$5.85/hr for 40hrs/wk (which a lot of people are lucky to get; most places cut you off at 36) is $234/wk, $936/mo, $12,168/yr. Taxes are about 15% at that wage, so you're looking at $10k per year. Nobody really lives on that; it's minimal survival, especially for a 'first-world' country. Housing and food costs vary wildly, but you can expect to pay about 80% of your after-tax income on basic needs (shelter, food, cheap clothes, electricity). Note that this doesn't include medical insurance, car insurance, gas, or any form of entertainment. Offering credit to someone in this situation is almost criminal, because it's quite likely they won't be able to keep up with it. One bounced check, late payment, or short paycheck, and they're screwed more thoroughly than a porn star; the fees and interest quickly outstrip their available income. Construction and manual labor is more like $8-$10/hr, more for trades like pipefitters, electricians, etc. A white-collar service job might net you $9-$15/hr. Specialists could see $25/hr or more, after 4+ additional years of training and certification, plus relevant experience. Basically, unless you put yourself into nearly lifelong debt for a degree (and manage to choose a good one), you're capped at about three times the poverty level unless you get a decade of experience or move into management/business ownership. Any opportunity beyond $12-$13/hr is pretty rare, and either physically or mentally punishing. (major exceptions are administration and government/military contract work) Another thing to consider is that once you move past $20k/yr, your taxes rise from 15% up to around 22%. Additionally, locations with moderate to high pay rates have correspondingly high costs of living. There are cities in the US where a McDonald's employee makes over $10/hr to start; unfortunately, almost everything is 2-2.5x more expensive, which leaves them worse off once increased taxes are factored in.
For more economic details, have a look at the census bureau, http://www.census.gov/. Latest data is from 2000. If you want to know more about our tax system, have a look at the ever-dreaded IRS here: http://www.irs.gov/.
U.S. minimum wage is $5.85, unless you're wait-staff. This is due to a July '07 increase; for the past several years it was $5.15.
Besides, if the CEO is paying someone $100/hr to research speeches, he's not paying her to research speeches... unless you consider 'research' to be equal to 'fellatio'.
Seriously, is there anyone in the states that can actually handle a little power without completely losing it? Granted, bad news is the best news, but you never hear about the guy that runs his company/organization responsibly, obeys the law and general morality, and doesn't screw a whole bunch of people, whether literally or figuratively? (bachelors excepted on the literal screwing, of course.) The worst part in this case is that it's a college that's getting screwed with. Education is critical, yet it's subject to some of the worst parts of both corporate and governmental corruption, massive administration bloat, micro-managing, and infighting. It's almost a miracle that anyone comes out of it as a productive human.
disclaimers: I live in the U.S. This post not intended to imply doubt of our grand overlord bush. No terroristic, subversive, or dissenting opinions intended or implied. fnordDo not read. Discard unused portion, do not store. All hail Eris Discordia.
Consider acquiring an AudioScience card. You'll find a new one costs as much or more than your father's CD player ($1k-$2k range). Heard of HD radio? The ASI 6000 series cards are commonly used in the broadcast industry to produce audio streams for HD broadcast, not to mention AM/FM, for the same reason the studios use high bitrate masters (highest quality before final compression). The whole point of a CD is that it is digital; any reader will read out the same data (barring damage not recoverable via CRC, etc). It's the audio processing hardware that makes the difference, and it is most certainly possible to get that kind of professional-grade hardware for a PC.
If an ASI is a bit out of your range, or you're just masochistic (wrt driver hell), consider an Echo Leyla or a Delta 1010. If that's still too far out there, try one of the 32bit/192kHz soundblaster cards that does 7.1 surround.
On the other hand, if you need lots and lots of audio channels at arbitrary quality, and you happen to have a beefy gigabit network, check out Axia. They're doing some straight out amazing things with audio over IP and centralized (read: rackmount) audio processing gear. That has nothing to do with home PC audio playback, I admit, but it does have implications for independant studios and audio gear for live shows.
Have you ever tried using Rivendell? Best be using SuSE pro, or best of luck getting the GPIO or ASI components to compile. If you've used any other automation system, the interface makes little sense.
Those issues aside, if you can make it work, go for it. It's probably a bit much just for streaming to a shoutcast server, but I don't have any personal experience with a program that is just right.
spot-on... that'll teach me to think before typing. Good luck on the ongoing troll hunt, too.
As for the issue at hand, I've read through more comments and such, and my opinion is the same. If a motherboard manufacturer is unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to make their pata ports bootable (directly, out of the box, no floppys, no workarounds), then don't include them in the first place. Deleting the pata pins (and controller) in favor of several sata connections is a great idea, so long as it's made obvious that it is a sata-only board. If a mobo-maker wants to add a controller chip after the fact, it needs to work the same way any other controller would (read: bootable).
Sure, there will be adapters and hardware workarounds to allow booting from pata, and there are sata optical drives available. That's not the point. The complaint is that it's harder or more expensive, not that it's impossible.
