Most corporations that have data centers do have hot swap failover, whether it's in the same center or multiple centers, and do have multiple routes to the outside world. Having spare capacity is part of doing business in pretty much every industry.
The argument that it's too expensive to have spares is true for anything if you get right down to it. It costs too much to buy a spare car at twenty or thirty grand. However, I do have a spare car. When I bought my new car, I kept my old car. For the two grand they would have given me, it didn't make sense to lose a perfectly functional vehicle in good condition. Spares don't have to be new. You can get spares by stretching the life of your fleet a little and using the older, near-EOL planes as your spares. By doing so, the cost of keeping the spares around is basically limited to a little bit of regular maintenance plus the cost of leasing hangar space for them or whatever.
Besides, even if you did it by buying more planes than you normally would, as I said in another post, amortized over the long term, that increases your operating costs by a few percent. If you increased the cost of tickets by that percentage, you could then buy an extra plane every so often and in a decade, you'll be up to your quota.
I'm going to guess neither. I'd imagine it was more of an application of Sagan's Law: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A study that says that a popular smartphone OS is so bad that only 20% of its users plan to buy another one is an extraordinary claim. If that were true, there's no way that a second or third manufacturer would start building phones based on the same OS and technology, much less the almost two DOZEN smartphone makers currently building Android-based phones. Even as an iPhone user, I'd have a had time believing that sort of a stat. It's just absurd on the face of it.
There is no way even to conceivable have a 2 percent spare in the current market because there is maybe 3 flights per day to a location. To have a spare would be like leaving 30 percent of your capacity unused.
I didn't say you had to have one spare per location. I said 2-3 percent, and I meant it. Stop making incorrect assumptions about what I'm suggesting. Here's how it could work:
Just having spares at your hub cities would statistically cut the number of delays in half; every flight is either flying into or out of a hub, so half the time, a failed plane is flying out from a major hub. Not having spares at your hub city is just plain inexcusable, yet this seems to be the norm.
A significant percentage of the time, planes are taken out of service because of a failure that does not require grounding the plane immediately, but limits the number of flights you can make before repairs are enacted. Having extra aircraft at your hub means that you can more easily swap out the plane before that fourth or fifth flight leaves it stranded in Albuquerque.
Even when a failure requires you to immediately pull the plane out of service, there's a sizable percentage of failures that occur in flight. If you have even a small number of aircraft scattered around the country in reserve, you could have a pilot fly the nearest spare directly to the destination city and meet the ailing aircraft there, largely reducing or even eliminating the delay that would otherwise occur on the return flight for that aircraft.
So that basically means that your aircraft delays would be mostly limited to equipment failures that are noticed on the ground during preflight checks in cities that are not hub cities. And even then, the maximum delay is capped at the amount of time it takes a pilot to fly a spare from a regional depot to that city. Assuming you call the pilot to head to the airport as soon as you think there might be a problem, you could probably keep that delay at under two hours, including the time to unload and reload the passengers and luggage. Either way, that's a lot better than the current practice, which usually involves the airline canceling the flight and trying to cram those passengers into other flights spread out over a day or three.
Alternatively, if you really want one spare airplane per airport, you could create a company that leases spares to all the airlines. Then, all the airlines at a small to medium-sized airport could share a single spare.
Not to mention that these jets are hundreds of millions of dollars to buy. It's not like an extra bus, taxi, train trip. Those are cheap vehicles with many more repeated trips daily.
And cost several hundred bucks per flight, unlike buses that average two or three. Either way, keeping 3% of planes in reserve provably means increasing the total cost of operations by no more than three percent (averaged over the long term, anyway), and realistically, probably more like a fraction of a percent, as a resting plane consumes no fuel, incurs no administrative overhead for booking passengers, incurs no costs for stewardesses or gate agents, incurs no gate fees from the airport, incurs no baggage handling expenses, etc. I'd be willing to pay an extra five bucks per flight for an airline that did this, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.
This means hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue (every day) for the airline inside a market space with very thin margins already.
If the government mandated it as I suggested, then the airlines' thin margins would be largely moot. It would simply result in a small fare hike (or, knowing the airlines, a small spare vehicle cost recovery fee). I've never seen any expense that any company didn't find a way to pass on to their customers, and I can't imagine the airlines starting now.:-)
A part failing is outside of human control. Whether or not you have spare parts on hand, however, is well within human control. Similarly, whether or not you have a spare plane to use while the first one is being repaired is also well within human control. The question of whether force majeure or equivalent contract clauses should apply is not one of whether a failure could have been prevented, but rather whether the failed flight could reasonably have been prevented by having plans in place to handle equipment failures gracefully.
