Indian pharmaceuticals are up to 1st world standards. The major manufacturer recruited a British CEO years ago to make sure of it. India has a long tradition of civil law and administration (in fact the legal system was overhauled by Lord Macaulay, of all people, at the start of the 19th century.) China (excluding Taiwan and Hong Kong) is only just starting to develop a civil law system. That's the key difference. The Bhopal scandal is not about a failure of Indian civil law, it's about the (disgraceful?) failure of the US government to return Union Carbide execs to India for trial. The Chinese product safety scandals have been about Chinese business as usual. Let's just hope the economic downturn does not slow the rate of improvement in China.
A good example is zinc oxide surge absorbers. A big enough surge causes them to explode, but provided the equipment is designed to absorb the explosion, there is no problem. So the suppressor could be UL recognised, used in a UL approved enclosure where it is surrounded by metal, no problem. Used in a homebrew piece of equipment in a plastic box, it could be a serious fire hazard.
This PSU could be perfectly safe mounted in the top of a steel PC chassis, but dangerous in a plastic chassis. That's why it should not be sold to end users.
If you look, that supply is only "UR" component recognition, i.e. it is not UL approved as a standalone item. UR just means that, if a UL tester finds it inside a computer being tested as a whole, he does not test the PSU individually but treats it as a single component. Replying to my own post, below, I should clarify that this seems to be a loophole that I have encountered before. Nobody should sell a UR assembly to an end user, it should only be sold to an OEM to replace an identical item in a UL piece of equipment. I hope this clarifies things.
There are numerous EU certification bodies, but basically any supply has to be CE marked. From experience with both kinds of approvals, and work on IEC electrical safety committees, I would say that there is nothing to choose between them. But can you actually buy a psu nowadays that is not UL and CE marked?
I think most problems would be with older equipment made in the days when both the US and the EU countries were trying to make inroads in the Chinese suppliers. For a time the certification bodies seemed to go a little crazy and let the Chinese get away with murder because they all wanted to be the primary Chinese certification body. One of the best incidents I remember was an auditor going around a Chinese plant with ISO 9002 certification. All the documentation was there, all the procedures written up. In English. And no-one in the entire factory spoke English. I doubt this is the case with electricals any more.
What you say is perfectly true, though I'm not sure that improves matters. If business had to work on a total non-screw-up policy, I doubt many would succeed. (Personally, what kept me out of the Navy was claustrophobia...I'd rather be rained on in a gale on the surface than safe in any space below decks. Irrational but there you are.) But what my colleague said is also true. If a sub captain decides on an attack, and it was a tactical mistake, everybody has the same risk of battle regardless of how well they do their jobs. There are many other hazardous military positions where there is some scope for individual initiative even in an attack. The chance of survival may be little better, but for some people any chance is better than no chance out of all proportion to the odds.
If the UK no longer responds to messages and they have reason to believe this is due to war damage, they open their sealed, handwritten letter from the Prime Minister. This contains their instructions. There is of course much speculation as to what it contains, ranging from "Hi, welcome to the US Navy" to "I told them Iraq had WMDs, but would they listen?". Sadly, barring a takeover of the UK by pacifists, we will never find out.
First, Wellington wasn't in the Navy. Second, he said it of Spanish officers, not the British Navy. (His comment on the Army is rarely reported in full: "They were the scum of the Earth, and look what fine fellows we have made of them").
For real Navy incompetence, you need to look no further than John Jervis, Lord St. Vincent. His idea of blockade was so close that its main danger was to his own ships, which were often wrecked close inshore. Appointed to shore command, he couldn't see the need for all those people working in shipyards. So he sacked 20% of them and cut the pay of the rest. Hence Nelson's depleted fleet at Trafalgar. Making stupid decisions to cut costs has a long history in the Navy, beginning with the aftermath of the Armada.
I was talking to a retired submariner only last week, a former 1st Lt (exec equivalent), and he commented that being in a submarine is like being in prison, only with no visitors. Most submariners hate it. Think about it: you are in a steel box which is actually quite fragile, and your life is entirely dependent on the decisions made by one man. On a surface ship you may have some influence on your fate (shooting down an enemy aircraft with a gun or a missile, deciding exactly when and where to abandon ship) but in a sub you have no control at all.
Now think about a corporate drone using Windows. Your desktop is locked down, updates are rolled out by IT. If your machine is taken over by an IE exploit, the Exchange server fails, etc. etc., there is nothing you can do about it.
