Sadly, BP should hope that things work out for it the way things worked out for ExxonMobile after the catastrophe of the Exxon Valdez.
Exxon had a drunk for a captain who crashed a poorly designed oil tanker causing one of the worst environmental disasters in history. The region's environment still has not recovered two decades later. But ExxonMobile sure has! ExxonMobile is the most profitable company in the world. From 2005-2009 the annual profit for ExxonMobile averaged $36 Billion!
The US Supreme Court was also generous enough a few years ago to reduce the punitive damages award against ExxonMobile for the Valdez from an original jury amount of $5 Billion down to $500 Million (about five days worth of profits).
My employer the Mental Health Project of the Urban Justice Center is one of the nonprofits on this lawsuit.
The Press Release from www.urbanjustice.org
The Social Security Administration (SSA) will repay over $500 million to 80,000 individuals whose benefits were suspended or denied since January 1, 2007, under a nationwide class action settlement which U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken preliminarily approved on August 11, 2009. Many more people who were denied benefits between 2000 and 2006 will also have the chance to re-establish their eligibility. All told, more than 200,000 individuals will receive back benefits and/or have benefits re-instated under this settlement.
The settlement resolves a class action lawsuit challenging SSAâ(TM)s unlawful policy of suspending or denying benefits based on warrant information. The lawsuit, Martinez v. Astrue, disputed SSAâ(TM)s interpretation of a narrowly drawn provision of the Social Security Act, which prohibits payment of benefits to anyone "fleeing to avoid prosecution" for a felony.
Courts across the country have held that the law does not permit SSA to suspend or deny benefits without a finding that the person had the intent to flee. However, SSA had continued to suspend or deny benefits to thousands each month based only on a crude computer matching system using outstanding warrant information.
This unlawful policy has had devastating consequences on the lives of elderly and disabled individuals, many of whom rely upon Social Security benefits as their only income and, without their rightfully due benefits, have been unable to pay for rent or other basic necessities. Moreover, the absence of a functioning appeal system left people without recourse to challenge these denials for years; individuals were routinely and inaccurately told that they could not appeal these decisions, even though an appeals process does in fact exist. This settlement will allow class members â" many of whom have been rendered destitute, homeless, and dependent on relatives and charity â" to rebuild their lives. A fairness hearing is scheduled to occur September 24, 2009, where Judge Wilken will hear any objections before deciding whether to grant final approval.
Urban Justice Center, National Senior Citizens Law Center, Disability Rights California, Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County and pro bono counsel Munger, Tolles & Olson represent plaintiffs in this class action. Court documents and relevant materials can be found on this page. For more information, contact Emilia Sicilia.
The discovery and debate over the "hobbits" Homo floresiensis is fascinating.
It appears that the hobbits are a unique species and not a shrunken version of Homo erectus based not so much on brain size, but on different and more ape-like body parts including feet, wrists, hips, and shoulders. The NYTimes has a couple of stories on this.
OLPC is presently not the resounding distribution success it originally predicted, but it is well on its way to achieving some of its goals. Intel has introduced the Classmate PC as a response to OLPC. Libya chose to distribute that instead. Is that really a loss? How much does it matter if Libyan kids are using Classmate PC instead of OLPC? The ultra-low cost PC market was in part created by OLPC. Microsoft drops the price of its software for poor countries from $150 to $3 to respond to the threat of Linux and OLPC. That is a good thing.
Another thing to understand is that OLPC is not best suited for the very poorest countries. It is better suited for moderately poor countries. Peru, where people generally are not absolutely starving, is a better choice than Haiti.
There is no need for a trip to Mars to be one-way only. Robert Zubrin lays out a detailed plan of a round-trip to Mars in the non-fiction book The Case for Mars.
Getting people to Mars and back is entirely possible. It wouldn't be cheap, but it could be done with current technology for well under 100 billion US$. Basically two or three launches to Mars are needed and would land on Mars near each other. One of the launches would contain a spacecraft with the three or four people. Another launch would contain a return-to-earth craft. Nothing is going to automatically wipe out the astronauts who make the couple year round trip. However, the astronauts' risk of getting cancer some time during their life will be increased probably by a couple percent.
In terms of the cost $50 billion is not chump change and would probably be better spent on things like healthcare. But sending people to Mars is a much better investment than the trillion dollars spent on the war on Iraq.