Failures are a part of doing business. The term "acts of God" is intended to protect only against failures that either cannot reasonably be foreseen (overthrow of a government, for example) or are so catastrophic that they cannot be dealt with when they do occur (a hurricane, for example). It is not intended to allow a company to not take responsibility for normal day-to-day failures. A competent, responsible company is expected to have contingency plans in place to deal with a reasonable number of normal day-to-day failures. If a company does not, it is inept and should be allowed to go bankrupt as quickly as possible so that more competent companies can take its place.
Remember that any delay caused by aircraft equipment failure could have been prevented with a single spare plane in the right location.
They'll continue to do that anyway; at an absolute minimum, they're still on the hook for mandatory refunds if a flight doesn't happen, which customers can and will take to another carrier if Southworst can't get them where they are going. All this change does is guarantee that when something fails badly enough that the FAA won't let them fly, they consider it to not be their problem, so they can leave customers stranded and won't have to pay the hotel bill.
Personally, I think there should be a law about the minimum percentage of your fleet that you must keep ready as hot swap spares. Even a two or three percent spare rate should be enough to make these problems go away almost entirely. And I think that somebody at Southwest should be taken out and strapped to the wing for this change.
Oh, on rereading the GP post, I see what you're saying now. You meant that the emission is infrared. That's true for some of it. Not sure what portion.
First, the filament is physically touching parts of the bulb. Second, modern incandescent bulbs are filled with argon and nitrogen to displace the oxygen rather than evacuating it. AFAIK, most bulbs haven't been vacuum tubes since the teens or maybe the twenties (almost a hundred years ago).
On average, only about 10% of an incandescent bulb's energy is emitted as visible light.
Greenpeace has never invested a single dollar into renewable energies, (you know trying to solve these problems) instead choosing that they prefer 'direct action' and political influence.
That's because Greenpeace is all about attention whoring instead of actually improving anything. I watched a few years ago as they bashed Apple constantly for their environmental policies. For as long as I can remember, Apple has been several years ahead of pretty much everybody in the industry in terms of reduction of hazardous materials. Greenpeace was still picking on them. Why? Because iPod is popular. They picked their targets not based on what would actually do the most good or who was doing the most harm, but on who would garner the most attention.
The net result of this was that they gave good ratings to companies who treated the environment as a PR opportunity and droned on about all the things they planned to do (with no timeline) to help the environment, while bashing a company that was actually doing many of those things and actively working on many of the others. In short, they were doing precisely the opposite of what a respectable environmental organization does. I lost what little respect I had for Greenpeace when I realized that this was happening. To be fair, I never respected them that much....
Their position on nuclear power is similar. Instead of focusing on the biggest problems---coal, diesel, gasoline---they focus on something that will get them the most attention---nuclear power. In my book, this attention whoring puts them squarely into the "does more harm than good" camp. They've done more to distract the public from the real environmental issues than all the industry-funded think tanks and ad campaigns put together. I would go so far as to say that no single group has done more to *harm* the environmental movement than Greenpeace.
I'd be willing to bet that if you followed the money, an awful lot of really bad polluters are funding Greenpeace (possibly through shell companies). If the BPs of the world aren't funding Greenpeace, they should be. It's an army of people who are so genuinely clueless that they act like corporate tools and work against their own best interests on a regular basis. Those who would harm the environment truly have no greater friend than Greenpeace, and those corporations might as well acknowledge that.
There are countless environmental organizations that actually make tangible improvements to our environment. Greenpeace isn't one of them, and the best thing we as a society can do is to treat them like a misbehaving two-year-old---ignore their tantrums until they get bored/tired. There's really no point in doing anything else.
You probably mean ephebophilia is more common. It's a bit saddening that there are people out there who would literally equate a 40 year old man that wants to nail Miley Cyrus with a 40 year old man that wants to nail a 5 year old.
Thanks. I couldn't think of the term for that and couldn't be bothered to look it up. My point was that society has a tendency to lump those two together, for better or worse.
Either way, I imagine that it's a bit of a Gaussian type of curve instead of something like a 1 in 25 figure. Through my late teens and early twenties, I've had different friends of different ages that all had their upper and lower limits, and each was different. It's kinda neat how after they all hit 23 or so, the upper limit rises dramatically;)
And the lower end rises more slowly; the distance always seems greater when looking up. It would be quite fascinating to analyze the percentage of people who find women of different ages sexually attractive, assuming you could get people past the fear of stigmatization and actually get a random sampling of the population to answer honestly in some way. But, as they say, good luck with that....
You're right that for integer performance, the G5 was just so-so, and its memory latency compounded that, making the overall OS responsiveness an absolute dog compared with the Intel-based Macs. So for most normal day-to-day use, the newer machines seem a lot faster.
That said, for audio recording purposes, the later G5 models can still hold their own pretty well against the current crop of Intel-based Macs. If I'm remembering the benchmarks correctly, the current model (or possibly the last model) of the eight-core Mac Pro is the first Intel-based Mac that can keep up with the quad G5 in floating-point performance. When you consider that the quad G5 is a five-year-old machine with half as many cores, I think that's pretty darn impressive even if it is drawing twice the wattage.
