Japan had already offered surrender terms to the US before the bomb drop. They asked for the emperor to remain as a figurehead. We said in return that we would only accept unconditional surrender. We dropped the first bomb because we could, we dropped the second bomb for collaborative data. After they offered unconditional surrender, we let them keep the emperor as figurehead.
Nope they didn't. There were no offers from the government of Japan before the first atomic bombing, period. They did offer to surrender with retention of the Emperor with all his privileges and powers ("his prerogatives") after the first bomb. The U.S. rejected this offer, and dropped the second bomb, and the USSR declared war on Japan, and then the Japanese surrendered, abandoning their attempt to change the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
Look at India and Pakistan. Two countries at each other's throats for decades after they gained their independence, yet the moment the two got nuclear weapons, suddenly hostilities ceased.
Not quite. The Kargil War was fought between May and July 1999, after both nations had conducted nuclear tests and declared themselves nuclear armed.
Similarly, the Yom Kippur War in 1973 was an attack on Israel by Syria and Egypt at a time that both nations knew Israel was nuclear armed, and the Falkland Island War was fought against a nuclear armed UK.
What these all have in common is that they are limited wars. Kargil was small (~50,000 soldiers engaged combined) and fought over limited terrain. The Yom Kippur War huge, but the objectives of the attackers was limited, they were seeking to recover some (in the case of Egypt) or all (in the case of Syria) of their national soil lost in a war only 6 years before. The Falkland War was a colossal blunder mostly by one man (Admiral Jorge Anaya), rather than a well planned operation, but one indicates that the UKs nuclear forces were entirely discounted.
Nuclear weapons make the world safe for limited war, but that is enormously preferable to the unlimited kind.
That's the last place I'd want to build an industry, not just because of me but also my workers would have to deal with the heavy tax burden.
Consult the 2010 Ernst & Young study: "Total state and local business taxes
State-by-state estimates for fiscal year 2009" (http://www.cost.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=76116). You will find that the business tax burden in California, as a share of the state gross product, is 34th in the nation (last column on pg. 12). On a state ranking is BELOW the median, and is in the BOTTOM THIRD in fact. And on page 8, where it charts the ratio of business taxes to spending benefiting business (and if we pretend education does not benefit business at all) the California ratio is 2.68: 45th in the nation, far below the national average (3.50).
Taking into account that the total tax per capita burden only places it at 12th place, the fact is California is a moderate tax state, with LOW business taxes, and one of the most favorable business tax vs business support spending environments in the country.
But if you keep lying repeatedly really loudly, in a really angry voice, non-stop eventually people start to think there is something to what you say. Job well done!
Somehow I suspect the actual tax burden for a corporation wouldn't be measured well by either (tax $)/population or by (tax $)/($ personal income)? Perhaps corporate tax rates would be more relevant. Now I don't have any solid information, either -- can't be arsed to do my research -- but at least I'm not looking at plainly irrelevant figures and pretending that discredits someone.
A lot of attitude there for someone who knows nothing about the subject and is too lazy to look anything up, eh?
The per capita tax rate is very relevant for assessing the tax climate, especially since the OP specifically combined business and personal taxes in his angry factless bloviation. (Of course no right-winger can discuss taxes without being really! really! angry!).
If you add just one little factoid (easily looked up) that California relies disproportionately on personal income taxes (Meg Whitman is basing her whole campaign on slashing upper income tax rates - like her own), then you realize that the business burden must be unusually low.
And so it is: as percentage of the state gross product California business taxes are... wait for it... 28th in the nation. See the Ernst&Young study at: http://www.cost.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=76116 . Check out the last column on pg. 12.
That's right folks, the California state business tax burden is BELOW THE MEDIAN of all states!
TThat's reason number one. That's the last place I'd want to build an industry, not just because of me but also my workers would have to deal with the heavy tax burden.
Better someplace that has few taxes & doesn't steal (much) money from the workers' paychecks.
Yes, the crushing tax burden on the being in the second quintile of per capita taxes. According to the very conservative newspaper The OC Register (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/tax-270147-pay-increases.html?pic=19). California's total tax burden is 12th in total revenues collected per capita. Calculated as a percentage of income (California ranks 7th in income) it is even lower.
This is not an unreasonable tax burden for a state requiring the infrastructure and education to support a high-tech economy.
The bit equating all taxation with theft tips the reader that rationality is not forthcoming from the above poster. The real Tea Party (in 1773) believed in "No taxation without representation" not "No taxation!!!". I'm sure we would all be happier in the Libertarian Utopia where all services (if they exist) are provided by unregulated corporations. Possibly you should try it in rugged individualistic Alaska - which has the highest taxes in the country, and the largest amount of government spending per capita.
... I'm not saying that research like this shouldn't be done, but will anyone ever be able to provide solid 'data' about the universe conducting experiments on Earth? I would think you would have to do experiments in other environments, other than on Earth. All of the results of these experiments will have to allow for a large amount of beautiful math and a wonderful imagination.
