It's not magic, it's physics!

McDonalds just ordered a bunch of touch-screen ordering systems that would replace cashiers.

http://www.neowin.net/news/mcdonalds-ord...

Back in the day, grocery store checkers were unionized, skilled laborers working with all-mechanical checkout machines. When they went on strike, the skilled aspect of their jobs was replaced with the laser scanners and electronic checkout stands. Is that about to happen with fast food and the minimum wage strikers?

By the way, this doesn't mean that the food will come on a conveyor belt. You still get a receipt with either your name or an order number on it, and someone will still bring it out to you and call your name or number.

McDonalds just ordered a bunch of touch-screen ordering systems that would replace cashiers.

http://www.neowin.net/news/mcdonalds-orders-7000-t...

Back in the day, grocery store checkers were unionized, skilled laborers working with all-mechanical checkout machines. When they went on strike, the skilled aspect of their jobs was replaced with the laser scanners and electronic checkout stands. Is that about to happen with fast food and the minimum wage strikers?

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly13/incremental7-...

In the 50's, it cost an inflation-adjusted ~$300 to have a baby, including a 4 day stay for mom. If we had not changed the rules in health care, essentially allowing the entire industry to blatantly violate the Sherman and Clayton acts and commit what in any other industry would be called "racketeering" and "price fixing," then it wouldn't cost much more than that *out of pocket* for health expenses.

But let's be a little more generous than that and let doctor's salaries grow to what they are today, rather than leaving them as middle-class like they used to be.

If we suddenly had everything in health care cost 1/5th of what it does today, would anybody need to buy insurance to afford care? (Please answer for yourself). (Oh, and that 1/5th is still *way* higher than simple adjustment for inflation).

Oh... and by the way, there is at least one place that charges that 1/5, with the only catch being that they only take cash, no insurance.

http://www.surgerycenterok.com/

They list their pricing. Good luck finding out how much surgery costs at any other hospital in the U.S.A.

Oh wait, it already has happened. (except that the "reverse" Zimmerman was *actually* white, not the "white hispanic" that the media tried to paint as white).

http://rochester.ynn.com/content/top_stories/49092...

Roderick Scott, a black man, had a gun on him. He spotted Chris Cervini, who is white, trying to break into a car. He asked "Hey, what are you doing?" and told him he had a gun.

Cervini charged at Roderick. Roderick shot him. Cervini is dead.

Roderick was charged with manslaughter. What was the verdict?

Not guilty.

Wait, what? Race had nothing to do with the Zimmerman outcome?

The question "Has the KKK infiltrated the Tea Party?" was asked in bad faith. I answered the question with precisely the kind of answer a question like that asks for: "Has the Communist Party infiltrated the Democrat Party?"

I got this email today:

Hello It's not magic, it's physics!

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Question: Has the KKK ever tried to infiltrate the Tea Party for the sake of indoctrination?

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It's pretty clear that the person who asked that question has a little bit of growing up to do.

So my question is this: is it common practice to report something that you disagree with as a violation?

Mine:

The engineer is the one with a job offer.

Any others?

Can anyone point to specific provisions in the bill that will increase costs? I'm just seeing if anyone actually understands what's in it, just to gauge whether or not the people who support it understand what's in it, and whether or not the people who oppose it know what's in it and what's not.

Please cite specific details about how exactly it reduces costs. Be honest, don't pull out party line mumbo jumbo. I want to know if anyone can actually intelligently argue that Obamacare will actually end up reducing costs. And keep in mind, human behavior is a variable, not something that can be predicted, so no arguments based on what people are going to do -- if your argument is based on that, then you must also consider the possibility that people will do the opposite.

I know the key specs that I want, but I want it at a lower cost. The reason I can't find what I'm looking for is because nobody offers a laptop that is high end for some components but low end for others -- if it comes with a quad-core processor, it also comes with a huge hard drive and often a gamer's graphics card, which are things that are not important to me and make it more expensive than I want, but the laptops closer to my price range don't have the performance that I want and still have bigger hard drives and other components that I don't want. Can anybody provide me with a link or place to go to find my own parts? I've already searched Google and haven't been able to find what I want.

I'm trying to build a magneto-optic Fabry-Perot resonator for a research project. If it works properly, it should be able to measure magnetic fields as low as 1 Amp per meter. It's my first time designing any free-space optical system, and I have a few questions about general considerations in building it:

1) Assuming my materials are optically flat, what is the best way to make sure that I have my high-reflactance surfaces perfectly parallel to each other? I know the reflected beam should come back on itself, and in theory there should be a bullseye interference pattern surrounding the spot, but I'm not sure how wide the pattern should be or the best way to be able to see it.

