exclusively to intellectual property.
That is a valid point, however there is still a huge difference between "real" property and "intellectual" property in that it is physically impossible in most cases for someone else to gain possession of the property unless the first individual looses possession of that property. Real property ownership laws are predicated on this physical reality. IP laws grew out of the desire to control movement of ideas for both political and financial reasons rather than out of physical considerations.
People voting with other peoples wallets, because one day we just decided that some people deserved to have their pockets picked, because Wes arbitrarily decided that what they had wasn't "property" anymore.
How is that related to arbitrarily deciding that limited time monopolies on the expression of an idea was a good idea? Ownership of physical items is a "natural" extension of the physical reality of physical items being unique - if I have a nifty stick, it is challenging for you to have that same stick at the same time. This is something that five-year-olds spend a lot of time grappling with - but most usually figure it out (though perhaps some of those at the top of the food chain perhaps could use some remedial lessons in sharing... but I digress).
Now, trying to explain to a five-year-old that once Pat makes up a new song, nobody else is allow to sing that new song for 75 or more years, is a bit more difficult.
We have a competitive application system in the US by which residency slots are allocated to medical students. Just as there are more applicants to med school than there are admission slots, there are more applicants to highly-competitive specialties than there are slots. Having clear, nationally-comparable test scores is much more meritocratic than reserving all the [CHOOSE HIGHLY COMPETITIVE SPECIALTY HERE] slots for graduates of the top ten med schools.
But it has been shown time and time again that (a) test scores have uncertainties in their results by at the very least a few percent, so there is no justification in ranking a 91 ahead of an 88, for example, and (b) test scores are only loosely correlated with future success and overall abilities once beyond a certain minimum - the people with 75 are not significantly less successful than those with 90s. Filling the [SPECIALTY] slots based solely on test scores does all a huge disservice by filling those specialties with predominantly a single "type" of med-student. Much better would be to set some reasonable minimum criteria for inclusion in that specialty, and then randomly selecting candidates from that pool. If you MUST do some sort of ranking, have it impact the odds of selection only marginally (ie the top ranked student in the pool has twice the chance of selection of the bottom ranked student). De-emphasizing the idea of education as a competition between peers for a limited resource such as grades or spots should also serve to increase the emphasis on learning from and with the peer group and perhaps the importance of the knowledge itself rather than just as a means to advancement.
Well, ideally, but a big part of the point of a lecture is to let you know what it is that you don't understand.
If you think about it for a while, you would realize that this should be the other way around (and may educational reforms try to get students and instructors on board with this also). The instructor time is the precious commodity that you should be trying to get the most value out of. The text is always available. If the student does the pre-reading they can come to class with an idea of what it is that they need the instructor's insight for, and can ask useful questions during the lecture and participate at a much higher level compared to if the lecture is their first exposure to the material.
There are entire fields of instructional practices based on this type of "just in time teaching", where the well prepared students attend classes unfocussed on the things they did not learn from the text.
Read the text before the class and everything is confusing - but can become clear in class. Don't read the text before the class and everything in the class is new and there is much less opportunity to learn from the class in the ways that can best be accomplished in the class format.
Plants also take up CO2 to produce O2, the more the faster. Basic chemistry. CO2 is a life giving gas. We could do with more of it.
Most plant growth is limited by nutrients other than CO2. Making more CO2 available does not help if you don't have enough nitrogen to do your growing, for example. With that said, don't you think that the people studying this stuff seriously for the last few decades have thought of this issue and are doing their best to include it in their models?
Here is a link from 2007 talking about the issues:
Think about how much a can of fuel weighs. Think how many of those you put into your car in a year. Think how many cars are out there. How many trucks delivering food. All that weight, all that fuel goes into the air and converts oxygen into CO2 as it goes. That is a lot of mass of CO2 that is being added to the air that was not 100 years.
Does it seem like a lot to you? Be careful to consider it against the size of the atmosphere, which is huge.
Ultimately, all the CO2 burned in all the time since the industrial revolution has caused a change of atmospheric composition of less than 1%. Surprising, but true.
Well, it is only a fractionally small part of the atmosphere, a few hundred parts per million, so sure, we have not changed the atmospheric composition by more than 1%. So what? Amazing how changing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by about 2.2% per year over the last decade, how "the present level is higher than at any time during the last 800 thousand years,[4] and likely higher than in the past 20 million years" has changed the atmosphere by less than 1%, but again, this is just a demonstration that CO2 is a small part of the atmosphere.