What matters in terms of rising sea levels is ice on land melting (not sea ice). Greenland has a bunch of ice on land that is melting at an alarming rate of over 80 cubic miles per year. Antarctica is the other massive source of ice on land and its land-based ice is melting quickly too. It also appears that in recent years the rate of melting ice and moving of glaciers on land in Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating. The BBC has an article on ice loss in Antarctica, which is losing 152 cubic km of ice a year - about 36 cubic miles. The whole world may be losing around 120 cubic miles of ice a year and in future years will be losing more annually. This rate causes a sea level rise of a small fraction of an inch right now, but a rise in the sea level of even say six inches would be a very bad thing, especially for places like Florida. The rate of the melting is increasing so it is hard to say how much sea levels will rise in the next 30 to 100 years.
Major purchases of OLPC are being made by Brazil, Argentina, Libiya, Nigerian and Thailand. India decided it was not so interested. The countries that have made purchases are the more wealthy developing countries. Nigerian and Libiya both are flooded with money from oil and are among the more developed nations in Africa. Thailand, Brazil, and Argentina also have a medium degree of economic development.
OLPC makes sense for these mid-level countries. It does not make sense in Darfur, Sudan where the needs are security, food, shelter, and medicine.
Yeah I used the life angle to get it posted, but there is a little bit of substance to this increased chance of life thinking. Even though the central bulge is not the best place to find life, finding plenty of planets in the central bulge, where large scale planet formation was somewhat in question, suggests that planets are formed around stars everywhere, not just in our galactic neighborhood. If planets are formed everywhere as opposed to just in select parts of the galaxy there are more planets generally and planets present in parts of the galaxy that are more hospitable to the formation of life.
It is not just the area of the galaxy around earth that has planets. Planets are probably helpful for the formation of life. More planets more chances for life.
Ohio in 2004 had some dirty stuff going on with a bad secretary of state. Florida in 2000 had some dirty stuff going on in 2000 with a bad secretary of state. As others have mentioned the US has a long history of serious problems in presidential elections, 1960 being a notable instance. At the municipal level things have been very bad too at times. Determining just how corrupt an election is, is difficult. Neither the Democrats or the Republicans have taken a longterm interest in clean elections.
There are other problems too. One of the big problems is the statistical tie. This is basically what happened in the Washington state race for governor and the Florida presidential election. The voting technology in use isn't that great and there is in practice a margin of error due to hanging chads, butterfly ballots, faulty computer hardware or software etc. With votes numbering in the millions the margin of error due to votes that aren't clear or properly recorded is hundreds at minimum. The result is if Bob leads Joe in Michigan by 300 votes that really doesn't mean anything because the margin of error is say at least 800 votes. To use the legal phrase the will of the voters is not determinable. There is no winner. It is a tie. Of course the US system has no provision for ties so things get really messy. This explains the Washington state governor's race I think, but it does not account for all of corruption, disenfranchisement and dead people voting elsewhere.
Ha. At least I am reading your comment. Nobody will read my reply though.
This article cites one expert and says For a 2.7 year trip to Mars the "study estimated that individual doses would end up being very high, at 2.26 sieverts.
This is enough to give 10% of men and 17% of women aged between 25 and 34 lethal cancers later in their lives.
1 sievert = 100 rem in radiation. So this article is saying 226 rem, whereas The Case for Mars says about 50 rem. At least the two sources are in the same ball park. The fatal cancer risk cited as 10% for men and 17% women of a young age. Because of the increased cancer risk one would probably not send women at least not on the first trip. Also, I find it unlikely that NASA or whomever is going to send a bunch of 20 somethings for the first trip to Mars. The candidates will probably be in their later 30s or 40s and that reduced the lifetime cancer risk substantially.
The Case for Mars noted a little under a 1% increase in fatal cancer risk over 30 years for a 50 rem exposure.
Assume a 40 year male old (life expectancy of about 80) is sent to Mars for a 2.4 year mission. Using the New Scientist's higher radiation figures that 40 year old will be exposed to pretty close to 200 rem. The increased risk of fatal cancer in the 40 year old's lifetime is going to be 4% or 5%. While this is not ideal, it really is not a showstopper for a first trip to Mars.
Talking about going to some place farther than Mars is a totally different matter. Jupiter is much farther and is not well within our technological capability like Mars is. (Mars orbits at about 1.5 au and Jupiter orbits at about 5 au.)
Both solar flares and cosmic radiation are serious (and potentially deadly) barriers to space exploration. Near the earth things aren't too bad, but a journey to Mars presents a serious problem.
Last I heard, there were no practical ways to deal with radiation in space.