Because the Earth is, after all, a fixed point in space?
The Sun moves relative to the galactic center 17 km/sec (thus covering 5.3 billion km in a decade). Earth travels 30 km/sec relative to the Sun, thus sweeping across a volume of space 300 million km across around the Sun annually, and a spiral path 10 billion km long each decade relative to the galaxy, while the Milky Way galaxy is moving at 630 km a second relative to the zero Hubble red shift frame of reference - which takes us over 200 billion km a decade. Physics experiments conducted a century ago where conducted at a point in space that is now 0.2 light years distant from where we are now!
So even just staying put here on Earth we are actually sampling a nice region of the Universe, especially thanks to our galactic glider. Now, if you think the properties of the Universe vary with their position relative to the Earth's center of mass we replicate physics experiments in space about as often as budgets allow, as well testing this possibility frequently on mountains and in aircraft. And there are those physics experiments we call probes we send to the outer reaches of the Solar System (one of which has shown up a slight anomaly). And let us not forget that direct observation of the distant Universe provides direct tests of the constancy of physical law.
So what are complaining about exactly? What should we be doing instead of what we are doing now?
Standard night vision uses near-infrared light to 'see'. It requires an infrared emitter to actually 'see' things. Normal human eyes cannot see this light. Military/industrial grade night vision uses sensors that picks infrared light generated from heat. This is the stuff you usually see in movies. (See FLIR entry in wikipedia)
This dark silicone picks up visible light, although it will be far more sensitive than current sensors. As long as it's not pitch black, a tiny amount of light that normal eyes cannot see will be sensed by it.
There are two types of night vision equipment - the cheaper near IR cameras mentioned above, and image intensifier tubes which enormously magnify visible light. The word "tubes" should alert you that IRTs are a vacuum tube technology, using vacuum ion cascades to magnify the image current. Perhaps "black silicon" will enable a solid state device to approach the performance of an IRT.
Where is the MathML (the official W3C mark-up language for mathematics) support?
Firefox has rendered MathML quite well for years now. Google's explanation was that "we will support MathML when webkit does". This was an annoying response, since a $200 billion dollar corporation with 20,000 geniuses as employees could certainly contribute the resources to webkit to add MathML in short order. But now webkit has got MathML implemented! And we have a new release of Chrome! So where is the MathML?
I have always found it ironic that the web was invented at a physics laboratory (CERN) specifically to publish scientific information (originally) but included no standard (not any mechanism) for displaying scientific formulas. All they had to do was add a tage (or something similar) to HTML so that conforming browsers had to render Tex (the code was freely available). To this very day people basically have to include pictures of formulas on web pages.
Apple products aren't "technically" impressive. They don't have the most power, they don't have the largest feature set, etc. Apple excels at technology integration (itunes musc store for example) and UI design. That's why for Apple products "Ooh, shiny" is more appropriate. Business-wise I would agree Apple is pretty innovative, but from a geeky technology standpoint they're kind of meh.
And thus the pain that is Desktop Linux continues. I use Ubuntu and Fedora for my home and office desktops (using Windows only when required) so I am an avid supporter of Desktop Linux but I am also intimately familiar with how far the user experience falls short. I set my teenage daughter up with a Lucid Lynx laptop and she is perfectly happy with it - but she is really smart geeky kid. For an ordinary user it is (as I said) a pain to use compared to Windows XP or 7, much less the polished interface of Apple; a judgement that my daughter, who uses all three, confirms.
Let's face it. A polished human-computer interface is as much an impressive technical achievement (much more so in fact) than a super-cool new application programming interface. And Apple's consistently top ranking reliability is an equally technically impressive in the hardware domain.
Indeed. I don't think that even Wikipedia should be run just like Wikipedia! The ability of Anonymous Cowards to change (almost*) anything on Wikipedia is a fatal flaw that is holding it back from ever being a reasonably reliable source of information on anything even slightly controversial. Requiring the creation of login (which would still be anonymous) before being able to make any change, and using user histories to make assessments of reliability to manage reversions, which edits "stick", etc. would have done a world of good to allowing Wikipedia to mature into something more than what it is.
*Used not to be "almost". The fact that this restriction was imposed demonstrates the fallacy of the idea. Locking down some content does not go nearly far enough.
Once Open Office (particularly Calc) can compete with Microsoft in terms of performance, stability, and features, then and only then will Microsoft need to worry about Open Office.
I have found Calc indispensible for it allows me to cut tables from browsers and paste it into a spreadsheet, and have it import perfectly. This has been of huge value to me. This does not work at all in Excel. Furthermore, I have found Excel to be a nightmare in its insistence on being "clever" and knowing better than me what is or should be in my document: insistently turning text that it thinks looks like email and web addresses into live links (something I have never wanted in my life), destroying text it thinks looks like dates into a non-recoverable form, its apparent inability to mix numbers (as text) and numbers (as numbers) in a single spreadsheet without nightmarish manual work-arounds, etc.
