I would hope that would be no more possible than flashlight emitting a lethal dose of visible light.
The GP is right. Take a flashlight, focus the light into a point (into an image of the LED crystal, to be precise) and point into your eye. You'd lose vision in that eye pretty quick.
X-ray scanners are scanning you with a medium power (? no data) beam. Each spot of your skin is exposed to that beam for a fraction of a second; an average exposure is supposed to be low. Imagine that I take a hot soldering iron and slide its tip across your chest. Each patch of the skin under the iron's tip heats up to 450F, but since there are many of those patches the average temperature is only, say, 45F - which is totally harmless. Would you like to lay down here, please, while I heat the iron up?
A catastrophic fault will stop the beam of the scanner. The entire output of the X-ray tube will be directed at a single spot of your body, wherever it happened to be at the time of failure. There could be many causes of that, from mechanical (insufficient grease; plastic gear stripped; motor burned out; the MOSFET controlling the motor is blown; motor's power supply failed) to programming (the software crashed in mid-scan.) That would be analogous to me starting to slide that hot soldering iron across your chest, but then just stopping the movement half-way, leaving the iron's tip on your skin, and going for a dinner. It'll burn a hole all the way through you by the time I'm back...
Nobody knows how reliable the X-ray scanner is. For all I know, it may be controlled by a Windows 95 box. You'd need to be awfully reckless to step inside one of those scanners. Technically illiterate people may see scanners as an opaque magic box and go through them without a second thought. But an engineer knows how dangerous those things are.
Who decides who is allowed to vote on who is allowed to decide?
Humanity worked out only one mechanism for that. It is called dictatorship. I don't know how a normally functioning democracy can install restrictions on itself. In essence, it requires a higher level of civic duty to willingly deny oneself the vote because the voter is not sure about his competence. At the same time the voter must be sure that *all* other voters will approach the vote in the same way; otherwise "smart people are full of doubt, but fools are always sure."
Since the fools will scream the loudest, and in any society the majority are fools[*], democracy can't prevent fools from voting. Therefore, democracy is rule by fools. It should be obvious enough to any observer of the US political process (as an example; other countries have their own demons.)
[*] The percentage of fools depends on the IQ threshold that you set. And that depends on the IQ of people that you'd like to decide your fate. If you insist on IQ of 200 then probably 95% of population are fools; if you are content with people of IQ 10 running your life then hardly any voter is a fool.
If we look at the lessons of the revolution of 1917 we immediately see that the party never intended to give an effective governing power to the rabble. Congresses of the Party involved people that were carefully selected out of tens of thousands - and still their vote (odobryam) did not matter. USSR, the first state that was officially ruled "by every kitchenmaid" in reality was ruled by a dozen of old men. And that's how it always was supposed to be. Other countries haven't escaped this fate either; their politicians are coming from the same class of people, and they all have approximately identical intentions. They differ only in specifics of how to get there. The people (of most countries) can only select one politician out of several, but all candidates are alike. The USA hasn't seen a President of Common Sense for how long? Probably for the entire last century. Herman Cain threatened to be such a president, so they neatly took him out.
I would go as far as to say that most countries are ruled by dictatorships; but those are modern, sophisticated dictatorships that pretend to give the voter the power, but in reality the voter has no power. For example, how many US Presidents started little victorious wars since 1945? How many times the same Presidents asked the Congress to declare war? How many Presidents were impeached for that? The unavoidable conclusion is that all branches of power are not adversaries (as they were meant to be) but willing co-conspirators. They figured out that making love amongst themselves is far more profitable than making war.
or having to hand desolder/resolder 10,000 of these damn things.
These connectors are nearly impossible to remove. Two large shield tabs + 8 (or more) through hole pins... It might be cheaper to scrap the batch.
I'm amazed that this was allowed to happen. Mightily unprofessional. You never assemble a large production run of anything until the same people assemble a hundred boards from the same kit and then you personally test those 100 boards. Then they are returned as "approved" samples, and any deviation will be at expense of the assembly house.
There may be no theoretical benefit, but since there's no such thing as an ideal sampler or filter or quantiser, it has many practical benefits.
Here is a quick example. You sample at 44 kHz. The first Nyquist zone is from 0 to 22 kHz, the second one is from 22 to 44 kHz (with flipped spectrum.)
Now, say that some [mechanical] harmonic from some instrument has frequency of 33 kHz. We don't hear those with our ears (parts of the ear are too massive to vibrate fast enough) so no harm done. The orchestra is playing as usual.
But now record this orchestra with an imperfect antialiasing filter (there are reasons why a perfect one wouldn't do you much good anyway.) The 33 kHz harmonic falls into the 2nd Nyquist zone. It will be played back as if it was (22 kHz - 11 kHz = 11 kHz.) Can you hear 11 kHz? Most people hear it just fine. Think about it for a moment. There was no 11 kHz signal in the original spectrum; there was 33 kHz, an inaudible one. The artifact showed up because a [lossy] mathematical operation was performed on the data that describes the signal. The resulting distortion produced an audible tone where none was present originally.
However if you encode at, say, 128 kHz sampling rate, things change. First, the antialiasing filter - even if it is of the same architecture - will have its cutoff way below the Fs/2. This means that signals of the second Nyquist zone will be attenuated by many tens of dB - essentially they can be completely eliminated because nobody cares what you do to ripple and phase above 30 or 40 kHz. Second, for the alias to show up it has to be in LF radio band now, starting at 128 kHz. Microphones aren't even mechanically capable of picking up those frequencies. And finally, if that 33 kHz harmonic passes through the filter (with the same mediocre attenuation as in the first example)... it will be played back as 33 kHz, and it won't go anywhere. The amplifier will filter it, and the speakers will attenuate it greatly. In other words, a serious distortion that was present when you are sampling at 44 kHz disappears when you are sampling at a much higher rate.
At least now that teenager has Google, and perhaps she'll be able to find the correct answers out there.
If you want a correct answer from Google you need to formulate a correct question. This is not possible without at least knowing the terms in which the problem is described. If that young worker is sent on a sales trip she will not even know that the Traveler's problem exists, is well known, and has solutions. If that young worker is tasked with coloring a map of the USA she will not know how many paint colors to order. I agree that she doesn't need to remember proofs of any of that (and I never knew them to begin with) but at very least she needs to know that the problem exists and may have ways to solve it.
research in a library, bleh
Perhaps. But books are written by humans for humans. They don't just dump a solution, loaded with jargon, onto you. Books teach you, step by step. Following through mathworld.com hyperlinks is just like being in RPM Hell where each new item requires ten more new items. The most important link leads here, and good luck figuring out how it relates to salesmen unless you understand most of the words there.
I was doing a contract in a large company some months ago. I was working at the company, in a cubicle. No travel was required. I was given a laptop. Why? Many reasons.
