To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
The need for "sleep" (regular periods of markedly reduced activity, distinct from mere rest) is virtually universal across the vertebrate sub-phylum at least, with a last common ancestor 500 million years ago, found in every family (though not necessarily obviously so in every species).
This extraordinary common pattern in creatures with radically different environments and life habits, persisting over such a vast stretch of evolutionary time, alone suggests there is not "one reason" for it, and indeed a lot of research has uncovered many necessary processes associated with sleep, which go hay-wire at different rates when sleep is denied. In fact going without sleep is lethal, usually killing animals faster than starvation.
Evolutionary biology offers a coherent explanation for all of these facts. Periods of inactivity to conserve energy and reduce exposure to predators is an evolutionary advantage, so a branch of evolutionary descent would tend to develop such a pattern if one did not already exist. Once a regular period of reduced activity exists biological processes that are more efficient or effective during periods of inactivity would tend to migrate in timing to coincide with it. Thus many biological processes, related or not, would in time become associated with this "sleep" period in a common pattern of convergent evolution, and the organism would become dependent on sleep periods for many unrelated biological reasons.
For what I hope are obvious reasons, Microsoft cares the most about those users!
And yet, only half of all employees work for large enterprises (according to the Census Bureau), and just about every employee, and lots and lots of non-employees have their own computers at home. So those users, which even you - a self-verified Microsoft pitch-man (to use a polite term) - readily admit are less "cared" about by Microsoft are the large majority of their total user base, and the source of the large majority of its revenues.
Thanks for confirming that only Big Boys get respect and decent treatment from the Redmond Mafia, all rest of us peons are only here to be "harvested".
Saurischians are dinosaurs, dinosaurs are saurischians. Birds are saurischians. Birds are dinosaurs.
Since the publication of The Origin of Species, and the flurry of evolutionary classification that took off after it, birds have been recognized as some kind of Archosaur or another. Birds have always been known to have been dinosaurs.
You are certainly correct that the identification of birds with dinosaurs was proposed quite early, but it is going a bit too far to say that was generally "known" to be the case. The "Are Bird's Dinosaurs?" debate, was absolutely a topic of argument for a century and a half, but is really two overlapping debates. The first is the actual descent of birds from fossilized (proposed) ancestors, and the second is a fundamental one for evolutionary classification, how should you group species (i.e. what is a taxon)?
Linnaean taxonomy was based on grouping species by common characteristics, but this created lots of paraphyletic and polyphyletic taxons. A paraphyletic taxon includes an ancestor, but only some of its descendants as member; a polyphyletic taxon excludes the common ancestor of the members and usually some of the other descendants as well (convergent evolution is a common reason for this).
Cladistics, the use of statistical grouping methods (aided by computers), clarified things considerably starting in the 1960s, and then genetic analysis put it into hyperdrive, proving the fundamental correctness of the cladistic approach, and giving it an unambiguous standard of validity. Modern groupings invariably strive to be monophyletic.
Cladisitics actually helped clarify the interpretation of the fossil record for birds so in the 1980s biology came to recognize that a consistent method of classification, combined with a better interpretation of fossil evidence required birds to be classified as a type of dinosaur.
It really is more than a matter of changing labels. This did create a change in understanding about how to think about dinosaurs based on the surviving branch of the taxon, and about the origin and nature of birds.
Multiples of 3 are just so much more useful in everyday life than multiples of 10. I used the base 12 pica/point system in printing for many years, and always admired how trivially easy it was to calculate layout proportions. The human attention is drawn strongly to things in threes: three panels, three points in an argument, three parts to a story, and many others.
More than just the magic of 3. Since 12 has the three smallest (non-trivial) integer divisors, and four of the five smallest, it is simple to do many proportional (ratio) calculations and measurements. 10 only has two (non-trivial) integer divisors.
This extended to adding 5 and 6 as divisors gives the 360 degree division of the circle, invented by the Sumerians and adopted universally around the Old World (along with their division of the day into 12, then 24 hours, for similar reasons). Utility is proven by use.
And we need to build a breeder reactor to reduce the volume of nuclear waste by 2 orders of magnitude.
No we don't, and it doesn't.
