Comment Ontario == China (Score 1) 184
So what is the Canadian equivilant of the Great Wall internet barrier?
Nevada county settles suits on I-80 cash seizures Tan Nguyen of Newport and Michael Lee of Denver said in lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court in Reno they were stopped last year on Interstate 80 near Winnemucca about 165 miles east of Reno under the pretext of speeding. They said they were subjected to illegal searches and told they wouldn’t be released with their vehicles unless they forfeited their cash.
The suits accused the same veteran deputy, Lee Dove, of taking a briefcase full of $50,000 in cash from Nguyen after stopping him for exceeding the speed limit by 3 mph in September, and seizing $13,800 and a handgun from Lee during a similar stop in December.
... Nguyen was given a written warning for speeding but wasn’t cited. As a condition of release, he signed a “property for safekeeping receipt,” which indicated the money was abandoned or seized and not returnable. But the lawsuit says he did so only because Dove threatened to seize his vehicle unless he “got in his car and drove off and forgot this ever happened.”
The day after Nguyen had his money taken, the sheriff issued a news release with a photograph of Dove pictured with a K-9 and $50,000 in seized cash “after a traffic stop for speeding.”
“This cash would have been used to purchase illegal drugs and now will benefit Humboldt County with training and equipment. Great job,” the statement said.
If you look at the information about the seizures it would be immediately obvious that the targets don't look like your stereotypical redneck sheriff. Surprise, surprise.
Want to smuggle anything? Look like a good old boy and have a NRA sticker on your car. For bonus points add some Tea Party crap. The cops will give you a thumbs up and send you on your way.
I have a friend who is a registered nurse and evaluates complaints about healthcare delivery. He has to write technical reports that refer to medical terminology and procedures. He is a native born US English speaker and writes well, and takes pride in his ability to communicate complex situations that can have important ramifications. For example, hospitals could loose accreditation or doctors could loose their licenses based on his reports.
His boss is a native speaking Chinese woman. She cannot write proper English sentences. She micromanages and rewrites his reports and turns his careful prose into hard to understand crap. She has a master's degree. She makes him less productive and degrades the quality of his work. Upper management loves her, and she get's paid more then he does. They like the fact that she is always finding fault, because it means that somehow they are the untrustworthy people who do the actual work.
So much for the myth of high quality US business practice.
First, Metapost is implemented as a macro language, so it is similar to C shell languages in the way it is evaluated. The symbols x, y, and z are predefined macros. For a location x the construct 3x is three times x. There are built in lengths, so 2cm and 1in are lengths. You can extend the language by defining you own macros for prefix or uinary and binary operations, which is the way that many of the operators are implemented.
The if and loop syntax
if boolean1 : expr1; else: expr2; elseif boolean2: expr3; fi
for i=1 step t until n: statement; statement; endfor
There are four levels of precedence. This is why multiplication by a constant can be expressed by putting a number in front of a value.
These are just some of the syntax features. The data types include splines, transforms, colors and numeric pairs for points. Built in operations can find points where two curves intersect and sub-curve sections between intersections.
It's fun in a strange fashion, and you can make some interesting geometrical pictures.
Iraq and Sadam Hussein did not have anything to do with the 9/11 attack.
Iraq and Sadam Hussein did not have anything to do with the 9/11 attack.
Iraq and Sadam Hussein did not have anything to do with the 9/11 attack.
Iraq and Sadam Hussein did not have anything to do with the 9/11 attack.
Iraq and Sadam Hussein did not have anything to do with the 9/11 attack.
Bush and his war criminal cronies used 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq. They knowingly lied their teeth out about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. If you look at the history of the US right wing going after Hussein, just look at the writings of Bill Krystal before Bush was appointed to the Presidency by the Supreme Court of the Republican Party. They used the Al Qaeda terror attack as a justification Iraq and Sadam Hussein did not have anything to do with the 9/11 attack.
Do you think Putin would have as easy a time invading Ukraine if the US was not tied up in the quagmire of Iraq? Would ISIS (which is not a real name, it's actually the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), even have come into existence if the US hadn't invaded Iraq?
The damage done by Bush is far from over. I expect much worse to occur.
Anyone remember that itty-bitty little mistake of invading the wrong country after 9/11 based on falsified intellegence?
On a scale of 0 to Iraq, how does Putin invading Ukraine rate?
I used to say that all TV was fiction except the weather, but then I saw Fox lying about that too: severe winter weather does not contradict global warming/climate change.
Russia never had long period of democracy, so the slide to authoritarianism does not have that far to go. The USA has a much longer democratic tradition (except for women, racial minorities, Native Americans, etc.) so it it taking longer to eliminate democratic forms of government.
Still democracy is slowly dieing in the USA, as evidenced by end of independent journalism, most criminal court cases being decided by plea bargains, the increasing costs of elections and the dysfunction of the legislative branch, the polarization of the Federal judiciary (the Roberts court decision on the Voting Rights Act) and the inability of the President to make deals with the Congress. (Note to Republicans: when there is a Republican President and the Democrats control the House and/or Senate, they will be just as unwilling to cooperate in running the country as in the current division of political power. Don't whine when you get bit by your own strategy.)