I have used Excel since before it was Excel (i.e. when it was still MultiPlan) and have found long ago that it passed the point of adding value and (as with most MS products) began adding misery instead. I happily use Calc and loathe having to fire up Excel now.
Meanwhile the so-called "liberals" seem intent to roll us back to Serfdom. It's as if they want to restore a 1500s-style political system in modern society, where the common man is treated like wards of the government....
Clearly you have no idea what governments and social conditions were like in the 1500s. "Wards of the government"?! Perhaps you have your education from Glenn Beck University?
... Last time I checked bookstores were not a social program....
Public libraries, and their book sales are however ABSOLUTELY a social program. Notice that word "public"? It is the public supporting it through taxes for the common good. And all libraries, except for private college libraries are public libraries. In addition, thrift stores generally operate as a form of social program. And it is from these two entities (public libraries and thrift stores) that the scanner gets the majority of his stock.
I believe that should be: "In a modern realistic theory of markets, definitely not. In practice, also definitely not...
Although many economics discussion on-line seem to be informed only by a haphazard reading of Adam Smith, much progress has been made in recent decades in developing economic theories that actually resemble real world behavior with its costs and quite noticeable failures. The perfection of free markets is ideology (or worse, campaign rhetoric), not economics.
There are satellite-guided air-to-air missiles? I have a feeling a satellite-guided missile trying to hit a moving target would be about as successful as a satellite-connected microtrading system.
Satellite-guided == GPS. You may have heard of it.It was developed for military purposes long before it started telling you how to drive your SUV into a lake.
Exactly. I did the math once and at 15', the difference between DVD and HD is meaningless on a 46" screen. Pretty meaningless on a 55" screen.
I can tell you that with both a 41" and a 55" screen I can immediately tell the difference when it is a Blu-ray rather than an up-sampled DVD. This has happened several times when a family member is viewing a movie and I don't know which format was purchased in. It may well not be the resolution per se that makes the difference visible, but the image quality difference is unmistakable.
That being said, mostly I don't care if the movie is on Blu-ray. Up-sampled DVD is perfectly fine for nearly all movies IMHO, even on the 55" screen. Although an image difference is easily detectable, it doesn't *improve the movie viewing experience to any significant degree*.
Depends. I already pay for The Economist as a news source. Sure, there are plenty of other places to get "breaking news" online. If I want to read high quality journalism... less so. When the NYT goes proper paywall, I'll pay. When the Daily Mail does, I'll rejoice;-)
-P
So, you want some poor quality journalism to go with the high quality journalism you get from The Economist? I am baffled by people who think the NYT is a good source of news. In the early 30s, they were printing stories denying the Soviet created famine in the Ukraine (stories they won a Pulitzer Prize for). During WWII, they denied/downplayed the Holocaust. More recently, one of their star reporters was discovered to file "on location" stories from his apartment in NY. There are more cases of such journalistic malfeasance by the NYT that covers most of its history.
Funny, you dredge up stuff from the 70-80 years ago, plus a 7-year-old minor fraud perpetrated on the paper by an employee (and that the paper itself detected and blew the whistle on), but omit the most serious failure in reporting by the Times in the last half-century: Judith Miller's trumpeting of the cooked and clearly defective intelligence claims of the Bush Administration about Iraq's supposed WMDs.
I admit that helping to push the U.S. into a needless war that has killed 4420 Americans, crippled 32,000 and committed the U.S. to a $2-3 trillion dollar war debt is a serious black mark on its record.
I think there is evidence that it has learned its lesson and will not be lap dog for right-wing craziness in the future. So maybe you should give the NYT a second chance.
A major cost of nuclear reactors is the bickering of the NIMBYs. Construction can take fifteen years (ten for bickering, five for construction). An investor could be investing in something else which makes money during that time so to convince him to invest in your plant you have to garantee massive returns in the future.
Umm.. did you actually read the Wikipedia page that you linked to? Do you realize that "bickering of the NIMBYs" and "fifteen year" construction period are not mentioned as a factor in any recent nuclear power plans? Do you realize that the high capital costs are even seen in nuclear-friendly France, were 80% of the power is nuclear?
To a degree opposition to nuclear power plants and changing nuclear power regulations in the 1970s did drive up costs of many plants in the U.S., but this was 30 years ago and licensing and regulation have been stable and plant-friendly for a generation now. (And the major reason that plant construction halted was that the expected electricity demand never materialized - not due to opposition or delays.)
Nuclear power has inherently high capital costs - the estimated costs for U.S. reactors and French reactors are about the same see: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html
("$3382/kW for Gen III+ in USA, $3860 for EPR at Flamanville in France to $5863/kW for EPR in Switzerland, with world median $4100/kW"). U.S. plans actually are on the low end of the price spectrum.
It is getting ridiculous to blame the lack of new power plants on hippies from the 70s who will soon be drawing social security.