I'd still kill to have seen a Power7 in a Mac OS X-based server box. What GHz barrier? 4.14 GHz, 16 core, baby. Makes the i7 look like a children's toy. Also uses as much power as a city block, of course, but it would be worth having to rewire my house with a 20 amp circuit just to watch the brownout.:-D
Every person that breaks the law fears being exposed, if we wanted to avoid that we'd have to either not have criminals or not have laws.
You misunderstand me. What I'm saying is that being accused of having kiddie porn is so stigmatized that even people who DO NOT have kiddie porn could be blackmailed by the threat of being accused of having it. Unlike all those other crimes you mention, the burden of proof in the mind of the public when it comes to child porn is remarkably low. It pretty much boils down to "Somebody said he/she did, so he/she did". That degree of stigmatization is inherently dangerous. Period.
Maybe, maybe not. I rather suspect that the taboo is predominantly because people naively believe that pedophilia is rare. It isn't. Roughly one in twenty-five people in the U.S. show some predisposition to pedophilia, and if you include teenagers in the mix, it jumps to... well, pretty much every adult male I've ever met who isn't lying. Given those numbers, I think it's likely that the social stigma would diminish significantly if people did not fear going to prison if found to be part of that one in twenty-five.
That said, doing anything that harms children is a particularly horrible abomination, so it's possible that the taboo won't ever go away under the (mistaken) assumption that pedophiles are a ticking timebomb just waiting to molest kids. In much the same way that every heterosexual male is a ticking timebomb waiting to rape or abuse an adult female, I suppose that is true.... I haven't raped anybody today. Have you?
And getting pedophilia out into the open would cut down on child molestation. Historically, statistically, there has been a strong correlation between repression of sexual desires and rates of sexual crime/violence. There's certainly no reason any sane person would believe pedophilia to be different in that regard.
Like I've said before, banning possession of anything is almost certainly a sign that somebody didn't think things through, whether it's kiddie porn, pot, handguns, knives, or even munitions. It's better for it to be out in the open so that you know where everyone stands than to be shrouded in secrecy so that everyone is always watching their neighbors in fear.
If a foreign interest were to find out you were downloading child porn, an offense where just being accused can cause your life to crumble around you, it would be trivial for them to blackmail you into revealing secrets.
On the other hand, if, as you say, merely being accused could cause your life to crumble around you, all someone has to do is threaten to accuse any random person. It isn't really relevant whether that person actually committed the crime in question if the mere threat of an accusation is enough to cause someone to turn traitor.
Thus, one could reasonably argue that stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does is, in and of itself, a national security risk. Indeed, paranoia in any form is a security risk, whether it's fear of the kiddie porn boogeyman, the fear of the terrorist boogeyman, the fear of the "Big Brother" boogeyman, or any other such thing. FDR had it right when he said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
The section "Basic Permissions" does not provide adequate protection. A literal reading of it says that I have the right to convey a copy of a GPLed work to an employee so that the employee can make proprietary changes, but does not say that the right to redistribute is not passed on to them, only that their modifications may be made for my exclusive use. What this means is that if I pass on a copy that has already been modified, any preexisting private modifications that I pass on to them inherit the terms of the license and are thus redistributable. Further, passing on any modified version solely for employee use (not modification) falls completely outside the scope of that clause, and is thus covered solely by the rules in section 5.
More to the point, the statement that someone can make changes exclusively for you conflicts with section 5, which says that you have no permission to license derivative works in any other way, and there is no clause in section 5 to indicate that section 2 overrides this, so the courts could go either way, but it seems likely that they would choose the interpretation that best satisfies both parts, which is as I described in the previous paragraph.
In short, the FSF may interpret the license to mean that internal use of modified copies doesn't pass on the right to redistribute, but unless you are talking about a GPLed project that is owned by FSF, their interpretation doesn't mean much; the license is murky at best on this issue, which means some other author of GPLed work might have a very different interpretation, might sue you to overturn that aspect of your NDA, and very well might win. Even in the best case, this means that adding anything proprietary into copies of GPLv3 works for internal use is potentially dangerous.
That said, the fact that the FSF's interpretation differs markedly from what the license actually says does suggest that this was an oversight rather than an intentional power grab, which is at least a slightly reassuring sign that the license might get fixed someday. One can hope.
In that case, only the IT people who did the copying have the legal right to carry it with them and give it out to the general public upon leaving the company. That's hardly a significant improvement. Read the GPL version 3 again, and in particular, the definition of "propagate". The license doesn't behave the way you think it does.
Doubly so if employees ever use their own personal equipment for business purposes.
Under GPLv2, you would have been correct, as the term "distribute" has specific meaning in copyright law, a definition that would generally exclude moving copies of copyrighted material around within a company (so long as you do not give it to contractors or other companies working with you, IIRC, but my memory of those aspects of copyright law are kind of vague, so take that with a grain of salt).