Currently nuclear waste volume consists of spent fuel rods which can be stored safely and permanently in dry casks. Currently power reactors need a core change every two years, one core load takes 4 dry casks to store. Dry cask storage takes about 25 square meters per cask (with generous "walk around space"), so that load could be stored in 100 square meters. Over a 50 year period this is only 25 fuel rod loads, or 100 casks, taking up 2500 square meters. Throw in all 100 reactors operating in the U.S., and that is 250,000 square meters, or about 65 acres. This is not a problem that needs "solving". It is already solved.
And reprocessing with breeder reactors does NOT "reduce the volume of nuclear waste by 2 orders of magnitude"! This is a made-up number. What reprocessing can do is remove the long-lived actinides for burning up in special actinide burner reactors (which need not be "breeders"), but the cost of this is very high. Currently the problem nuclear power has is its high capital cost that makes it financially unattractive to build new reactors. For any chance at commercial viability nuclear power must keep the fuel cost part of the system as low as possible. Cheap cask storage is the best option for this, which is why the nuclear industry is opting for it.
Fortunately the wind blows at night. Here is a wind resources map for the United States. Lots and lots of consistently windy areas. Wind is cheaper than solar currently and in nine out the ten nations that top the renewable energy charts, there is more wind capacity than solar, and this is likely to remain the case.
With the use of high voltage DC transmission lines (a technology that has been in use since 1930) electricity can be shipped coast to coast with minor losses. 800 KV lines can transport electricity from one coast to the other with about the same losses as existing grids, about 6%. Constructing a national long distance electrical "highway" makes most of the "problems" perceived with renewable energy disappear. Just like now, there is not going to be just one source of power in the future, so solar does not have to do it all.
Even is solar "only" supplies the daytime peak load, this is half of the total electricity demand. In North America it is convenient that 40% of the entire U.S. population lives on the Eastern Seaboard, so that when it has its evening demand peak, the sunny west is three hours earlier and would still be producing a lot of solar electricity. Then there are proven power storage technologies like pumped water storage. Just considering existing pumped storage capacity, and capacity expansion that has applied for permits, we are looking at 76.7 GW of PS capacity in the U.S. which is 7.5% of U.S. peak electricity demand.
Greedo never fires, because Han shot him, and Greedo is dead.
Of course. Which it is so utterly stupid and insulting to the audience to have Greedo shoot first. Han would have been dead. They were sitting across from each other at an effing table for X's sake!
>> Unlikely. Lucas destroyed the originals when he made the Special Editions.
Whut? Why TF would he do that?
Because he is God of the Star Wars Universe and mere things like preservation of significant historical documents, and the desires of the fan base are nothing to him.
Lucas is a brilliant businessman, his career with LucasFilm and ILM speak for themselves. But his talents and wisdom as a director and creative force are extremely uneven, and he seems unable to consider the views of others, no matter how well founded and insightful. Again, his post Star Wars career speaks for itself. I think he was extremely lucky to have an astonishingly talented team working with him when he made Star Wars, and he was also lucky that he had to collaborate and let others make key decisions - he was not so successful at that point that he could be creative dictator.
When did we start patenting imaginary ideas without proof they work?
It has been standard practice since the mid-1980s.
The patent system has been converted into a system for large corporations to erect entry barriers and hobbles for competitors. They can afford to create a portfolio of merit-less patents to use as legal weapons against competitors and defenses against other large corporations with similar merit-less patent portfolios.
Invention, innovation, advancing the public good through demonstrations of superior art, have almost nothing to do with it anymore, except accidentally. But the corporations are very happy, and that's what count these days.
Justly rated "troll" right now. Kohath's "evidence" is simply doing a search using his unsupported statement, but look at the actual results of his search and his claim immediately collapses into smoking ruins. That's why he didn't post any of them.
The query will of course tend to bring up *any* similar claims, rather than tending to bring up objective rankings, but only one single source of this claim appears in the top 20 search results - an unscientific (i.e. self-selected) poll by Chief Executive magazine. That's it. No other source making this claim. (CEOs as a group, it should be noted, have a high proportion of sociopaths - or worse - a fact that should be born in mind when considering CEO opinions about things).
But of the eight or so independent state rankings that show up in this search, none of them places California at the bottom. It is 8th from the top on one, and in the middle of several others. Not even the one-note Tax Foundation, that uses only a single metric for rating everything (low taxes on businesses = heaven, high taxes on businesses = hell, nothing else matters) places California on the bottom of their list.