I seriously doubt that westinghouse has anything to do with Thorium based reactors not being on the short list despite their many benefits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Key_benefits).
I would say it has far more to do with the lack of ability to produce weapons with their byproducts. The US would prefer to get a little something extra out of the deal.
Looking at the Wikipedia page, most the claimed benefits for thorium are no different from those of an appropriately designed modern uranium reactor ("no possibility of a meltdown, it generates power inexpensively, it does not produce weapons-grade by-products.. will burn up... nuclear weapon stockpiles"), the one signficant different claim ("will burn up existing high-level waste") is not true.
It can correctly be said that the high level waste from a thorium reactor would be about half that of a uranium reactor, but given the small volume of the current waste stream this gives small actual advantage.
Thorium reactors are a perfectly viable technology, but it is relatively undeveloped, and thus has much longer lead times, and much greater up front costs for no significant advantage.
The Achilles heel of nuclear power has always been the high capital costs, which means a longer period before profitable returns, and thus greater risk. It is simple hard-headed investment decision making that has kept nuclear power plants form being built. With thorium this problem is magnified.
If we can't get an established technology like uranium reactor built, thorium has no chance at all.
Actually, a ballistic arc (sub-orbital spaceflight) is the fastest way to travel between two points of the globe. You'll get from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in about half an hour or so. You'll also avoid the need to worry about weather anywhere except the start- and endpoints, and last but not least, the view is fantastic.
And giving your average well-heeled traveller, who can afford such a flight, up to 40 minutes of zero-gee. This creates a new business opportunity - developing next generation barf-bag technology! There will be a significant number of passengers hurling in zero gee for sure!
They have more than half of the web using their browser, compared to all other browsers COMBINED, and they failed ???
If you had included the original comment by the OP: "...what's certain is the web monoculture Microsoft wanted so badly and nearly achieved at the height of their power has failed" the foolishness of your retort would be transparent (possibly why you didn't include it?).
Slightly LESS THAN 50% use (not "more than") , and steadily declining, is most certainly a failed attempt at achieving a monoculture (complete market dominance). And at its current rate of decline IE will have the same market share as Firefox in two years, and Firefox lacks any deep pocket hundred-billion-dollar backer to push its adoption. That's what I call a failed business strategy from any perspective.
I think that depends on one's definition of "strange". Sure there's definitely room for marine biologists, physicists and chemists to learn from creatures inhabiting the deep. But all these newly discovered lifeforms are, as strange as they seem, still just distant cousins, restricted to evolutionary limitations. Glibly put, there are only so many fields which care about yet one more species of jellyfish.
Scientific knowledge would grow by leaps and bounds with something truly alien....
Studying all of the accessible regions of the Earth to inventory the most extreme and divergent forms of life is our best training ground for eventually detecting "truly alien" life. As noted in the census summary report (go to the website to download) every environment in the ocean, no matter how extreme, was found to harbor life, and the diversity of extremophiles that were discovered just exploded. If we do not understand the potential of our own forms of life to exploit extreme environments, we will be poorly prepared to know where or how to look to identify "truly alien" lifeforms
The Constitution implicitly assumes the private ownership of warships (see 'letters of marque and reprisal'), so the idea that the founders would have been shocked by private ownership of crew-served weapons seems rather silly.
Assuming the existence of privately-owned warships is not the same as guaranteeing them as a right.
The relevant question is not "what would shock the founders" -- hell, a country where you can't keep slaves anymore would be a shock to many of them. The question is, what does "arms" in "right to keep and bear arms" refer?
My understanding is that there was at the time a well-understood difference between "arms" -- basically, as discussed above, what an individual soldier would carry onto battle -- and "cannon".
Well said. A well-written and persuasive discussion of what does seem to be a consensus interpretation of the the 2nd Amendment is here: http://www.guncite.com/journals/reycrit.html.
The constitutional scholar (Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Tennessee) who writes the piece clearly has partisan leanings toward a fairly expansive interpretation of weapon ownership (which he reveals toward the bottom), but he is honest and points out that to be covered a weapon must be such that you can actually bear it. Crew served weapons are not covered, but any portable anti-tank weapon, anti-aircraft missile, or light machine gun would be. Ownership of heavier weapons might be permitted, but bearing them would not be covered by the Bill of Rights. Presumably a device like a Claymore mine - which weighs 3.5 lb and fires 700 steel pellets in a fan covering several thousand square meters and which would slaughter a couple of hundred people at a time in a suitably chosen crowd - is also covered.
Now I have not yet heard of any organized movement demanding that these types of weapons be sold in gun shops, though I know people who do argue for this. But since this is the logical consequence of the 2nd Amendment - that anyone should be able to buy and keep at home Stingers, RPGs, Javelin missiles, M-60 machine guns, Claymore mines - I predict that this will start surfacing among the Tea Party movement in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
Japan had already offered surrender terms to the US before the bomb drop. They asked for the emperor to remain as a figurehead. We said in return that we would only accept unconditional surrender. We dropped the first bomb because we could, we dropped the second bomb for collaborative data. After they offered unconditional surrender, we let them keep the emperor as figurehead.
