This situation is likely rampant in many companies. Isn't the Peter Principle something like some people rise to their level of incompetence. Many IT managers rise to that level but the dummies even higher up (CEOs, CFOs, COOs, Boards of Directors) can't see it in the folks they promoted to their level of incompetence. If they did, they would have to admit they're also just as incompetent.
Exactly what I was thinking. This thing may be a gold mine for the NSA, FBI, CIA and other three letter US government spy agencies we may not even know exist. Great work, Microsoft, for these spy folks. If you buy one of these things, it needs to be unplugged from the electric outlet when not in use, and maybe that won't be enough to stop the spies. Check out recent articles about how these folks have obtained all Verizon phone records, and now it's known they got stuff from Google, Microsoft, etc., cloud services.
The US Congress passed an appropriation for something like $398 million to build a bridge from mainland Alaska to an island off the coast with something like 50 residents. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge). It was called the Bridge to Nowhere and was never built. Never built, as far as I know. It may have sneaked into some other appropriation and secretly constructed. Anyway, building an airport without planes is par for the course when politicians get involved.
Around 2200 years ago, didn't Archimedes discover something about buoyancy and mass of water displaced required to cause something to float?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes'_principle
Maybe the designers left out the mass of the engines, crew, fuel, and a few more things. Ouch.
But we're stuck with the second law of thermodynamics. The reason combustion engine automobiles have radiators is that not all the chemical potential energy in gasoline cannot be converted into the work of moving the car down the road. In order to get more work done per mass of fuel by raising the efficiency of the combustion-to-work process would require raising the temperature of the combustion process, but then the engines might melt. The 2nd law and its consequences is one of the most subtle laws of nature unlike the 1st law.
There are people who believe that women have one more rib than men. After all, Eve was created from one of Adam's ribs. The fact that that is not true and easily proven but some fundamentalists absolutely reject simple observation and refuse to believe normal men and women have equal numbers of ribs. Scientific observation - counting the ribs of a man and a woman by touch - is the work of the devil.
Presumably the same person who miswired the Japanese 787 miswired at least one other plane. That should be easy to check. If there are other planes with smoking batteries, check the wiring, then do it for all other 787s.
As I've noted in other forums/threads, online courses produce extremely low learning compared to traditional direct contact classroom courses. Estimates are that online students learn about 30% of what in class students learn. Give the same test to the online students and classroom students and that picture is clear. There's something about direct contact with instructors and peer students that facilitates learning. It's not very subtle, either.
IIRC, Honda was fined big bucks for having inaccurate odometers. They indicated higher mileage by something like 3% which allegedly led to a requirement for more maintenance costs. I think that may amount to one extra oil change in 100,000 miles or earlier timing belt/water pump/spark plug replacements. Anyway, I'm not sure if the odometer error would be connected to a speedometer error.
The problem with heat pumps is that once the temperature of the source of the heat drops below about 32 deg F, the heat pump becomes about as efficient as resistive electric heating. If the batteries and electric motors become the source of heat that may help solve that problem, but what happens in the summer when the heat from those sources needs to be pushed into the atmosphere? The heat collectors might be insulating the hot components and prevent that. Perhaps one just changes the way air flows around or through the hot devices. Smart engineers can solve that problem.
In my region of Colorado where natural gas is not available in rural areas, homes are heated with what are called hybrid systems which are a combination of heat pumps and propane fired furnaces. At moderate temperatures, the heat pump does the job but at temps below freezing the furnace kicks in. The devices are hopefully programmed in such a way that minimizes total energy costs.
Nonsense!
Many processes take place converting a disordered state into a more ordered state. The second law only requires that the entropy of the universe increase not that the system undergoing the change increase entropy. From a small acorn a mighty elm tree grows. The process involves converting carbon dioxide and water (in a disordered state) into cellulose and other compounds (a more ordered state) using light energy and a catalyst, chlorophyll. The end result is the entropy of the surroundings has increased.