A laptop is a common denominator. Instead of sourcing several configurations you settle on one or two laptops, and make a volume deal - often a lease. Engineers and salesdroids all get laptops. These days a laptop is plenty fast for everyone.
Spare parts and OS images - the fewer configurations you support the fewer images you need to maintain.
Ease of deployment. It's a little device, you bring it into a cubicle and the guy is all good to go.
No monitor required. These aren't free, and they are yet another item to source and repair.
Fewer cables and power outlets are required.
Presentations. Even cubicle hermits need to present material at a meeting now and then.
Travel, however unlikely. A normally sedentiary engineer can be sent on an emergency call from an Important Customer. I have seen it happening now and then.
Work from home. Even if telecommuting is not your main mode of work, there are days when you can't come to the office (a child is sick, etc.) You grab the laptop and become as productive as possible under the circumstances. This also includes emergency work that Must Be Done Yesterday.
Low power consumption when running; excellent power management; one little fan instead of several large ones.
Easy access to expansion ports (no need to crawl under the table.)
I'm sure there are other reasons, but these are very obvious ones.
I'm typing this on a personal 17" notebook that I have for about 4 years now. It's normally sitting on my desk at home, but on several occasions I took it with me, and that was essential. I'm not just "browsing the web" on it, I'm doing my own work on it.
At most he is costing the company $20/day. Not insignificant, mind you, but it's not ripping the company off for thousands of dollars a year like this line of argument typically makes it sound like.
The last large place where I worked at had about 2,000 employees working in about 5 buildings on the campus. $20 x 2000 = $40K per day, or $10.4 million per year (5 days per week.) That's not a chump change, it's a serious accounting matter.
On that subject, the corporate beancounters will point out, instantly, that they can't write this off as overhead because this is a direct benefit to the employee. This will have to be counted as salary even if the CEO is crazy about green and is willing to spread the dough. He can't. If he does, some VP with a career interest will make it known, since the CEO can't run the company from prison. Solar doesn't help either, unless it's employees who pony the cash up and rent the land that the panels are sitting on. (That large company has installed solar panels at another site, actually.)
The main criticism of the charger network is it takes a good amount of time to recharge: the current "quick" charge gets you from 0 to 80% in about 45 minutes.
EVSE stations (or whatever does a quick charge) at a mall of any size will take care of that. 45 minutes is barely enough to order and carefully eat a sandwich or a pizza, or to browse a couple of stores, or to buy some groceries.
I can agree that it shouldn't be your daily routine to charge there - it will be more expensive in all aspects. However this could alleviate the range problem because that problem is a sure deal killer. As I was commenting on Leaf I went to the Nissan Web site and used their Google Maps thingy to plot a couple of my typical routes. One was about 30 miles, but with a climb of 2,000' at the end. I was unable to ascertain the effect of elevation on the range. One Leaf owner says this:
I have observed that climbing 0.5 miles up (and 10 miles forward) is about equivalent to 50 flat miles.
I need to go 0.37 miles up and about 3 miles horizontally - so let's say I'll waste 20 miles of range on that. Then my combined trip will be at least 50 miles, with minimum range specified as 68 miles. This is cutting close. A charger somewhere might be a requirement. (Not that I'm considering Leaf seriously, I sometimes travel a couple hundred miles per day.)
My other trip was 58 miles, with elevation of 1,000' at the other end. This makes it closer to 90 miles - basically at the far end of the range with all other factors being favorable (weather, daytime, no detours.)
Assuming you own a fairly typical midsize type car, imagine you wake up every morning with a quarter tank of gas. If stopping at a gas station is not on your "absolutely must do today" list...
It is. It means that there is about 2.5 gallons of gas in the tank. Within 50 miles the last fuel bar will start blinking. I may travel 50 miles today. I don't want to find myself in need of refueling when I can't easily afford that. It makes sense to fuel the car up when it is easy to do.
Running low on gas also means that the fuel pump is not getting proper cooling. It also means that the tilt of the car (as you go up or down some ramp) may affect the gas pickup - and you don't want any air in that pump.
A 1/4 of a tank in most cars amounts to 80-100 miles of range. This is enough for vast majority of the population (modulo my habits of sleeping, eating and fueling whenever you can because you may not get the chance later.) The Leaf does about the same; but the comparison is not accurate because a gas car can be fueled under 3 minutes nearly anywhere, with no fuss. Charging of an EV is a far bigger deal. As I said, if you must then you wait 45 minutes; but of course it's preferrable to not wait at all.
When I get down to 50-60 miles of range in my current car (a Gen.2 Prius) I'm actively looking for a gas station. However in a Leaf that's all the range it has, new. I'd be very uncomfortable being within 10-20 miles of travel from being stranded and having to pay an expensive towing bill. 10 miles is nothing if you need to make a detour around an accident ahead, on unfamiliar roads - and it happens from time to time. This is not a problem in a car that has 400 miles of range and can be refueled within minutes at any gas station in the country.
I'm also living in a hilly terrain, so Leaf would be burning a lot of joules climbing all these hills. Its range would be likely pretty poor.
I'd be buying Volt in an instant if only its price was in any way competitive (say, about $25K for the base model.) Most of my travel is relatively local (under 100 miles) and the rest can be handled on the gas engine and the generator. However at the current price Volt is out of consideration, unless I just want to get rid of some extra cash. As matter of fact, I'm finding my current Prius to be the best for me; Gen. 3 did some awful things with the center console, and the wagon has pretty poor fuel efficiency. So I don't have a worthy replacement for my car, even though it's slowly getting to the point, simply calendar-wise, when I will want to get a brand new one.
If the grid can handle peak loads during the day (and it usually can), then it can handle additional load at night charging EVs.
Those are two big differences, as they say in Odessa. Daytime consumers are industrial facilities, and the power to them is delivered via thick underground cables. Nighttime EV chargers are connected to a residential distribution grid, implemented as overhead wires and transformers on poles. Loss of power will force you to miss the charging cycle and call for a taxicab next morning. That won't be free.
The power companies have a LOT of interest in making sure their distribution grid and generating capacity is up to snuff.
I understand what you are saying about the total power needs of an EV. However power companies are interested in pushing EV users into the far more expensive day rates. As matter of fact, that's what you will be paying if you charge at work. Businesses will not allow free leeching of a considerable amount of power by thousands of employees. The price will be set high, at very least to cover installation of chargers and to pay for daytime power.
I'd prefer a LEAF over the Volt, though, for various reasons.
I personally would be very uncomfortable on a freeway if I'm low on charge and there is an accident far ahead and nobody knows how soon it can be cleared. This is not a concern in a Prius or a Volt, but generally any gasoline-burning car will be OK as well. In a Leaf you may be watching the needle to go all the way to zero, and then lights dim and the car is off, surrounded by thousands of other cars. What you are going to do? There isn't enough power even for blinking emergency lights.