The problem is that the term "distribution" isn't the term used by the GPLv3. The GPLv3 uses the term "propagate", and defines it as follows:
To "propagate" a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.
Clearly, putting it on multiple computers does constitute propagating, but as it is done by the IT person, only that IT person would retain the right to distribute further copies. Offering it for internal download, again, clearly qualifies. Why? Because without permission to copy something, making additional copies for additional machines would be a copyright violation.
The GPL is actually remarkably clear on this point; making something available to the general public is not required for the license to kick in, and internal distribution does count. The concern over internal distribution is legitimate, at least under GPLv3. Don't like that? Pick software with a better license next time, like GPL version 2.
My take on glossy screens is that they look worse than matte in most real world lighting conditions, but noticeably (though not significantly) better in ideal light conditions.
Actually, I find glossy to be better in many poor lighting conditions as well. I can at least somewhat use my glossy screen outdoors (with the brightness cranked all the way up) as long as the sun isn't right behind me. With a matte screen, the light coming in from an angle scatters when it hits the screen, and thus I've always found that it washes out the display too much to be usable unless the sun is right in front of you, at which point you're blinded by that. You do have to get used to the fact that there are now reflections that are more clearly visible, but because they are clearly visible, they have well-defined edges, and you can adjust your position to get the worst reflections off your screen entirely. After using one for a while, you tend to stop noticing the minor reflections.
For some tasks, matte screens are better. If you're trying to do something that requires color matching or something, you're better off if the whole screen has equal amounts of glare. For most purposes, though, the matte screen just means that instead of part of the screen being completely washed out and the rest being usable, the whole screen is washed out pretty badly.
IIRC, what matters most as far as how much heat per square inch during reentry is the mass to surface area ratio. A wing-based design allows you to have minimal support structure for a large portion of the vehicle, which allows you to add a lot of surface area without adding a lot of mass.
Even with a non-ablative heat shield, a capsule design still gets insanely hot on the outside. I'm pretty sure you'd end up having to change the tiles out fairly frequently or the material is going to fracture from the differential heating. Most materials don't like having somebody shoot liquid nitrogen at one side of it and a flamethrower at the other.... I could be wrong. Either way, IIRC, the material should last far longer with a wing-based design, assuming you don't go overboard on the structural steel.
However, if you would like the efficiencies created by being able to land your spacecraft someplace specific and useful near a population center, like a spaceport or airport, than wings are just the ticket.
Not just that. Capsules don't scale well. Building a heat shield that burns up on reentry is fine if you're flying once in a while with three or four people. It doesn't work well for a space plane to carry a hundred people on a daily basis. In the long run, we need something that's truly reusable.
Whoever told you that "airbags = totaled" is wrong. Airbags are replaced all the time in accidents. It's nowhere near $20k. The replacement cost for the airbags themselves range from about $1,000 for a driver-side single unit up to about $6,000 if you're replacing two main airbags, two side curtain airbags, and the front windshield. Although many cars beyond eight or ten years old aren't worth as much as the airbags would cost, it's not a given.
You're right that on some cars, the ECU won't allow the car to start if the air bags are not operational. That typically means you have to replace the air bag system, not the car, not even the ECU. If you want to find out if your car is one of those, just unplug the air bag fuse. If your car starts, your car's ECU probably doesn't care about the airbags.... Bear in mind that most cars (or at least the ones I've dealt with) have a separate airbag ECU that's responsible for air bags (or uses the body ECU). That might indeed have to be replaced, but that isn't your main (engine) ECU. (Yes, I realize that the "E" in ECU is supposed to mean engine, and that a "body ECU" is nonsensical, but it's a commonly used term....)
There are a couple of manufacturers (Audi, VW, maybe a couple of others) that hard-code serial numbers into things, and various pieces of the system won't talk to parts that don't match the expected number. That's not the norm, though. To deal with that, you have to connect a code reader to the old one, read the codes, connect a code reader to the new one, and set the codes to match. It's more of a pain, but it still shouldn't require gutting the car. Besides, AFAIK, you shouldn't need to replace the actual air bag ECU, just the bag units themselves.
That said, IANAM, so take this with a grain of salt.
More importantly, after an airbag blows, if you want to, you could just shove the airbag out of the way and continue driving the car indefinitely. You can also replace that part (and only that part) without gutting and replacing the entire inside of the car.
By contrast, if an eFuse destroys itself, your whole phone is bricked, and can only be repaired by replacing the entire phone, or at least its main board.
An airbag is solely for safety, whereas a phone is a phone, and that single component is supposedly solely for "safety". If the phone were perfectly functional without it (albeit less "safe", then that would be fine. It's not. Therefore, an airbag and an eFuse are not comparable. Simple as that.