Conclusion: Windows is the appropriate operating system for submarines.
You may have noticed that there is growing interest in vertical farms - i.e. using the sides of tall buildings as farmland, based around hydroponics. Because vertical farms are enclosed, water management is easier. One obvious use is for growing transport-intensive crops like fruit, cutting the delivered cost by producing very close to point of consumption. But another would be to produce oil from algae. In either case, sun-receiving surfaces which currently have little function are being utilised effectively.
A lot of people posting so far seem to confuse corn subsidy biofuel with biofuels in general. But there are other biofuels already which are not energy-negative such as alcohol made from sugar cane waste in Brazil, where the nonconvertible cellulose is burned to provide the heat input to the process. Here in the UK we have limited production of alcohol and charcoal from coppiced shrubs and timber processing waste; there are several other initiatives. Given that the price of oil is controlled more by speculation than demand, and given financial instability, we can expect it to change wildly over the next few years. Industries needing long term investment should be protected to some degree from the fluctuations. A working biofuel industry would help to stabilise the oil price, because it would introduce an element of competition into the fuels market. Speculators do not like competitive industries because it is harder to manipulate them.
Zen Buddhism only has rules that contradict themselves, i.e. change is the only thing that doesn't change, variety is void and void is variety, the four majors are empty.
If you think that is what Zen is about, you do not know Zen. Zen asserts that certain truths can only be asserted without affirmation or negation, therefore there is no contradiction. It's a bit like the superposition of wave functions...or just a statement that, by trying to classify the world in black and white terms, we fall into error. You cannot argue against Zen Buddhist beliefs, not because Zen implements an inconsistent logical system, but because Zen relies on the primacy of experience. If you fall into a river, you cannot extract yourself by argument. It is meaningless to affirm or deny your predicament, the only thing to do is to start swimming.
Period. They had a purpose in the era of "wild" capitalism, but those times are over.
Where have you been for the last two years? Isn't unrestricted lending and a $50 billion Ponzi scheme operated from Wall Street, no less, evidence that wild capitalism is still going strong?
I think TFA suffers from the author not knowing an awful lot about the different religions.
IMHO,
Java is more like Episcopalianism - it's based ultimately on C (Judaism) but rejects some of the more traditional ideas and allows for a wide range of interpretations.
Erlang is like Zen - initially hard to understand but based around some apparently simple but deep concepts. And yes, I have studied Zen, you insensitive clod!
C# is Mormonism - a kind of parallel reality to the mainstream Episcopalianism that is Java, and it costs more to join.
C++ is fundamentalist Christianity - at first sight it looks fine but you have to believe increasingly strange things the more you get sucked into it, and it can just blow up in your face without warning.
And COBOL is Islam - it has been around a long time, it is still widely believed in, it can be a bit narrow but for many of its believers it works extremely well.
What are "professional bodies" if not unions? Do you really want a world in which anybody can call themselves a teacher,physician, an accountant, a lawyer, an airline pilot, or a civil or electrical engineer? What are these but unions? My wife, like most such people, cannot legally work in her profession without regular compliance assessment by her professional body. I can...but it has still been worth my while in terms of establishing credibility to add a few more postnominal letters after my Masters.
Manufacturer certification (MCSE cough cough) is not a substitute for an organisation that takes care over assessing credentials. Here in the UK we have the BCS and the IAP, and perhaps others. My own feeling is that the main opposition to proper regulation of the software and IT industry comes from (a) managers who are unqualified and would not be able to get certification, (b) managements who want to cut corners on the job and (c) contractors who hop from one job to another without ever picking up a serious core competence.
He was saying that they need someone named John Peel on the project to make any progress, along with his assistants Ruby, Ranter, Royal,Bellman and True. (Those who are thinking of the public school educated DJ rather than the Cumberland farmer should refer to this page though I disagree slightly with the version of the song there.
Before anybody starts too much on the "look at the Japanese, their comics are better than US comics.."
Anyone remember this for real old timer geek cred? Nicely drawn in a vaguely hippy style, some good jokes, and quite mathematically rigorous. I still have a copy.
What was especially nice was that we had an annoying lecturer at U who having got as far as generating an equation would then make handle turning gestures while feeding numbers into it to get a result; a few years later, there was E McSquared's Function Machine, complete with handle, and before the personal computer.
It's a thermodynamic cycle. To get 100% efficiency the waste heat would have to be rejected at absolute zero, just look at the heat engine equations. You can in theory build a Stirling engine that is more efficient than even the best turbodiesels - but there is a conflict between the (higher) speed needed for adiabatic operation, and the (lower) speed needed to reject the waste heat close to ambient.
