How about birth control? Not over-populating an already over-crowded planet?
The main problem with GM, is that eventually the GM crops will work their way "into the wild". And then there is no stopping them. What happens if a particularly nasty GM crop gets loose and cross cultivates with wild or non-GM crops, and wipes out the natural crop? And said nasty GM crop is after-the-fact demonstrated to have a severe negative health impact on the human population? How can anyone control it? Wipe it out? What then???
GM is a time-bomb, sooner or later it's going to explode. And we are starting to see the expansion now.
Exactly. I grew up in the 70's, rode my bike everywhere. I never even heard of a bike helmet until the very late 80's at the earliest. Motorcycle helmets, yes, bike helmets, no.
Excuse me? Low end torque doesn't matter at all? What do you think gets a car moving from a dead stop? And accelerates it to cruising speed? It's called low end torque. Obviously you have never seen HP/torque curves for gasoline and diesel engines before. Or maybe you have a binary throttle, in which case torque is less of an issue, however, your tires will not last long.
Diesel engines make peak torque (and power) typically well below 4000 rpm (~1500-2000 rpm), while gasoline engines make peak power above that. For a given displacement, a diesel engine will "pull harder", due to more torque, from a lower rpm than a gas engine. As rpm builds, the favor shifts to the gasoline engine as it has more rpm headroom than a diesel. However, more rpm = more fuel, which is one of the main reasons why diesels are more efficient than gasoline engines. You don't need high rpm with a diesel to get equivalent power compared to a gasoline engine.
Now, there are ways to get diesel-like torque (and efficiency) from a small gasoline engine, like the VW TSI engines. These employ both a supercharger and turbo in series. The supercharger provides tons of low-end boost at low rpm (practically from 1000 rpm) giving a good amount of diesel-like low end torque while the turbo starts to kick in around 1500 rpm and takes over from the supercharger. Eventually the supercharger is bypassed completely and disconnected to avoid parasitic power loss from the compressor. This twincharger system allows a relatively small displacement 1.4 liter engine to perform like a much larger one, while retaining very good fuel efficiency as long as you don't drive with your foot on the floor. I have an 09 Golf with the TSI and it develops 160 horsepower and 220 NM torque, which gets it from zero to 60 mph in under 8 sec, while still being able to pull 40+ mpg on the highway. And I can tell you, the secret sauce is the low end torque courtesy of the supercharger, that makes it hella fun to drive.
Checks? We haven't had those in wide use in Finland for at least 15 years. Every bank here and many local shops have secure electronic terminals where you can pay your bills, if you do not want to do it online. I have paid all my bills online for about 10 years now, and never had a single issue. We can also order from many Finnish-based online stores and make transfers directly from personal bank accounts, a direct debit transaction. No credit cards are needed in many cases and the approval takes no longer than a credit card transaction. Direct-debit from your own bank account is also possible in practically any shop using a so-called "bank card". In most cases, the credit cards issued by the local banks are also bank cards. When I ring up a purchase, I just tell the clerk to either charge the purchase to credit or direct-debit from my account. Easy, simple. I absolutely hated paper checks when I was living in the US. Keeping the checkbook balanced (which it never was), etc.
I don't understand this fear of online payment in the US. It seems most people in the US would gladly give out their credit card number over an unsecure landline to an unknown person/company at the other end, but paying bills online using a secure site is just too risky. Get over it and join the 21st century already.
As an American living abroad, it really frustrates me to see how totally awful some systems are in the US, when I have seen the alternatives available elsewhere. Don't get me started on healthcare, or mobile phone providers, or ISPs... or...
I have a 3rd gen iPod which I just happened to buy in a duty free shop at the Paris airport several years ago. Unfortunately, France had a similar law regarding the output volume of mobile devices and my iPod was limited (great, thanks). It really sucked when I tried to use high quality full size Sennheiser headphones with this iPod, it just would not drive them enough to get decent volume levels. I'm not talking deafening levels, but decent music listening levels. I had to resort to a firmware hack on the iPod that disabled the volume limit and I vowed never to buy any mobile electronics in France ever again, thanks to this ridiculous law.