This post is misleading and somewhat inaccurate. Radiation is a bit of a problem in interplanetary space such as between the Earth and Mars, but it is nowhere near the killer show-stopping problem it is made out to be. The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin explains this in greater detail.
Everyone on earth absorbs some radiation constantly. Pilots who fly polar routes regularly and people who live in high altitudes receive double or more the amount of radiation that regular people do.
In interplanetary space astronauts would receive more radiation, but they would not receive enough radiation to make them sick by a long shot. It is estimated that a two and a half year Mars mission would expose an astronaut to an accumulated 50 rem of radiation. This only increases a person's chances of dying of cancer slightly, about 1% over thirty years. Over thirty years a nonsmoker adult of middle age would have a 20% chance of dying of cancer. Add 50 rem of radiation and the chance of dying of cancer is roughly 21% instead of 20%. Even if the radiation were 100 rem the chance would only increase by 2% to 22%.
Also, the design of the spacecraft and habitat/home on Mars can reduce exposure to radiation. Put sandbags on the roof of the house on Mars for example. On the spacecraft put the water and fuel around the edge of the craft forming a thicker wall.
Radiation would not stop a manned mission to Mars.
Language has largely lliterate people? Make a multimedia encyclopedia, including articles on how to read and write!
[sarcasm] Because although they are illiterate they have plenty of access to the internet, multimedia computers, and good computer training. [/sarcasm]
A better idea would be to take some of those $100 laptops and put a really good locally tailored learn-to-read program on them and give them to very poor rural villages. This is assuming the $100 laptop has good enough sound to handle the task.
I think the list is pretty good, but it is missing what got the web started in large part, porn. I don't mean to be a troll, but early in the web's commercial development porn was a big fraction of the business, perhaps a third of the web. I do not know if there is a single pioneering porn website that could be listed with the likes of eBay, Yahoo, and craigslist, but porn's role should not be forgotten.
P.S. I think Yahoo should be ranked higher. Yahoo was a leader in searching and portalness. Mapquest.com also maybe should have made the list over say Salon.com or easyjet.com
Most nuclear power reactors use uranium enriched to 3%-5% U-235 (the rest being U-238). Weapons grade enriched uranium for nuclear bombs typically has at least 85% U-235. A variety of processes can be used for enrichment with centrifuges being the most common.
I am not a lawyer. Now the wrongly arrested Gannon should file a civil suit against the police. It looks like he has a decent case for false arrest. This is one standard way a person goes on offense to remedy wrongful police behavior. It is not super effective, but it is much better than doing nothing.
The state wiretap law notwithstanding, [police chief] Hefferan said citizens and businesses have the right to set up security systems that include audio recording, but they must post clear, obvious notice to warn anyone within range. The "obscure little sticker" Gannon had posted on the side of his house wasn't enough, Hefferan said.
While police are never good sources for a fair interpretation of the law, the police chief's assertion that the problem was the size of the sticker denoting the video/audio recording indicates that the police don't have much to stand on.
This matches my original point. Countries such as Argentia and Brazil in contrast to India and Bangladesh have established health care systems and can spend money on other priorities such as OLPC.
On the divergent topic the US is not a good representative of how medicine is handled in 'developed countries.' Most wealthier nations have a state-based universal health care model. This is true for all of Western Europe I think. These state based models are never perfect, but few countries think that the US system of private health insurance is a good idea for covering the general population.
It could help the parent of said child know that the child has measles and get them to the hospital.
This is not the US we are talking about here. Recognition of disease is not the problem. People can't just hop into the family car and drive the kid to the hospital. Poor people who make up the majority of South Asia have no cars and few hospitals. Medical care is extremely limited. Having laptops doesn't solve people's basic needs. Vaccination and antibiotics do help and are much needed. This is the problem.
Bill Gates for all his evil has realized this and made it the focus of the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation's support for public health initiatives in poor countries now rivals the aid provided by countries such as the US.
Well this follows the/. story on skepticism for OLPC in India. Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and Nigeria are all substantially more wealthy than India on a per capita basis. India (with a lot more help from the industrialized world than it is presently getting) needs to focus on providing things like basic vaccines for all children. Laptops don't help children who are dieing from measels for lack of vaccination. Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and Nigeria all have enough money to provide some basics like vaccines. These are not countries where large scale famine is a great threat. These four countries have a substantial level of economic development and government services. This is not to say the implementation of public health strategies and other much-needed services in these four countries is ideal.
