I wonder how much they're getting in tax breaks for this installation. Note that they're doing this in California, not in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and other states in which they presumably receive at least as much sunlight.
There's no such thing as "proving something to be safe." It's not possible. If the bulk of accumulated evidence doesn't indicate sufficient safety, what would?
Stop being a whiny little pussy and get on the plane.
We could also, if we wished, eradicate widespread vaccination and the refrigeration of food.
Lowest bidder and profit: Capitalists win, Everyone else lose. Dangerous things should not let in the hands of capitalists.
The Tennessee Valley Authority is owned by the Federal government and was created by Congress in the 1930s, but don't let that stop you.
Yes, this.
Remember when Sony used rootkits surreptitiously distributed on things that appeared to be standard Redbook audio CDs and then used those rootkits to install secret CD drivers on users' computers, which contained no uninstaller and would render the drive inoperable if the user attempted a manual uninstallation, and which also left the users' computers open to invasion by other malware from other parties?
Remember all the people who swore they'd never give Sony money again? They ran out and bought PS3s.
Let's see what they use as examples of excessive hours and draconian rules.
â- Excessive overtime is routine, despite a legal limit of 36 hours a month. One payslip, seen by the Observer, indicated that the worker had performed 98 hours of overtime in a month.
98 hours of overtime. In a month. I'll grant that's a lot of overtime. If he's working a 48-hour week, call it 192 hours straight time a month, and then 98 on top of that? If he's not working weekends, yeesh, that's a month of 14.5-hour workdays. That's hard, is really is, most people won't work days like that for a sustained period of time unless they're medical residents. Even if he *is* working on weekends, which if you're working that much OT you are, then it would take working 12-hour shifts on the weekdays and then coming in for 10-hour days on the weekends. *That* I've done, and plenty of other people have too without it being "inhumane."
And that's the article's outlier. Look at that legal limit. 36 hours a month? Jesus, the unions in this country would strike long and hard if an employer instituted a flat cap of 1.2 hours/day OT. Raise your hand if you've never worked more 36 hours a month OT. Now get off the computer and go get a job.
â- Workers attempting to meet the huge demand for the first iPad were sometimes pressured to take only one day off in 13.
Wow. Really? There's a rush of demand and you're so busy you have to work through the weekend? That happens so often in every business that it's a standard joke. And note even the wording: they're not required to, they're *pressured* to, and that only *sometimes*. Again, raise your hand if you've never worked two weeks off without a break.
â- In some factories badly performing workers are required to be publicly humiliated in front of colleagues.
Okay, this has never happened to me, it's not really a Western culture thing, outside of British public schools. American schools used to stick poor performers in the corner with a dunce cap, if Gasoline Alley and other such comics haven't lied to me, but I guess that's gone out of style.
â- Crowded workers' dormitories can sleep up to 24 and are subject to strict rules. One worker told the NGO investigators that he was forced to sign a "confession letter" after illicitly using a hairdryer. In the letter he wrote: "It is my fault. I will never blow my hair inside my room. I have done something wrong. I will never do it again."
Crowding? And strict rules? In China? Getthefuckouttahere.
â- In the wake of a spate of suicides at Foxconn factories last summer, workers were asked to sign a statement promising not to kill themselves and pledging to "treasure their lives".
Ah. The suicides. First, if Foxconn has a suicide problem, this isn't a dumb policy. The "I shalt not kill myself note" is actually a fairly standard bit of psychiatric treatment for would-be suicides, sort of like the suicide hotline phones on some bridges. Maybe it'll help, maybe it won't, but the fact that they're doing it doesn't demonstrate that they're inhumane and don't care about their workers, it demonstrates just the opposite.
And does Foxconn have a suicide problem? I doubt it. Foxconn's huge. They've got a million workers, 17 of which killed themselves over a five-year period. So that's a rate of
And then there's this bit:
Workers claim that, if they turn down excessive demands for overtime, they will be forced to rely on their basic wage: workers in Chengdu are paid only 1,350 yuan (£125) a month for a basic 48-hour week, equivalent to about 65p an hour.