Nope they didn't. There were no offers from the government of Japan before the first atomic bombing, period. They did offer to surrender with retention of the Emperor with all his privileges and powers ("his prerogatives") after the first bomb. The U.S. rejected this offer, and dropped the second bomb, and the USSR declared war on Japan, and then the Japanese surrendered, abandoning their attempt to change the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
Not quite. The Kargil War was fought between May and July 1999, after both nations had conducted nuclear tests and declared themselves nuclear armed.
Similarly, the Yom Kippur War in 1973 was an attack on Israel by Syria and Egypt at a time that both nations knew Israel was nuclear armed, and the Falkland Island War was fought against a nuclear armed UK.
What these all have in common is that they are limited wars. Kargil was small (~50,000 soldiers engaged combined) and fought over limited terrain. The Yom Kippur War huge, but the objectives of the attackers was limited, they were seeking to recover some (in the case of Egypt) or all (in the case of Syria) of their national soil lost in a war only 6 years before. The Falkland War was a colossal blunder mostly by one man (Admiral Jorge Anaya), rather than a well planned operation, but one indicates that the UKs nuclear forces were entirely discounted.
Nuclear weapons make the world safe for limited war, but that is enormously preferable to the unlimited kind.
Consult the 2010 Ernst & Young study: "Total state and local business taxes State-by-state estimates for fiscal year 2009" (http://www.cost.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=76116). You will find that the business tax burden in California, as a share of the state gross product, is 34th in the nation (last column on pg. 12). On a state ranking is BELOW the median, and is in the BOTTOM THIRD in fact. And on page 8, where it charts the ratio of business taxes to spending benefiting business (and if we pretend education does not benefit business at all) the California ratio is 2.68: 45th in the nation, far below the national average (3.50).
Taking into account that the total tax per capita burden only places it at 12th place, the fact is California is a moderate tax state, with LOW business taxes, and one of the most favorable business tax vs business support spending environments in the country.
But if you keep lying repeatedly really loudly, in a really angry voice, non-stop eventually people start to think there is something to what you say. Job well done!
Somehow I suspect the actual tax burden for a corporation wouldn't be measured well by either (tax $)/population or by (tax $)/($ personal income)? Perhaps corporate tax rates would be more relevant. Now I don't have any solid information, either -- can't be arsed to do my research -- but at least I'm not looking at plainly irrelevant figures and pretending that discredits someone.
A lot of attitude there for someone who knows nothing about the subject and is too lazy to look anything up, eh?
The per capita tax rate is very relevant for assessing the tax climate, especially since the OP specifically combined business and personal taxes in his angry factless bloviation. (Of course no right-winger can discuss taxes without being really! really! angry!).
If you add just one little factoid (easily looked up) that California relies disproportionately on personal income taxes (Meg Whitman is basing her whole campaign on slashing upper income tax rates - like her own), then you realize that the business burden must be unusually low.
And so it is: as percentage of the state gross product California business taxes are ... wait for it... 28th in the nation. See the Ernst&Young study at: http://www.cost.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=76116 . Check out the last column on pg. 12.
That's right folks, the California state business tax burden is BELOW THE MEDIAN of all states!
TThat's reason number one. That's the last place I'd want to build an industry, not just because of me but also my workers would have to deal with the heavy tax burden. Better someplace that has few taxes & doesn't steal (much) money from the workers' paychecks.
Yes, the crushing tax burden on the being in the second quintile of per capita taxes. According to the very conservative newspaper The OC Register (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/tax-270147-pay-increases.html?pic=19). California's total tax burden is 12th in total revenues collected per capita. Calculated as a percentage of income (California ranks 7th in income) it is even lower.
This is not an unreasonable tax burden for a state requiring the infrastructure and education to support a high-tech economy.
The bit equating all taxation with theft tips the reader that rationality is not forthcoming from the above poster. The real Tea Party (in 1773) believed in "No taxation without representation" not "No taxation!!!". I'm sure we would all be happier in the Libertarian Utopia where all services (if they exist) are provided by unregulated corporations. Possibly you should try it in rugged individualistic Alaska - which has the highest taxes in the country, and the largest amount of government spending per capita.
... I'm not saying that research like this shouldn't be done, but will anyone ever be able to provide solid 'data' about the universe conducting experiments on Earth? I would think you would have to do experiments in other environments, other than on Earth. All of the results of these experiments will have to allow for a large amount of beautiful math and a wonderful imagination.
Because the Earth is, after all, a fixed point in space?