Plans change, and even if I didn't intend to go somewhere I might have to do that. A single phone call can change all that. A Leaf is OK only if you are fully in control of all your plans. This rarely happens. Real life requires a car that can be fueled (with gas or electrons) quickly enough and easily enough. A trip to the airport (50 miles one way) will leave the Leaf stranded.
Or, to put it the other way, machines should serve the needs of humans - and not the other way around. However a Leaf will be training his driver to do this and not to do that. The penalty for disobeying the Master is expensive (a tow truck to the nearest charger, and then camping there until the charge is complete.)
IMO, the EV charger network needs to be built. However it's unwise to do "from the top," starting with super-expensive cars that nobody can afford. You need to flood the market with dirt cheap, all-plastic boxes on wheels; that will create demand for chargers. Once the network is deployed you can raise the bar and make more expensive vehicles. Perhaps electric bicycles and motorcycles should be included.
This is also pretty obvious considering that an EV, especially a low-end one, will not be competitive with a gasoline car in range - not for a long time. So it can be assumed that many people will want to own two cars; one EV and one gasoline. The EV must be priced so that it makes sense to buy it and use it on a daily basis for short errands. The Volt, at $40K price, is not a good "errand car," and the EV mode is the only one where you can hope to recoup the investment.
People don't trash Volt because it is Volt. It's just the math doesn't make sense. When GM starts selling a car that gives people a reason to buy then things will change.
At this moment Volt can be sold only to wealthy individuals who have a free spot in one of their garages. It is not a practical car, and it is not bought for its practical qualities. The number of such buyers is always small, and Volt already ran out of its "target demography."
Volt needs to become much cheaper to be even considered by majority of car buyers.
The strategy is simple and it worked for the Prius. When the Prius came out, it was not a lower TCO than other cars on the market either.
I own a Prius for last 7 years. Its TCO was always low, and remains low today. Back in 2005 I needed a new car, and Prius was both technically interesting and economical in the long term. It was also a nice car in every other aspect. But the most important point is that Prius was reasonably priced. Perhaps it was a few $K more expensive than the average, but it was in the ballpark. Volt is outrageously outside.
Even at $5/gal gas, fuel costs would only be around $0.15 per mile.
Volt needs premium gas. It is already close to $5. But let's say it's the price you pay. Volt can do 37 mpg in gas-assisted mode. 37 miles = $5, 1 mile = 13.5 cents.
Looks like you are correct.
On the other side of the equation, Prius runs at 50 mpg. The $4/gal (regular) gas results in 8 cents per mile.
Volt needs about 10 kWh to drive 40 miles. With each kWh bought at 10 cents at night, the effective cost of a Volt's EV mile is 2.5 cents.
So the GP post is off by about an order of magnitude. Volt in EV mode is cheaper than Prius by 5.5 cents per mile, but the same Volt in gas mode is more expensive by the same 5.5 cents.
A standard Volt costs about $13K more than a loaded Prius. Driving Volt in gas mode is a total loss, so we won't go there. Let's see how many miles you need to drive Volt in EV mode to beat Prius. Since each mile earns you 5.5 cents and you need to win back $13K, the number is... 236 thousand miles. It's safe to say that both cars are junk by that time. Besides, to drive Volt that much in EV mode you need (counting on 80 miles, two charges per day) 11 years of weekday driving. If you dare to use headlights, A/C or windshield wipers then your break even date is even further away. The car will not live long enough, especially given that the battery needs to be replaced after 10 years. Prius's battery is about $3K, Volt's battery is about $18K, which puts Volt into a deep abyss of red again and forever.
Meanwhile, another gasoline powered car bursts into flames every two minutes in this country but nobody seems to say anything about those...
About zero of those cases occur in garages, after the owner inspects the car and finds nothing wrong with it.
However Volt's battery is delivering exactly that. A hit by a small stone on the road, or a pothole, can turn the battery into a fire hazard weeks after the incident. You park the car in the garage, go to sleep, and wake up burning. This is something that gasoline cars don't do often.
In order to get the savings in gasoline cost you project, you would have to drive a lot of miles.
You can't drive a lot of miles in a Volt in EV mode. Unless you are charging on the route, your daily EV mileage is limited to 40 miles (or 80, if you can charge at work.)
If the break-even point is around 100K miles then you will need 7 years of daily 40-mile EV driving or 3.5 years of daily 80-mile EV driving. But chances are that the real break-even point is farther in time because Volt consumes premium gas at 37 mpg. So unless your commute is of just the right distance you will be spending money on premium gas, when competition uses cheaper regular gas.
The break-even point is also influenced by the fact that you pay the money up front. If you buy a $20K car and invest the $18K at 3% interest this will give you $12K of compound interest over 10 years. This money can buy you 7,500 gal. of gas today, and you can drive 300,000 miles on that gas. This means that you are better off buying a $20K car and paying for gas as you go.
Also note that some municipalities are toying with the idea of extra taxes on EV owners because they are using the roads but pay no fuel tax. This is likely to happen, and it will further push the EV into the red.
Rising gas prices may make an EV more appealing; however that depends on prices on electric power. There is also a possibility that the electric grid will simply not support charging of too many EVs at the same time (at night) and the power company will have plenty of interest in NOT fixing that.
Getting that $7,500 from the IRS requires that you owe that much to begin with. But I guess people who buy a $40K car do that.
Then when you run out of gas after 300 miles (not too far from a regular car's range), you pull into a gas station and refuel and keep going.
Volt runs on premium gas, and the mileage is only 37 mpg. You'd go bankrupt before you reach your destination.
There are several cars on the market, hybrid and not, that are better than that on highway, and they run on cheapest gas that there is. Volt is not a good choice for long distance travel.
Volt is also not a good choice for local travel because it carries the ICE instead of more batteries. A 60-80 mile range would be good enough for driving around town.
It's somehow the (free) operating system's fault because printer manufacturers design their hardware around yet another half-baked printing protocol instead of just using a standard that's been around for decades?
Nobody in his right mind should pay for a separate CPU and RAM and everything else in a printer if the host can do all that, faster, and at zero cost. Rendering PostScript is not exactly a trivial matter. Printer manufacturers do the right thing here. What they aren't doing right is that they don't provide drivers for Linux. On the other hand, quite a few Linux users gave up on the desktop long ago.
Social networks fill the gaps in subscriber's life - because his life has so many gaps. People with full and busy lives have no need for social networks.
They were a group of people organized for their skill mix, which was expertise in film
And that was exactly their problem. A bunch of chemists simply had no job to fulfill in the new digital imaging business. The threshold of entry into the digital camera business was ridiculously low ($29.99 for a USB camera) and anybody could do it - and they did, every other company in China who couldn't possibly even dream of starting a film company. A unique technology that was a closely held secret became a commodity.