Larry is not just a Dem, but an ex leader of the Democrat Leadership Council in 1992 which saw in the Clintons. He has nothing in common w/ Trump or the GOP. If anything, he's probably in bed w/ Sacramento Dems
Not so fast. Trump himself was a Democrat from August 2001 to September 2009, eight years.
Being a self-interested opportunist of no fixed allegiance makes Ellison nearly a Trump clone (except, more competent business-wise).
Unfortunately the U.S. does use cluster bombs in a big way, and "dud" cluster munitions aren't much different from land mines in the civilian safety problem they present.
Now, it would be possible - and actually straightforward - to make cluster munitions that cannot create a long term safety hazard.
How? By using insensitive explosives detonated by an exploding bridge wire (EBW), or a "slapper" exploding foil (EF), detonator to directly fire the high explosive, with a circuit that has a designed-in power drain that will drain the battery dead within a certain period of time. Once the battery goes dead (as it must) the cluster munition could not detonate, and even throwing the munition in a fire would not make it explode.
As far as I know such cluster munition designs are not in use.
After all, maiming civilians is what it's all about for these brave warrior nations.
The US uses landmines only along the Korean DMZ, where there are no civilians.
Here is a link to that policy. The is now explicitly in compliance with the Ottawa Treaty (Mine Ban Treaty) with the sole exception of its use on the Korean DMZ, which is a closed, fenced, thoroughly marked, and patrolled military zone where there is no possibility of civilian (or for that matter military) encounter.
OTOH, the U.S. still uses sea mines, which can sink civilian ships as easily as military ones. Not quite the same problem as land mines, but not completely different either.
Autonomous missiles - those using their own radar emitters, and IR guided missiles - do indeed acquire their own targets. But they do not autonomously launch, even an anti-ship missile sent on an over-the-horizon attack was vectored toward a known target (or group of targets).
Of course this means that they may go astray and end up selecting the wrong target. This definitely happens on occasion, though usually the unintended "target" is another military platform in the area. It is alleged (but the truth of the matter is unclear) that Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 was shot down by a stray French missile, engaging Libyan aircraft, on 27 June 1980.
The only weapons that may autonomously launch/fire (after being activated by a human, to prevent friendly-fire kills) are terminal defense systems.
Wow, what a piece of content-less name-calling non-sequitur by a coward. Low even for an AC.
I provided plenty of documentation and links showing that the claiming it is "because of the endowment" is lie, pure and simple. The numbers don't lie. Wikpedia hype and ACs, well not so much.
Come back when are willing to argue facts with an actual bit/. identifier coward.
Sorry but your comment is dangerously ignorant. Your comment undermines their fundraising drive yet is reprehensibly ignorant of the scale of expenses that the Wikimedia Foundation has. You act as if all that money is irrelevant which totally ignores *EVERYTHING* about what needs to be done to provide readers what the volunteer editors have written and created.
This points to the key problem with WIkimedia.
If you look at the Charity Watch score for Wikipedia you see that is pretty high, indicating a well run charity. This seems odd given that there is actually very little public information about the actual uses to which the money is put (no, spending by broad accounting category - "engineering", "advertising", etc. does not provide this).
Examining the matter more closely it appears that Jimmy Wales has broken new ground in "charity engineering", operating a charity in such a way that the various scoring factors for a well-run charity are met, without actually providing any real transparency.
For most charities, that exist to provide services to specific classes of people say, you can tell if they are well-run by the fraction of money actually being spent on those people. Take as an example "Doctors Without Borders". It exists to put medical teams in war-torn and otherwise troubled areas who have none. You can assess its effectiveness by counting its teams and staffers, and the money that goes directly to supporting them.
If the purpose of Wikimedia is to support Wikipedia (that's their pitch on every page view) then they are an abysmally run charity. The total cost of supporting Wikipedia is about $8 million it seems - a fairly generous estimate really, with hosting costing only $2 million of this. They do not provide any convenient break-out of this, BTW, they hide the actual figure (but enough data, historical and otherwise, is available to make a good estimate), only the hosting figure is actually provided. The Wikipedia support cost disappeared from view when the aggressive, highly profitable fund-raising started. Thus of the ~$100 million they are collecting this year, only 8% goes to the supporting the mission they use to promote the fund-raising. Perhaps another 10% is going into the newly created endowment (we will have to see reporting for this year), but they are not being transparent about this thus far. By normal standards this would put them in the tank as a scam charity.