The main point is that the thermal efficiency is not too important provided the collector is cheap.
Multistage PV - i.e. being able to use longer wavelengths in more than one stage of electron acceleration, as happens with photosynthesis - probably has better long terms prospects as it has no moving parts.
Multi-fuel engines have been around for a while (engine nerds like to restore the ancient Kelvins, which ran on both gasoline and Diesel - but not very well on either.) However, they will never be as clean and efficient as a single fuel engine because the actual mode of combustion of gasoline and Diesel engines is quite different - gasoline burns fast and Diesel burns slow. I remember well the horrible multi-fuel engine of the British Challenger tank, which betrayed its presence with a plume of smoke. A favorite trick of the squaddies was to wait till an MOD official was near the exhaust and then start the engine, covering them in clouds of soot (I've been in a tank when this happened, and believe me it was very funny).
As noted above, small and efficient Diesels are common in Europe, one reason why our average gas mileage is nearly twice that of the US. The reason for no US sales? Lack of demand, and regulation. US consumers do not like sub-200BHP engines, and the emissions regulations are biased in favor of gasoline. Repeated claims that Diesel particulate emissions kill over 20000 people a year have never been substantiated by proper studies, AFAIK.
Not bailing out GM could be the most environmentally friendly thing the Senate can do, as with GM and its lobbyists off the plot, there is a chance that the US will adopt a more rational (read German, Japanese or French style) approach to car manufacture.
Warners et al are being disingenuous in talking about a "tax". If they seek to obtain it from third parties on the basis that they will then not sue, that is surely extortion or blackmail. If the Government were to mandate it, it would not be a tax but possibly a State Aid. I would hope that any attempt to do this in Europe would fall foul of the Competition Commissioner - you know, the woman who wheeled people like Tridge and Tanenbaum into court to deal with Microsoft.
I suspect that perfectly adequate laws exist in the US to deal with this sort of thing, but the problem is the cost of litigation for people who, independently, are not able to take on large corporations. This could be an opportunity for the new Administration to do something social democratic which has no real downside: introduce a federal consumer protection body which has some real teeth and is funded to litigate against overbearing corporates. Just don't put Ralph "My ego is big enough to think I could be President" Nader in charge.
It just confirms that stars are circling around the galactic center, which may or may not contain anything at all
I'm sure you didn't really mean to write that. The discovery that stars move in orbits where there is no central mass would be far more exciting and disruptive to physics than finding a black hole there.
Once you shoot someone, for whatever reason, you are yourself a violent attacker. The bar has been lowered for you to do it again. And the more that the violent believe they are likely to be resisted by people with guns, the more they are likely to escalate, by e.g. going armed with a machine weapon. I have news for you. There is no such thing as a "good gundeath". There are only cases where it is a less bad outcome for the initiator of violence to get killed than the intended victim. But no ethicist, no theologian, and (in my experience) no professional soldier would call it "good".
Following correct application in accordance with manufacturer directions, one or more persons will not suffer from any of the diseases that previously afflicted them. 100% effective treatment of schizophrenia, depression, cancer.
Babbage's Difference Engine was a calculator, not a computer. However, I do take slight issue. Anyone who has read about what Turing made the Manchester Mark 1 actually DO, apart from being suitably awed, would have to admit that while notionally it belonged to Manchester U, Turing definitely pwned it.
Actually I don't think you are correct, except insofar as the analogy is not precise, but there are several instances of what looks like race conditions in the brain causing problems. Some of them are to do with optical illusions where one part of visual processing handles the field one way, another handles it another, and a static field appears to oscillate, have abnormal brightness etc. Another is the phenomenon of dyslexia. I do not pretend to be any kind of expert on this and my little knowledge is probably hopelessly out of date, but at one time there was an idea that it applied to languages like English which are neither phonetic like Greek or German, or symbolic like written Chinese. The idea is that in some people the processing mechanisms for phonetic and symbolic analysis fail to synchronise properly resulting in confusion. There are said to be examples of dyslexics who are NOT dyslexic in, say, Japanese where the symbolic and phonetic parts of the written language are clearly differentiated.
Secondly, the whole point of learning a message based language like Erlang is that you do not need to worry about race conditions and deadlocking. Obviously you have to worry about deadly embrace...but that is a design issue.