The odds of being able to buy a digital camera with a sensor large enough to compete with medium format film, never mind large format, is practically zero.
Resolution of the film is limited to resolution of the scanner, unless that negative is all that you will ever need.
Also, resolution of the sensor is improving over time, whereas resolution of the film is more or less static.
Is your flash card guaranteed to hold data 103+ years?
It's not required to do so - not any more than an undeveloped film has to retain a latent image for 100 years. The film gets developed and becomes stable; the flash card gets read and the data is copied onto a variety of media. If you take even minimal precautions (one backup) you are already good because only simultaneous failure of both storage devices can deprive you of your data. Once recorded reliably, your digital photo can be read millions of years after capture. No pattern of dye particles that are suspended in layers of organic substance can be hoped to survive that long, let alone to retain correct colors.
You could argue that most people don't care about quality that high or longevity that great.
This is indeed an easy position to argue. Besides, many digital cameras are not limited by the number of pixels - they are limited by the lenses, and then by accuracy of the CCD.
Digital cameras have many other advantages; for example, instant review and deletion of unnecessary images; zero cost of each image; higher reliability (few to no moving parts); easy integration into the modern digital life. Those advantages alone were good enough to choose digital even back in days of VGA sensors. Today, with a 10MP sensor in every low cost camera, the quality of the image is just a factor of how much you are willing to pay for a good lens.
Socialism in USSR lacked the will to live. It was not energetic enough to compete on the international scene. Messages from abroad, with pictures of NYC city streets paved with gold, were not helpful.
Many problems could be prevented by stopping Gorbachev (you may want to follow this link.) There would be no Chechnya, for example.
In other words, the path to a Star Trek replicator goes through Communism, and not the other way around.
The path to any sane society goes through people who are moral. This is something that many societies lack. The US society is one of the worst in this respect, but the modern Russian society is also far from being healthy. Amoral people cannot build anything - and they don't; their domain is theft, consumption and destruction. Who builds things these days? Chinese, because they are honest workers.
As I said, I don't know what was happening in Hungary. A common Soviet man only knew who was the leader of the Communist party there. Those Communist parties were very young, and they were basically forced upon people (as I understand) so it is logical to believe that leaders of those parties didn't feel all too secure in their chairs. That was not the case in USSR; several generations changed in the country, and by 1950's all the positions of power were held by people who never saw Czar, never owned a business, never were allowed to travel abroad, and never paid (or were paid) in gold. In a way, USSR did create a new man - a member of the hive, who is only comfortable inside the box. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, was full of people who had other ideas in their recent memory. Perhaps some even lost a lot after Communists took over around 1945. So revolts 10 years later are very easy to understand.
But with regard to "people who told me that they had to write such reports," now you have my testimony that I have never needed to write anything like that or even knew how - and nobody ever approached me with such requests.
Perhaps it's a function of what friends one keeps. I'm sure that an otherwise unemployed lady who likes to visit restaurants in Moscow and establish liaisons with foreign visitors had a good chance of being talked to about such things. But if you are a machinist at a factory, or a farmer on a farm a thousand miles away from Moscow - what can you possibly tell, and about who? Secret police in USSR was not omnipotent; they had to use their limited resources wisely.
Regardless, it's all history now. All we can do is to know it and be sure to not reuse its worst parts in the future. The good parts will come naturally.
I'm living in a post-communist country and have met a few half-Russian guys and they all have this rose colored view of communism.
Then perhaps they know something that you don't? Many of your friends (and more people on Slashdot) have somewhat fond memories of the old USSR (of best parts of it, admittedly!) - are they all wrong, despite being there, and you alone are correct, even though you were (probably) living in Eastern Europe then, like in Hungary? Note that in USSR those countries were considered "a near abroad" and visiting you would be seen as a half-step toward going all the way capitalist.
The whole idea of communism was a half-baked mess
Absolutely. As a social system it was unsustainable. I don't think you can find many people who'd argue the opposite. By the way, your ideas about GULAG and snitching and jailing are a complete mess too; you might just as well recall Ivan IV "The Terrible" - and I will recall Vlad Tepes in return:-) As reported, they did lots of spying and snitching in East Germany, but not in USSR - not after Stalin died anyway. We are talking about half a century here. USSR in 1980's was extremely safe for living, and there was hardly anyone to spy upon (talks in kitchens with a bottle of vodka at hand don't count.) You'd have to go against the state to earn your three square meals per day on sunny beaches of Kolyma river. Attacking the state, peacefully or not, was not tolerated (see modern China.) Your links telling about Hungarian opposition only tell that Socialism in the Eastern Bloc was sustained by dictatorial methods. It can be easily seen why that was necessary - once the oppression was removed these regimes promptly fell.
So we have here a duality. On one hand, we have a society that is unstable by design, like a traditional, well known commune. On the other hand, life for most people was good enough in that commune (until the 1990s, at least.)
You cannot reconcile these two. People from the ex-USSR are selectively remembering the good parts, but most understand, logically, that the society that delivered those good parts could not possibly exist for long. It's pure nostalgia. Besides, there were bad parts too; I couldn't buy SciFi books anywhere; Stanislaw Lem was published in qty. 50,000 once per decade, in a 350M country! (But that's a minor problem, compared to 1+ hour travel to work in public transportation; bad living conditions; inferior medicine; etc.)
Perhaps you do not have much good to say about the socialist past of your country. I have no knowledge on that front, and it would be foolish of me to tell you, a citizen of that country, how you should feel about something. However life in the old USSR was not all bad. As the G*P poster (Alex) said, many curse Gorbachev and his Perestroika for what he did to USSR. A good half of the current population of Russia is of that opinion; that's why they vote for Putin - because he represents (and does) a movement toward those old ideals, toward a strong, stable, independent state. Also note that Communists are not getting much of the vote - only hopeless idealists vote for them.)
There is no exact answer to your question because you postulated that "USSR is so cool" (that wasn't what the GP claimed) and then demanded proof of that statement.
No government can be "cool" for everyone. If the government protects me from being robbed, it necessarily restricts rights of the robber. Humans only can choose between several types of the government, from Somalia's anarchy to Uzbekistan's strict dictatorship, with every other country in between.
You can compare governments using different metrics. You can use freedom as a yardstick; then Somalia wins hands down. You can use employment and social stability as a measure; then Uzbekistan is a winner. Different groups of people (a.k.a. nations) choose and keep different styles of government based on what works for them. USSR fell when the government was no longer satisfactory to the society - and that happened because the decay of the society, built into the structure of USSR's socialism, damaged the country so much that there wasn't enough food to get by. The USA is falling because the decay of the society, built into the USA's capitalism, is eliminating the working class by encouraging employers to move out of the country (taxes are high, competition from China is strong, can't build anything in the USA.) By some estimates, half of americans receive government assistance at expense of the other half and of Chinese banks. This cannot continue forever.