But they do have pages and pages about expansive vague goals, from which it is impossible assess how effective they are being, or where most of the money they spend is really going and which is being used for covering literally unlimited fundraising. Sure they are paying a lot of staff high salaries. But why? The exploding staff and grants are unconnected with non-existent exploding Wikipedia costs, or usage, or quality.
Actually in a sense the transparency that does exist, getting them high charity ratings, provides us with key data to see that they are (mostly) running a scam. You see we know their over-all balance sheet and can see that it has currently (making adjustments for unreported recent months) $100 million or so in unspent money, free and clear, and are piling it up at a rate of at least $30 million a year. This is enough money right now to fully fund that endowment.
Thanks for citing their marketing material. Every nonprofit-for-profit has "reasons" why they need all the money the solicit. But you need to peek behind the curtain to see if "reasons" are supported by actual data. It isn't hard.
And there are very serious questions about all that money being rushed out the door, who it is going to and why. There is a high level of self-dealing in passing out grants, and creating and filling the ballooning list of paid positions. It is very lucrative to be a "friend-of-Jimmy".
A glance at the financials shows that "building an endowment" is NOT the reason for the incessant fund-raising. First, the endowment was only launched this year, and their stated plan is to use only 10-20% of their fundraising revenue for that endowment. Currently they seem to be at the low end of that number (or below it) but we will need to see a report on 2016 to see the actual break-out. The goal of the endowment is to reach $100 million, but in their last annual foundation report (a 28 page advertising pamphlet with only one page of actual information) they state having $78 million in net assets as of 18 months ago, which is an increase of $25 million from the previous year report (almost all of it unrestricted).
If we assume that the net assets are only accumulating at the same rate as from June 2014 to June 2015 (by all data it is probably higher, much higher), then right now they have about $115 million in assets, more than enough to fully fund their foundation with soliciting a penny (they received at least $6 million in designated donations to the foundation when they set it up, so they no more than $94 million to make up to reach their stated goal.
So no. The foundation has nothing to do with their aggressive, relentless fund-raising.
I'd say a chemistry set, but they have been completely nerfed to the point of not being interesting anymore.
Yes, there has been a war on chemistry now for at least 30 years. Most outlets selling chemicals to hobbyists have disappeared.
However even now there are some decent options.
The only chemistry set on the market worth considering is the Thames & Kosmos C3000 set for $280. The less expensive Thames & Kosmos chem sets are not bad - they all have some real chemistry in them - but too limited. The Thamses & Kosmos set might get you busted in Texas though since it contains an Erlenmeyer flask (a special license is needed to possess one).
But you can buy any chemical or equipment needed for a legitimate hobby from Elemental Scientific LLC, and there is a nice book available by Robert Bruce Thompson called Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments which tells you everything you need to get. And, even better, Elemental Scientific sells its own chemistry sets based on the Thompson book! You buy the equipment and chemical sets separately.
Now that the seventh shell is complete the next man-made element will have to be in a new shell.
Does this make it much harder, or impossible, to create element 119?
Not on account of completing an electron shell, but yes, new ideas are needed to extend this list further - they seem to be at an end of the current methods.
Another addendum: what the book does report is the radioactivity of a few specific items found at the shed. The most radioactive was a vegetable can with a count rate of 50,000 CPM. Definitely radioactive, but to put this in context uranium glazed Fiestaware, which was sold to the public to eat off of as late as 1972, emits up to 30,000 CPM and yes, you can buy one of these for $39 today if you like.
The next most radioactive item was 6,000 CPM, one at 3,000, one at 1,500, and nothing else more than the low hundreds, not very radioactive at all.
Slashdot Mirror
To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
Hamlet's Soliloquy
The need for "sleep" (regular periods of markedly reduced activity, distinct from mere rest) is virtually universal across the vertebrate sub-phylum at least, with a last common ancestor 500 million years ago, found in every family (though not necessarily obviously so in every species).