PATA: wide, flat cable for data + bastard MOLEX power cable = 2 cables. SATA: small, narrow cable for data + (easy SATA | bastard MOLEX) power cable = 2 cables.
It's two cables either way. The exception is optical drives with an analog audio cable (for three total cables), and that works the same for both types of IDE optical drives. That said, you're absolutely correct about stock parts and thermal performance. Use a decent case and you'll be way ahead of the game anyway.
There is currently no good reason to disallow booting from PATA drives of any sort. Maybe in 5-10 years, once the vast majority of PATA devices have died and are replaced by SATA versions, it will be worthwhile to delete the PATA controllers entirely. Until then, don't screw around with basic functionality. Either have a fully functional controller or none at all, but don't half-ass it in an attempt at forcing hardware upgrades.
Like all genetic regrowth techniques, this one has a long way to go before it could be used in humans. At present, it involves using pig cells incubated in the abdominal tissue of living rats. Fascinating, to be sure, but not quite mainstream yet. It is interesting that this group is using collagen sponges as scaffolding; I'm glad to hear research has continued with that technique to the point that it is functional for growing complex tissues. This is certainly promising; the step from here to fully-regrown teeth is not overwhelming. Still, I wouldn't bet on your Coca-Cola stocks skyrocketing just yet.
Addendum: I missed a few things. There are some talk/news stations, and listener base is much lower during the overnight shift. Even so, slashing the losses in half (way more than enough to account for the discrepancy) leaves an obligation of at least $50m yearly. That's assuming none of these stations get particularly popular. --Zero
Disclaimer: The company I work for is owned by Clear Channel. These comments are my own views and do not reflect the views of my employers.
Have you considered who will be paying the most? This year, every Clear Channel station in the top 100 markets will be simulcast streaming. That's on the order of 1,300 stations, +/- 100 or so. Since I've already done the math, I'll clue you in.
Using an average of one song per four minutes, each station will be playing 131,400 songs per year. That's $144.54 per station per listener. TFA quotes 500 listeners as average; that works out to:
I can tell you firsthand they are not making that kind of revenue on their streaming side. Clear Channel stands to lose on the order of $100m this year. Ad revenue might help offset it next year, but we're still looking in the range of $100m or so for 2008 as well. CC most definately did not sign up to lose $150-300m in the next two years; it's really not a good time.
On a side note: If you want to hear something new on a Clear Channel station, call in or email the PD (production director). Tell him or her you want to hear it. Ask them to check CCADS ('seecads'). If it's not available, tell them to request it from Bobby Leach. Offer to lend them your cd, if it's safe for radio play. Call in or email your favorite jock; tell them to bug their PD about getting the track. Get your friends to request it. If you know people in other major cities, ask them to do the same. If you're not asking the impossible, they will listen and your favorite track will get played. As a bonus, if it gets into the system, anyone can request it in any city and they won't have as much hassle.
or you can use ours... ftp://ftp.prophetsys.com/Drivers/DST/DSTtool.exe...provided without warranty, responsibility, or any representations of any particular function, do not use, sacrifice a chicken in the name of FSM, etc., etc.... please don't smite the server and get me fired...
Bear in mind that it does nothing whatsoever to resolve issues arising from programs scheduling things during the whole transition, or networks that require a central timekeeping source, or anything else mentioned in other posts. It just and only fixes your daylight savings database and current timezone settings. No restart needed, how nice.
By the way, radio automation is one of those time-sensitive systems that get really finniky about DST. This tool plays nice with our systems (because they are already designed to read DST from windows), but it might just break yours.
This is something useful... Real photographers often don't have the cash to shell out for a top-of-the-line graphics processing server. Something like this should make it easier for smaller photography businesses to get into digital tech. Less actual film, less darkroom time/space/supplies, faster turnaround... all good for the little guy.
"Um, Ender called, and he doesn't think that's funny..."
Anyway, what's the big surprise that activities requiring hand-eye coordination improve actual hand-eye coordination? Granted, some games would be better than others... It's also good to see some actual research in this regard...
The dystopian hell depicted in Brazil is reason enough to tell the executive branch to go piss kerosene up a burning rope. Honestly, it's like he's trying to grab so much power that he can scare off the people that want him impeached or worse. In the process, any agency with clout is using the opportunity to get more access to private information in the name of counterterrorism.
To choose an extreme example, consider the impact of being publicly accused of a sex crime. A person in that situation can never recover their reputation. Granted, a government inquiry won't carry quite the impact that an allegation of sexual assault would carry, but there are repercussions. Given our government's fine history of absolute, impossible perfection in all matters of paperwork and private citizens , it is certain that random, innocent people will suffer because of failures on the part of government agencies. I may not have anything to hide, but that doesn't mean I would ever give up my privacy willingly. I feel that most people would agree with me, particularly if they hadn't been force-fed the idea that total surveillance is necessary for any safety at all. Those in power know this, so they work around the little problems (like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights) any way they can and as far from public knowlege as possible. It's downright criminal behavior, and anyone involved should be prosecuted for treason. End of story.