Now, I wonder if this is yet again another French law being forced onto the rest of the EU by France. They seem to be getting good at this lately (three strikes anyone...?)
Except that in the US, the *marketing* budgets of the major pharma's far outweigh their R&D budgets. One of the major reasons why drugs are so expensive in the US is due to the marketing of drugs directly to consumers. This is something that has really bothered me a long time. You should never buy a drug based on the marketing of that drug by the manufacturer, e.g. TV ads. You should buy a drug that is selected by your doctor based on your illness, among other factors. Of course if you're in the US, hopefully your doc is not in bed with a pharma company, otherwise you are screwed. Another sad topic...
When I moved out of the US, I really noticed the lack of pharma advertising. No viagra ads on TV, no XYZ drug of the week ads, etc. Here in the EU pharma advertising is regulated, as it should be. And our drugs are far cheaper.
Before I mention LED's, the 3 main problems I see with CFL's today are:
1. They last nowhere near as long as they are marketed. We moved into an old house about 1.5 years ago. We almost immediately started replacing all incandescents with CFL's and that was completed within a few months. Until today, we have had to replace about 10-20% of the CFL's. Which means multiple failures within 1.5 years. Most of the CFL's sold here are marketed with a 6-10 year lifetime, so how is it that many are failing after a year or so? I stay away from the generic brands and only buy the more expensive CFL's from the major manufacturers (including the one mentioned in TFA). I know that CFL's should not be switched on and off at short intervals and we avoid that as much as we can, but this can only be taken so far. CFL's don't come anywhere near their stated lifetimes today.
2. They have a long warm-up time after switching them on. Most CFL's take about 10-20 seconds before they reach about 90% of their peak light output. This is just not acceptable in many cases. Take a closet for example. You turn on the light to look for something. But with a CFL, you have to stand there and wait while the light warms up before you can see anything. So you are standing there, waiting for the bulb to reach an acceptable brightness. This is unacceptable. In this case, you need light NOW. Not 10-20 seconds from now, but NOW. Some of the smaller CFL's meant to replace halogen spots are even worse, I have 3 in a coatroom and they have to be on almost a full minute before they reach 90% output.
3. Performance in the cold is far worse. Warm-up times increase exponentially in the cold. I have many outdoor lamps around my house and yard. Over time, these have also been replaced with CFL's. Some are on a twilight timer and this eliminates the problem of slow warm up (for the most part), but if I need extra light outdoors I need to switch the lights on a couple of minutes before I actually NEED the light, to give the bulbs a chance to warm up and produce usable light.
As I'm pretty fed up with CFL's weaknesses, I'm all ready for LED's once they solve the current problems:
- Broad spectrum daylight output is needed (today's LED's emit a fairly narrow spectrum or output a too cold color temperature) - Better light diffusion and dispersion is needed to mimic incandescents (many LED's are too "point-source") - Cost, the current prices for LED's are ridiculous
Waiting...
PS: I don't mention mercury and recycling because I live in Finland which has a good recycling system. Here, it is not a problem (or inconvenience) to recycle and we don't just throw everything in a landfill.
I really could not care less what "sheeple" are listening to or how "compatible" their music tastes are to mine. I *know* my musical tastes do not necessarily match up with others, especially when it concerns new popular music. So please explain why should I let others decide what is hot, for me?
This is precisely why I rarely listen to radio, whether it's streamed or broadcast over the air. They place too much weight on "the hottest new music", and this causes otherwise good music, which may not be "today's hottest new music" to be buried in the background noise. Not to mention that "the hottest new music" then gets played over and over, 100's of times a day on popular radio stations. This get boring and monotonous really quick. While radio can be a good way to discover new bands, I rarely listen to it for long periods of time because it just repeats the same tracks over and over. It's a very lopsided system that promotes the hottest single-of-the-day at the expense of everything else.
Mikogo. I've been using it for months now at home and occasionally at work. Early versions lacked some features such as being able to launch a remote control session from your PC to a remote host, but these have long since been addressed by the developers. I found it works fine through routers and firewalls and over VPN. Accounts are free for personal use. It's very easy to set up and use.