All http requests are independent and thus can be evaluated in parallel by whatever number of machines they're willing to throw at the problem.
It should be also mentioned that this evaluation can be done in hardware. A single FPGA can implement multiple matching circuits, and you can have thousands of FPGAs in the system. It is also perfectly scalable.
Slashdot Mirror
I would hope that would be no more possible than flashlight emitting a lethal dose of visible light.
The GP is right. Take a flashlight, focus the light into a point (into an image of the LED crystal, to be precise) and point into your eye. You'd lose vision in that eye pretty quick.
X-ray scanners are scanning you with a medium power (? no data) beam. Each spot of your skin is exposed to that beam for a fraction of a second; an average exposure is supposed to be low. Imagine that I take a hot soldering iron and slide its tip across your chest. Each patch of the skin under the iron's tip heats up to 450F, but since there are many of those patches the average temperature is only, say, 45F - which is totally harmless. Would you like to lay down here, please, while I heat the iron up?
A catastrophic fault will stop the beam of the scanner. The entire output of the X-ray tube will be directed at a single spot of your body, wherever it happened to be at the time of failure. There could be many causes of that, from mechanical (insufficient grease; plastic gear stripped; motor burned out; the MOSFET controlling the motor is blown; motor's power supply failed) to programming (the software crashed in mid-scan.) That would be analogous to me starting to slide that hot soldering iron across your chest, but then just stopping the movement half-way, leaving the iron's tip on your skin, and going for a dinner. It'll burn a hole all the way through you by the time I'm back...
Nobody knows how reliable the X-ray scanner is. For all I know, it may be controlled by a Windows 95 box. You'd need to be awfully reckless to step inside one of those scanners. Technically illiterate people may see scanners as an opaque magic box and go through them without a second thought. But an engineer knows how dangerous those things are.
Who decides who is allowed to vote on who is allowed to decide?
Humanity worked out only one mechanism for that. It is called dictatorship. I don't know how a normally functioning democracy can install restrictions on itself. In essence, it requires a higher level of civic duty to willingly deny oneself the vote because the voter is not sure about his competence. At the same time the voter must be sure that *all* other voters will approach the vote in the same way; otherwise "smart people are full of doubt, but fools are always sure."
Since the fools will scream the loudest, and in any society the majority are fools[*], democracy can't prevent fools from voting. Therefore, democracy is rule by fools. It should be obvious enough to any observer of the US political process (as an example; other countries have their own demons.)
[*] The percentage of fools depends on the IQ threshold that you set. And that depends on the IQ of people that you'd like to decide your fate. If you insist on IQ of 200 then probably 95% of population are fools; if you are content with people of IQ 10 running your life then hardly any voter is a fool.
If we look at the lessons of the revolution of 1917 we immediately see that the party never intended to give an effective governing power to the rabble. Congresses of the Party involved people that were carefully selected out of tens of thousands - and still their vote (odobryam) did not matter. USSR, the first state that was officially ruled "by every kitchenmaid" in reality was ruled by a dozen of old men. And that's how it always was supposed to be. Other countries haven't escaped this fate either; their politicians are coming from the same class of people, and they all have approximately identical intentions. They differ only in specifics of how to get there. The people (of most countries) can only select one politician out of several, but all candidates are alike. The USA hasn't seen a President of Common Sense for how long? Probably for the entire last century. Herman Cain threatened to be such a president, so they neatly took him out.
I would go as far as to say that most countries are ruled by dictatorships; but those are modern, sophisticated dictatorships that pretend to give the voter the power, but in reality the voter has no power. For example, how many US Presidents started little victorious wars since 1945? How many times the same Presidents asked the Congress to declare war? How many Presidents were impeached for that? The unavoidable conclusion is that all branches of power are not adversaries (as they were meant to be) but willing co-conspirators. They figured out that making love amongst themselves is far more profitable than making war.
or having to hand desolder/resolder 10,000 of these damn things.
These connectors are nearly impossible to remove. Two large shield tabs + 8 (or more) through hole pins... It might be cheaper to scrap the batch.
I'm amazed that this was allowed to happen. Mightily unprofessional. You never assemble a large production run of anything until the same people assemble a hundred boards from the same kit and then you personally test those 100 boards. Then they are returned as "approved" samples, and any deviation will be at expense of the assembly house.
There may be no theoretical benefit, but since there's no such thing as an ideal sampler or filter or quantiser, it has many practical benefits.
Here is a quick example. You sample at 44 kHz. The first Nyquist zone is from 0 to 22 kHz, the second one is from 22 to 44 kHz (with flipped spectrum.)
Now, say that some [mechanical] harmonic from some instrument has frequency of 33 kHz. We don't hear those with our ears (parts of the ear are too massive to vibrate fast enough) so no harm done. The orchestra is playing as usual.
But now record this orchestra with an imperfect antialiasing filter (there are reasons why a perfect one wouldn't do you much good anyway.) The 33 kHz harmonic falls into the 2nd Nyquist zone. It will be played back as if it was (22 kHz - 11 kHz = 11 kHz.) Can you hear 11 kHz? Most people hear it just fine. Think about it for a moment. There was no 11 kHz signal in the original spectrum; there was 33 kHz, an inaudible one. The artifact showed up because a [lossy] mathematical operation was performed on the data that describes the signal. The resulting distortion produced an audible tone where none was present originally.
However if you encode at, say, 128 kHz sampling rate, things change. First, the antialiasing filter - even if it is of the same architecture - will have its cutoff way below the Fs/2. This means that signals of the second Nyquist zone will be attenuated by many tens of dB - essentially they can be completely eliminated because nobody cares what you do to ripple and phase above 30 or 40 kHz. Second, for the alias to show up it has to be in LF radio band now, starting at 128 kHz. Microphones aren't even mechanically capable of picking up those frequencies. And finally, if that 33 kHz harmonic passes through the filter (with the same mediocre attenuation as in the first example) ... it will be played back as 33 kHz, and it won't go anywhere. The amplifier will filter it, and the speakers will attenuate it greatly. In other words, a serious distortion that was present when you are sampling at 44 kHz disappears when you are sampling at a much higher rate.
At least now that teenager has Google, and perhaps she'll be able to find the correct answers out there.
If you want a correct answer from Google you need to formulate a correct question. This is not possible without at least knowing the terms in which the problem is described. If that young worker is sent on a sales trip she will not even know that the Traveler's problem exists, is well known, and has solutions. If that young worker is tasked with coloring a map of the USA she will not know how many paint colors to order. I agree that she doesn't need to remember proofs of any of that (and I never knew them to begin with) but at very least she needs to know that the problem exists and may have ways to solve it.
research in a library, bleh
Perhaps. But books are written by humans for humans. They don't just dump a solution, loaded with jargon, onto you. Books teach you, step by step. Following through mathworld.com hyperlinks is just like being in RPM Hell where each new item requires ten more new items. The most important link leads here, and good luck figuring out how it relates to salesmen unless you understand most of the words there.