Some people are commenting on the police generally. I'll chime in as well. Being a police officer in a major city in the US is not always an easy job. The level of compensation is generally far too low given the degree of difficulty and danger involved in being a police officer. (Police are injured fairly regularly and occasionally killed.) There are serious questions about training and supervision of beat police officers as is highlighted by the tragic case of Ousmane Zongo, an unarmed man who was wrongly killed by an NYPD officer. Police officers often work a considerable amount of overtime or second jobs on top of a demanding regular work schedule. There are also questions about the ability to recruit good candidates to be police officers in major cities given the low pay (and often compartively higher pay in the suburbs.) To achieve better policing major cities should drastically increase the pay of police officers and extend and improve training. Hours worked should also probably be reduced.
I am not a lawyer. If the facts of this incident are as described in the story this is an easy civil suit for wrongful arrest. A law that outlawed taking pictures of police activity in public would be unconstitutional (1st Amendment) in any case and doesn't exist. The right to observe police activity in public is well established. Another poster mentioned that the police might have a right to privacy in making an arrest in public. Wrong. One cannot have a right to privacy in public doing a public activity. There is no possible expectation of privacy there. This isn't to say that police all over the country don't pull this kind of shit all the time-arresting or attacking people for videotaping or taking pictures of public police activity. Usually it isn't quite this blatant though.
One thing this article misses is the impact of the industrial revolution on health. People are healthier today than they were 150 years ago or even 75 years ago, yes. The 19th and early 20th century had people in the industrialized world in rather unhealthy conditions with quite poor diet. The real question is looking at the health of people century by century over the last 10,000 years in a variety of places and cultures. Changes in medicine, population patterns (rural to urban) and diet have changed health, but not in the ways implied by this article.
Consider disease.
Antibiotics and modern medicine have changed disease in a big way. However, how common were major wide-spread outbreaks of disease 5000 years ago? The flu of 1918 and the plague of the Middle Ages were widespread because of increased travel and contact among peoples compared to say in 1500 BC. AIDS is a modern example of a disease that has spread quickly globally today, which would not have reached many populations in earlier times. People's in Western Hemisphere were almost totally isolated until 500 years ago. Australia as well was isolated.
Diseases brought from Europe such as small pox were the primary cause of the annihilation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Native American peoples had no immunity to such diseases.
Some diseases such as polio and small pox were common 1000 years ago and have been all but eliminated today, but probably were not so common in 3000 BC. Other diseases that have been eliminated such as leprosy seem to have a long history in some populations, but probably not all.
Consider nutrition.
In modern times people in the industrialized world by and large never want for calories. Excess calorie consumption is a far greater public health threat than lack of calories. However, this is not true world wide as famine kills hundreds of thousands in Africa in particular.
500 years ago, a lack of abundance of calories at some point during a person's life was fairly common globally. Also, poor nutrition from an unbalanced diet was far more common in Europe 500 years ago than today. Poor nutrition is a major problem today in South Asia and other areas.
How was the diet of peoples around the world in 2500 BC? Because the world was far less populated then, nutrition on average may well have been better than in 1500 AD.
The diet of woodlands Native Americans 600 years ago was probably as balanced as the diet of modern US residents. This was not necessarily true of the Native Americans of Central America, who relied more heavily on corn agriculture.
Much of this information on disease and nutrition can be ascertained from looking at skeletal remains.
One thing we do know from archeology: humans today are generally larger than they have been over the past 10,000 years. This is probably because of an abundance of calories throughout their lives, although reductions in disease may also be a factor.
My guess is Microsoft is just patenting vague advertising-revenue stuff to block others from patenting it. This does not mean Microsoft actually plans to move to advertising instead of paying for software.
First, if you have any credit card debt pay that off. Credit card debt should always be avoided if possible.
Second, ideally you will have some money in the bank after you graduate just in case things do not pan out immediately. (I graduated a CS major in 2001 when during the school year everybody went from having great jobs to having no jobs at all... I was laidoff the week I graduated.)
Third, if you have say $8000 in the bank and do not expect to use it for the next six months or nine or twelve months you can generally go to your bank and have say $3000 put in a short term (6-12 month) certificate of deposit (CD). The CD will not earn very much interest, but it will be better than your savings or checking account. Putting the a few thousand in an investment like stocks is not a good idea for the short term and you might need that money after you graduate. (Maybe you'll get a great job in Hawaii, but have to pay for your own expensive relocation, who knows.)
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Sadly, BP should hope that things work out for it the way things worked out for ExxonMobile after the catastrophe of the Exxon Valdez.