Cannabis leads inevitably to carpentry. Among other useful skills.
As a child, I used to infuriate the city employees in my town by building small dams, trapping rainwater runoff, and forming substantial pools in low-lying intersections. (needless to say, it was a pretty small town) In more modern times, I built a desktop 4-axis CNC mill. Assembled is probably more accurate, I guess... Cat-5 makes great signal cable, even for driving servos/steppers. I've used it to cut wax forms for lost-wax casting in copper and silver. Ended up modifying the same machine to take Dreml bits (and the flex-drive, woot) since they're 90% cheaper than proper milling bits, which only last about twice as long.
As it happens, a frequency analysis reveals a strong peak at 15kHz (-8db), with the vast majority of the signal confined to a 1kHz band centered on 15kHz. Virtually all of the signal is within 2.5kHz of 15kHz. Much to my coworkers' dismay, I have access to a (software) tone generator. I can attest that a pure 15kHz tone is much worse than this file.
1989 Merkur XR4Ti. 2.3l 4cyl., 22.5mpg, 154,213 miles. 175 BHP (128.8kW), 200 ft-lb (271.2 NM). 7.9s 0-60, 120mph top end. Paint's faded, small crack in the dash. I've had a warped brake rotor and a bad driveshaft caused by guibo failure (previous owner's fault). I expect to replace plenty of mechanical parts (cv shafts, clutch, swap T9 for T5, etc.) over the next 50k mi. (the electrics are another story...) The engine? Solid as high-nickel steel. This despite poor maintenance, improper oil, and wastegate failure (leading to 10psi+ overpressure from turbo, 100+ degrees f increase in intake temp). Needless to say, I'm taking better care of it, but clearly not all 4-cylinder engines are equal. This engine has seen 50k miles of the roughest abuse an engine can be forced through AFTER 100k miles of rougher-than-average use, and it's still unbelievably fast. If only the Germans had a clue about wiring...
This is very long overdue... ITER may or may not make break-even, but it will prove whether or not a viable fusion plant could be built at some point in the future. All of the known problems are engineering (implementation) problems, not theory problems. If ITER is successful, it will justify spending more on fusion. If it's a miserable failure for appropriate reasons, it will justify diverting funding into other alternative energy sources.
FYI, the reason this is so enticing (aside from the coolness factor and the amount of money already spent) is that it lacks critical (from some perspectives) restrictions of the wind/solar/wave power methods, particularly the cap on peak power density. This is very important for industry. Consider the widely varied power requirements for various sectors of life (corporate, industrial, home, etc.); the power source needs to fit certain parameters. Right now, very powerful (economically and politically) sectors have energy requirements that don't fit well with most alt energy methods. That could be changed, given enough incentive, but the best fit right now appears to be fusion. Whether that proves to be true is something that ITER will answer for us.
Seriously, though, the medical advances alone more than made up for the costs of NASA projects, let alone the advances for industry, computer science, prediction (weather, failure, astronomical, engine performance, etc), and others. Counting things that were either invented or significantly advanced by NASA's projects over the years, we get this list of notables, and hundreds of others not mentioned:
X-ray structural analysis Non-invasive optical breast biopsy via CCD Virtual Reality systems Semiconductor cubing Laser surveying Thermoelectric heating/cooling (think hot/cold coolers) Rugged optical coatings (also fogless optics) Air and water purification systems and monitoring/testing systems Food preparation and storage (freeze-drying; ~20+ year shelf life) Quartz crystal timing devices (read: digital watch) Solar panels Radiation shielding Satellites (GPS, vegetation monitoring, weather monitoring) Fire-resistant fabric Excimer lasers MRI Magnetic bearings Wireless communications Doppler radar Robots (including robotic hands, software, extensive work on sensing and partial autonomy) Emergency cutters (Jaws of Life) Vehicle flywheels, brakes, etc. Composites Fuel cells Advanced lubricants and solid lubricant coatings
Still think it wasn't worth it? (not that you think that per se, but others surely do)
I should have been more precise. I did admit to mangling the fine art of statistics, though. In proper terms, this means that instead of a 1/100,000 chance of an impact next year, it might actually be 1/1,000. Such a dramatic change in a value we once held to be pretty accurate is jarring, particularly given the subject matter.
As stated previously by others, though, this survey is turning up smaller impacts than we typically see on land. Probably, this is because erosion on land erases craters of this size much more quickly. The underwater variety fill up with sediments and are not at all apparent without localized gravitational measurements, but they remain observable for much longer. So, it may still be that the probability of an earth-level event happening in a given year is still 1/100,000, but we're finding out that the probability of a major impact dealing local or regional devastation may be a hundred times more likely.