Did I miss something? Your proposal was that we should limit your new system to people with degrees. Others objected that they did not feel that was a good idea. Your idea is thus not clearly "superior in every way to what we currently have".
Really, so if I submitted a work to Nature or the Lancet but didn't in fact have any kind of degree they'd put it through peer review?
Probably not. But then again, if you were asking the question "If I submitted a work to Nature or the Lancet, and did have a very fancy degree from a very fancy place, they'd put it through peer review?" the answer would again be "probably not". Those particular publications are trying to be the coolest kids on the block, publishing ground breaking research on earth shattering subjects. To get published in them the papers need to be deemed to be pretty important.
In general however, the real barrier to getting papers accepted is the quality of the writing and the content, rather than the accreditation of the submitter.
Actually, rollovers are some of the most survivable of crashes...providing the occupants are wearing seat belts.
My understanding was that the human heart (more accurately the aorta feeding into it) does not take too well to forces/accelerations in the vertical direction - the body is strapped in, but the heart can be pulled away from the aorta, which of course is not how it is designed to operate. I think that this is more common in rollover accidents, since one gets more up/down forces, but I can't find anything specifically about that in a quick search:
The iPhone still has a hefty market share - which is important for Apple because they make the bulk of their iPhone related money on the iTunes store commissions.
I don't think it invalidates any of your other points, but it looks like iTunes (apps, music, and video) brought in about 1/10 the money as did sales of iPhones in the last quarter, about 1/3 of the amount brought in from iPad sales, about 1/3 of the amount brought in from CPU sales and about the same amount as brought in by iPod sales. My rough estimates from the following graph give about 2.5 billion for iTunes, 2.5 for iPod, 7.5 for CPU, 7.5 for iPad, 25 billion for iPhone.
They seem to have had a total of 46 billion of total revenue, and 13 billion in net profit. Even if all of the 2.5 billion of iTunes was 100% profit (ie no costs associated with it), that is still only about 1/5th of their total net income. The iPhone would need to have profit rates of less than 10% to get its net profit to be about equal to this. That doesn't sound like "they make the bulk of their iPhone related money on the iTunes store commissions".
Apple is making some pretty big bucks in their content sales businesses, but they still seem to be making the lion's share of their money in the hardware sales business.
The reason most cars didn't last long back then is the bodies rust out in northern climates well before anything else needs to be repaired or rebuilt.
I think I read a few years ago that when Ontario (or was it some other place?) mandated an increased warranty period for body rust (eight years I think), the longevity of cars increased accordingly.
Compare the size of these components on a new Honda, Toyota, or even domestic econobox and then compare to a '60s Ford/GM/Mopar. They're tiny and not greasable... Hence accelerated failure rates of parts that should last around 100,000 miles.
I think this might be, at least partially, a case of "survivor bias". Any car we see today from the 1960s is necessarily an exceptional vehicle. All the crappy ones from that period are now off the road. The ones with poor maintenance, poor construction, and poor luck are dead and buried. In comparison, the newer ones are still limping along, available to be visible. A young adult will have NEVER see a car on the road from 1960 that is not being babied by some collector - of course they are in great shape.
These are overpriced disposable cars made to last 5-10 years and after that they get very expensive to maintain since you can't just rebuild whatever is worn out.
My understanding is that the longevity and reliability of modern automobiles has been steadily improving. A car reaching 100,000 miles used to be relatively rare without major work, now it is relatively common. In the 1980s, a ten year old car in good condition was difficult to find, while today they are much more common. The fraction of cars that reach beyond the 5-10 year mark is greater for cars made after 2000 than it was for those made in before that date.
Yes, today's cars are expensive to fix, and a challenge for even a well supplied garage to rebuild due to sealed components and specialized components, but modern cars also require much less in the way of ongoing maintenance and are much less likely to need major repairs due to regular wear and tear.
One division of a cell phone seller that I'm familiar with wipes them with windex, therefore marks the value up on the books to about $150 because its now "reconditioned", donates them to battered women, homeless people, etc, as 911 emergency phones, marks the $150 loss/donation on their tax return, and uses that to balance against their income earned from selling phones and prays like hell that they never get audited.