Quite obviously this does not make them "not smart enough".
It makes them not competent enough.
I was doing a contract in a large company some months ago. I was working at the company, in a cubicle. No travel was required. I was given a laptop. Why? Many reasons.
I'm sure there are other reasons, but these are very obvious ones.
I'm typing this on a personal 17" notebook that I have for about 4 years now. It's normally sitting on my desk at home, but on several occasions I took it with me, and that was essential. I'm not just "browsing the web" on it, I'm doing my own work on it.
Just a couple of random comments here.
At most he is costing the company $20/day. Not insignificant, mind you, but it's not ripping the company off for thousands of dollars a year like this line of argument typically makes it sound like.
The last large place where I worked at had about 2,000 employees working in about 5 buildings on the campus. $20 x 2000 = $40K per day, or $10.4 million per year (5 days per week.) That's not a chump change, it's a serious accounting matter.
On that subject, the corporate beancounters will point out, instantly, that they can't write this off as overhead because this is a direct benefit to the employee. This will have to be counted as salary even if the CEO is crazy about green and is willing to spread the dough. He can't. If he does, some VP with a career interest will make it known, since the CEO can't run the company from prison. Solar doesn't help either, unless it's employees who pony the cash up and rent the land that the panels are sitting on. (That large company has installed solar panels at another site, actually.)
The main criticism of the charger network is it takes a good amount of time to recharge: the current "quick" charge gets you from 0 to 80% in about 45 minutes.
EVSE stations (or whatever does a quick charge) at a mall of any size will take care of that. 45 minutes is barely enough to order and carefully eat a sandwich or a pizza, or to browse a couple of stores, or to buy some groceries.
I can agree that it shouldn't be your daily routine to charge there - it will be more expensive in all aspects. However this could alleviate the range problem because that problem is a sure deal killer. As I was commenting on Leaf I went to the Nissan Web site and used their Google Maps thingy to plot a couple of my typical routes. One was about 30 miles, but with a climb of 2,000' at the end. I was unable to ascertain the effect of elevation on the range. One Leaf owner says this:
I need to go 0.37 miles up and about 3 miles horizontally - so let's say I'll waste 20 miles of range on that. Then my combined trip will be at least 50 miles, with minimum range specified as 68 miles. This is cutting close. A charger somewhere might be a requirement. (Not that I'm considering Leaf seriously, I sometimes travel a couple hundred miles per day.)
My other trip was 58 miles, with elevation of 1,000' at the other end. This makes it closer to 90 miles - basically at the far end of the range with all other factors being favorable (weather, daytime, no detours.)
Assuming you own a fairly typical midsize type car, imagine you wake up every morning with a quarter tank of gas. If stopping at a gas station is not on your "absolutely must do today" list...
It is. It means that there is about 2.5 gallons of gas in the tank. Within 50 miles the last fuel bar will start blinking. I may travel 50 miles today. I don't want to find myself in need of refueling when I can't easily afford that. It makes sense to fuel the car up when it is easy to do.
Running low on gas also means that the fuel pump is not getting proper cooling. It also means that the tilt of the car (as you go up or down some ramp) may affect the gas pickup - and you don't want any air in that pump.
A 1/4 of a tank in most cars amounts to 80-100 miles of range. This is enough for vast majority of the population (modulo my habits of sleeping, eating and fueling whenever you can because you may not get the chance later.) The Leaf does about the same; but the comparison is not accurate because a gas car can be fueled under 3 minutes nearly anywhere, with no fuss. Charging of an EV is a far bigger deal. As I said, if you must then you wait 45 minutes; but of course it's preferrable to not wait at all.
To be p
More of a Volt person, I take it? :-)
When I get down to 50-60 miles of range in my current car (a Gen.2 Prius) I'm actively looking for a gas station. However in a Leaf that's all the range it has, new. I'd be very uncomfortable being within 10-20 miles of travel from being stranded and having to pay an expensive towing bill. 10 miles is nothing if you need to make a detour around an accident ahead, on unfamiliar roads - and it happens from time to time. This is not a problem in a car that has 400 miles of range and can be refueled within minutes at any gas station in the country.
I'm also living in a hilly terrain, so Leaf would be burning a lot of joules climbing all these hills. Its range would be likely pretty poor.
I'd be buying Volt in an instant if only its price was in any way competitive (say, about $25K for the base model.) Most of my travel is relatively local (under 100 miles) and the rest can be handled on the gas engine and the generator. However at the current price Volt is out of consideration, unless I just want to get rid of some extra cash. As matter of fact, I'm finding my current Prius to be the best for me; Gen. 3 did some awful things with the center console, and the wagon has pretty poor fuel efficiency. So I don't have a worthy replacement for my car, even though it's slowly getting to the point, simply calendar-wise, when I will want to get a brand new one.
If the grid can handle peak loads during the day (and it usually can), then it can handle additional load at night charging EVs.
Those are two big differences, as they say in Odessa. Daytime consumers are industrial facilities, and the power to them is delivered via thick underground cables. Nighttime EV chargers are connected to a residential distribution grid, implemented as overhead wires and transformers on poles. Loss of power will force you to miss the charging cycle and call for a taxicab next morning. That won't be free.
The power companies have a LOT of interest in making sure their distribution grid and generating capacity is up to snuff.
I understand what you are saying about the total power needs of an EV. However power companies are interested in pushing EV users into the far more expensive day rates. As matter of fact, that's what you will be paying if you charge at work. Businesses will not allow free leeching of a considerable amount of power by thousands of employees. The price will be set high, at very least to cover installation of chargers and to pay for daytime power.
I'd prefer a LEAF over the Volt, though, for various reasons.
I personally would be very uncomfortable on a freeway if I'm low on charge and there is an accident far ahead and nobody knows how soon it can be cleared. This is not a concern in a Prius or a Volt, but generally any gasoline-burning car will be OK as well. In a Leaf you may be watching the needle to go all the way to zero, and then lights dim and the car is off, surrounded by thousands of other cars. What you are going to do? There isn't enough power even for blinking emergency lights.
Plans change, and even if I didn't intend to go somewhere I might have to do that. A single phone call can change all that. A Leaf is OK only if you are fully in control of all your plans. This rarely happens. Real life requires a car that can be fueled (with gas or electrons) quickly enough and easily enough. A trip to the airport (50 miles one way) will leave the Leaf stranded.
Or, to put it the other way, machines should serve the needs of humans - and not the other way around. However a Leaf will be training his driver to do this and not to do that. The penalty for disobeying the Master is expensive (a tow truck to the nearest charger, and then camping there until the charge is complete.)