Thirdly, I don't see the point of your argument about simulations not being exact representations of physical processes. If you cannot tell, from the I and the O, whether or not it is a simulation, who cares? One of my cars has a physical accelerator control with a cable to the butterfly, one has a variable resistance transducer feeding into the EMS. Without looking, you could not tell which was which.
Slashdot Mirror
Indian pharmaceuticals are up to 1st world standards. The major manufacturer recruited a British CEO years ago to make sure of it. India has a long tradition of civil law and administration (in fact the legal system was overhauled by Lord Macaulay, of all people, at the start of the 19th century.) China (excluding Taiwan and Hong Kong) is only just starting to develop a civil law system. That's the key difference. The Bhopal scandal is not about a failure of Indian civil law, it's about the (disgraceful?) failure of the US government to return Union Carbide execs to India for trial. The Chinese product safety scandals have been about Chinese business as usual. Let's just hope the economic downturn does not slow the rate of improvement in China.
This PSU could be perfectly safe mounted in the top of a steel PC chassis, but dangerous in a plastic chassis. That's why it should not be sold to end users.
If you look, that supply is only "UR" component recognition, i.e. it is not UL approved as a standalone item. UR just means that, if a UL tester finds it inside a computer being tested as a whole, he does not test the PSU individually but treats it as a single component. Replying to my own post, below, I should clarify that this seems to be a loophole that I have encountered before. Nobody should sell a UR assembly to an end user, it should only be sold to an OEM to replace an identical item in a UL piece of equipment. I hope this clarifies things.
I think most problems would be with older equipment made in the days when both the US and the EU countries were trying to make inroads in the Chinese suppliers. For a time the certification bodies seemed to go a little crazy and let the Chinese get away with murder because they all wanted to be the primary Chinese certification body. One of the best incidents I remember was an auditor going around a Chinese plant with ISO 9002 certification. All the documentation was there, all the procedures written up. In English. And no-one in the entire factory spoke English. I doubt this is the case with electricals any more.
You'll be telling me next you can't stack people on top of each other in tall buildings. Have you heard of "floors"?
What you say is perfectly true, though I'm not sure that improves matters. If business had to work on a total non-screw-up policy, I doubt many would succeed. (Personally, what kept me out of the Navy was claustrophobia...I'd rather be rained on in a gale on the surface than safe in any space below decks. Irrational but there you are.) But what my colleague said is also true. If a sub captain decides on an attack, and it was a tactical mistake, everybody has the same risk of battle regardless of how well they do their jobs. There are many other hazardous military positions where there is some scope for individual initiative even in an attack. The chance of survival may be little better, but for some people any chance is better than no chance out of all proportion to the odds.
If the UK no longer responds to messages and they have reason to believe this is due to war damage, they open their sealed, handwritten letter from the Prime Minister. This contains their instructions. There is of course much speculation as to what it contains, ranging from "Hi, welcome to the US Navy" to "I told them Iraq had WMDs, but would they listen?". Sadly, barring a takeover of the UK by pacifists, we will never find out.
For real Navy incompetence, you need to look no further than John Jervis, Lord St. Vincent. His idea of blockade was so close that its main danger was to his own ships, which were often wrecked close inshore. Appointed to shore command, he couldn't see the need for all those people working in shipyards. So he sacked 20% of them and cut the pay of the rest. Hence Nelson's depleted fleet at Trafalgar. Making stupid decisions to cut costs has a long history in the Navy, beginning with the aftermath of the Armada.
Now think about a corporate drone using Windows. Your desktop is locked down, updates are rolled out by IT. If your machine is taken over by an IE exploit, the Exchange server fails, etc. etc., there is nothing you can do about it.
Conclusion: Windows is the appropriate operating system for submarines.
A lot of people posting so far seem to confuse corn subsidy biofuel with biofuels in general. But there are other biofuels already which are not energy-negative such as alcohol made from sugar cane waste in Brazil, where the nonconvertible cellulose is burned to provide the heat input to the process. Here in the UK we have limited production of alcohol and charcoal from coppiced shrubs and timber processing waste; there are several other initiatives. Given that the price of oil is controlled more by speculation than demand, and given financial instability, we can expect it to change wildly over the next few years. Industries needing long term investment should be protected to some degree from the fluctuations. A working biofuel industry would help to stabilise the oil price, because it would introduce an element of competition into the fuels market. Speculators do not like competitive industries because it is harder to manipulate them.