2) The last person to work on the project before I was put on it had a setup where he had a laser pointing at a mirror at about 45 degrees to point into the system. The laser has an isolator in it so reflections won't damage it, but it's a higher power laser (not dangerous, just very bright). Do I really need the mirror, or is it just convenient for some other purpose (i.e. easier to fine tune pointing the beam)?

3) The system has 2 slabs of magneto-optic material with high reflective coating on one side and anti-reflective coating on the other. The high reflective coatings go on the laser input side and the output side, with the anti-reflective coatings on the inside part of the cavity. We tried using a single slab with both sides HR coated before, but it didn't work and we don't know exactly why. It could be because the material is too lossy, or it could be our slab wasn't flat enough. My question is how do I make sure the 2 slabs are parallel, other than by pointing the reflected beams back at themselves?

Thanks for any tips on how to do this. You don't have to know what exactly I'm doing to answer any of these questions.

How many of you have seen your rates drop? How about your rates rise or threaten to rise? How many of you own/work for businesses that this will benefit? What about businesses that it will hurt?

My own personal experience:

I am a married student at a university with a baby on the way. My private university requires each student to have some sort of health insurance coverage, which ticks me off but it's okay because it's only the enrolled students who are required to have insurance, and my wife's work currently offers insurance coverage for us. However, she is having a baby in a few months, and will be laid off at about the same time (with a severance package). After she is laid off, I plan on getting a part time job to make ends meet without us having to cut into savings for living expenses (but we will probably have to cut into savings to pay tuition). With a part time job, we will be able to afford everything without having to go into debt, provided that we only have to pay for insurance for me (which insurance I'm most likely never going to use). However, the Obamacare bill mandates that we all have insurance, and in order for us to be able to afford to pay for everything AND the insurance would require taking out a loan (which the federal government now controls, thanks to that same Obamacare bill). Before Obamacare, I would have been able to graduate debt free, and now that seems a lot less likely. Thanks Obama!

Wasn't the idea of the health care bill to HELP poor people instead of force them into debt?

If you were buying a TV and you went to the salesman and said "give me the best HDTV you have. Don't show me the prices, I don't care what it costs, because I am paying someone else premiums and I am paying taxes to the government, and they in return are going to pay for this TV. I don't care about the cost, just give me the best one." Do you think you would get a good price on that TV? Do you think you would even get a good value for the money?

Now think about that with health care. Since your employer is generally paying most of the premiums for you, and you pay medicare taxes and then people on medicare have their insurance, do you think that the prices are going to have any kind of controls at all? MOST PARTICULARLY with the government involved in the payment, since they do no negotiating whatsoever about price because they (for now) don't have to worry about balancing a budget or turning a profit?

Please only answer this if you actually understand what quantum entanglement and entangled particles are. It has to do with wave-particle duality of matter, and I don't want any idk answers.

I am interested in learning about this phenomenon. I understand what it is, but I was wondering if anybody has any experience dealing with it. What kind of process is used to entangle two particles, what methods are used to test entanglement, and what else about it can you tell me?

It seems like the government wants to do a lot of that nowadays, and I wonder if the progressives will want to start electing people with education specifically designed for social engineering.

It's obvious that most of our representatives in congress aren't listening to us, our thoughts, opinions, and needs, so they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing.

It's also obvious that most of them are not even reading any of the legislation that is going through, and it has recently just been rammed through without thorough discussion. John Conyers said "I love those people who say 'read the bill.' What good is reading the bill if you don't have two days and two lawyers to figure out what it means?" (By the way, Conyers IS a lawyer. If he can't understand it, then obviously something fishy is going on).

They're not even writing the bills. Even during the Bush administration, most of the bills in congress weren't written by congressmen. I don't know how far back the tradition goes, but the bills have not been written by congressmen, they've been written by special interest groups. Do you want your lives to be run by a bunch of special interest groups who give sweet favors to the people you voted to represent you?

So if they're not reading the bills and they're not writing the bills, and the bills can be forced through without them even really debating them, then it begs the question. Does Congress even matter anymore? Or are they just a puppet group? Or are they just a bunch of buffoons who get paid $20,000 less than the top 1% while demonizing the top 1%, and claiming to help the poor while they just exploit them for more votes?

Just out of curiosity. I would like to know about the chemical process, what kind of conditions, perhaps a microbiological explanation, etc. I'm not looking for "the signs of an egg going bad," just the science.