Designing self-destructing hardware should be illegal. Fundamentally, designing a device to deliberately damage itself is no different than deliberately designing a laptop to fail a few months after the warranty expires. It is selling a customer a product that you know to be fundamentally defective because you deliberately made it so, and doing this without remorse. Unless clearly labeled with "This hardware may destroy itself at any time", that's false advertising and fraud for starters.
The worst thing is that if they are building this in to detect firmware hacking now, what's to stop them from using it for something else in the future? Oh, you installed a ringtone that isn't approved. Say goodbye to your phone. Oh, you visited a website that is used by movie pirates (despite not being able to do anything significant there with your phone). We don't like that, either. Pop. Living in China? You received a phone call from a suspected dissident or went to a website that the government considers dodgy. We're killing your phone. And so on.
And what's to stop a virus from attacking the phone and simultaneously killing millions of these things worldwide on the same day? This is a glorified land mine, and we all have heard the statistics about how many tens of thousands of people are killed or maimed every year by those. Adding a feature like this into a product borders on suicidally stupid, and I really hope it blows up in their faces as soon as possible just so I can say, "I told you so."
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But it doesn't work when you let out the magic smoke....
Most corporations that have data centers do have hot swap failover, whether it's in the same center or multiple centers, and do have multiple routes to the outside world. Having spare capacity is part of doing business in pretty much every industry.
The argument that it's too expensive to have spares is true for anything if you get right down to it. It costs too much to buy a spare car at twenty or thirty grand. However, I do have a spare car. When I bought my new car, I kept my old car. For the two grand they would have given me, it didn't make sense to lose a perfectly functional vehicle in good condition. Spares don't have to be new. You can get spares by stretching the life of your fleet a little and using the older, near-EOL planes as your spares. By doing so, the cost of keeping the spares around is basically limited to a little bit of regular maintenance plus the cost of leasing hangar space for them or whatever.
Besides, even if you did it by buying more planes than you normally would, as I said in another post, amortized over the long term, that increases your operating costs by a few percent. If you increased the cost of tickets by that percentage, you could then buy an extra plane every so often and in a decade, you'll be up to your quota.
Seriously. It's just not a big deal.
I'm going to guess neither. I'd imagine it was more of an application of Sagan's Law: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A study that says that a popular smartphone OS is so bad that only 20% of its users plan to buy another one is an extraordinary claim. If that were true, there's no way that a second or third manufacturer would start building phones based on the same OS and technology, much less the almost two DOZEN smartphone makers currently building Android-based phones. Even as an iPhone user, I'd have a had time believing that sort of a stat. It's just absurd on the face of it.
I didn't say you had to have one spare per location. I said 2-3 percent, and I meant it. Stop making incorrect assumptions about what I'm suggesting. Here's how it could work:
So that basically means that your aircraft delays would be mostly limited to equipment failures that are noticed on the ground during preflight checks in cities that are not hub cities. And even then, the maximum delay is capped at the amount of time it takes a pilot to fly a spare from a regional depot to that city. Assuming you call the pilot to head to the airport as soon as you think there might be a problem, you could probably keep that delay at under two hours, including the time to unload and reload the passengers and luggage. Either way, that's a lot better than the current practice, which usually involves the airline canceling the flight and trying to cram those passengers into other flights spread out over a day or three.
Alternatively, if you really want one spare airplane per airport, you could create a company that leases spares to all the airlines. Then, all the airlines at a small to medium-sized airport could share a single spare.
And cost several hundred bucks per flight, unlike buses that average two or three. Either way, keeping 3% of planes in reserve provably means increasing the total cost of operations by no more than three percent (averaged over the long term, anyway), and realistically, probably more like a fraction of a percent, as a resting plane consumes no fuel, incurs no administrative overhead for booking passengers, incurs no costs for stewardesses or gate agents, incurs no gate fees from the airport, incurs no baggage handling expenses, etc. I'd be willing to pay an extra five bucks per flight for an airline that did this, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.
If the government mandated it as I suggested, then the airlines' thin margins would be largely moot. It would simply result in a small fare hike (or, knowing the airlines, a small spare vehicle cost recovery fee). I've never seen any expense that any company didn't find a way to pass on to their customers, and I can't imagine the airlines starting now. :-)
A part failing is outside of human control. Whether or not you have spare parts on hand, however, is well within human control. Similarly, whether or not you have a spare plane to use while the first one is being repaired is also well within human control. The question of whether force majeure or equivalent contract clauses should apply is not one of whether a failure could have been prevented, but rather whether the failed flight could reasonably have been prevented by having plans in place to handle equipment failures gracefully.
Failures are a part of doing business. The term "acts of God" is intended to protect only against failures that either cannot reasonably be foreseen (overthrow of a government, for example) or are so catastrophic that they cannot be dealt with when they do occur (a hurricane, for example). It is not intended to allow a company to not take responsibility for normal day-to-day failures. A competent, responsible company is expected to have contingency plans in place to deal with a reasonable number of normal day-to-day failures. If a company does not, it is inept and should be allowed to go bankrupt as quickly as possible so that more competent companies can take its place.