Even so, this is still very much up in the air. There remain many more sites to be found and verified before we can establish a reasonable baseline from which to extrapolate probability values. It's all well and good to claim a 1/1,000 chance, but at this point it's still just an educated guess.
I'll remember to be more precise when posting in the science section. Thanks for the correction.
I stand corrected.
You're absolutely right: a 10-megaton impact would be quite surviveable for the majority of humans. Certainly locally catastrophic, but bomb shelters and the like would be useful down to some distance from impact (based on size, density, velocity, and material at impact, as well as shelter design). I did specify 'large impact', but it was in the context of the article, so that would equate to about 10 megatons.
This would help explain how they came up with the 1,000 year per impact number as opposed to the.5 million year per impact number. Their definition of 'major' apparently differs... of course, it may be that they can find evidence from much smaller impacts underwater due to this gravitational scanning technology than are observable on land after x thousands of years of erosion. Since smaller impacts presumably happen more often, that would make the rate of 10-megaton impacts much faster than that of 1,000 megaton impacts, for instance.
OK, so the square and cube symbols didn't transfer, for some reason. Here it is again in caret notation.
2 * area of manhattan = 120 km^2 * height of chrysler building (0.319 km) = 38.28 km^3 .001 km *.003 km * 850 km =.0255 km^3, rounded to 0.03 km^3 to account for non-shelving space.
Thus, the area in question, 38.28 km^3 = 1,276 cLoC.
Apologies for the mistake; it previewed correctly:(
Manhattan's area is about 60 km. The Chrysler building is 0.319 km tall. The volume in question is thus 120km * 0.319km = 38.28km.
Estimates on the volume of the Library of Congress vary, partly because it is housed in three separate buildings, and floor plans aren't immediately available, nor are values for area or volume. This answer will use the listed shelf space as a least-volume indicator, assuming the shelves are 3 meters high and 1 meter deep. This is totally arbitrary, but should give a rough estimate. The listed length of shelf space in the LoC is 850km. Thus, this estimate of the volume of one LoC is:.001km *.003km * 850km = 0.0255 km.
Thus, the number of cubic Libraries of Congress, or cLoC, is 38.28 km / 0.0255 km = 1,501.1765 cLoC. Admittedly, the LoC contains considerable space not used for shelving. This may push the estimate of the LoC's volume to as high as 0.03 km. Given this upper bound (again, based purely on a blind estimate), this gives a value of 1,276 cLoC.
In light of the difficulties inherent in using the same name for units of mass, volume, data, bandwidth, and potentially more units, I propose that the more common usage of the unit LoC as applied to data be denoted sLoC (storage, roughly 20 terabytes), and the bandwidth variety be termed bLoC (or sLoC/s, roughly 20 Tb/s). Mass can readily be termed mLoC, and volume, as used above, can be termed cLoC (roughly 0.03 km).
Now that I've wasted far too much of my time, I need to be getting back to work. Thanks for asking.
Remember if we're talking huge tidal waves from a large meteor impact, the people who witness this wave (albeit briefly) are quite unlikely to survive long enough to tell others about it.
Yes and no... There are places where mountain chains run right into the ocean, for starters. A few people could have survived. Besides, people who lived far enough away from shore, or high enough to avoid the surge, would have been able to see the devastation long after the event. If you were to go to New Orleans today, you'd see evidence of the devastation wrought by the (somewhat) recent hurricanes. A megatsunami would leave permanent scars; coastlines would be reformed, low-lying vegetation wiped away, the courses of rivers changed, etc. People would eventually find out, and the scars on the land wouldn't fade for decades, if not centuries. For that matter, if we looked closely enough, we could probably find fairly convincing evidence for this megatsunami scenario having actually happened several thousand years ago anywhere we care to look (within reason).
Of course, that does not disprove the fact you've pointed out, namely that early humanity was tied very closely to water. Floods were locally devastating events that remained in the cultural consciousness for many generations, often growing in the retelling. The prime difficulty faced by researchers investigating the factual basis of myths is, in fact, picking out the little bits of truth from all the embellishments.
As for dying, should a large impact occur, you're exactly right. We'll be dying by the billions. All the preparation in the world would be meaningless if a hefty chunk of rock were to impact anywhere near you at a few kilometers per second. The only realistic means of preserving humanity in such an event would be successfully, sustainably establishing a permanent human presence in space before it all went down. Not a few people in a space station, but thousands or more wherever we can make it work. For those of you against colonization for financial reasons, I'm not advocating devoting our entire world production to this. It doesn't make sense to place all of your eggs in the same basket. We should be putting serious effort into many areas of improvement, space colonization among them.
Slashdot Mirror
ok.
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
Does that sound more like your average band is making money hand over fist, or being bent over sideways?