There would be no civilian nuclear plants if they had to buy real insurance.
All nuclear power is implicitly backed up by government guarantees that they will pick up the cost if a major accident happens. In the US, there are explicit limits to the amount that utilities have to pay out if something goes badly wrong. That is the only reason they can get any insurance at all. If they had to get insurance without that limit the economic model would not work. No one will insure a reactor because the down side is so huge. The low probability of an event does not counterbalance the immense burden of failure. No insurance company would take a bet like that.
Although the mechanism is different in Japan, the Japanese government is deeply involved in maintaining the illusion that TEPCO is a solvent company. In other venues, like the US, they would have already been forced into involuntary bankruptcy, and the government would be on the hook.
The Japanese government is taking much of the financial and administrative responsibility for cleanup. A big part of the funding is coming from all the other energy companies in Japan. Effectively the are taxing the energy sector for TEPCO's failure.
This is another example of how big corporations want the freedom and lack of oversight of laissez-faire capitalism while taking vast subsidies from the government. If you want to see how far this can go just examine the current state of Wall Street. They are literally getting free money from the Treasury. That's what the US government's current zero interest policy means.
EEs need to know the basics of electrical theory. Even if they use design tools that handle all the low level details, to do a good job and avoid mistakes they need to know simple things like Ohm's law. No one says "that's too low level, the state of the art has made Ohm's law only useful to a small set of professionals."
The low level tools of CS are languages and interfaces. A professional needs to have knowledge of both high level and low level tools. If they don't their training is inadequate. Even if the exposure is in school, and not used professionally, it's important to have the experience.
By the way, so called Software Engineering is a bad joke. It is almost non-existent. Real engineers, like ME or EE or Civil Engineer types can design something for a predictable cost that has a very high likelihood of meeting all it's design goals. If the cost, time or result is wrong it's because someone failed. By that criteria all software development is always a failure. Using the term "Software Engineer" is fraudulent. Other engineering disciplines should stop computer software developers from degrading the term Engineer.
According to researchers, monkeys in the vicinity of Fukushima City had detectable levels of radioactive cesium in their muscles, while the northern monkeys did not. Researchers also found that the Fukushima simians had significantly lower white and red blood cell counts compared with macaque troops almost 200 miles away.
The researchers suggested their findings mirrored studies conducted on human health impacts following the Chernobyl disaster, where researchers found decreased blood cell counts in people living in contaminated areas.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-fukushima-monkeys-20140724-story.html
The Chernobyl site is in the process of having a New Safe Confinement structure built, which will keep radioactive material from the disaster site from entering the environment for 100 years. Once it is in place some of the radioactive material will be broken up and moved to long term buried storage.,
In contrast, one of the articles states "The plant is believed to be still releasing an average of 10 million becquerels per hour of radioactive material." The quoted 1.1 trillion BQ figure was the result from recent debris removal.
Up to 1.12 trillion becquerels of cesium was dispersed last summer as debris was removed from the battered building of reactor 3 at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, with tainted rice later being found in Miniamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, according to Tokyo Electric.
The amount of cleanup and debris handling remaining is immense compared to the work done in this last operation. This means that the impact of future work will be proportionally larger.
Beyond that, the three damaged cores are still not stable or safe. There is no solid information on the state of cores, or even if the core material is in the containment structure. At least one of the cores is believed to have suffered a complete meltdown and become corium.
The already severely damaged reactors are still at risk for future earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons. Any one of these events could result in another large scale radiation event. The Fukushima disaster is not necessarily over. It's just less active.
So go on and giggle over a number. It shows that you have the collective intelligence of a retarded 11 year old.
It's not like users will ever know what they are doing. It could be going on right now and no one would be the wiser. Maybe the are rolling this out now because they have been keeping (and possibly using) this data, and they figure that pretending that there is an option available will give them plausible denyability. It would be consistent with their otther behavior.
The (pretend) government oversight agencies are a pathetic joke. The recent "net neutrality" clusterfuck shows that they don't even have to pretend that customers are stake holders or have any say in the matter. The FCC is now a fully owned subsidiary of the telecom industry. The only open question is how the monopolistic spoils are going to be divided. It's no different then gangs controlling their turf so they get all the profit from the various rackets that they run.
So what are you going to do, switch to TimeWarner or Comcast? The difference is the same as paying protection money to the Mafia, the Bloods, or the Crips or
Nothing to see here, move along. No capitalism, no democracy, no competition.
The Sterling crank output could drive a generator, and there are some existing Sterling designs that use the linear motion of the pistons as magnets with a coil for electrical generation. The boiling water is a closed loop that is the hot side of the Sterling engine.
This lends itself to a modular design where the water boiling and Sterling power generation are a sealed unit, and you get more power (and protection against single points of failure) by replicating the module. The major limitation of this system is that it only works during daylight hours. Even so, if it has high enough efficiency and low enough manufacturing cost it could be useful for environments without extensive electrical grid infrastructure.
2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League