Remember that any delay caused by aircraft equipment failure could have been prevented with a single spare plane in the right location.
They'll continue to do that anyway; at an absolute minimum, they're still on the hook for mandatory refunds if a flight doesn't happen, which customers can and will take to another carrier if Southworst can't get them where they are going. All this change does is guarantee that when something fails badly enough that the FAA won't let them fly, they consider it to not be their problem, so they can leave customers stranded and won't have to pay the hotel bill.
Personally, I think there should be a law about the minimum percentage of your fleet that you must keep ready as hot swap spares. Even a two or three percent spare rate should be enough to make these problems go away almost entirely. And I think that somebody at Southwest should be taken out and strapped to the wing for this change.
IR and UV are commonly referred to as light, but neither is visible, so that's a debatable point.
Oh, on rereading the GP post, I see what you're saying now. You meant that the emission is infrared. That's true for some of it. Not sure what portion.
First, the filament is physically touching parts of the bulb. Second, modern incandescent bulbs are filled with argon and nitrogen to displace the oxygen rather than evacuating it. AFAIK, most bulbs haven't been vacuum tubes since the teens or maybe the twenties (almost a hundred years ago).
On average, only about 10% of an incandescent bulb's energy is emitted as visible light.
That's because Greenpeace is all about attention whoring instead of actually improving anything. I watched a few years ago as they bashed Apple constantly for their environmental policies. For as long as I can remember, Apple has been several years ahead of pretty much everybody in the industry in terms of reduction of hazardous materials. Greenpeace was still picking on them. Why? Because iPod is popular. They picked their targets not based on what would actually do the most good or who was doing the most harm, but on who would garner the most attention.
The net result of this was that they gave good ratings to companies who treated the environment as a PR opportunity and droned on about all the things they planned to do (with no timeline) to help the environment, while bashing a company that was actually doing many of those things and actively working on many of the others. In short, they were doing precisely the opposite of what a respectable environmental organization does. I lost what little respect I had for Greenpeace when I realized that this was happening. To be fair, I never respected them that much....
Their position on nuclear power is similar. Instead of focusing on the biggest problems---coal, diesel, gasoline---they focus on something that will get them the most attention---nuclear power. In my book, this attention whoring puts them squarely into the "does more harm than good" camp. They've done more to distract the public from the real environmental issues than all the industry-funded think tanks and ad campaigns put together. I would go so far as to say that no single group has done more to *harm* the environmental movement than Greenpeace.
I'd be willing to bet that if you followed the money, an awful lot of really bad polluters are funding Greenpeace (possibly through shell companies). If the BPs of the world aren't funding Greenpeace, they should be. It's an army of people who are so genuinely clueless that they act like corporate tools and work against their own best interests on a regular basis. Those who would harm the environment truly have no greater friend than Greenpeace, and those corporations might as well acknowledge that.
There are countless environmental organizations that actually make tangible improvements to our environment. Greenpeace isn't one of them, and the best thing we as a society can do is to treat them like a misbehaving two-year-old---ignore their tantrums until they get bored/tired. There's really no point in doing anything else.
Thanks. I couldn't think of the term for that and couldn't be bothered to look it up. My point was that society has a tendency to lump those two together, for better or worse.
And the lower end rises more slowly; the distance always seems greater when looking up. It would be quite fascinating to analyze the percentage of people who find women of different ages sexually attractive, assuming you could get people past the fear of stigmatization and actually get a random sampling of the population to answer honestly in some way. But, as they say, good luck with that....
You're right that for integer performance, the G5 was just so-so, and its memory latency compounded that, making the overall OS responsiveness an absolute dog compared with the Intel-based Macs. So for most normal day-to-day use, the newer machines seem a lot faster.
That said, for audio recording purposes, the later G5 models can still hold their own pretty well against the current crop of Intel-based Macs. If I'm remembering the benchmarks correctly, the current model (or possibly the last model) of the eight-core Mac Pro is the first Intel-based Mac that can keep up with the quad G5 in floating-point performance. When you consider that the quad G5 is a five-year-old machine with half as many cores, I think that's pretty darn impressive even if it is drawing twice the wattage.
I'd still kill to have seen a Power7 in a Mac OS X-based server box. What GHz barrier? 4.14 GHz, 16 core, baby. Makes the i7 look like a children's toy. Also uses as much power as a city block, of course, but it would be worth having to rewire my house with a 20 amp circuit just to watch the brownout. :-D
DV is basically a slightly altered MJPEG, and it's a pretty popular acquisition format. It's not the best quality, but I'd hardly call it lousy.
How does making something available on an internal download site for employees to install not qualify as enabling another party to receive a copy?
Don't get me wrong, I agree that the license should allow that use, but the license is not as clear as it should be on that point.