This extraordinary common pattern in creatures with radically different environments and life habits, persisting over such a vast stretch of evolutionary time, alone suggests there is not "one reason" for it, and indeed a lot of research has uncovered many necessary processes associated with sleep, which go hay-wire at different rates when sleep is denied. In fact going without sleep is lethal, usually killing animals faster than starvation.
Evolutionary biology offers a coherent explanation for all of these facts. Periods of inactivity to conserve energy and reduce exposure to predators is an evolutionary advantage, so a branch of evolutionary descent would tend to develop such a pattern if one did not already exist. Once a regular period of reduced activity exists biological processes that are more efficient or effective during periods of inactivity would tend to migrate in timing to coincide with it. Thus many biological processes, related or not, would in time become associated with this "sleep" period in a common pattern of convergent evolution, and the organism would become dependent on sleep periods for many unrelated biological reasons.
For what I hope are obvious reasons, Microsoft cares the most about those users!
And yet, only half of all employees work for large enterprises (according to the Census Bureau), and just about every employee, and lots and lots of non-employees have their own computers at home. So those users, which even you - a self-verified Microsoft pitch-man (to use a polite term) - readily admit are less "cared" about by Microsoft are the large majority of their total user base, and the source of the large majority of its revenues.
Thanks for confirming that only Big Boys get respect and decent treatment from the Redmond Mafia, all rest of us peons are only here to be "harvested".
Saurischians are dinosaurs, dinosaurs are saurischians. Birds are saurischians. Birds are dinosaurs. Since the publication of The Origin of Species, and the flurry of evolutionary classification that took off after it, birds have been recognized as some kind of Archosaur or another. Birds have always been known to have been dinosaurs.
You are certainly correct that the identification of birds with dinosaurs was proposed quite early, but it is going a bit too far to say that was generally "known" to be the case. The "Are Bird's Dinosaurs?" debate, was absolutely a topic of argument for a century and a half, but is really two overlapping debates. The first is the actual descent of birds from fossilized (proposed) ancestors, and the second is a fundamental one for evolutionary classification, how should you group species (i.e. what is a taxon)?
Linnaean taxonomy was based on grouping species by common characteristics, but this created lots of paraphyletic and polyphyletic taxons. A paraphyletic taxon includes an ancestor, but only some of its descendants as member; a polyphyletic taxon excludes the common ancestor of the members and usually some of the other descendants as well (convergent evolution is a common reason for this).
Cladistics, the use of statistical grouping methods (aided by computers), clarified things considerably starting in the 1960s, and then genetic analysis put it into hyperdrive, proving the fundamental correctness of the cladistic approach, and giving it an unambiguous standard of validity. Modern groupings invariably strive to be monophyletic.
Cladisitics actually helped clarify the interpretation of the fossil record for birds so in the 1980s biology came to recognize that a consistent method of classification, combined with a better interpretation of fossil evidence required birds to be classified as a type of dinosaur.
It really is more than a matter of changing labels. This did create a change in understanding about how to think about dinosaurs based on the surviving branch of the taxon, and about the origin and nature of birds.
Phlogiston also put up quite a fight before finally going the way of the dodo.
It was tasty?
Mmmm... dodo, and phlogiston...
Multiples of 3 are just so much more useful in everyday life than multiples of 10. I used the base 12 pica/point system in printing for many years, and always admired how trivially easy it was to calculate layout proportions. The human attention is drawn strongly to things in threes: three panels, three points in an argument, three parts to a story, and many others.
More than just the magic of 3. Since 12 has the three smallest (non-trivial) integer divisors, and four of the five smallest, it is simple to do many proportional (ratio) calculations and measurements. 10 only has two (non-trivial) integer divisors.
This extended to adding 5 and 6 as divisors gives the 360 degree division of the circle, invented by the Sumerians and adopted universally around the Old World (along with their division of the day into 12, then 24 hours, for similar reasons). Utility is proven by use.
And we need to build a breeder reactor to reduce the volume of nuclear waste by 2 orders of magnitude.
No we don't, and it doesn't.