Exxon had a drunk for a captain who crashed a poorly designed oil tanker causing one of the worst environmental disasters in history. The region's environment still has not recovered two decades later. But ExxonMobile sure has! ExxonMobile is the most profitable company in the world. From 2005-2009 the annual profit for ExxonMobile averaged $36 Billion!
The US Supreme Court was also generous enough a few years ago to reduce the punitive damages award against ExxonMobile for the Valdez from an original jury amount of $5 Billion down to $500 Million (about five days worth of profits).
My employer the Mental Health Project of the Urban Justice Center is one of the nonprofits on this lawsuit.
The Press Release from www.urbanjustice.org
The Social Security Administration (SSA) will repay over $500 million to 80,000 individuals whose benefits were suspended or denied since January 1, 2007, under a nationwide class action settlement which U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken preliminarily approved on August 11, 2009. Many more people who were denied benefits between 2000 and 2006 will also have the chance to re-establish their eligibility. All told, more than 200,000 individuals will receive back benefits and/or have benefits re-instated under this settlement.
The settlement resolves a class action lawsuit challenging SSAâ(TM)s unlawful policy of suspending or denying benefits based on warrant information. The lawsuit, Martinez v. Astrue, disputed SSAâ(TM)s interpretation of a narrowly drawn provision of the Social Security Act, which prohibits payment of benefits to anyone "fleeing to avoid prosecution" for a felony.
Courts across the country have held that the law does not permit SSA to suspend or deny benefits without a finding that the person had the intent to flee. However, SSA had continued to suspend or deny benefits to thousands each month based only on a crude computer matching system using outstanding warrant information.
This unlawful policy has had devastating consequences on the lives of elderly and disabled individuals, many of whom rely upon Social Security benefits as their only income and, without their rightfully due benefits, have been unable to pay for rent or other basic necessities. Moreover, the absence of a functioning appeal system left people without recourse to challenge these denials for years; individuals were routinely and inaccurately told that they could not appeal these decisions, even though an appeals process does in fact exist. This settlement will allow class members â" many of whom have been rendered destitute, homeless, and dependent on relatives and charity â" to rebuild their lives.
A fairness hearing is scheduled to occur September 24, 2009, where Judge Wilken will hear any objections before deciding whether to grant final approval.
Urban Justice Center, National Senior Citizens Law Center, Disability Rights California, Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County and pro bono counsel Munger, Tolles & Olson represent plaintiffs in this class action.
Court documents and relevant materials can be found on this page. For more information, contact Emilia Sicilia.
The discovery and debate over the "hobbits" Homo floresiensis is fascinating.
It appears that the hobbits are a unique species and not a shrunken version of Homo erectus based not so much on brain size, but on different and more ape-like body parts including feet, wrists, hips, and shoulders. The NYTimes has a couple of stories on this.
Well for the parent of a young teen, the best way to intrigue a young teen in a topic is to make it forbidden.
BAN your son from programming!
Sure enough soon he'll be sneaking out of his bed at night to code on his own.
OLPC is presently not the resounding distribution success it originally predicted, but it is well on its way to achieving some of its goals. Intel has introduced the Classmate PC as a response to OLPC. Libya chose to distribute that instead. Is that really a loss? How much does it matter if Libyan kids are using Classmate PC instead of OLPC? The ultra-low cost PC market was in part created by OLPC. Microsoft drops the price of its software for poor countries from $150 to $3 to respond to the threat of Linux and OLPC. That is a good thing.
Another thing to understand is that OLPC is not best suited for the very poorest countries. It is better suited for moderately poor countries. Peru, where people generally are not absolutely starving, is a better choice than Haiti.
LOL. That is a great slogan. It might actually be a 20th.
There is no need for a trip to Mars to be one-way only. Robert Zubrin lays out a detailed plan of a round-trip to Mars in the non-fiction book The Case for Mars.
Getting people to Mars and back is entirely possible. It wouldn't be cheap, but it could be done with current technology for well under 100 billion US$. Basically two or three launches to Mars are needed and would land on Mars near each other. One of the launches would contain a spacecraft with the three or four people. Another launch would contain a return-to-earth craft. Nothing is going to automatically wipe out the astronauts who make the couple year round trip. However, the astronauts' risk of getting cancer some time during their life will be increased probably by a couple percent.
In terms of the cost $50 billion is not chump change and would probably be better spent on things like healthcare. But sending people to Mars is a much better investment than the trillion dollars spent on the war on Iraq.