There, fixed that for you.
Definitely - the audit will kill you. Even if they actually did something to create a phone with a "value" of $150, they can't claim that as a loss/donation when they give it away. Giving away an item does not generate a transaction on your books that you can enter into any of your expenses categories. Giving money does. The expenses associated with reconditioned the device have already been captured by you accounting system when you bought the windex and the paper-towels.
I suppose you might be able to play with some "depreciation of inventory" type of thing, but in order to make that work, at some point you have to count that "reconditinging" process of generating $148 of value (with the $2 you paid out to the seller of the old phone to get to the $150 value as inventory on your books) as income - so when you give them away at $150, you really haven't scammed any balance against income.
If you are going to cook your books, you might as well just go whole hog and inflate your "legitimate" expenses, or decrease your "legitimate" income. Get into a largely cash business and then you've got some great scam opportunities.
The instadose dosimeter brings radiation monitoring into the digital age. Smaller than a flash drive, this rugged instant read radiation dosimeter provides immediate dose readings when connected to any computer with internet access.
When a user wishes to obtain a reading he or she simply logs-in to any computer with internet access. The accumulated dose stored on the device is processed through a proprietary algorithm. Once complete, a graphical representation of the current dose displays on the screen. The user can also view cumulative dosage information.
With our secure online AMP program (Account Management Program), account administrators can manage all the elements of a radiation monitoring program online. From account administration to managing individual wearers and devices, AMP provides real time access to account details, device assignments, reports, and all pertinent account information.
I also see that Google has "Update Engine": "a flexible Mac OS X framework that can help developers keep their products up-to-date. It can update nearly any type of software, including Cocoa apps, screen savers, and preference panes. It can even update kernel extensions, regular files, and root-owned applications. Update Engine can even update multiple products just as easily as it can update one."
I don't know if anyone else uses that though. Sparkle is probably not as full featured, but is probably easier to implement. http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/
Why the hell don't MS Windows and OS X have a repository system to update apps?
Not a repository system, but Sparkle is a very commonly used free update framework for Mac OS X, used by virtually every piece of non-Apple software I use.
> If by "mediocre-to-bad" you mean 35-45 MPG (for something like a Prius), then I suppose that is true,
I've heard that number, but I suspect it's from press releases. It doesn't appear to match what prius owners are actually seeing. There are four just in my circle of friends (six figure geeks who can afford trendy things) and they're all getting in the twenties on the freeway. Gas engine economy cars can meet or beat that. It's only logical. Take any machine designed for a particular environment (in this case, typical city traffic) and put it in a different environment, and it will perform differently.
Your friends are doing something wrong or they don't understand how to calculate their MPG. They should get their machines checked out.
I've put about over 150,000 km on our 2003 Prius, and I have never had a tank with worse consumption than 6.5 L/100km which Google claims is 36.186859 miles per gallon. This has included a number of cross continent drives, with tanks of gas consumed entirely with average speeds over 110 kmph (68 MPH), in winter conditions with snow tires. I am lucky to get less than 4.5 L/100km (better than 52 MPG), even on nice summer days at low speeds, but 5 L/100 km (47 MPG) per tank is pretty common (and close to the car's lifetime average I think).
I don't think I have ever seen an average consumption (I don't recall if it does 5 minute or 15 minute averages on the display) that was as bad as 7.9 L/100km ( 29.7 MGP), except for maybe in highway hill climbing, but then it tends to get offset up in the run down the other side.
I am in no way an ultra-MPG personality - I mostly just point the car and push the pedal (though perhaps I use cruise control a bit more than average for highway driving). I do record consumption and distance for each tank of gas though, to what end I don't really know, it's not like I do any analysis of it or anything - this is probably the most extensive I have done. For actual data from some guy in Minnesota you might be interested in http://john1701a.com/ he's got some nice graphs of his mileage - note the significant winter effect.
In any case, I find it easier to believe that you are misunderstanding your friends' reporting rather than my automobile being some magical statistical anomaly that somehow gets better mileage than "normal". Perhaps they are complaining that their guage reports a low 20s MPG when they step on the pedal? Is this a problem of "instant" vs "average" data?