1. Deny admission of students graduating from any public school in Missouri to any university in the United States that receives federal or state funding. This, of course, would include federal funding for scientific research involving participation in graduate or undergraduate programs.
1. Deny federal scholarship support and loans, including Pell grants, for undergraduate or graduate students in Missouri schools, colleges or universities.
2. Deny federal funding for all programs for any school, school system, college or university in Missouri.
3. Deny employment by the federal government for any person who attended a Missouri K-12 school, college or university.
Maybe these, and other funding restrictions would force reconsideration of this bill.
I went to a conference about online courses a few years back and it was reported that students taking online courses learned about one-third as much as those taking the same course using traditional direct classroom teaching from the same prof who was involved in preparing the online course. There are some things that internet technology is useful for such as making the syllabus and perhaps class notes available to students and answering non-complicated questions about a lecture. There must something very important about seeing the prof in action, getting immediate feedback about something not understood in the classroom, answers to other students questions and interaction with other students. Also, my experience is that office hours with individual or a small group and help sessions really help learning. These observations suggest that interactions with the prof and those who study a subject are critical to learning.
In the US awhile back there was a scandal involving something called pink slime which was added to ground "beef". TV news showed this stuff's manufacture out of leftover parts of who knows what. Watching the making or sausage or laws might have been less disgusting. Horse meat might be better than this stuff.
In the Western US there is also major concern about the round up of wild mustang horses for slaughter for dog food. Maybe some of them ended up in British grocery store raw burger.
Thanks for the science about the lifetime of Tau Ceti. The article in the first link in the original post said 2x. Who's Counting? So if we colonized it in the next few thousand years, we wouldn't have to look for a new place for another 12 billion years.
The thing is, though, if intelligent life developed at the same time from planet formation, using your number for the age of Tau Ceti, life has been on the fourth planet for maybe ~1.8 billion. A pretty long time, something like 1,000 times as long as intelligent life here on earth.
PS: We have a mountain in Colorado named Mount Shavano, 14,232 feet, in the Sawatch range not far from Salida, CO.
According to the article, Tau Ceti is two times as old as our sun which makes it somewhere around eight billion years old. If the planet formation there followed the same evolution as ours, that may mean these planets are also around eight billion years old and if intelligent life formed after about four billion years after planet formation like here on earth, then intelligent life on the fourth planet is four billion years old if it hasn't destroyed itself. It would be interesting to see how they solved the same problems we're confronted with here. We surely could learn something from such an old, experienced civilization.
It's also my understanding that suns like ours and Tau Ceti will turn into a red giant after about eight billion years and destroy close in planets and then cool down. ATau Ceti may be near the end of its life, and colonizing the fourth planet may not be the best idea.
Automobile analogies are always interesting. However, Ford, or Honda for that matter, doesn't require you buy Ford (or Honda) branded gasoline. Should manufacturers require branded fuel, then if you don't, since there's a marker in manufacturer branded gasoline, the car won't run and you'll have to have your car towed to the dealer, have the fuel system drained and fueled with branded gasoline. Same thing with replacement parts. Napa parts may be better than OEMs.
Not being a developer, I've got to ask: Is the OS that important in developing APPs? It would seem to me that the tools developers use are the key to APP production. How many development tools require the use of the OS's command line or the OS's graphical user interface other than to open a tool or save the resulting code?
This means you are using about 5 kW hr per day or 150 kW hr per month. That's very good efficiency. Probably what you would use in and emergency situation where you were under stringent control of electric energy use. I don't know if that's a winter number when you might be running a furnace blower motor for a forced air furnace or water pump motor for hydronic heating. Perhaps you heat with wood. GE is reporting that their bottom freezer refrigerators use about 550 kWhr of electric energy per year or about 1.5 kWhr per day. So maybe you can get away with 5 kWhr/day. My use is about 15 kWhr/day and I thought I was pretty efficient.