$5.85/hr for 40hrs/wk (which a lot of people are lucky to get; most places cut you off at 36) is $234/wk, $936/mo, $12,168/yr. Taxes are about 15% at that wage, so you're looking at $10k per year. Nobody really lives on that; it's minimal survival, especially for a 'first-world' country. Housing and food costs vary wildly, but you can expect to pay about 80% of your after-tax income on basic needs (shelter, food, cheap clothes, electricity). Note that this doesn't include medical insurance, car insurance, gas, or any form of entertainment. Offering credit to someone in this situation is almost criminal, because it's quite likely they won't be able to keep up with it. One bounced check, late payment, or short paycheck, and they're screwed more thoroughly than a porn star; the fees and interest quickly outstrip their available income.
Construction and manual labor is more like $8-$10/hr, more for trades like pipefitters, electricians, etc.
A white-collar service job might net you $9-$15/hr. Specialists could see $25/hr or more, after 4+ additional years of training and certification, plus relevant experience.
Basically, unless you put yourself into nearly lifelong debt for a degree (and manage to choose a good one), you're capped at about three times the poverty level unless you get a decade of experience or move into management/business ownership. Any opportunity beyond $12-$13/hr is pretty rare, and either physically or mentally punishing. (major exceptions are administration and government/military contract work) Another thing to consider is that once you move past $20k/yr, your taxes rise from 15% up to around 22%. Additionally, locations with moderate to high pay rates have correspondingly high costs of living. There are cities in the US where a McDonald's employee makes over $10/hr to start; unfortunately, almost everything is 2-2.5x more expensive, which leaves them worse off once increased taxes are factored in.
For more economic details, have a look at the census bureau, http://www.census.gov/. Latest data is from 2000.
If you want to know more about our tax system, have a look at the ever-dreaded IRS here: http://www.irs.gov/.
U.S. minimum wage is $5.85, unless you're wait-staff. This is due to a July '07 increase; for the past several years it was $5.15.
Besides, if the CEO is paying someone $100/hr to research speeches, he's not paying her to research speeches... unless you consider 'research' to be equal to 'fellatio'.
Seriously, is there anyone in the states that can actually handle a little power without completely losing it? Granted, bad news is the best news, but you never hear about the guy that runs his company/organization responsibly, obeys the law and general morality, and doesn't screw a whole bunch of people, whether literally or figuratively? (bachelors excepted on the literal screwing, of course.) The worst part in this case is that it's a college that's getting screwed with. Education is critical, yet it's subject to some of the worst parts of both corporate and governmental corruption, massive administration bloat, micro-managing, and infighting. It's almost a miracle that anyone comes out of it as a productive human.
disclaimers: I live in the U.S. This post not intended to imply doubt of our grand overlord bush. No terroristic, subversive, or dissenting opinions intended or implied. fnordDo not read. Discard unused portion, do not store. All hail Eris Discordia.
Consider acquiring an AudioScience card. You'll find a new one costs as much or more than your father's CD player ($1k-$2k range). Heard of HD radio? The ASI 6000 series cards are commonly used in the broadcast industry to produce audio streams for HD broadcast, not to mention AM/FM, for the same reason the studios use high bitrate masters (highest quality before final compression). The whole point of a CD is that it is digital; any reader will read out the same data (barring damage not recoverable via CRC, etc). It's the audio processing hardware that makes the difference, and it is most certainly possible to get that kind of professional-grade hardware for a PC.
If an ASI is a bit out of your range, or you're just masochistic (wrt driver hell), consider an Echo Leyla or a Delta 1010. If that's still too far out there, try one of the 32bit/192kHz soundblaster cards that does 7.1 surround.
On the other hand, if you need lots and lots of audio channels at arbitrary quality, and you happen to have a beefy gigabit network, check out Axia. They're doing some straight out amazing things with audio over IP and centralized (read: rackmount) audio processing gear. That has nothing to do with home PC audio playback, I admit, but it does have implications for independant studios and audio gear for live shows.
Have you ever tried using Rivendell?
Best be using SuSE pro, or best of luck getting the GPIO or ASI components to compile.
If you've used any other automation system, the interface makes little sense.
Those issues aside, if you can make it work, go for it. It's probably a bit much just for streaming to a shoutcast server, but I don't have any personal experience with a program that is just right.
spot-on... that'll teach me to think before typing.
Good luck on the ongoing troll hunt, too.
As for the issue at hand, I've read through more comments and such, and my opinion is the same. If a motherboard manufacturer is unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to make their pata ports bootable (directly, out of the box, no floppys, no workarounds), then don't include them in the first place. Deleting the pata pins (and controller) in favor of several sata connections is a great idea, so long as it's made obvious that it is a sata-only board. If a mobo-maker wants to add a controller chip after the fact, it needs to work the same way any other controller would (read: bootable).
Sure, there will be adapters and hardware workarounds to allow booting from pata, and there are sata optical drives available. That's not the point. The complaint is that it's harder or more expensive, not that it's impossible.
PATA: wide, flat cable for data + bastard MOLEX power cable = 2 cables.
SATA: small, narrow cable for data + (easy SATA | bastard MOLEX) power cable = 2 cables.