To owners of regular gas cars, hybrids are counterintuitive. My truck gets 17 to 19 MPG in town [1], 25 or better on the freeway if I don't change speed a lot and there aren't too many hills. A hybrid will tend to get its best mileage in town and mediocre-to-bad mileage on long freeway trips.
If by "mediocre-to-bad" you mean 35-45 MPG (for something like a Prius), then I suppose that is true, but it is still generally much better than most other vehicles on the road. The differences between city and highway is not more than 10%, which I personally would not classify as "mediocre" let alone "bad".
The big thing that causes waste in a moving vehicle is air resistance - higher speeds have significantly higher air resistances (it goes as about the square of wind-speed, so twice as fast has four times the resistance), so it makes sense that traveling faster takes more fuel. This is true for all vehicles. Try your truck at 65 and compare it to 75 and you'll find that the truck gets much better fuel consumption at the lower speed. For internal combustion engines, there are also inefficiencies when running at low RPM, so stop and go-traffic is a real killer as you need to be at the lower RMP each time you shift gears - a well designed hybrid can mostly eliminate these inefficiencies.
My problem was the roughly $5k premium vs a Corolla. If I was planning to keep a car for 10+ years, there may have been a payback, but I was likely looking at 5 years or less. There was no way the Prius was going to pay for itself in that time frame.
Were you planning on junking the car after five year or reselling it? What's the price difference between a five year old Corolla and a five year old Prius? When I last looked at used Prius prices, they were quite high - perhaps as much as $5k higher than Corollas. If so, the "premium" is not such a big deal.
Using Kelly Blue Book at http://www.kbb.com/ for cars in zip code 02134 cause I like "Zoom": a 2007 Prius goes for $14,444 a 2007 Corolla CE Sedan 4D goes for $11,200
I don't know if these are the models one should compare, but the Pius premium for resale seems to be about $3244, to with that in mind, you would only need to have a "payback" of about $1746 over your use of the car. A couple of brake jobs and fuel savings might cover that over five years perhaps.
Of course none of this takes into account cash flow issues, inflation, taxes, rebates, loan costs, lost investment opportunities or anything like that - all of which would impact any comprehensive "total cost of ownership" type of calculations. But for short term ownership, the resale value differences are not insignificant.
Incidentally, from the same site, for new cars, the 2011 Prius base model new seems to be about $22,000 while the Corolla is $15,575, or about $6500 more expensive.
YoYo Ma has said of the Strad he plays (The Davidoff Strad once owned by DuPree IIRC) that he has to coax the sound from it. Learning how to coax sound from a temperamental instrument can take weeks of practice.
If it is a "temperamental instrument", perhaps it is not as "good" as one that isn't as "tempermental"?
Slashdot Mirror
When I moved from Ontario to Vancouver in '98, ICBC insurance was prohibitively expensive. I had already paid the high-risk $1800/yr premiums in my teens and was down to $70/month, then ICBC expected me to pay the high-risk premiums again, pretty much ignoring my driver training and driving record. I was literally quoted the same rate as a new untrained driver my age when I inquired out of curiosity.
Well, ICBC does not set rate based on age, just on driving record, so you might have been quoted the same rate as a new driver, but that rate is what any new driver would be quoted, no matter what age they were. With that said, I am pretty sure that they can include out-of-province driving records, as there are loads of hits in google searches with people posting how they needed to get letters from their ON insurers to prove various details about their previous driving history, and other responses from people who had no issues. It at least is possible that had you pursued it further you would have been able to get "credit" for your many years of claims-free driving.
Coming from Ontario as a late 20's single male with no accidents or driving infractions, my insurance would have gone from $700 to $2400. I was told 'Everyone pays the same rate'. I guess they do, it's just that it is the highest possible rate.
I haven't lived in BC for quite some time, but the ICBC rate system does seem "fair" in that they classify drivers based solely (or is it just primarily?) on their driving history rather than on their demographics. The things one has at least some control of (ie your driving record) seems less arbitrary than your age, gender, etc. With that said, I don't know how ICBC deals with people who's history is from outside the province, but it seems reasonable to think they should be able to get historical data from other provinces.
http://www.icbc.com/autoplan/costs/premiums-set
In BC the car insurance is run by a government monopoly, so I guess it would be easier to pass them data. Having a well run single insurer is actually pretty efficient, as it lowers a lot of advertising and other overhead, but of course there are challenges in a system without competitive pressures to keep things in line, and a poorly run monopoly can be really terrible.