The main reason that car batteries fail is that the lead plates collapse to the bottom of the cells. The result is that either the lead short circuits the battery or are no longer connected to their internal conductors, more likely the latter. This is a physical failure not a physical chemistry failure. Car batteries are subjected to substantial mechanical stress due to the conditions under which they operate in automobiles.
My Prius has a 67 horse power electric motor that acts as a generator to charge the car's batteries. Not sure, but if its generating capacity is 67 HP, that's about 50 kW. That should be plenty for a 10 kW house load. What I need to figure out is how to hook that up to my house electric system. It might be easier for the plugin Prius. Somehow, reverse the current flow.
Our two-person, 2,800 sq. feet house in Colorado uses about 450 - 500 kWhr of electric energy per month with gas water heater, gas dryer, gas heat, electric cooking stove. When purchased, the house had an electric water heater. It was quickly replaced with a gas water heater, and our electric usage was cut in half. Anyone who has access to natural gas should IMMEDIATLY replace their water heater with a gas fired device. The payback is pretty quick. Likewise, a gas dryer will save enormous energy costs, particularly if it doesn't use a pilot light. Our gas bill in the summer is essentially the cost of having the gas meter attached to the house since the dryer and water heater use so little energy.
You can buy Apple products at Best Buy. There's also a store in my city named something like Mac Store that sells and services the complete line of Apple products. Don't know if it's a chain store franchise, though.
Flat Panel TVs have become pretty cheap and with all the added functions and reliability, everybody who wants one or more may already have them. I have a Sharp Aquos which has an estimated 60,000 hours of liftetime. It's great, by the way. At 8 hours per day, that's about 20 years of use. And, as I said, everyone who wants or needs one or more of these things already has them, there's not much of a market. I've seen prices for 50 +" Samsungs or Sharps for $1,200 - $1,500 at Costco. It seems that Sony has already given up on flat panels even though they are supposed to be pretty good, maybe the best. Not to advocate an illegal pricing structure, it does seem like the producers have to increase prices.
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This situation is likely rampant in many companies. Isn't the Peter Principle something like some people rise to their level of incompetence. Many IT managers rise to that level but the dummies even higher up (CEOs, CFOs, COOs, Boards of Directors) can't see it in the folks they promoted to their level of incompetence. If they did, they would have to admit they're also just as incompetent.
I'm guessing Smith believes if we all pray more/harder all these storms will go away. It's either the devil's fault or god is mad at us.
Exactly what I was thinking. This thing may be a gold mine for the NSA, FBI, CIA and other three letter US government spy agencies we may not even know exist. Great work, Microsoft, for these spy folks. If you buy one of these things, it needs to be unplugged from the electric outlet when not in use, and maybe that won't be enough to stop the spies. Check out recent articles about how these folks have obtained all Verizon phone records, and now it's known they got stuff from Google, Microsoft, etc., cloud services.
The US Congress passed an appropriation for something like $398 million to build a bridge from mainland Alaska to an island off the coast with something like 50 residents. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge). It was called the Bridge to Nowhere and was never built. Never built, as far as I know. It may have sneaked into some other appropriation and secretly constructed. Anyway, building an airport without planes is par for the course when politicians get involved.
Around 2200 years ago, didn't Archimedes discover something about buoyancy and mass of water displaced required to cause something to float? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes'_principle Maybe the designers left out the mass of the engines, crew, fuel, and a few more things. Ouch.
But we're stuck with the second law of thermodynamics. The reason combustion engine automobiles have radiators is that not all the chemical potential energy in gasoline cannot be converted into the work of moving the car down the road. In order to get more work done per mass of fuel by raising the efficiency of the combustion-to-work process would require raising the temperature of the combustion process, but then the engines might melt. The 2nd law and its consequences is one of the most subtle laws of nature unlike the 1st law.
There are people who believe that women have one more rib than men. After all, Eve was created from one of Adam's ribs. The fact that that is not true and easily proven but some fundamentalists absolutely reject simple observation and refuse to believe normal men and women have equal numbers of ribs. Scientific observation - counting the ribs of a man and a woman by touch - is the work of the devil.
