The original patents were utility patents, not design patents. You are uninformed and you need to come to terms with that, such as not spitting ignorant bullshit at others thats based completely on incomplete information.
Ummm
The fact is patents championed by Thomas Jefferson http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/classes/tcc313/200Rprojs/jefferson_invent/patent.html and enshrined in Article I Sec. 8 of the U.S. Constitution. It may or may not be wise to eradicate patents, but doing so will require a Constitutional Amendment.
Regulations, on the other hand, are generally understood to be created by the bureaucracy without having been voted on by Congress nor signed by the President. Sorry, but if patents are a government regulation then so is the Second Amendment.
There are some secondary characteristics of the mirror that may be less than perfect for optical astronomy. The Hubble mirror was ground smooth enough to focus the Lyman Alpha spectral lines of neutral hydrogen (best way to see H2 gas clouds). These wavelengths are in the UV. Presumably an earth-looking satellite won't have much use for UV, but it might be better at IR, which is also useful in astronomy. Also in service of the short wavelength goal, the Hubble primary mirror was made of a very exotic glass with near zero thermal coefficient of expansion. The mirror has glass stiffening braces in back that were *welded* on; no annealing necessary. Presumably spy satellites rarely have multi-hour exposure times, so thermal stability may not be so necessary. On the other hand, it sounds like the spy satellite secondary mirrors are adaptive optics. This is good for correcting for atmospheric distortion, but it needs a bright source (earth based scopes with AO use lasers to create a bright source high in the atmosphere for distortion correction). Perhaps the AO can be used to correct for thermal changes to the primary; I don't know...
So would you rather send your kids to a school that raises kids from the 10th to the 25th percentile (a raise of 25%) or a school that merely raises kids from the 70th to the 75th percentile? Or what about a school that simply maintains its students at the 90th percentile?
Seems to me that 10th to 25th percentile school is most likely to graduate kids on the 25th percentile. Not what I'm looking for. If my kids can fit in at the zero raise 90th percentile school, I think I'd be pretty satisfied with it.
The downside of all the small sensor cameras is low light shooting. You'll just have to accept that in low light your camera is not a full 12 or 14 megapixels. What I do is force the ISO to be 100 all the time. If the ISO climbs to 200 I can see noise I don't like at full resolution; either that or noise reduction artifacts that are also annoying. So I shoot at ISO 100 and either underexpose and/or reduce the effective pixel count. Underexposure can be adjusted in post-processing; reduced pixel count is just a fact of life in low light - 3.5 megapixels is still decent for many purposes.
Here's a decent recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/royal-icing-recipe/index.html . The reason it calls for pasturized egg whites is there's no cooking involved and raw eggs are risky. We have used powdered egg whites http://www.google.com/search?q=powdered+egg+whites&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 (reconstituted according to directions) to good effect.
The answer is Skyhook, a company that war-drives our neighborhoods, collects WiFi info without permission, associates WiFi MACs or other identifying info with Lat. & Long. coordinates and sells a service that can tell WiFi receivers where they are.
So if it's evil for Google to war-drive and collect WiFi identifiers, shouldn't it also be evil for Skyhook?
Disclosure: I don't work for Google but a couple friends do...
The TSA has not yet caught a single terrorist attempting to get on a plane.
Nice straw man. Sure, comments like this pass for "reason" on Rush Limbaugh, but I thought slashdot was slightly higher caliber.
The purpose of screening is deterrence. Let me repeat that: the screening is there to deter, not capture, terrorists. Take for example the famous "underwear bomber" of last Xmas. Even Bruce Schneier, vocal critic of the TSA, admits that airport security helped foil the underwear bomber.
From the link: "In order to get through airport security, Abdulmutallab -- or, more precisely, whoever built the bomb -- had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise; he had to resort to a much more ineffective detonation mechanism. And, as we've learned, detonating PETN is actually very hard."
Admittedly, it's easier to count angels on the head of a pin than deterred terrorists, but the underwear bomber was truly foiled by airport security, and his failure surely adds to the deterrence power of airport security.