The Sun moves relative to the galactic center 17 km/sec (thus covering 5.3 billion km in a decade). Earth travels 30 km/sec relative to the Sun, thus sweeping across a volume of space 300 million km across around the Sun annually, and a spiral path 10 billion km long each decade relative to the galaxy, while the Milky Way galaxy is moving at 630 km a second relative to the zero Hubble red shift frame of reference - which takes us over 200 billion km a decade. Physics experiments conducted a century ago where conducted at a point in space that is now 0.2 light years distant from where we are now!
So even just staying put here on Earth we are actually sampling a nice region of the Universe, especially thanks to our galactic glider. Now, if you think the properties of the Universe vary with their position relative to the Earth's center of mass we replicate physics experiments in space about as often as budgets allow, as well testing this possibility frequently on mountains and in aircraft. And there are those physics experiments we call probes we send to the outer reaches of the Solar System (one of which has shown up a slight anomaly). And let us not forget that direct observation of the distant Universe provides direct tests of the constancy of physical law.
So what are complaining about exactly? What should we be doing instead of what we are doing now?
Standard night vision uses near-infrared light to 'see'. It requires an infrared emitter to actually 'see' things. Normal human eyes cannot see this light. Military/industrial grade night vision uses sensors that picks infrared light generated from heat. This is the stuff you usually see in movies. (See FLIR entry in wikipedia)
This dark silicone picks up visible light, although it will be far more sensitive than current sensors. As long as it's not pitch black, a tiny amount of light that normal eyes cannot see will be sensed by it.
There are two types of night vision equipment - the cheaper near IR cameras mentioned above, and image intensifier tubes which enormously magnify visible light. The word "tubes" should alert you that IRTs are a vacuum tube technology, using vacuum ion cascades to magnify the image current. Perhaps "black silicon" will enable a solid state device to approach the performance of an IRT.
Where is the MathML (the official W3C mark-up language for mathematics) support?
Firefox has rendered MathML quite well for years now. Google's explanation was that "we will support MathML when webkit does". This was an annoying response, since a $200 billion dollar corporation with 20,000 geniuses as employees could certainly contribute the resources to webkit to add MathML in short order. But now webkit has got MathML implemented! And we have a new release of Chrome! So where is the MathML?
I have always found it ironic that the web was invented at a physics laboratory (CERN) specifically to publish scientific information (originally) but included no standard (not any mechanism) for displaying scientific formulas. All they had to do was add a tage (or something similar) to HTML so that conforming browsers had to render Tex (the code was freely available). To this very day people basically have to include pictures of formulas on web pages.
Apple products aren't "technically" impressive. They don't have the most power, they don't have the largest feature set, etc. Apple excels at technology integration (itunes musc store for example) and UI design. That's why for Apple products "Ooh, shiny" is more appropriate. Business-wise I would agree Apple is pretty innovative, but from a geeky technology standpoint they're kind of meh.
And thus the pain that is Desktop Linux continues. I use Ubuntu and Fedora for my home and office desktops (using Windows only when required) so I am an avid supporter of Desktop Linux but I am also intimately familiar with how far the user experience falls short. I set my teenage daughter up with a Lucid Lynx laptop and she is perfectly happy with it - but she is really smart geeky kid. For an ordinary user it is (as I said) a pain to use compared to Windows XP or 7, much less the polished interface of Apple; a judgement that my daughter, who uses all three, confirms.
Let's face it. A polished human-computer interface is as much an impressive technical achievement (much more so in fact) than a super-cool new application programming interface. And Apple's consistently top ranking reliability is an equally technically impressive in the hardware domain.
Spoken like a true anonymous coward. Didn't find the cut-and-paste the least bit convincing, it is in glaring contradiction to my own observations.
Run universities like Wikipedia? ...
Indeed. I don't think that even Wikipedia should be run just like Wikipedia! The ability of Anonymous Cowards to change (almost*) anything on Wikipedia is a fatal flaw that is holding it back from ever being a reasonably reliable source of information on anything even slightly controversial. Requiring the creation of login (which would still be anonymous) before being able to make any change, and using user histories to make assessments of reliability to manage reversions, which edits "stick", etc. would have done a world of good to allowing Wikipedia to mature into something more than what it is.
*Used not to be "almost". The fact that this restriction was imposed demonstrates the fallacy of the idea. Locking down some content does not go nearly far enough.
Once Open Office (particularly Calc) can compete with Microsoft in terms of performance, stability, and features, then and only then will Microsoft need to worry about Open Office.
I have found Calc indispensible for it allows me to cut tables from browsers and paste it into a spreadsheet, and have it import perfectly. This has been of huge value to me. This does not work at all in Excel. Furthermore, I have found Excel to be a nightmare in its insistence on being "clever" and knowing better than me what is or should be in my document: insistently turning text that it thinks looks like email and web addresses into live links (something I have never wanted in my life), destroying text it thinks looks like dates into a non-recoverable form, its apparent inability to mix numbers (as text) and numbers (as numbers) in a single spreadsheet without nightmarish manual work-arounds, etc.