Presumably the same person who miswired the Japanese 787 miswired at least one other plane. That should be easy to check. If there are other planes with smoking batteries, check the wiring, then do it for all other 787s.
As I've noted in other forums/threads, online courses produce extremely low learning compared to traditional direct contact classroom courses. Estimates are that online students learn about 30% of what in class students learn. Give the same test to the online students and classroom students and that picture is clear. There's something about direct contact with instructors and peer students that facilitates learning. It's not very subtle, either.
IIRC, Honda was fined big bucks for having inaccurate odometers. They indicated higher mileage by something like 3% which allegedly led to a requirement for more maintenance costs. I think that may amount to one extra oil change in 100,000 miles or earlier timing belt/water pump/spark plug replacements. Anyway, I'm not sure if the odometer error would be connected to a speedometer error.
The problem with heat pumps is that once the temperature of the source of the heat drops below about 32 deg F, the heat pump becomes about as efficient as resistive electric heating. If the batteries and electric motors become the source of heat that may help solve that problem, but what happens in the summer when the heat from those sources needs to be pushed into the atmosphere? The heat collectors might be insulating the hot components and prevent that. Perhaps one just changes the way air flows around or through the hot devices. Smart engineers can solve that problem.
In my region of Colorado where natural gas is not available in rural areas, homes are heated with what are called hybrid systems which are a combination of heat pumps and propane fired furnaces. At moderate temperatures, the heat pump does the job but at temps below freezing the furnace kicks in. The devices are hopefully programmed in such a way that minimizes total energy costs.
Nonsense! Many processes take place converting a disordered state into a more ordered state. The second law only requires that the entropy of the universe increase not that the system undergoing the change increase entropy. From a small acorn a mighty elm tree grows. The process involves converting carbon dioxide and water (in a disordered state) into cellulose and other compounds (a more ordered state) using light energy and a catalyst, chlorophyll. The end result is the entropy of the surroundings has increased.
Should this bill become law:
1. Deny admission of students graduating from any public school in Missouri to any university in the United States that receives federal or state funding. This, of course, would include federal funding for scientific research involving participation in graduate or undergraduate programs.
1. Deny federal scholarship support and loans, including Pell grants, for undergraduate or graduate students in Missouri schools, colleges or universities.
2. Deny federal funding for all programs for any school, school system, college or university in Missouri.
3. Deny employment by the federal government for any person who attended a Missouri K-12 school, college or university.
Maybe these, and other funding restrictions would force reconsideration of this bill.
I went to a conference about online courses a few years back and it was reported that students taking online courses learned about one-third as much as those taking the same course using traditional direct classroom teaching from the same prof who was involved in preparing the online course. There are some things that internet technology is useful for such as making the syllabus and perhaps class notes available to students and answering non-complicated questions about a lecture. There must something very important about seeing the prof in action, getting immediate feedback about something not understood in the classroom, answers to other students questions and interaction with other students. Also, my experience is that office hours with individual or a small group and help sessions really help learning. These observations suggest that interactions with the prof and those who study a subject are critical to learning.
In the US awhile back there was a scandal involving something called pink slime which was added to ground "beef". TV news showed this stuff's manufacture out of leftover parts of who knows what. Watching the making or sausage or laws might have been less disgusting. Horse meat might be better than this stuff.
In the Western US there is also major concern about the round up of wild mustang horses for slaughter for dog food. Maybe some of them ended up in British grocery store raw burger.
Shavano,
Thanks for the science about the lifetime of Tau Ceti. The article in the first link in the original post said 2x. Who's Counting? So if we colonized it in the next few thousand years, we wouldn't have to look for a new place for another 12 billion years.
The thing is, though, if intelligent life developed at the same time from planet formation, using your number for the age of Tau Ceti, life has been on the fourth planet for maybe ~1.8 billion. A pretty long time, something like 1,000 times as long as intelligent life here on earth.