What matters in terms of rising sea levels is ice on land melting (not sea ice). Greenland has a bunch of ice on land that is melting at an alarming rate of over 80 cubic miles per year. Antarctica is the other massive source of ice on land and its land-based ice is melting quickly too. It also appears that in recent years the rate of melting ice and moving of glaciers on land in Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating. The BBC has an article on ice loss in Antarctica, which is losing 152 cubic km of ice a year - about 36 cubic miles. The whole world may be losing around 120 cubic miles of ice a year and in future years will be losing more annually. This rate causes a sea level rise of a small fraction of an inch right now, but a rise in the sea level of even say six inches would be a very bad thing, especially for places like Florida. The rate of the melting is increasing so it is hard to say how much sea levels will rise in the next 30 to 100 years.
The above comment is correct.
Major purchases of OLPC are being made by Brazil, Argentina, Libiya, Nigerian and Thailand. India decided it was not so interested. The countries that have made purchases are the more wealthy developing countries. Nigerian and Libiya both are flooded with money from oil and are among the more developed nations in Africa. Thailand, Brazil, and Argentina also have a medium degree of economic development.
OLPC makes sense for these mid-level countries. It does not make sense in Darfur, Sudan where the needs are security, food, shelter, and medicine.
Yeah I used the life angle to get it posted, but there is a little bit of substance to this increased chance of life thinking. Even though the central bulge is not the best place to find life, finding plenty of planets in the central bulge, where large scale planet formation was somewhat in question, suggests that planets are formed around stars everywhere, not just in our galactic neighborhood. If planets are formed everywhere as opposed to just in select parts of the galaxy there are more planets generally and planets present in parts of the galaxy that are more hospitable to the formation of life.
It is not just the area of the galaxy around earth that has planets. Planets are probably helpful for the formation of life. More planets more chances for life.
Ohio in 2004 had some dirty stuff going on with a bad secretary of state. Florida in 2000 had some dirty stuff going on in 2000 with a bad secretary of state. As others have mentioned the US has a long history of serious problems in presidential elections, 1960 being a notable instance. At the municipal level things have been very bad too at times. Determining just how corrupt an election is, is difficult. Neither the Democrats or the Republicans have taken a longterm interest in clean elections.
There are other problems too. One of the big problems is the statistical tie. This is basically what happened in the Washington state race for governor and the Florida presidential election. The voting technology in use isn't that great and there is in practice a margin of error due to hanging chads, butterfly ballots, faulty computer hardware or software etc. With votes numbering in the millions the margin of error due to votes that aren't clear or properly recorded is hundreds at minimum. The result is if Bob leads Joe in Michigan by 300 votes that really doesn't mean anything because the margin of error is say at least 800 votes. To use the legal phrase the will of the voters is not determinable. There is no winner. It is a tie. Of course the US system has no provision for ties so things get really messy. This explains the Washington state governor's race I think, but it does not account for all of corruption, disenfranchisement and dead people voting elsewhere.
Ha. At least I am reading your comment. Nobody will read my reply though.
This article cites one expert and says For a 2.7 year trip to Mars the "study estimated that individual doses would end up being very high, at 2.26 sieverts.
This is enough to give 10% of men and 17% of women aged between 25 and 34 lethal cancers later in their lives.
1 sievert = 100 rem in radiation. So this article is saying 226 rem, whereas The Case for Mars says about 50 rem. At least the two sources are in the same ball park. The fatal cancer risk cited as 10% for men and 17% women of a young age. Because of the increased cancer risk one would probably not send women at least not on the first trip. Also, I find it unlikely that NASA or whomever is going to send a bunch of 20 somethings for the first trip to Mars. The candidates will probably be in their later 30s or 40s and that reduced the lifetime cancer risk substantially.
The Case for Mars noted a little under a 1% increase in fatal cancer risk over 30 years for a 50 rem exposure.
Assume a 40 year male old (life expectancy of about 80) is sent to Mars for a 2.4 year mission. Using the New Scientist's higher radiation figures that 40 year old will be exposed to pretty close to 200 rem. The increased risk of fatal cancer in the 40 year old's lifetime is going to be 4% or 5%. While this is not ideal, it really is not a showstopper for a first trip to Mars.
Talking about going to some place farther than Mars is a totally different matter. Jupiter is much farther and is not well within our technological capability like Mars is. (Mars orbits at about 1.5 au and Jupiter orbits at about 5 au.)
Both solar flares and cosmic radiation are serious (and potentially deadly) barriers to space exploration. Near the earth things aren't too bad, but a journey to Mars presents a serious problem.
Last I heard, there were no practical ways to deal with radiation in space.