Unfortunately, nowhere in the Bible does Satan ever have a trident. But this is Slashdot... sigh let the Christian bashing begin if it must!
True. However, the Book of Revelations does refer to Satan's realm as Hades. The early Christians carried a lot of baggage from ancient Rome and thereby from ancient Greece. The Roman god of the underworld, Pluto (Greek = Hades) was frequently depicted carrying a bident - a two pronged staff. As any reader of the Percy Jackson series knows, the trident is carried by Hades' brother, the god of the sea (Roman name = Neptune, Greek = Poseidon).
Since Pluto/Hades was the god of the underworld, he became associated with Satan in many early Christians' minds, and the Book of Revelations referred to the underworld as Hades. At some point, for reasons unknown to me, some depictions of Pluto/Hades began to carry the trident. I guess it's cooler. Or maybe crueler. Hence the Satan - trident connection.
"Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him." Revelation 6:8, New International Version, also New American Bible.
"Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death." Revelation 20:14, New International Version, also New American Bible.
For another fine example of the early Christians inheriting from the ancient Romans and Greeks, take a look at the 1633 trial of Galileo for heresy for suggesting that his observations prove the Earth revolves around the Sun. The bible never says explicitly that the Sun revolves around the Earth (though the creation story is implicitly terracentric), but the Church, through its tradition of Scholasticism, was at the time still committed to many of the theories of Aristotle who explicitly supported the implicit terracentrism of the bible. Aristotle/Scholasticism won the early rounds, but today Galileo and the scientific method are the heavyweight tag-team champs, and the Catholic church has admitted is error vis-a-vis Galileo.
United States L= 78.0, im= 6.4, cost $7290, 16.0% of GDP
Canada L= 80.3, im= 4.6, cost $3895, 10.1% of GDP
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Austria L= 79.2, im= 4.5, cost $3763, 10.1% of GDP
United Kingdom L= 78.7, im= 5.0, cost $2992, 8.4% of GDP
Denmark L= 78.0, im= 4.5, cost $3362, 10.4% of GDP
Finland L= 78.7, im= 3.5, cost $2840, 8.2% of GDP
France L= 79.9, im= 4.2, cost $4763, 11.0% of GDP
Germany L= 79.0, im= 4.1, cost $3527, 10.4% of GDP
Greece L= 79.4, im= 5.3, cost $2727, 9.6% of GDP
Italy L= 79.9, im= 5.7, cost $2686, 8.7% of GDP
Norway L= 79.7, im= 3.6, cost $4763, 8.9% of GDP
Spain L= 79.8, im= 4.3, cost $2671, 8.5% of GDP
Sweden L= 80.6, im= 2.8, cost $3323, 9.1% of GDP
Switzerland L= 80.6, im= 4.3, cost $4417, 10.8% of GDP
Ireland L= 77.9, im= 5.2, cost $3424, 7.6% of GDP
Portugal L= 77.9, im= 4.9, cost $2150, 9.9% of GDP
USA is not worst in class; Ireland and Portugal both have slightly lower life expectancy.
The study cited in TFA only discusses US citizens 65 and above, i.e. those benefiting from nationalized public health care in the form of Medicare. I think the data unequivocally says that people with life-long national health care almost always live longer, and get much more bang for their health care buck.
Canadian life expectancy = 80.3 years, UK ife expectancy = 78.7 years, and US life expectancy = 78.0 years (in 2007) according to http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html and that's because Canada and the UK have life-long public health care.
But when medicare starts to cover US citizens at age 65, suddenly US citizens have a much better outlook. US citizens lucky enough to survive until age 65 and receive medicare coverage have a longer life expectancy than their British peers.
Actually, if you go back and study the data at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html and http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf you'll discover that the US has both higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy than Canada and almost every developed European democracy (even Germany who absorbed the disaster known as East Germany a few decades back). For what its worth, the US also pays much more per capita for their lower life expectancies. I wonder if this data would change anyone's mind about the benefits of health care reform...
With all the fancy scientists in the world, why can't they just once build a nuclear balm?