If you think that is what Zen is about, you do not know Zen. Zen asserts that certain truths can only be asserted without affirmation or negation, therefore there is no contradiction. It's a bit like the superposition of wave functions...or just a statement that, by trying to classify the world in black and white terms, we fall into error. You cannot argue against Zen Buddhist beliefs, not because Zen implements an inconsistent logical system, but because Zen relies on the primacy of experience. If you fall into a river, you cannot extract yourself by argument. It is meaningless to affirm or deny your predicament, the only thing to do is to start swimming.
Where have you been for the last two years? Isn't unrestricted lending and a $50 billion Ponzi scheme operated from Wall Street, no less, evidence that wild capitalism is still going strong?
IMHO,
Manufacturer certification (MCSE cough cough) is not a substitute for an organisation that takes care over assessing credentials. Here in the UK we have the BCS and the IAP, and perhaps others. My own feeling is that the main opposition to proper regulation of the software and IT industry comes from (a) managers who are unqualified and would not be able to get certification, (b) managements who want to cut corners on the job and (c) contractors who hop from one job to another without ever picking up a serious core competence.
He was saying that they need someone named John Peel on the project to make any progress, along with his assistants Ruby, Ranter, Royal,Bellman and True. (Those who are thinking of the public school educated DJ rather than the Cumberland farmer should refer to this page though I disagree slightly with the version of the song there.
Anyone remember this for real old timer geek cred? Nicely drawn in a vaguely hippy style, some good jokes, and quite mathematically rigorous. I still have a copy.
What was especially nice was that we had an annoying lecturer at U who having got as far as generating an equation would then make handle turning gestures while feeding numbers into it to get a result; a few years later, there was E McSquared's Function Machine, complete with handle, and before the personal computer.
The main point is that the thermal efficiency is not too important provided the collector is cheap.
Multistage PV - i.e. being able to use longer wavelengths in more than one stage of electron acceleration, as happens with photosynthesis - probably has better long terms prospects as it has no moving parts.
As noted above, small and efficient Diesels are common in Europe, one reason why our average gas mileage is nearly twice that of the US. The reason for no US sales? Lack of demand, and regulation. US consumers do not like sub-200BHP engines, and the emissions regulations are biased in favor of gasoline. Repeated claims that Diesel particulate emissions kill over 20000 people a year have never been substantiated by proper studies, AFAIK.
Not bailing out GM could be the most environmentally friendly thing the Senate can do, as with GM and its lobbyists off the plot, there is a chance that the US will adopt a more rational (read German, Japanese or French style) approach to car manufacture.
I suspect that perfectly adequate laws exist in the US to deal with this sort of thing, but the problem is the cost of litigation for people who, independently, are not able to take on large corporations. This could be an opportunity for the new Administration to do something social democratic which has no real downside: introduce a federal consumer protection body which has some real teeth and is funded to litigate against overbearing corporates. Just don't put Ralph "My ego is big enough to think I could be President" Nader in charge.
I'm sure you didn't really mean to write that. The discovery that stars move in orbits where there is no central mass would be far more exciting and disruptive to physics than finding a black hole there.
Once you shoot someone, for whatever reason, you are yourself a violent attacker. The bar has been lowered for you to do it again. And the more that the violent believe they are likely to be resisted by people with guns, the more they are likely to escalate, by e.g. going armed with a machine weapon. I have news for you. There is no such thing as a "good gundeath". There are only cases where it is a less bad outcome for the initiator of violence to get killed than the intended victim. But no ethicist, no theologian, and (in my experience) no professional soldier would call it "good".
Following correct application in accordance with manufacturer directions, one or more persons will not suffer from any of the diseases that previously afflicted them. 100% effective treatment of schizophrenia, depression, cancer.
Babbage's Difference Engine was a calculator, not a computer. However, I do take slight issue. Anyone who has read about what Turing made the Manchester Mark 1 actually DO, apart from being suitably awed, would have to admit that while notionally it belonged to Manchester U, Turing definitely pwned it.
Secondly, the whole point of learning a message based language like Erlang is that you do not need to worry about race conditions and deadlocking. Obviously you have to worry about deadly embrace...but that is a design issue.
Thirdly, I don't see the point of your argument about simulations not being exact representations of physical processes. If you cannot tell, from the I and the O, whether or not it is a simulation, who cares? One of my cars has a physical accelerator control with a cable to the butterfly, one has a variable resistance transducer feeding into the EMS. Without looking, you could not tell which was which.
Totally agree with the article, btw., excellent link.