It's two cables either way. The exception is optical drives with an analog audio cable (for three total cables), and that works the same for both types of IDE optical drives. That said, you're absolutely correct about stock parts and thermal performance. Use a decent case and you'll be way ahead of the game anyway.
There is currently no good reason to disallow booting from PATA drives of any sort. Maybe in 5-10 years, once the vast majority of PATA devices have died and are replaced by SATA versions, it will be worthwhile to delete the PATA controllers entirely. Until then, don't screw around with basic functionality. Either have a fully functional controller or none at all, but don't half-ass it in an attempt at forcing hardware upgrades.
Like all genetic regrowth techniques, this one has a long way to go before it could be used in humans. At present, it involves using pig cells incubated in the abdominal tissue of living rats. Fascinating, to be sure, but not quite mainstream yet.
It is interesting that this group is using collagen sponges as scaffolding; I'm glad to hear research has continued with that technique to the point that it is functional for growing complex tissues.
This is certainly promising; the step from here to fully-regrown teeth is not overwhelming. Still, I wouldn't bet on your Coca-Cola stocks skyrocketing just yet.
Addendum: I missed a few things.
There are some talk/news stations, and listener base is much lower during the overnight shift.
Even so, slashing the losses in half (way more than enough to account for the discrepancy) leaves an obligation of at least $50m yearly. That's assuming none of these stations get particularly popular.
--Zero
Disclaimer: The company I work for is owned by Clear Channel. These comments are my own views and do not reflect the views of my employers.
Have you considered who will be paying the most? This year, every Clear Channel station in the top 100 markets will be simulcast streaming. That's on the order of 1,300 stations, +/- 100 or so. Since I've already done the math, I'll clue you in.
Using an average of one song per four minutes, each station will be playing 131,400 songs per year. That's $144.54 per station per listener. TFA quotes 500 listeners as average; that works out to:
100 listeners: $14,454 --- 500 listeners: $72,270 --- 1,000 listeners: $144,540
At 1,300 stations or so, that means this ruling will cost Clear Channel:
100/station: $18.8m --- 500/station: $94m --- 1,000/station: $188m
I can tell you firsthand they are not making that kind of revenue on their streaming side. Clear Channel stands to lose on the order of $100m this year. Ad revenue might help offset it next year, but we're still looking in the range of $100m or so for 2008 as well. CC most definately did not sign up to lose $150-300m in the next two years; it's really not a good time.
On a side note: If you want to hear something new on a Clear Channel station, call in or email the PD (production director). Tell him or her you want to hear it. Ask them to check CCADS ('seecads'). If it's not available, tell them to request it from Bobby Leach. Offer to lend them your cd, if it's safe for radio play. Call in or email your favorite jock; tell them to bug their PD about getting the track. Get your friends to request it. If you know people in other major cities, ask them to do the same. If you're not asking the impossible, they will listen and your favorite track will get played. As a bonus, if it gets into the system, anyone can request it in any city and they won't have as much hassle.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387
...provided without warranty, responsibility, or any representations of any particular function, do not use, sacrifice a chicken in the name of FSM, etc., etc.... please don't smite the server and get me fired...
or you can use ours...
ftp://ftp.prophetsys.com/Drivers/DST/DSTtool.exe
Bear in mind that it does nothing whatsoever to resolve issues arising from programs scheduling things during the whole transition, or networks that require a central timekeeping source, or anything else mentioned in other posts. It just and only fixes your daylight savings database and current timezone settings. No restart needed, how nice.
By the way, radio automation is one of those time-sensitive systems that get really finniky about DST. This tool plays nice with our systems (because they are already designed to read DST from windows), but it might just break yours.
This is something useful... Real photographers often don't have the cash to shell out for a top-of-the-line graphics processing server. Something like this should make it easier for smaller photography businesses to get into digital tech. Less actual film, less darkroom time/space/supplies, faster turnaround... all good for the little guy.
"Um, Ender called, and he doesn't think that's funny..."
Anyway, what's the big surprise that activities requiring hand-eye coordination improve actual hand-eye coordination? Granted, some games would be better than others... It's also good to see some actual research in this regard...
Brilliant.
The dystopian hell depicted in Brazil is reason enough to tell the executive branch to go piss kerosene up a burning rope. Honestly, it's like he's trying to grab so much power that he can scare off the people that want him impeached or worse. In the process, any agency with clout is using the opportunity to get more access to private information in the name of counterterrorism.
To choose an extreme example, consider the impact of being publicly accused of a sex crime. A person in that situation can never recover their reputation. Granted, a government inquiry won't carry quite the impact that an allegation of sexual assault would carry, but there are repercussions. Given our government's fine history of absolute, impossible perfection in all matters of paperwork and private citizens , it is certain that random, innocent people will suffer because of failures on the part of government agencies. I may not have anything to hide, but that doesn't mean I would ever give up my privacy willingly. I feel that most people would agree with me, particularly if they hadn't been force-fed the idea that total surveillance is necessary for any safety at all. Those in power know this, so they work around the little problems (like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights) any way they can and as far from public knowlege as possible. It's downright criminal behavior, and anyone involved should be prosecuted for treason. End of story.