A friend of mine who is a composer and musician told me he once had someone ask him to autograph a CD full of pirated copies of my friend's works. Now THAT takes chutzpah!
This is one of my favourite videos, a little short film explaining some things about an Arts NonProfit (a choral group):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0W59PDwFNM
Unless I have a foot and 50 pounds on you, in which case the stick's gonna be mine. The only thing that keeps that from happening are shared values in the community that force the bigger guy, either through overt policing or social stigma, to let the little guy keep his stick. All ownership is based on coercion, I assume most anti-copyright people would be comfortable with this concept, since their entire approach is just reworking of Proudhonian anarchism, except applied exclusively to intellectual property.
That is a valid point, however there is still a huge difference between "real" property and "intellectual" property in that it is physically impossible in most cases for someone else to gain possession of the property unless the first individual looses possession of that property. Real property ownership laws are predicated on this physical reality. IP laws grew out of the desire to control movement of ideas for both political and financial reasons rather than out of physical considerations.
People voting with other peoples wallets, because one day we just decided that some people deserved to have their pockets picked, because Wes arbitrarily decided that what they had wasn't "property" anymore.
How is that related to arbitrarily deciding that limited time monopolies on the expression of an idea was a good idea? Ownership of physical items is a "natural" extension of the physical reality of physical items being unique - if I have a nifty stick, it is challenging for you to have that same stick at the same time. This is something that five-year-olds spend a lot of time grappling with - but most usually figure it out (though perhaps some of those at the top of the food chain perhaps could use some remedial lessons in sharing... but I digress).
Now, trying to explain to a five-year-old that once Pat makes up a new song, nobody else is allow to sing that new song for 75 or more years, is a bit more difficult.
We have a competitive application system in the US by which residency slots are allocated to medical students. Just as there are more applicants to med school than there are admission slots, there are more applicants to highly-competitive specialties than there are slots. Having clear, nationally-comparable test scores is much more meritocratic than reserving all the [CHOOSE HIGHLY COMPETITIVE SPECIALTY HERE] slots for graduates of the top ten med schools.
But it has been shown time and time again that (a) test scores have uncertainties in their results by at the very least a few percent, so there is no justification in ranking a 91 ahead of an 88, for example, and (b) test scores are only loosely correlated with future success and overall abilities once beyond a certain minimum - the people with 75 are not significantly less successful than those with 90s. Filling the [SPECIALTY] slots based solely on test scores does all a huge disservice by filling those specialties with predominantly a single "type" of med-student. Much better would be to set some reasonable minimum criteria for inclusion in that specialty, and then randomly selecting candidates from that pool. If you MUST do some sort of ranking, have it impact the odds of selection only marginally (ie the top ranked student in the pool has twice the chance of selection of the bottom ranked student). De-emphasizing the idea of education as a competition between peers for a limited resource such as grades or spots should also serve to increase the emphasis on learning from and with the peer group and perhaps the importance of the knowledge itself rather than just as a means to advancement.
And I want a pony.
Well, ideally, but a big part of the point of a lecture is to let you know what it is that you don't understand.
If you think about it for a while, you would realize that this should be the other way around (and may educational reforms try to get students and instructors on board with this also). The instructor time is the precious commodity that you should be trying to get the most value out of. The text is always available. If the student does the pre-reading they can come to class with an idea of what it is that they need the instructor's insight for, and can ask useful questions during the lecture and participate at a much higher level compared to if the lecture is their first exposure to the material.
There are entire fields of instructional practices based on this type of "just in time teaching", where the well prepared students attend classes unfocussed on the things they did not learn from the text.
http://www.google.com/search?q="just+in+time+teaching"
Read the text before the class and everything is confusing - but can become clear in class. Don't read the text before the class and everything in the class is new and there is much less opportunity to learn from the class in the ways that can best be accomplished in the class format.
Plants also take up CO2 to produce O2, the more the faster. Basic chemistry. CO2 is a life giving gas. We could do with more of it.
Most plant growth is limited by nutrients other than CO2. Making more CO2 available does not help if you don't have enough nitrogen to do your growing, for example. With that said, don't you think that the people studying this stuff seriously for the last few decades have thought of this issue and are doing their best to include it in their models?