Currently nuclear waste volume consists of spent fuel rods which can be stored safely and permanently in dry casks. Currently power reactors need a core change every two years, one core load takes 4 dry casks to store. Dry cask storage takes about 25 square meters per cask (with generous "walk around space"), so that load could be stored in 100 square meters. Over a 50 year period this is only 25 fuel rod loads, or 100 casks, taking up 2500 square meters. Throw in all 100 reactors operating in the U.S., and that is 250,000 square meters, or about 65 acres. This is not a problem that needs "solving". It is already solved.
And reprocessing with breeder reactors does NOT "reduce the volume of nuclear waste by 2 orders of magnitude"! This is a made-up number. What reprocessing can do is remove the long-lived actinides for burning up in special actinide burner reactors (which need not be "breeders"), but the cost of this is very high. Currently the problem nuclear power has is its high capital cost that makes it financially unattractive to build new reactors. For any chance at commercial viability nuclear power must keep the fuel cost part of the system as low as possible. Cheap cask storage is the best option for this, which is why the nuclear industry is opting for it.
What about at night?
Fortunately the wind blows at night. Here is a wind resources map for the United States. Lots and lots of consistently windy areas. Wind is cheaper than solar currently and in nine out the ten nations that top the renewable energy charts, there is more wind capacity than solar, and this is likely to remain the case.
With the use of high voltage DC transmission lines (a technology that has been in use since 1930) electricity can be shipped coast to coast with minor losses. 800 KV lines can transport electricity from one coast to the other with about the same losses as existing grids, about 6%. Constructing a national long distance electrical "highway" makes most of the "problems" perceived with renewable energy disappear. Just like now, there is not going to be just one source of power in the future, so solar does not have to do it all.
Even is solar "only" supplies the daytime peak load, this is half of the total electricity demand. In North America it is convenient that 40% of the entire U.S. population lives on the Eastern Seaboard, so that when it has its evening demand peak, the sunny west is three hours earlier and would still be producing a lot of solar electricity. Then there are proven power storage technologies like pumped water storage. Just considering existing pumped storage capacity, and capacity expansion that has applied for permits, we are looking at 76.7 GW of PS capacity in the U.S. which is 7.5% of U.S. peak electricity demand.
Very well put!
You make an excellent case for the usage.
Han didn't shoot first.
Here's the order of operations:
Han shoots Greedo.
Greedo never fires, because Han shot him, and Greedo is dead.
Of course. Which it is so utterly stupid and insulting to the audience to have Greedo shoot first. Han would have been dead. They were sitting across from each other at an effing table for X's sake!
>> Unlikely. Lucas destroyed the originals when he made the Special Editions.
Whut? Why TF would he do that?
Because he is God of the Star Wars Universe and mere things like preservation of significant historical documents, and the desires of the fan base are nothing to him.
Lucas is a brilliant businessman, his career with LucasFilm and ILM speak for themselves. But his talents and wisdom as a director and creative force are extremely uneven, and he seems unable to consider the views of others, no matter how well founded and insightful. Again, his post Star Wars career speaks for itself. I think he was extremely lucky to have an astonishingly talented team working with him when he made Star Wars, and he was also lucky that he had to collaborate and let others make key decisions - he was not so successful at that point that he could be creative dictator.
Umm... perp?
When did we start patenting imaginary ideas without proof they work?
It has been standard practice since the mid-1980s.
The patent system has been converted into a system for large corporations to erect entry barriers and hobbles for competitors. They can afford to create a portfolio of merit-less patents to use as legal weapons against competitors and defenses against other large corporations with similar merit-less patent portfolios.
Invention, innovation, advancing the public good through demonstrations of superior art, have almost nothing to do with it anymore, except accidentally. But the corporations are very happy, and that's what count these days.
Justly rated "troll" right now. Kohath's "evidence" is simply doing a search using his unsupported statement, but look at the actual results of his search and his claim immediately collapses into smoking ruins. That's why he didn't post any of them.
The query will of course tend to bring up *any* similar claims, rather than tending to bring up objective rankings, but only one single source of this claim appears in the top 20 search results - an unscientific (i.e. self-selected) poll by Chief Executive magazine. That's it. No other source making this claim. (CEOs as a group, it should be noted, have a high proportion of sociopaths - or worse - a fact that should be born in mind when considering CEO opinions about things).