--Zero
Sometimes?
Cannabis leads inevitably to carpentry. Among other useful skills.
As a child, I used to infuriate the city employees in my town by building small dams, trapping rainwater runoff, and forming substantial pools in low-lying intersections. (needless to say, it was a pretty small town)
In more modern times, I built a desktop 4-axis CNC mill. Assembled is probably more accurate, I guess... Cat-5 makes great signal cable, even for driving servos/steppers. I've used it to cut wax forms for lost-wax casting in copper and silver. Ended up modifying the same machine to take Dreml bits (and the flex-drive, woot) since they're 90% cheaper than proper milling bits, which only last about twice as long.
As it happens, a frequency analysis reveals a strong peak at 15kHz (-8db), with the vast majority of the signal confined to a 1kHz band centered on 15kHz. Virtually all of the signal is within 2.5kHz of 15kHz.
Much to my coworkers' dismay, I have access to a (software) tone generator. I can attest that a pure 15kHz tone is much worse than this file.
Funny...
For the underinformed, that's Nuclear-Biological-Chemical.
How about BOAKYAG? Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. Roughly equalivent.
1989 Merkur XR4Ti.
2.3l 4cyl., 22.5mpg, 154,213 miles. 175 BHP (128.8kW), 200 ft-lb (271.2 NM). 7.9s 0-60, 120mph top end.
Paint's faded, small crack in the dash. I've had a warped brake rotor and a bad driveshaft caused by guibo failure (previous owner's fault). I expect to replace plenty of mechanical parts (cv shafts, clutch, swap T9 for T5, etc.) over the next 50k mi. (the electrics are another story...)
The engine? Solid as high-nickel steel. This despite poor maintenance, improper oil, and wastegate failure (leading to 10psi+ overpressure from turbo, 100+ degrees f increase in intake temp).
Needless to say, I'm taking better care of it, but clearly not all 4-cylinder engines are equal. This engine has seen 50k miles of the roughest abuse an engine can be forced through AFTER 100k miles of rougher-than-average use, and it's still unbelievably fast.
If only the Germans had a clue about wiring...
Apology accepted. Now who are the other two?
This is very long overdue... ITER may or may not make break-even, but it will prove whether or not a viable fusion plant could be built at some point in the future. All of the known problems are engineering (implementation) problems, not theory problems. If ITER is successful, it will justify spending more on fusion. If it's a miserable failure for appropriate reasons, it will justify diverting funding into other alternative energy sources.
FYI, the reason this is so enticing (aside from the coolness factor and the amount of money already spent) is that it lacks critical (from some perspectives) restrictions of the wind/solar/wave power methods, particularly the cap on peak power density. This is very important for industry. Consider the widely varied power requirements for various sectors of life (corporate, industrial, home, etc.); the power source needs to fit certain parameters. Right now, very powerful (economically and politically) sectors have energy requirements that don't fit well with most alt energy methods. That could be changed, given enough incentive, but the best fit right now appears to be fusion. Whether that proves to be true is something that ITER will answer for us.
What did we get out of it?
Tang.
Seriously, though, the medical advances alone more than made up for the costs of NASA projects, let alone the advances for industry, computer science, prediction (weather, failure, astronomical, engine performance, etc), and others.
Counting things that were either invented or significantly advanced by NASA's projects over the years, we get this list of notables, and hundreds of others not mentioned:
X-ray structural analysis
Non-invasive optical breast biopsy via CCD
Virtual Reality systems
Semiconductor cubing
Laser surveying
Thermoelectric heating/cooling (think hot/cold coolers)
Rugged optical coatings (also fogless optics)
Air and water purification systems and monitoring/testing systems
Food preparation and storage (freeze-drying; ~20+ year shelf life)
Quartz crystal timing devices (read: digital watch)
Solar panels
Radiation shielding
Satellites (GPS, vegetation monitoring, weather monitoring)
Fire-resistant fabric
Excimer lasers
MRI
Magnetic bearings
Wireless communications
Doppler radar
Robots (including robotic hands, software, extensive work on sensing and partial autonomy)
Emergency cutters (Jaws of Life)
Vehicle flywheels, brakes, etc.
Composites
Fuel cells
Advanced lubricants and solid lubricant coatings
Still think it wasn't worth it?
(not that you think that per se, but others surely do)
I should have been more precise. I did admit to mangling the fine art of statistics, though. In proper terms, this means that instead of a 1/100,000 chance of an impact next year, it might actually be 1/1,000. Such a dramatic change in a value we once held to be pretty accurate is jarring, particularly given the subject matter.