You misunderstand me. What I'm saying is that being accused of having kiddie porn is so stigmatized that even people who DO NOT have kiddie porn could be blackmailed by the threat of being accused of having it. Unlike all those other crimes you mention, the burden of proof in the mind of the public when it comes to child porn is remarkably low. It pretty much boils down to "Somebody said he/she did, so he/she did". That degree of stigmatization is inherently dangerous. Period.
Maybe, maybe not. I rather suspect that the taboo is predominantly because people naively believe that pedophilia is rare. It isn't. Roughly one in twenty-five people in the U.S. show some predisposition to pedophilia, and if you include teenagers in the mix, it jumps to... well, pretty much every adult male I've ever met who isn't lying. Given those numbers, I think it's likely that the social stigma would diminish significantly if people did not fear going to prison if found to be part of that one in twenty-five.
That said, doing anything that harms children is a particularly horrible abomination, so it's possible that the taboo won't ever go away under the (mistaken) assumption that pedophiles are a ticking timebomb just waiting to molest kids. In much the same way that every heterosexual male is a ticking timebomb waiting to rape or abuse an adult female, I suppose that is true.... I haven't raped anybody today. Have you?
And getting pedophilia out into the open would cut down on child molestation. Historically, statistically, there has been a strong correlation between repression of sexual desires and rates of sexual crime/violence. There's certainly no reason any sane person would believe pedophilia to be different in that regard.
Like I've said before, banning possession of anything is almost certainly a sign that somebody didn't think things through, whether it's kiddie porn, pot, handguns, knives, or even munitions. It's better for it to be out in the open so that you know where everyone stands than to be shrouded in secrecy so that everyone is always watching their neighbors in fear.
On the other hand, if, as you say, merely being accused could cause your life to crumble around you, all someone has to do is threaten to accuse any random person. It isn't really relevant whether that person actually committed the crime in question if the mere threat of an accusation is enough to cause someone to turn traitor.
Thus, one could reasonably argue that stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does is, in and of itself, a national security risk. Indeed, paranoia in any form is a security risk, whether it's fear of the kiddie porn boogeyman, the fear of the terrorist boogeyman, the fear of the "Big Brother" boogeyman, or any other such thing. FDR had it right when he said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
The section "Basic Permissions" does not provide adequate protection. A literal reading of it says that I have the right to convey a copy of a GPLed work to an employee so that the employee can make proprietary changes, but does not say that the right to redistribute is not passed on to them, only that their modifications may be made for my exclusive use. What this means is that if I pass on a copy that has already been modified, any preexisting private modifications that I pass on to them inherit the terms of the license and are thus redistributable. Further, passing on any modified version solely for employee use (not modification) falls completely outside the scope of that clause, and is thus covered solely by the rules in section 5.
More to the point, the statement that someone can make changes exclusively for you conflicts with section 5, which says that you have no permission to license derivative works in any other way, and there is no clause in section 5 to indicate that section 2 overrides this, so the courts could go either way, but it seems likely that they would choose the interpretation that best satisfies both parts, which is as I described in the previous paragraph.
In short, the FSF may interpret the license to mean that internal use of modified copies doesn't pass on the right to redistribute, but unless you are talking about a GPLed project that is owned by FSF, their interpretation doesn't mean much; the license is murky at best on this issue, which means some other author of GPLed work might have a very different interpretation, might sue you to overturn that aspect of your NDA, and very well might win. Even in the best case, this means that adding anything proprietary into copies of GPLv3 works for internal use is potentially dangerous.
That said, the fact that the FSF's interpretation differs markedly from what the license actually says does suggest that this was an oversight rather than an intentional power grab, which is at least a slightly reassuring sign that the license might get fixed someday. One can hope.
In that case, only the IT people who did the copying have the legal right to carry it with them and give it out to the general public upon leaving the company. That's hardly a significant improvement. Read the GPL version 3 again, and in particular, the definition of "propagate". The license doesn't behave the way you think it does.
Doubly so if employees ever use their own personal equipment for business purposes.
Under GPLv2, you would have been correct, as the term "distribute" has specific meaning in copyright law, a definition that would generally exclude moving copies of copyrighted material around within a company (so long as you do not give it to contractors or other companies working with you, IIRC, but my memory of those aspects of copyright law are kind of vague, so take that with a grain of salt).
The problem is that the term "distribution" isn't the term used by the GPLv3. The GPLv3 uses the term "propagate", and defines it as follows:
Clearly, putting it on multiple computers does constitute propagating, but as it is done by the IT person, only that IT person would retain the right to distribute further copies. Offering it for internal download, again, clearly qualifies. Why? Because without permission to copy something, making additional copies for additional machines would be a copyright violation.
The GPL is actually remarkably clear on this point; making something available to the general public is not required for the license to kick in, and internal distribution does count. The concern over internal distribution is legitimate, at least under GPLv3. Don't like that? Pick software with a better license next time, like GPL version 2.