But of the eight or so independent state rankings that show up in this search, none of them places California at the bottom. It is 8th from the top on one, and in the middle of several others. Not even the one-note Tax Foundation, that uses only a single metric for rating everything (low taxes on businesses = heaven, high taxes on businesses = hell, nothing else matters) places California on the bottom of their list.
BTW, isn't "meaningless tautology" a superfluous redundancy?
Well played, sir.
Larry is not just a Dem, but an ex leader of the Democrat Leadership Council in 1992 which saw in the Clintons. He has nothing in common w/ Trump or the GOP. If anything, he's probably in bed w/ Sacramento Dems
Not so fast. Trump himself was a Democrat from August 2001 to September 2009, eight years.
Being a self-interested opportunist of no fixed allegiance makes Ellison nearly a Trump clone (except, more competent business-wise).
Unfortunately the U.S. does use cluster bombs in a big way, and "dud" cluster munitions aren't much different from land mines in the civilian safety problem they present.
Now, it would be possible - and actually straightforward - to make cluster munitions that cannot create a long term safety hazard.
How? By using insensitive explosives detonated by an exploding bridge wire (EBW), or a "slapper" exploding foil (EF), detonator to directly fire the high explosive, with a circuit that has a designed-in power drain that will drain the battery dead within a certain period of time. Once the battery goes dead (as it must) the cluster munition could not detonate, and even throwing the munition in a fire would not make it explode.
As far as I know such cluster munition designs are not in use.
After all, maiming civilians is what it's all about for these brave warrior nations.
The US uses landmines only along the Korean DMZ, where there are no civilians.
Here is a link to that policy. The is now explicitly in compliance with the Ottawa Treaty (Mine Ban Treaty) with the sole exception of its use on the Korean DMZ, which is a closed, fenced, thoroughly marked, and patrolled military zone where there is no possibility of civilian (or for that matter military) encounter.
OTOH, the U.S. still uses sea mines, which can sink civilian ships as easily as military ones. Not quite the same problem as land mines, but not completely different either.
Autonomous missiles - those using their own radar emitters, and IR guided missiles - do indeed acquire their own targets. But they do not autonomously launch, even an anti-ship missile sent on an over-the-horizon attack was vectored toward a known target (or group of targets).
Of course this means that they may go astray and end up selecting the wrong target. This definitely happens on occasion, though usually the unintended "target" is another military platform in the area. It is alleged (but the truth of the matter is unclear) that Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 was shot down by a stray French missile, engaging Libyan aircraft, on 27 June 1980.
The only weapons that may autonomously launch/fire (after being activated by a human, to prevent friendly-fire kills) are terminal defense systems.
There is an incident in South Africa when an automated anti-aircraft gun killed 9 people, while firing in some sort of autonomous state, but a mechanical failure was responsible.
Wow, what a piece of content-less name-calling non-sequitur by a coward. Low even for an AC.
I provided plenty of documentation and links showing that the claiming it is "because of the endowment" is lie, pure and simple. The numbers don't lie. Wikpedia hype and ACs, well not so much.
Come back when are willing to argue facts with an actual bit /. identifier coward.
Sorry but your comment is dangerously ignorant. Your comment undermines their fundraising drive yet is reprehensibly ignorant of the scale of expenses that the Wikimedia Foundation has. You act as if all that money is irrelevant which totally ignores *EVERYTHING* about what needs to be done to provide readers what the volunteer editors have written and created.
This points to the key problem with WIkimedia.
If you look at the Charity Watch score for Wikipedia you see that is pretty high, indicating a well run charity. This seems odd given that there is actually very little public information about the actual uses to which the money is put (no, spending by broad accounting category - "engineering", "advertising", etc. does not provide this).
Examining the matter more closely it appears that Jimmy Wales has broken new ground in "charity engineering", operating a charity in such a way that the various scoring factors for a well-run charity are met, without actually providing any real transparency.
For most charities, that exist to provide services to specific classes of people say, you can tell if they are well-run by the fraction of money actually being spent on those people. Take as an example "Doctors Without Borders". It exists to put medical teams in war-torn and otherwise troubled areas who have none. You can assess its effectiveness by counting its teams and staffers, and the money that goes directly to supporting them.