IMO, the EV charger network needs to be built. However it's unwise to do "from the top," starting with super-expensive cars that nobody can afford. You need to flood the market with dirt cheap, all-plastic boxes on wheels; that will create demand for chargers. Once the network is deployed you can raise the bar and make more expensive vehicles. Perhaps electric bicycles and motorcycles should be included.
This is also pretty obvious considering that an EV, especially a low-end one, will not be competitive with a gasoline car in range - not for a long time. So it can be assumed that many people will want to own two cars; one EV and one gasoline. The EV must be priced so that it makes sense to buy it and use it on a daily basis for short errands. The Volt, at $40K price, is not a good "errand car," and the EV mode is the only one where you can hope to recoup the investment.
People don't trash Volt because it is Volt. It's just the math doesn't make sense. When GM starts selling a car that gives people a reason to buy then things will change.
At this moment Volt can be sold only to wealthy individuals who have a free spot in one of their garages. It is not a practical car, and it is not bought for its practical qualities. The number of such buyers is always small, and Volt already ran out of its "target demography."
Volt needs to become much cheaper to be even considered by majority of car buyers.
The strategy is simple and it worked for the Prius. When the Prius came out, it was not a lower TCO than other cars on the market either.
I own a Prius for last 7 years. Its TCO was always low, and remains low today. Back in 2005 I needed a new car, and Prius was both technically interesting and economical in the long term. It was also a nice car in every other aspect. But the most important point is that Prius was reasonably priced. Perhaps it was a few $K more expensive than the average, but it was in the ballpark. Volt is outrageously outside.
Take my word as someone who bought a Leaf and is in the process of filling out the tax forms.
If so, you owe Slashdot an extensive report about this Leaf thing once you get used to it and learn what it is good for :-)
Even at $5/gal gas, fuel costs would only be around $0.15 per mile.
Volt needs premium gas. It is already close to $5. But let's say it's the price you pay. Volt can do 37 mpg in gas-assisted mode. 37 miles = $5, 1 mile = 13.5 cents.
Looks like you are correct.
On the other side of the equation, Prius runs at 50 mpg. The $4/gal (regular) gas results in 8 cents per mile.
Volt needs about 10 kWh to drive 40 miles. With each kWh bought at 10 cents at night, the effective cost of a Volt's EV mile is 2.5 cents.
So the GP post is off by about an order of magnitude. Volt in EV mode is cheaper than Prius by 5.5 cents per mile, but the same Volt in gas mode is more expensive by the same 5.5 cents.
A standard Volt costs about $13K more than a loaded Prius. Driving Volt in gas mode is a total loss, so we won't go there. Let's see how many miles you need to drive Volt in EV mode to beat Prius. Since each mile earns you 5.5 cents and you need to win back $13K, the number is ... 236 thousand miles. It's safe to say that both cars are junk by that time. Besides, to drive Volt that much in EV mode you need (counting on 80 miles, two charges per day) 11 years of weekday driving. If you dare to use headlights, A/C or windshield wipers then your break even date is even further away. The car will not live long enough, especially given that the battery needs to be replaced after 10 years. Prius's battery is about $3K, Volt's battery is about $18K, which puts Volt into a deep abyss of red again and forever.
Meanwhile, another gasoline powered car bursts into flames every two minutes in this country but nobody seems to say anything about those...
About zero of those cases occur in garages, after the owner inspects the car and finds nothing wrong with it.
However Volt's battery is delivering exactly that. A hit by a small stone on the road, or a pothole, can turn the battery into a fire hazard weeks after the incident. You park the car in the garage, go to sleep, and wake up burning. This is something that gasoline cars don't do often.
In order to get the savings in gasoline cost you project, you would have to drive a lot of miles.
You can't drive a lot of miles in a Volt in EV mode. Unless you are charging on the route, your daily EV mileage is limited to 40 miles (or 80, if you can charge at work.)
If the break-even point is around 100K miles then you will need 7 years of daily 40-mile EV driving or 3.5 years of daily 80-mile EV driving. But chances are that the real break-even point is farther in time because Volt consumes premium gas at 37 mpg. So unless your commute is of just the right distance you will be spending money on premium gas, when competition uses cheaper regular gas.
The break-even point is also influenced by the fact that you pay the money up front. If you buy a $20K car and invest the $18K at 3% interest this will give you $12K of compound interest over 10 years. This money can buy you 7,500 gal. of gas today, and you can drive 300,000 miles on that gas. This means that you are better off buying a $20K car and paying for gas as you go.
Also note that some municipalities are toying with the idea of extra taxes on EV owners because they are using the roads but pay no fuel tax. This is likely to happen, and it will further push the EV into the red.
Rising gas prices may make an EV more appealing; however that depends on prices on electric power. There is also a possibility that the electric grid will simply not support charging of too many EVs at the same time (at night) and the power company will have plenty of interest in NOT fixing that.
Getting that $7,500 from the IRS requires that you owe that much to begin with. But I guess people who buy a $40K car do that.
Then when you run out of gas after 300 miles (not too far from a regular car's range), you pull into a gas station and refuel and keep going.
Volt runs on premium gas, and the mileage is only 37 mpg. You'd go bankrupt before you reach your destination.
There are several cars on the market, hybrid and not, that are better than that on highway, and they run on cheapest gas that there is. Volt is not a good choice for long distance travel.
Volt is also not a good choice for local travel because it carries the ICE instead of more batteries. A 60-80 mile range would be good enough for driving around town.
It's somehow the (free) operating system's fault because printer manufacturers design their hardware around yet another half-baked printing protocol instead of just using a standard that's been around for decades?
Nobody in his right mind should pay for a separate CPU and RAM and everything else in a printer if the host can do all that, faster, and at zero cost. Rendering PostScript is not exactly a trivial matter. Printer manufacturers do the right thing here. What they aren't doing right is that they don't provide drivers for Linux. On the other hand, quite a few Linux users gave up on the desktop long ago.
people with lives use G+
Social networks fill the gaps in subscriber's life - because his life has so many gaps. People with full and busy lives have no need for social networks.
They were a group of people organized for their skill mix, which was expertise in film
And that was exactly their problem. A bunch of chemists simply had no job to fulfill in the new digital imaging business. The threshold of entry into the digital camera business was ridiculously low ($29.99 for a USB camera) and anybody could do it - and they did, every other company in China who couldn't possibly even dream of starting a film company. A unique technology that was a closely held secret became a commodity.
The odds of being able to buy a digital camera with a sensor large enough to compete with medium format film, never mind large format, is practically zero.
Resolution of the film is limited to resolution of the scanner, unless that negative is all that you will ever need.
Also, resolution of the sensor is improving over time, whereas resolution of the film is more or less static.
Is your flash card guaranteed to hold data 103+ years?