Actually, I find glossy to be better in many poor lighting conditions as well. I can at least somewhat use my glossy screen outdoors (with the brightness cranked all the way up) as long as the sun isn't right behind me. With a matte screen, the light coming in from an angle scatters when it hits the screen, and thus I've always found that it washes out the display too much to be usable unless the sun is right in front of you, at which point you're blinded by that. You do have to get used to the fact that there are now reflections that are more clearly visible, but because they are clearly visible, they have well-defined edges, and you can adjust your position to get the worst reflections off your screen entirely. After using one for a while, you tend to stop noticing the minor reflections.
For some tasks, matte screens are better. If you're trying to do something that requires color matching or something, you're better off if the whole screen has equal amounts of glare. For most purposes, though, the matte screen just means that instead of part of the screen being completely washed out and the rest being usable, the whole screen is washed out pretty badly.
IIRC, what matters most as far as how much heat per square inch during reentry is the mass to surface area ratio. A wing-based design allows you to have minimal support structure for a large portion of the vehicle, which allows you to add a lot of surface area without adding a lot of mass.
Even with a non-ablative heat shield, a capsule design still gets insanely hot on the outside. I'm pretty sure you'd end up having to change the tiles out fairly frequently or the material is going to fracture from the differential heating. Most materials don't like having somebody shoot liquid nitrogen at one side of it and a flamethrower at the other.... I could be wrong. Either way, IIRC, the material should last far longer with a wing-based design, assuming you don't go overboard on the structural steel.
Not just that. Capsules don't scale well. Building a heat shield that burns up on reentry is fine if you're flying once in a while with three or four people. It doesn't work well for a space plane to carry a hundred people on a daily basis. In the long run, we need something that's truly reusable.
Whoever told you that "airbags = totaled" is wrong. Airbags are replaced all the time in accidents. It's nowhere near $20k. The replacement cost for the airbags themselves range from about $1,000 for a driver-side single unit up to about $6,000 if you're replacing two main airbags, two side curtain airbags, and the front windshield. Although many cars beyond eight or ten years old aren't worth as much as the airbags would cost, it's not a given.
You're right that on some cars, the ECU won't allow the car to start if the air bags are not operational. That typically means you have to replace the air bag system, not the car, not even the ECU. If you want to find out if your car is one of those, just unplug the air bag fuse. If your car starts, your car's ECU probably doesn't care about the airbags.... Bear in mind that most cars (or at least the ones I've dealt with) have a separate airbag ECU that's responsible for air bags (or uses the body ECU). That might indeed have to be replaced, but that isn't your main (engine) ECU. (Yes, I realize that the "E" in ECU is supposed to mean engine, and that a "body ECU" is nonsensical, but it's a commonly used term....)
There are a couple of manufacturers (Audi, VW, maybe a couple of others) that hard-code serial numbers into things, and various pieces of the system won't talk to parts that don't match the expected number. That's not the norm, though. To deal with that, you have to connect a code reader to the old one, read the codes, connect a code reader to the new one, and set the codes to match. It's more of a pain, but it still shouldn't require gutting the car. Besides, AFAIK, you shouldn't need to replace the actual air bag ECU, just the bag units themselves.
That said, IANAM, so take this with a grain of salt.
More importantly, after an airbag blows, if you want to, you could just shove the airbag out of the way and continue driving the car indefinitely. You can also replace that part (and only that part) without gutting and replacing the entire inside of the car.
By contrast, if an eFuse destroys itself, your whole phone is bricked, and can only be repaired by replacing the entire phone, or at least its main board.
An airbag is solely for safety, whereas a phone is a phone, and that single component is supposedly solely for "safety". If the phone were perfectly functional without it (albeit less "safe", then that would be fine. It's not. Therefore, an airbag and an eFuse are not comparable. Simple as that.
Designing self-destructing hardware should be illegal. Fundamentally, designing a device to deliberately damage itself is no different than deliberately designing a laptop to fail a few months after the warranty expires. It is selling a customer a product that you know to be fundamentally defective because you deliberately made it so, and doing this without remorse. Unless clearly labeled with "This hardware may destroy itself at any time", that's false advertising and fraud for starters.
The worst thing is that if they are building this in to detect firmware hacking now, what's to stop them from using it for something else in the future? Oh, you installed a ringtone that isn't approved. Say goodbye to your phone. Oh, you visited a website that is used by movie pirates (despite not being able to do anything significant there with your phone). We don't like that, either. Pop. Living in China? You received a phone call from a suspected dissident or went to a website that the government considers dodgy. We're killing your phone. And so on.
And what's to stop a virus from attacking the phone and simultaneously killing millions of these things worldwide on the same day? This is a glorified land mine, and we all have heard the statistics about how many tens of thousands of people are killed or maimed every year by those. Adding a feature like this into a product borders on suicidally stupid, and I really hope it blows up in their faces as soon as possible just so I can say, "I told you so."
Boycott MOT. This ends now.