PS: We have a mountain in Colorado named Mount Shavano, 14,232 feet, in the Sawatch range not far from Salida, CO.
According to the article, Tau Ceti is two times as old as our sun which makes it somewhere around eight billion years old. If the planet formation there followed the same evolution as ours, that may mean these planets are also around eight billion years old and if intelligent life formed after about four billion years after planet formation like here on earth, then intelligent life on the fourth planet is four billion years old if it hasn't destroyed itself. It would be interesting to see how they solved the same problems we're confronted with here. We surely could learn something from such an old, experienced civilization.
It's also my understanding that suns like ours and Tau Ceti will turn into a red giant after about eight billion years and destroy close in planets and then cool down. ATau Ceti may be near the end of its life, and colonizing the fourth planet may not be the best idea.
Automobile analogies are always interesting. However, Ford, or Honda for that matter, doesn't require you buy Ford (or Honda) branded gasoline. Should manufacturers require branded fuel, then if you don't, since there's a marker in manufacturer branded gasoline, the car won't run and you'll have to have your car towed to the dealer, have the fuel system drained and fueled with branded gasoline. Same thing with replacement parts. Napa parts may be better than OEMs.
Not being a developer, I've got to ask: Is the OS that important in developing APPs? It would seem to me that the tools developers use are the key to APP production. How many development tools require the use of the OS's command line or the OS's graphical user interface other than to open a tool or save the resulting code?
The article noted is full of BS. It's total nonsense. Science fiction.
This means you are using about 5 kW hr per day or 150 kW hr per month. That's very good efficiency. Probably what you would use in and emergency situation where you were under stringent control of electric energy use. I don't know if that's a winter number when you might be running a furnace blower motor for a forced air furnace or water pump motor for hydronic heating. Perhaps you heat with wood. GE is reporting that their bottom freezer refrigerators use about 550 kWhr of electric energy per year or about 1.5 kWhr per day. So maybe you can get away with 5 kWhr/day. My use is about 15 kWhr/day and I thought I was pretty efficient.
The main reason that car batteries fail is that the lead plates collapse to the bottom of the cells. The result is that either the lead short circuits the battery or are no longer connected to their internal conductors, more likely the latter. This is a physical failure not a physical chemistry failure. Car batteries are subjected to substantial mechanical stress due to the conditions under which they operate in automobiles.
My Prius has a 67 horse power electric motor that acts as a generator to charge the car's batteries. Not sure, but if its generating capacity is 67 HP, that's about 50 kW. That should be plenty for a 10 kW house load. What I need to figure out is how to hook that up to my house electric system. It might be easier for the plugin Prius. Somehow, reverse the current flow.
Our two-person, 2,800 sq. feet house in Colorado uses about 450 - 500 kWhr of electric energy per month with gas water heater, gas dryer, gas heat, electric cooking stove. When purchased, the house had an electric water heater. It was quickly replaced with a gas water heater, and our electric usage was cut in half. Anyone who has access to natural gas should IMMEDIATLY replace their water heater with a gas fired device. The payback is pretty quick. Likewise, a gas dryer will save enormous energy costs, particularly if it doesn't use a pilot light. Our gas bill in the summer is essentially the cost of having the gas meter attached to the house since the dryer and water heater use so little energy.
You can buy Apple products at Best Buy. There's also a store in my city named something like Mac Store that sells and services the complete line of Apple products. Don't know if it's a chain store franchise, though.
Flat Panel TVs have become pretty cheap and with all the added functions and reliability, everybody who wants one or more may already have them. I have a Sharp Aquos which has an estimated 60,000 hours of liftetime. It's great, by the way. At 8 hours per day, that's about 20 years of use. And, as I said, everyone who wants or needs one or more of these things already has them, there's not much of a market. I've seen prices for 50 +" Samsungs or Sharps for $1,200 - $1,500 at Costco. It seems that Sony has already given up on flat panels even though they are supposed to be pretty good, maybe the best. Not to advocate an illegal pricing structure, it does seem like the producers have to increase prices.