It's not required to do so - not any more than an undeveloped film has to retain a latent image for 100 years. The film gets developed and becomes stable; the flash card gets read and the data is copied onto a variety of media. If you take even minimal precautions (one backup) you are already good because only simultaneous failure of both storage devices can deprive you of your data. Once recorded reliably, your digital photo can be read millions of years after capture. No pattern of dye particles that are suspended in layers of organic substance can be hoped to survive that long, let alone to retain correct colors.
You could argue that most people don't care about quality that high or longevity that great.
This is indeed an easy position to argue. Besides, many digital cameras are not limited by the number of pixels - they are limited by the lenses, and then by accuracy of the CCD.
Digital cameras have many other advantages; for example, instant review and deletion of unnecessary images; zero cost of each image; higher reliability (few to no moving parts); easy integration into the modern digital life. Those advantages alone were good enough to choose digital even back in days of VGA sensors. Today, with a 10MP sensor in every low cost camera, the quality of the image is just a factor of how much you are willing to pay for a good lens.
Socialism in USSR lacked the will to live. It was not energetic enough to compete on the international scene. Messages from abroad, with pictures of NYC city streets paved with gold, were not helpful.
Many problems could be prevented by stopping Gorbachev (you may want to follow this link.) There would be no Chechnya, for example.
In other words, the path to a Star Trek replicator goes through Communism, and not the other way around.
The path to any sane society goes through people who are moral. This is something that many societies lack. The US society is one of the worst in this respect, but the modern Russian society is also far from being healthy. Amoral people cannot build anything - and they don't; their domain is theft, consumption and destruction. Who builds things these days? Chinese, because they are honest workers.
As I said, I don't know what was happening in Hungary. A common Soviet man only knew who was the leader of the Communist party there. Those Communist parties were very young, and they were basically forced upon people (as I understand) so it is logical to believe that leaders of those parties didn't feel all too secure in their chairs. That was not the case in USSR; several generations changed in the country, and by 1950's all the positions of power were held by people who never saw Czar, never owned a business, never were allowed to travel abroad, and never paid (or were paid) in gold. In a way, USSR did create a new man - a member of the hive, who is only comfortable inside the box. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, was full of people who had other ideas in their recent memory. Perhaps some even lost a lot after Communists took over around 1945. So revolts 10 years later are very easy to understand.
But with regard to "people who told me that they had to write such reports," now you have my testimony that I have never needed to write anything like that or even knew how - and nobody ever approached me with such requests.
Perhaps it's a function of what friends one keeps. I'm sure that an otherwise unemployed lady who likes to visit restaurants in Moscow and establish liaisons with foreign visitors had a good chance of being talked to about such things. But if you are a machinist at a factory, or a farmer on a farm a thousand miles away from Moscow - what can you possibly tell, and about who? Secret police in USSR was not omnipotent; they had to use their limited resources wisely.
Regardless, it's all history now. All we can do is to know it and be sure to not reuse its worst parts in the future. The good parts will come naturally.
I'm living in a post-communist country and have met a few half-Russian guys and they all have this rose colored view of communism.
Then perhaps they know something that you don't? Many of your friends (and more people on Slashdot) have somewhat fond memories of the old USSR (of best parts of it, admittedly!) - are they all wrong, despite being there, and you alone are correct, even though you were (probably) living in Eastern Europe then, like in Hungary? Note that in USSR those countries were considered "a near abroad" and visiting you would be seen as a half-step toward going all the way capitalist.
The whole idea of communism was a half-baked mess
Absolutely. As a social system it was unsustainable. I don't think you can find many people who'd argue the opposite. By the way, your ideas about GULAG and snitching and jailing are a complete mess too; you might just as well recall Ivan IV "The Terrible" - and I will recall Vlad Tepes in return :-) As reported, they did lots of spying and snitching in East Germany, but not in USSR - not after Stalin died anyway. We are talking about half a century here. USSR in 1980's was extremely safe for living, and there was hardly anyone to spy upon (talks in kitchens with a bottle of vodka at hand don't count.) You'd have to go against the state to earn your three square meals per day on sunny beaches of Kolyma river. Attacking the state, peacefully or not, was not tolerated (see modern China.) Your links telling about Hungarian opposition only tell that Socialism in the Eastern Bloc was sustained by dictatorial methods. It can be easily seen why that was necessary - once the oppression was removed these regimes promptly fell.
So we have here a duality. On one hand, we have a society that is unstable by design, like a traditional, well known commune. On the other hand, life for most people was good enough in that commune (until the 1990s, at least.)
You cannot reconcile these two. People from the ex-USSR are selectively remembering the good parts, but most understand, logically, that the society that delivered those good parts could not possibly exist for long. It's pure nostalgia. Besides, there were bad parts too; I couldn't buy SciFi books anywhere; Stanislaw Lem was published in qty. 50,000 once per decade, in a 350M country! (But that's a minor problem, compared to 1+ hour travel to work in public transportation; bad living conditions; inferior medicine; etc.)
Perhaps you do not have much good to say about the socialist past of your country. I have no knowledge on that front, and it would be foolish of me to tell you, a citizen of that country, how you should feel about something. However life in the old USSR was not all bad. As the G*P poster (Alex) said, many curse Gorbachev and his Perestroika for what he did to USSR. A good half of the current population of Russia is of that opinion; that's why they vote for Putin - because he represents (and does) a movement toward those old ideals, toward a strong, stable, independent state. Also note that Communists are not getting much of the vote - only hopeless idealists vote for them.)
You're dodging the question
There is no exact answer to your question because you postulated that "USSR is so cool" (that wasn't what the GP claimed) and then demanded proof of that statement.
No government can be "cool" for everyone. If the government protects me from being robbed, it necessarily restricts rights of the robber. Humans only can choose between several types of the government, from Somalia's anarchy to Uzbekistan's strict dictatorship, with every other country in between.
You can compare governments using different metrics. You can use freedom as a yardstick; then Somalia wins hands down. You can use employment and social stability as a measure; then Uzbekistan is a winner. Different groups of people (a.k.a. nations) choose and keep different styles of government based on what works for them. USSR fell when the government was no longer satisfactory to the society - and that happened because the decay of the society, built into the structure of USSR's socialism, damaged the country so much that there wasn't enough food to get by. The USA is falling because the decay of the society, built into the USA's capitalism, is eliminating the working class by encouraging employers to move out of the country (taxes are high, competition from China is strong, can't build anything in the USA.) By some estimates, half of americans receive government assistance at expense of the other half and of Chinese banks. This cannot continue forever.
All http requests are independent and thus can be evaluated in parallel by whatever number of machines they're willing to throw at the problem.
It should be also mentioned that this evaluation can be done in hardware. A single FPGA can implement multiple matching circuits, and you can have thousands of FPGAs in the system. It is also perfectly scalable.