Holy shit, imagine that. If my employer requests ("demands") that I work overtime, and I say "No, I'm busy," ("turns down"), I won't get paid any overtime ("forced to rely on my basic wage")? What a bunch of horseshit!
1350RMB/month, by the way, is double what the average rural dweller in China makes, is an above-average salary for an urban dweller in China, and is more than double the annual per-household expenditure in Chengdu. Maybe that's why those Foxconn employees aren't committing suicide very often.
Look, this is China. I'm willing to accept that appalling human rights abuses go on behind the gates of every factory in the place. But the facts as presented in this article aren't saying anything than that Foxconn's a pretty decent place to work if you're living in China and want to get paid.
It doesn't mean 'virgin birth.' Immaculate Conception is the Catholic doctrine that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was herself conceived free of Original Sin. It's got nothing to do with the other Catholic doctrine of the virgin birth, which is that Mary was impregnated with Jesus without any sexual intercourse occurring.
Hope this helps.
Dogfish and McGovern also collaborated on: Jiahu, based on chemanalysis of 9000-year-old pottery fragments from China; Sah'tea, based on 9th-century Finnish sahti; and Pangaea, which is more gimmicky than most of Dogfish head's gimmicks, and includes an ingredient from every continent.
Unfortunately for the free-market personal choice crowd, you can't simply reduce salt in your diet by avoiding the salt shaker.
Most salt comes from processed food and restaurant food, and not just potato chips.
Um...that's a non sequitur. So most salt comes from processed food and restaurant food, how does that indicate you can't simply reduce salt in your diet?
*Eat less processed food*. Eat out less. It's not difficult, nor is it expensive. Problem averted. The free-market personal-choice crowd wins again.
Yes, it does.
No, it doesn't. USC 17 is the law. It was passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. Two parties can enter into a contract if they want to, it doesn't change the law for those not party to that contract.
Under the terms of the current settlement - she has lost her legal right to sue over copyright infringemen
What settlement? She's not party to any settlement. You can I can't enter into a settlement that remove's the RIAA's right to sue over copyright infringement, Google and a group of authors can't enter into a settlement that removes the right of other authors to sue for copyright infringement.
She just doesn't want to be screwed over by Google in a land grab deal negotiated by an 'Authors Guild' that doesn't represent her.
What good is a petition, then? An agreement between Google and this 'Author's Guild' doesn't change the black-letter copyright law of this country. If she's not represented by the Guild, then when Google reproduces her work withour her permission, then she can sue them for copyright infringement.
Enough exercise for what?
They'll be allowed to run and play, but if they do it during school, they'll wear a heart monitor.
Yes. First, there's the financial cost; it's hard enough for schools to afford, you know, *gym equipment* in the first place, and now you want them to buy heart monitors for every kid as well? Kids can learn about heart rates and pulses quite adequately without that expenditure, and as far as target heart rate and exercise goes, two fingers on the wrist and a frigging watch with a second hand work fine.
Second, there's the social cost. You're either teaching them that "This routine physical activity we're requiring you to engage in is so dangerous it could *kill you* and you need to wear one of these to be safe," or "Our society is so ridiculously litigious and cowardly that this is what it's come to." That generation's going to be even more fucked up than the one that thought the TSA sounded like a good idea.
Oh, how fitting. The captcha I've been given to post this is 'bogeymen.'
f it uses mirrors of some type to aim the laser "beam", won't missile designers just make the missile housing out of the same reflective material?
Well, no. First, high-energy mirrors are fragile things. The reflective surface is very thin, and is kept very clean. Get some crud on it, that crud absorbs in the incident energy, the mirror fails. How are you going to coat a missile body, which needs must be exposed to the environment, with this fragile coating and still expect it to be a high-energy mirror?
Second, the energy *density* is smaller at the mirror than at the target. Being able to withstand the energy density of the lasing cavity isn't the same thing as being able to withstand the energy density of that laser, at the target, where it's as close to being a point as the focusing system can manage.
That's not correct. If blackbody(-ish) radiation covered the entire range of EM radiation, then the radiated power would be infinite. That's why there's this whole "Planck's constant" thing, because people realized that it doesn't work that way.
Many people are unenthusiastic about their work.