I have used Excel since before it was Excel (i.e. when it was still MultiPlan) and have found long ago that it passed the point of adding value and (as with most MS products) began adding misery instead. I happily use Calc and loathe having to fire up Excel now.
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Meanwhile the so-called "liberals" seem intent to roll us back to Serfdom. It's as if they want to restore a 1500s-style political system in modern society, where the common man is treated like wards of the government. ...
Clearly you have no idea what governments and social conditions were like in the 1500s. "Wards of the government"?! Perhaps you have your education from Glenn Beck University?
Which we haven't used since Hiroshima. Nagasaki was an implosion. Deployed weapons have all been implosion since then.
There have been gun-assembly tactical weapons developed and deployed, mostly tactical nuclear artillery shells.
... Last time I checked bookstores were not a social program. ...
Public libraries, and their book sales are however ABSOLUTELY a social program. Notice that word "public"? It is the public supporting it through taxes for the common good. And all libraries, except for private college libraries are public libraries. In addition, thrift stores generally operate as a form of social program. And it is from these two entities (public libraries and thrift stores) that the scanner gets the majority of his stock.
In a free market don't they always?
In theory, yes. In practice, definitely not.....
I believe that should be: "In a modern realistic theory of markets, definitely not. In practice, also definitely not...
Although many economics discussion on-line seem to be informed only by a haphazard reading of Adam Smith, much progress has been made in recent decades in developing economic theories that actually resemble real world behavior with its costs and quite noticeable failures. The perfection of free markets is ideology (or worse, campaign rhetoric), not economics.
There are satellite-guided air-to-air missiles? I have a feeling a satellite-guided missile trying to hit a moving target would be about as successful as a satellite-connected microtrading system.
Satellite-guided == GPS. You may have heard of it.It was developed for military purposes long before it started telling you how to drive your SUV into a lake.
Exactly. I did the math once and at 15', the difference between DVD and HD is meaningless on a 46" screen. Pretty meaningless on a 55" screen.
I can tell you that with both a 41" and a 55" screen I can immediately tell the difference when it is a Blu-ray rather than an up-sampled DVD. This has happened several times when a family member is viewing a movie and I don't know which format was purchased in. It may well not be the resolution per se that makes the difference visible, but the image quality difference is unmistakable.
That being said, mostly I don't care if the movie is on Blu-ray. Up-sampled DVD is perfectly fine for nearly all movies IMHO, even on the 55" screen. Although an image difference is easily detectable, it doesn't *improve the movie viewing experience to any significant degree*.
Depends. I already pay for The Economist as a news source. Sure, there are plenty of other places to get "breaking news" online. If I want to read high quality journalism ... less so. When the NYT goes proper paywall, I'll pay. When the Daily Mail does, I'll rejoice ;-)
-P
So, you want some poor quality journalism to go with the high quality journalism you get from The Economist? I am baffled by people who think the NYT is a good source of news. In the early 30s, they were printing stories denying the Soviet created famine in the Ukraine (stories they won a Pulitzer Prize for). During WWII, they denied/downplayed the Holocaust. More recently, one of their star reporters was discovered to file "on location" stories from his apartment in NY. There are more cases of such journalistic malfeasance by the NYT that covers most of its history.
Funny, you dredge up stuff from the 70-80 years ago, plus a 7-year-old minor fraud perpetrated on the paper by an employee (and that the paper itself detected and blew the whistle on), but omit the most serious failure in reporting by the Times in the last half-century: Judith Miller's trumpeting of the cooked and clearly defective intelligence claims of the Bush Administration about Iraq's supposed WMDs.
I admit that helping to push the U.S. into a needless war that has killed 4420 Americans, crippled 32,000 and committed the U.S. to a $2-3 trillion dollar war debt is a serious black mark on its record.
I think there is evidence that it has learned its lesson and will not be lap dog for right-wing craziness in the future. So maybe you should give the NYT a second chance.
A major cost of nuclear reactors is the bickering of the NIMBYs. Construction can take fifteen years (ten for bickering, five for construction). An investor could be investing in something else which makes money during that time so to convince him to invest in your plant you have to garantee massive returns in the future.
Wikipedia has a page on the economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants
Umm.. did you actually read the Wikipedia page that you linked to? Do you realize that "bickering of the NIMBYs" and "fifteen year" construction period are not mentioned as a factor in any recent nuclear power plans? Do you realize that the high capital costs are even seen in nuclear-friendly France, were 80% of the power is nuclear?
To a degree opposition to nuclear power plants and changing nuclear power regulations in the 1970s did drive up costs of many plants in the U.S., but this was 30 years ago and licensing and regulation have been stable and plant-friendly for a generation now. (And the major reason that plant construction halted was that the expected electricity demand never materialized - not due to opposition or delays.)
Nuclear power has inherently high capital costs - the estimated costs for U.S. reactors and French reactors are about the same see: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html ("$3382/kW for Gen III+ in USA, $3860 for EPR at Flamanville in France to $5863/kW for EPR in Switzerland, with world median $4100/kW"). U.S. plans actually are on the low end of the price spectrum.