This post is misleading and somewhat inaccurate. Radiation is a bit of a problem in interplanetary space such as between the Earth and Mars, but it is nowhere near the killer show-stopping problem it is made out to be. The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin explains this in greater detail.
Everyone on earth absorbs some radiation constantly. Pilots who fly polar routes regularly and people who live in high altitudes receive double or more the amount of radiation that regular people do.
In interplanetary space astronauts would receive more radiation, but they would not receive enough radiation to make them sick by a long shot. It is estimated that a two and a half year Mars mission would expose an astronaut to an accumulated 50 rem of radiation. This only increases a person's chances of dying of cancer slightly, about 1% over thirty years. Over thirty years a nonsmoker adult of middle age would have a 20% chance of dying of cancer. Add 50 rem of radiation and the chance of dying of cancer is roughly 21% instead of 20%. Even if the radiation were 100 rem the chance would only increase by 2% to 22%.
Also, the design of the spacecraft and habitat/home on Mars can reduce exposure to radiation. Put sandbags on the roof of the house on Mars for example. On the spacecraft put the water and fuel around the edge of the craft forming a thicker wall.
Radiation would not stop a manned mission to Mars.
Language has largely lliterate people? Make a multimedia encyclopedia, including articles on how to read and write!
[sarcasm] Because although they are illiterate they have plenty of access to the internet, multimedia computers, and good computer training. [/sarcasm]
A better idea would be to take some of those $100 laptops and put a really good locally tailored learn-to-read program on them and give them to very poor rural villages. This is assuming the $100 laptop has good enough sound to handle the task.
I think the list is pretty good, but it is missing what got the web started in large part, porn. I don't mean to be a troll, but early in the web's commercial development porn was a big fraction of the business, perhaps a third of the web. I do not know if there is a single pioneering porn website that could be listed with the likes of eBay, Yahoo, and craigslist, but porn's role should not be forgotten.
P.S. I think Yahoo should be ranked higher. Yahoo was a leader in searching and portalness. Mapquest.com also maybe should have made the list over say Salon.com or easyjet.com
Just as a sidenote for people... Wikipedia has more on uranium enrichment.
Most nuclear power reactors use uranium enriched to 3%-5% U-235 (the rest being U-238). Weapons grade enriched uranium for nuclear bombs typically has at least 85% U-235. A variety of processes can be used for enrichment with centrifuges being the most common.
I am not a lawyer. Now the wrongly arrested Gannon should file a civil suit against the police. It looks like he has a decent case for false arrest. This is one standard way a person goes on offense to remedy wrongful police behavior. It is not super effective, but it is much better than doing nothing.
The state wiretap law notwithstanding, [police chief] Hefferan said citizens and businesses have the right to set up security systems that include audio recording, but they must post clear, obvious notice to warn anyone within range. The "obscure little sticker" Gannon had posted on the side of his house wasn't enough, Hefferan said.
While police are never good sources for a fair interpretation of the law, the police chief's assertion that the problem was the size of the sticker denoting the video/audio recording indicates that the police don't have much to stand on.
This matches my original point. Countries such as Argentia and Brazil in contrast to India and Bangladesh have established health care systems and can spend money on other priorities such as OLPC.
On the divergent topic the US is not a good representative of how medicine is handled in 'developed countries.' Most wealthier nations have a state-based universal health care model. This is true for all of Western Europe I think. These state based models are never perfect, but few countries think that the US system of private health insurance is a good idea for covering the general population.
It could help the parent of said child know that the child has measles and get them to the hospital.
This is not the US we are talking about here. Recognition of disease is not the problem. People can't just hop into the family car and drive the kid to the hospital. Poor people who make up the majority of South Asia have no cars and few hospitals. Medical care is extremely limited. Having laptops doesn't solve people's basic needs. Vaccination and antibiotics do help and are much needed. This is the problem.
Bill Gates for all his evil has realized this and made it the focus of the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation's support for public health initiatives in poor countries now rivals the aid provided by countries such as the US.
There are other foundations such as the Measels Initiative, UNAIDS and the World Health Organization working on global public health problems as well.
Well this follows the /. story on skepticism for OLPC in India. Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and Nigeria are all substantially more wealthy than India on a per capita basis. India (with a lot more help from the industrialized world than it is presently getting) needs to focus on providing things like basic vaccines for all children. Laptops don't help children who are dieing from measels for lack of vaccination. Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and Nigeria all have enough money to provide some basics like vaccines. These are not countries where large scale famine is a great threat. These four countries have a substantial level of economic development and government services. This is not to say the implementation of public health strategies and other much-needed services in these four countries is ideal.