Here is a link from 2007 talking about the issues:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11655-climate-myths-higher-co2-levels-will-boost-plant-growth-and-food-production.html
In short while there are a number of expected results for plants with higher CO2 levels, they are unlikely to be our saviour.
Think about how much a can of fuel weighs. Think how many of those you put into your car in a year. Think how many cars are out there. How many trucks delivering food. All that weight, all that fuel goes into the air and converts oxygen into CO2 as it goes. That is a lot of mass of CO2 that is being added to the air that was not 100 years.
Does it seem like a lot to you? Be careful to consider it against the size of the atmosphere, which is huge.
Ultimately, all the CO2 burned in all the time since the industrial revolution has caused a change of atmospheric composition of less than 1%. Surprising, but true.
Well, it is only a fractionally small part of the atmosphere, a few hundred parts per million, so sure, we have not changed the atmospheric composition by more than 1%. So what? Amazing how changing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by about 2.2% per year over the last decade, how "the present level is higher than at any time during the last 800 thousand years,[4] and likely higher than in the past 20 million years" has changed the atmosphere by less than 1%, but again, this is just a demonstration that CO2 is a small part of the atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere
Just because it is a small fraction of the atmosphere does not mean that it cannot have a large influence on the climate.
Did I miss something? Your proposal was that we should limit your new system to people with degrees. Others objected that they did not feel that was a good idea. Your idea is thus not clearly "superior in every way to what we currently have".
Really, so if I submitted a work to Nature or the Lancet but didn't in fact have any kind of degree they'd put it through peer review?
Probably not. But then again, if you were asking the question "If I submitted a work to Nature or the Lancet, and did have a very fancy degree from a very fancy place, they'd put it through peer review?" the answer would again be "probably not". Those particular publications are trying to be the coolest kids on the block, publishing ground breaking research on earth shattering subjects. To get published in them the papers need to be deemed to be pretty important.
In general however, the real barrier to getting papers accepted is the quality of the writing and the content, rather than the accreditation of the submitter.
It's still that way, last I checked. You're just supposed to bring your passport.
Most of that passport requirement is because they know that the crossing back into the USA is such a pain without a passport these days.
Actually, rollovers are some of the most survivable of crashes...providing the occupants are wearing seat belts.
My understanding was that the human heart (more accurately the aorta feeding into it) does not take too well to forces/accelerations in the vertical direction - the body is strapped in, but the heart can be pulled away from the aorta, which of course is not how it is designed to operate. I think that this is more common in rollover accidents, since one gets more up/down forces, but I can't find anything specifically about that in a quick search:
Traumatic Aortic Rupture : http://www.thedoctorwillseeyounow.com/content/heart/art2030.html?getPage=2
The iPhone still has a hefty market share - which is important for Apple because they make the bulk of their iPhone related money on the iTunes store commissions.
I don't think it invalidates any of your other points, but it looks like iTunes (apps, music, and video) brought in about 1/10 the money as did sales of iPhones in the last quarter, about 1/3 of the amount brought in from iPad sales, about 1/3 of the amount brought in from CPU sales and about the same amount as brought in by iPod sales. My rough estimates from the following graph give about 2.5 billion for iTunes, 2.5 for iPod, 7.5 for CPU, 7.5 for iPad, 25 billion for iPhone.
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/24/apple-reports-best-quarter-ever-in-q1-2012-13-06-billion-profit-on-46-33-billion-in-revenue/
They seem to have had a total of 46 billion of total revenue, and 13 billion in net profit. Even if all of the 2.5 billion of iTunes was 100% profit (ie no costs associated with it), that is still only about 1/5th of their total net income. The iPhone would need to have profit rates of less than 10% to get its net profit to be about equal to this. That doesn't sound like "they make the bulk of their iPhone related money on the iTunes store commissions".
Apple is making some pretty big bucks in their content sales businesses, but they still seem to be making the lion's share of their money in the hardware sales business.
The reason most cars didn't last long back then is the bodies rust out in northern climates well before anything else needs to be repaired or rebuilt.
I think I read a few years ago that when Ontario (or was it some other place?) mandated an increased warranty period for body rust (eight years I think), the longevity of cars increased accordingly.
Compare the size of these components on a new Honda, Toyota, or even domestic econobox and then compare to a '60s Ford/GM/Mopar. They're tiny and not greasable... Hence accelerated failure rates of parts that should last around 100,000 miles.