If the purpose of Wikimedia is to support Wikipedia (that's their pitch on every page view) then they are an abysmally run charity. The total cost of supporting Wikipedia is about $8 million it seems - a fairly generous estimate really, with hosting costing only $2 million of this. They do not provide any convenient break-out of this, BTW, they hide the actual figure (but enough data, historical and otherwise, is available to make a good estimate), only the hosting figure is actually provided. The Wikipedia support cost disappeared from view when the aggressive, highly profitable fund-raising started. Thus of the ~$100 million they are collecting this year, only 8% goes to the supporting the mission they use to promote the fund-raising. Perhaps another 10% is going into the newly created endowment (we will have to see reporting for this year), but they are not being transparent about this thus far. By normal standards this would put them in the tank as a scam charity.
But they do have pages and pages about expansive vague goals, from which it is impossible assess how effective they are being, or where most of the money they spend is really going and which is being used for covering literally unlimited fundraising. Sure they are paying a lot of staff high salaries. But why? The exploding staff and grants are unconnected with non-existent exploding Wikipedia costs, or usage, or quality.
Actually in a sense the transparency that does exist, getting them high charity ratings, provides us with key data to see that they are (mostly) running a scam. You see we know their over-all balance sheet and can see that it has currently (making adjustments for unreported recent months) $100 million or so in unspent money, free and clear, and are piling it up at a rate of at least $30 million a year. This is enough money right now to fully fund that endowment.
Thanks for citing their marketing material. Every nonprofit-for-profit has "reasons" why they need all the money the solicit. But you need to peek behind the curtain to see if "reasons" are supported by actual data. It isn't hard.
We can look at the exploding spending at Wikimedia.
And there are very serious questions about all that money being rushed out the door, who it is going to and why. There is a high level of self-dealing in passing out grants, and creating and filling the ballooning list of paid positions. It is very lucrative to be a "friend-of-Jimmy".
A glance at the financials shows that "building an endowment" is NOT the reason for the incessant fund-raising. First, the endowment was only launched this year , and their stated plan is to use only 10-20% of their fundraising revenue for that endowment. Currently they seem to be at the low end of that number (or below it) but we will need to see a report on 2016 to see the actual break-out. The goal of the endowment is to reach $100 million, but in their last annual foundation report (a 28 page advertising pamphlet with only one page of actual information) they state having $78 million in net assets as of 18 months ago, which is an increase of $25 million from the previous year report (almost all of it unrestricted).
If we assume that the net assets are only accumulating at the same rate as from June 2014 to June 2015 (by all data it is probably higher, much higher), then right now they have about $115 million in assets, more than enough to fully fund their foundation with soliciting a penny (they received at least $6 million in designated donations to the foundation when they set it up, so they no more than $94 million to make up to reach their stated goal.
So no. The foundation has nothing to do with their aggressive, relentless fund-raising.
I'd say a chemistry set, but they have been completely nerfed to the point of not being interesting anymore.
Yes, there has been a war on chemistry now for at least 30 years. Most outlets selling chemicals to hobbyists have disappeared.
However even now there are some decent options.
The only chemistry set on the market worth considering is the Thames & Kosmos C3000 set for $280. The less expensive Thames & Kosmos chem sets are not bad - they all have some real chemistry in them - but too limited. The Thamses & Kosmos set might get you busted in Texas though since it contains an Erlenmeyer flask (a special license is needed to possess one).
But you can buy any chemical or equipment needed for a legitimate hobby from Elemental Scientific LLC, and there is a nice book available by Robert Bruce Thompson called Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments which tells you everything you need to get. And, even better, Elemental Scientific sells its own chemistry sets based on the Thompson book! You buy the equipment and chemical sets separately.
Now that the seventh shell is complete the next man-made element will have to be in a new shell. Does this make it much harder, or impossible, to create element 119?
Not on account of completing an electron shell, but yes, new ideas are needed to extend this list further - they seem to be at an end of the current methods.
Another addendum: what the book does report is the radioactivity of a few specific items found at the shed. The most radioactive was a vegetable can with a count rate of 50,000 CPM. Definitely radioactive, but to put this in context uranium glazed Fiestaware, which was sold to the public to eat off of as late as 1972, emits up to 30,000 CPM and yes, you can buy one of these for $39 today if you like.
The next most radioactive item was 6,000 CPM, one at 3,000, one at 1,500, and nothing else more than the low hundreds, not very radioactive at all.