It is getting ridiculous to blame the lack of new power plants on hippies from the 70s who will soon be drawing social security.
I seriously doubt that westinghouse has anything to do with Thorium based reactors not being on the short list despite their many benefits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Key_benefits). I would say it has far more to do with the lack of ability to produce weapons with their byproducts. The US would prefer to get a little something extra out of the deal.
Looking at the Wikipedia page, most the claimed benefits for thorium are no different from those of an appropriately designed modern uranium reactor ("no possibility of a meltdown, it generates power inexpensively, it does not produce weapons-grade by-products .. will burn up ... nuclear weapon stockpiles"), the one signficant different claim ("will burn up existing high-level waste") is not true.
It can correctly be said that the high level waste from a thorium reactor would be about half that of a uranium reactor, but given the small volume of the current waste stream this gives small actual advantage.
Thorium reactors are a perfectly viable technology, but it is relatively undeveloped, and thus has much longer lead times, and much greater up front costs for no significant advantage.
The Achilles heel of nuclear power has always been the high capital costs, which means a longer period before profitable returns, and thus greater risk. It is simple hard-headed investment decision making that has kept nuclear power plants form being built. With thorium this problem is magnified.
If we can't get an established technology like uranium reactor built, thorium has no chance at all.
Actually, a ballistic arc (sub-orbital spaceflight) is the fastest way to travel between two points of the globe. You'll get from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in about half an hour or so. You'll also avoid the need to worry about weather anywhere except the start- and endpoints, and last but not least, the view is fantastic.
And giving your average well-heeled traveller, who can afford such a flight, up to 40 minutes of zero-gee. This creates a new business opportunity - developing next generation barf-bag technology! There will be a significant number of passengers hurling in zero gee for sure!
They have more than half of the web using their browser, compared to all other browsers COMBINED, and they failed ???
If you had included the original comment by the OP: "...what's certain is the web monoculture Microsoft wanted so badly and nearly achieved at the height of their power has failed" the foolishness of your retort would be transparent (possibly why you didn't include it?).
Slightly LESS THAN 50% use (not "more than") , and steadily declining, is most certainly a failed attempt at achieving a monoculture (complete market dominance). And at its current rate of decline IE will have the same market share as Firefox in two years, and Firefox lacks any deep pocket hundred-billion-dollar backer to push its adoption. That's what I call a failed business strategy from any perspective.
I think that depends on one's definition of "strange". Sure there's definitely room for marine biologists, physicists and chemists to learn from creatures inhabiting the deep. But all these newly discovered lifeforms are, as strange as they seem, still just distant cousins, restricted to evolutionary limitations. Glibly put, there are only so many fields which care about yet one more species of jellyfish.
Scientific knowledge would grow by leaps and bounds with something truly alien. ...
Studying all of the accessible regions of the Earth to inventory the most extreme and divergent forms of life is our best training ground for eventually detecting "truly alien" life. As noted in the census summary report (go to the website to download) every environment in the ocean, no matter how extreme, was found to harbor life, and the diversity of extremophiles that were discovered just exploded. If we do not understand the potential of our own forms of life to exploit extreme environments, we will be poorly prepared to know where or how to look to identify "truly alien" lifeforms
Assuming the existence of privately-owned warships is not the same as guaranteeing them as a right.
The relevant question is not "what would shock the founders" -- hell, a country where you can't keep slaves anymore would be a shock to many of them. The question is, what does "arms" in "right to keep and bear arms" refer?
My understanding is that there was at the time a well-understood difference between "arms" -- basically, as discussed above, what an individual soldier would carry onto battle -- and "cannon".
Well said. A well-written and persuasive discussion of what does seem to be a consensus interpretation of the the 2nd Amendment is here: http://www.guncite.com/journals/reycrit.html .
The constitutional scholar (Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Tennessee) who writes the piece clearly has partisan leanings toward a fairly expansive interpretation of weapon ownership (which he reveals toward the bottom), but he is honest and points out that to be covered a weapon must be such that you can actually bear it. Crew served weapons are not covered, but any portable anti-tank weapon, anti-aircraft missile, or light machine gun would be. Ownership of heavier weapons might be permitted, but bearing them would not be covered by the Bill of Rights. Presumably a device like a Claymore mine - which weighs 3.5 lb and fires 700 steel pellets in a fan covering several thousand square meters and which would slaughter a couple of hundred people at a time in a suitably chosen crowd - is also covered.
Now I have not yet heard of any organized movement demanding that these types of weapons be sold in gun shops, though I know people who do argue for this. But since this is the logical consequence of the 2nd Amendment - that anyone should be able to buy and keep at home Stingers, RPGs, Javelin missiles, M-60 machine guns, Claymore mines - I predict that this will start surfacing among the Tea Party movement in the near future.