I think this might be, at least partially, a case of "survivor bias". Any car we see today from the 1960s is necessarily an exceptional vehicle. All the crappy ones from that period are now off the road. The ones with poor maintenance, poor construction, and poor luck are dead and buried. In comparison, the newer ones are still limping along, available to be visible. A young adult will have NEVER see a car on the road from 1960 that is not being babied by some collector - of course they are in great shape.
These are overpriced disposable cars made to last 5-10 years and after that they get very expensive to maintain since you can't just rebuild whatever is worn out.
My understanding is that the longevity and reliability of modern automobiles has been steadily improving. A car reaching 100,000 miles used to be relatively rare without major work, now it is relatively common. In the 1980s, a ten year old car in good condition was difficult to find, while today they are much more common. The fraction of cars that reach beyond the 5-10 year mark is greater for cars made after 2000 than it was for those made in before that date.
Yes, today's cars are expensive to fix, and a challenge for even a well supplied garage to rebuild due to sealed components and specialized components, but modern cars also require much less in the way of ongoing maintenance and are much less likely to need major repairs due to regular wear and tear.
There, fixed that for you.
Definitely - the audit will kill you. Even if they actually did something to create a phone with a "value" of $150, they can't claim that as a loss/donation when they give it away. Giving away an item does not generate a transaction on your books that you can enter into any of your expenses categories. Giving money does. The expenses associated with reconditioned the device have already been captured by you accounting system when you bought the windex and the paper-towels.
I suppose you might be able to play with some "depreciation of inventory" type of thing, but in order to make that work, at some point you have to count that "reconditinging" process of generating $148 of value (with the $2 you paid out to the seller of the old phone to get to the $150 value as inventory on your books) as income - so when you give them away at $150, you really haven't scammed any balance against income.
If you are going to cook your books, you might as well just go whole hog and inflate your "legitimate" expenses, or decrease your "legitimate" income. Get into a largely cash business and then you've got some great scam opportunities.
https://www.mirion.com/?p=dsd_main&gclid=CN3B-7H01K0CFc3DKgodgjAMoA
This one looks good:
The instadose dosimeter brings radiation monitoring into the digital age. Smaller than a flash drive, this rugged instant read radiation dosimeter provides immediate dose readings when connected to any computer with internet access.
When a user wishes to obtain a reading he or she simply logs-in to any computer with internet access. The accumulated dose stored on the device is processed through a proprietary algorithm. Once complete, a graphical representation of the current dose displays on the screen. The user can also view cumulative dosage information.
With our secure online AMP program (Account Management Program), account administrators can manage all the elements of a radiation monitoring program online. From account administration to managing individual wearers and devices, AMP provides real time access to account details, device assignments, reports, and all pertinent account information.
I also see that Google has "Update Engine": "a flexible Mac OS X framework that can help developers keep their products up-to-date. It can update nearly any type of software, including Cocoa apps, screen savers, and preference panes. It can even update kernel extensions, regular files, and root-owned applications. Update Engine can even update multiple products just as easily as it can update one."
http://code.google.com/p/update-engine/
I don't know if anyone else uses that though. Sparkle is probably not as full featured, but is probably easier to implement.
http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/
http://code.google.com/p/update-engine/
Why the hell don't MS Windows and OS X have a repository system to update apps?
Not a repository system, but Sparkle is a very commonly used free update framework for Mac OS X, used by virtually every piece of non-Apple software I use.
http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/
Appfresh seems to wrap all of the Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and Sparkle mechanisms in one place, but I haven't tried that.
http://metaquark.de/appfresh
AppUpdate and WigdetUpdate Dashboard widgets do a reasonable job of keeping non-Apple software current:
http://gkaindl.com/software/app-update/
http://gkaindl.com/software/widget-update
> If by "mediocre-to-bad" you mean 35-45 MPG (for something like a Prius), then I suppose that is true,
I've heard that number, but I suspect it's from press releases. It doesn't appear to match what prius owners are actually seeing. There are four just in my circle of friends (six figure geeks who can afford trendy things) and they're all getting in the twenties on the freeway. Gas engine economy cars can meet or beat that. It's only logical. Take any machine designed for a particular environment (in this case, typical city traffic) and put it in a different environment, and it will perform differently.