As stated previously by others, though, this survey is turning up smaller impacts than we typically see on land. Probably, this is because erosion on land erases craters of this size much more quickly. The underwater variety fill up with sediments and are not at all apparent without localized gravitational measurements, but they remain observable for much longer. So, it may still be that the probability of an earth-level event happening in a given year is still 1/100,000, but we're finding out that the probability of a major impact dealing local or regional devastation may be a hundred times more likely.
Even so, this is still very much up in the air. There remain many more sites to be found and verified before we can establish a reasonable baseline from which to extrapolate probability values. It's all well and good to claim a 1/1,000 chance, but at this point it's still just an educated guess.
I'll remember to be more precise when posting in the science section. Thanks for the correction.
I stand corrected. .5 million year per impact number. Their definition of 'major' apparently differs... of course, it may be that they can find evidence from much smaller impacts underwater due to this gravitational scanning technology than are observable on land after x thousands of years of erosion. Since smaller impacts presumably happen more often, that would make the rate of 10-megaton impacts much faster than that of 1,000 megaton impacts, for instance.
You're absolutely right: a 10-megaton impact would be quite surviveable for the majority of humans. Certainly locally catastrophic, but bomb shelters and the like would be useful down to some distance from impact (based on size, density, velocity, and material at impact, as well as shelter design). I did specify 'large impact', but it was in the context of the article, so that would equate to about 10 megatons.
This would help explain how they came up with the 1,000 year per impact number as opposed to the
OK, so the square and cube symbols didn't transfer, for some reason. Here it is again in caret notation.
.001 km * .003 km * 850 km = .0255 km^3, rounded to 0.03 km^3 to account for non-shelving space. :(
2 * area of manhattan = 120 km^2 * height of chrysler building (0.319 km) = 38.28 km^3
Thus, the area in question, 38.28 km^3 = 1,276 cLoC.
Apologies for the mistake; it previewed correctly
Manhattan's area is about 60 km. The Chrysler building is 0.319 km tall. The volume in question is thus 120km * 0.319km = 38.28km. .001km * .003km * 850km = 0.0255 km.
Estimates on the volume of the Library of Congress vary, partly because it is housed in three separate buildings, and floor plans aren't immediately available, nor are values for area or volume. This answer will use the listed shelf space as a least-volume indicator, assuming the shelves are 3 meters high and 1 meter deep. This is totally arbitrary, but should give a rough estimate. The listed length of shelf space in the LoC is 850km. Thus, this estimate of the volume of one LoC is:
Thus, the number of cubic Libraries of Congress, or cLoC, is 38.28 km / 0.0255 km = 1,501.1765 cLoC. Admittedly, the LoC contains considerable space not used for shelving. This may push the estimate of the LoC's volume to as high as 0.03 km. Given this upper bound (again, based purely on a blind estimate), this gives a value of 1,276 cLoC.
In light of the difficulties inherent in using the same name for units of mass, volume, data, bandwidth, and potentially more units, I propose that the more common usage of the unit LoC as applied to data be denoted sLoC (storage, roughly 20 terabytes), and the bandwidth variety be termed bLoC (or sLoC/s, roughly 20 Tb/s). Mass can readily be termed mLoC, and volume, as used above, can be termed cLoC (roughly 0.03 km).
Now that I've wasted far too much of my time, I need to be getting back to work. Thanks for asking.
Remember if we're talking huge tidal waves from a large meteor impact, the people who witness this wave (albeit briefly) are quite unlikely to survive long enough to tell others about it.
Yes and no... There are places where mountain chains run right into the ocean, for starters. A few people could have survived. Besides, people who lived far enough away from shore, or high enough to avoid the surge, would have been able to see the devastation long after the event. If you were to go to New Orleans today, you'd see evidence of the devastation wrought by the (somewhat) recent hurricanes. A megatsunami would leave permanent scars; coastlines would be reformed, low-lying vegetation wiped away, the courses of rivers changed, etc. People would eventually find out, and the scars on the land wouldn't fade for decades, if not centuries. For that matter, if we looked closely enough, we could probably find fairly convincing evidence for this megatsunami scenario having actually happened several thousand years ago anywhere we care to look (within reason).
Of course, that does not disprove the fact you've pointed out, namely that early humanity was tied very closely to water. Floods were locally devastating events that remained in the cultural consciousness for many generations, often growing in the retelling. The prime difficulty faced by researchers investigating the factual basis of myths is, in fact, picking out the little bits of truth from all the embellishments.
As for dying, should a large impact occur, you're exactly right. We'll be dying by the billions. All the preparation in the world would be meaningless if a hefty chunk of rock were to impact anywhere near you at a few kilometers per second. The only realistic means of preserving humanity in such an event would be successfully, sustainably establishing a permanent human presence in space before it all went down. Not a few people in a space station, but thousands or more wherever we can make it work. For those of you against colonization for financial reasons, I'm not advocating devoting our entire world production to this. It doesn't make sense to place all of your eggs in the same basket. We should be putting serious effort into many areas of improvement, space colonization among them.