Some people are commenting on the police generally. I'll chime in as well. Being a police officer in a major city in the US is not always an easy job. The level of compensation is generally far too low given the degree of difficulty and danger involved in being a police officer. (Police are injured fairly regularly and occasionally killed.) There are serious questions about training and supervision of beat police officers as is highlighted by the tragic case of Ousmane Zongo, an unarmed man who was wrongly killed by an NYPD officer. Police officers often work a considerable amount of overtime or second jobs on top of a demanding regular work schedule. There are also questions about the ability to recruit good candidates to be police officers in major cities given the low pay (and often compartively higher pay in the suburbs.) To achieve better policing major cities should drastically increase the pay of police officers and extend and improve training. Hours worked should also probably be reduced.
I am not a lawyer. If the facts of this incident are as described in the story this is an easy civil suit for wrongful arrest. A law that outlawed taking pictures of police activity in public would be unconstitutional (1st Amendment) in any case and doesn't exist. The right to observe police activity in public is well established. Another poster mentioned that the police might have a right to privacy in making an arrest in public. Wrong. One cannot have a right to privacy in public doing a public activity. There is no possible expectation of privacy there. This isn't to say that police all over the country don't pull this kind of shit all the time-arresting or attacking people for videotaping or taking pictures of public police activity. Usually it isn't quite this blatant though.
One thing this article misses is the impact of the industrial revolution on health. People are healthier today than they were 150 years ago or even 75 years ago, yes. The 19th and early 20th century had people in the industrialized world in rather unhealthy conditions with quite poor diet. The real question is looking at the health of people century by century over the last 10,000 years in a variety of places and cultures. Changes in medicine, population patterns (rural to urban) and diet have changed health, but not in the ways implied by this article.
Consider disease.
Antibiotics and modern medicine have changed disease in a big way. However, how common were major wide-spread outbreaks of disease 5000 years ago? The flu of 1918 and the plague of the Middle Ages were widespread because of increased travel and contact among peoples compared to say in 1500 BC. AIDS is a modern example of a disease that has spread quickly globally today, which would not have reached many populations in earlier times. People's in Western Hemisphere were almost totally isolated until 500 years ago. Australia as well was isolated.
Diseases brought from Europe such as small pox were the primary cause of the annihilation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Native American peoples had no immunity to such diseases.
Some diseases such as polio and small pox were common 1000 years ago and have been all but eliminated today, but probably were not so common in 3000 BC. Other diseases that have been eliminated such as leprosy seem to have a long history in some populations, but probably not all.
Consider nutrition.
In modern times people in the industrialized world by and large never want for calories. Excess calorie consumption is a far greater public health threat than lack of calories. However, this is not true world wide as famine kills hundreds of thousands in Africa in particular.
500 years ago, a lack of abundance of calories at some point during a person's life was fairly common globally. Also, poor nutrition from an unbalanced diet was far more common in Europe 500 years ago than today. Poor nutrition is a major problem today in South Asia and other areas.
How was the diet of peoples around the world in 2500 BC? Because the world was far less populated then, nutrition on average may well have been better than in 1500 AD.
The diet of woodlands Native Americans 600 years ago was probably as balanced as the diet of modern US residents. This was not necessarily true of the Native Americans of Central America, who relied more heavily on corn agriculture.
Much of this information on disease and nutrition can be ascertained from looking at skeletal remains.
One thing we do know from archeology: humans today are generally larger than they have been over the past 10,000 years. This is probably because of an abundance of calories throughout their lives, although reductions in disease may also be a factor.
My guess is Microsoft is just patenting vague advertising-revenue stuff to block others from patenting it. This does not mean Microsoft actually plans to move to advertising instead of paying for software.
First, if you have any credit card debt pay that off. Credit card debt should always be avoided if possible.
Second, ideally you will have some money in the bank after you graduate just in case things do not pan out immediately. (I graduated a CS major in 2001 when during the school year everybody went from having great jobs to having no jobs at all... I was laidoff the week I graduated.)
Third, if you have say $8000 in the bank and do not expect to use it for the next six months or nine or twelve months you can generally go to your bank and have say $3000 put in a short term (6-12 month) certificate of deposit (CD). The CD will not earn very much interest, but it will be better than your savings or checking account. Putting the a few thousand in an investment like stocks is not a good idea for the short term and you might need that money after you graduate. (Maybe you'll get a great job in Hawaii, but have to pay for your own expensive relocation, who knows.)