Your friends are doing something wrong or they don't understand how to calculate their MPG. They should get their machines checked out.
I've put about over 150,000 km on our 2003 Prius, and I have never had a tank with worse consumption than 6.5 L/100km which Google claims is 36.186859 miles per gallon. This has included a number of cross continent drives, with tanks of gas consumed entirely with average speeds over 110 kmph (68 MPH), in winter conditions with snow tires. I am lucky to get less than 4.5 L/100km (better than 52 MPG), even on nice summer days at low speeds, but 5 L/100 km (47 MPG) per tank is pretty common (and close to the car's lifetime average I think).
I don't think I have ever seen an average consumption (I don't recall if it does 5 minute or 15 minute averages on the display) that was as bad as 7.9 L/100km ( 29.7 MGP), except for maybe in highway hill climbing, but then it tends to get offset up in the run down the other side.
I am in no way an ultra-MPG personality - I mostly just point the car and push the pedal (though perhaps I use cruise control a bit more than average for highway driving). I do record consumption and distance for each tank of gas though, to what end I don't really know, it's not like I do any analysis of it or anything - this is probably the most extensive I have done. For actual data from some guy in Minnesota you might be interested in http://john1701a.com/ he's got some nice graphs of his mileage - note the significant winter effect.
In any case, I find it easier to believe that you are misunderstanding your friends' reporting rather than my automobile being some magical statistical anomaly that somehow gets better mileage than "normal". Perhaps they are complaining that their guage reports a low 20s MPG when they step on the pedal? Is this a problem of "instant" vs "average" data?
To owners of regular gas cars, hybrids are counterintuitive. My truck gets 17 to 19 MPG in town [1], 25 or better on the freeway if I don't change speed a lot and there aren't too many hills. A hybrid will tend to get its best mileage in town and mediocre-to-bad mileage on long freeway trips.
If by "mediocre-to-bad" you mean 35-45 MPG (for something like a Prius), then I suppose that is true, but it is still generally much better than most other vehicles on the road. The differences between city and highway is not more than 10%, which I personally would not classify as "mediocre" let alone "bad".
The big thing that causes waste in a moving vehicle is air resistance - higher speeds have significantly higher air resistances (it goes as about the square of wind-speed, so twice as fast has four times the resistance), so it makes sense that traveling faster takes more fuel. This is true for all vehicles. Try your truck at 65 and compare it to 75 and you'll find that the truck gets much better fuel consumption at the lower speed. For internal combustion engines, there are also inefficiencies when running at low RPM, so stop and go-traffic is a real killer as you need to be at the lower RMP each time you shift gears - a well designed hybrid can mostly eliminate these inefficiencies.
My problem was the roughly $5k premium vs a Corolla. If I was planning to keep a car for 10+ years, there may have been a payback, but I was likely looking at 5 years or less. There was no way the Prius was going to pay for itself in that time frame.
Were you planning on junking the car after five year or reselling it? What's the price difference between a five year old Corolla and a five year old Prius? When I last looked at used Prius prices, they were quite high - perhaps as much as $5k higher than Corollas. If so, the "premium" is not such a big deal.
Using Kelly Blue Book at http://www.kbb.com/ for cars in zip code 02134 cause I like "Zoom":
a 2007 Prius goes for $14,444
a 2007 Corolla CE Sedan 4D goes for $11,200
I don't know if these are the models one should compare, but the Pius premium for resale seems to be about $3244, to with that in mind, you would only need to have a "payback" of about $1746 over your use of the car. A couple of brake jobs and fuel savings might cover that over five years perhaps.
Of course none of this takes into account cash flow issues, inflation, taxes, rebates, loan costs, lost investment opportunities or anything like that - all of which would impact any comprehensive "total cost of ownership" type of calculations. But for short term ownership, the resale value differences are not insignificant.
Incidentally, from the same site, for new cars, the 2011 Prius base model new seems to be about $22,000 while the Corolla is $15,575, or about $6500 more expensive.
YoYo Ma has said of the Strad he plays (The Davidoff Strad once owned by DuPree IIRC) that he has to coax the sound from it. Learning how to coax sound from a temperamental instrument can take weeks of practice.
If it is a "temperamental instrument", perhaps it is not as "good" as one that isn't as "tempermental"?