Please let us know who you work for so we can all avoid your company, if this is how you really feel based on TFA. This kind of BS aggressive attitude is what is wrong in a lot of companies. Basically you are saying screw the customers and you don't care if you step on toes to get rich. Go F yourself.
Isn't it common knowledge that consoles are sold as a loss-leader because the money is made back on games and games licensing? You want cheaper games, buy a PC. Of course these days, the cost difference is negligible on many popular games.
Consoles have now been around long enough that this must be common knowledge. Not to mention that consoles are a closed platform. You try to modify the platform and of course you are not going to be able to play with anyone else. Besides, if you are modding your console to play pirated/copied games, do you really think the manufacturer will go along nicely with that?
Not to mention that everyone has a slightly different ideal body weight. This has nothing to do with what you *think* you should weigh, how you look or what your BMI is (which I believe is a completely useless number). Muscle mass and bone structure or density can vary quite a lot from one person to the next, and both of these can be significant influences to your overall weight. As several posts have already pointed out, muscle weighs more than fat, so converting fat into muscle through exercise is not going to make you lose weight. Exercise can help develop lean muscle tissue and contributes to burning more calories, but the issues behind weight gain/loss are much more complex than that.
Great, just what we need, more profiling in place of real security. And just how is this supposed to work with psychopaths who do not experience the emotion of fear?
Well for one thing, the LHC is not analogous to power station gear, and secondly even if you put a tin roof over something what's to stop birds from flying under the tin roof? Ever seen a bird indoors?
When you build something as big and complex as the LHC, there are bound to be issues like this that you just can't predict beforehand or prevent completely.
Exactly. Nothing was ever found wrong with Audi's cars. I remember that case went on for a couple years, yet no evidence could be found that the car was at fault. If I remember correctly, in the end Audi was forced to pay out to some of the "victims", even though they were never proven to have been at fault.
Pretty soon we will not have to be responsible for our own actions in anything we ever do, we can just blame some company or product for our own mistakes.
Maybe that's true in the US, but as a previous poster mentioned, here in Scandinavia the line has to be able to support at least 75% of it's specified speed over a 24 hour period. Clearly this tactic would be illegal here. Once again, you are getting screwed.
No shocker here, put an MBA-type in charge of a tech company and watch it make more money in the short term, but fail to innovate. Of course, to make more money you invest less in R&D. After all, how many stockholders truly care about investing in R&D, because if the money is going into R&D, it's _not_ going into _their_ pockets. Eventually, this strategy will fail in the long run and the company will then be too far behind to compete. It will get gobbled up by a larger and more successful competitor and will disappear...
You are correct. It opens the door for faster prototypes and PCB designs. This is actually a fairly expensive area for any company that makes products that use PCB's. One-off PCB's are very expensive today.
Slashdot Mirror
How about birth control? Not over-populating an already over-crowded planet?
The main problem with GM, is that eventually the GM crops will work their way "into the wild". And then there is no stopping them. What happens if a particularly nasty GM crop gets loose and cross cultivates with wild or non-GM crops, and wipes out the natural crop? And said nasty GM crop is after-the-fact demonstrated to have a severe negative health impact on the human population? How can anyone control it? Wipe it out? What then???
GM is a time-bomb, sooner or later it's going to explode. And we are starting to see the expansion now.
Mod parent up.
Exactly. I grew up in the 70's, rode my bike everywhere. I never even heard of a bike helmet until the very late 80's at the earliest. Motorcycle helmets, yes, bike helmets, no.
Excuse me? Low end torque doesn't matter at all? What do you think gets a car moving from a dead stop? And accelerates it to cruising speed? It's called low end torque. Obviously you have never seen HP/torque curves for gasoline and diesel engines before. Or maybe you have a binary throttle, in which case torque is less of an issue, however, your tires will not last long.
Diesel engines make peak torque (and power) typically well below 4000 rpm (~1500-2000 rpm), while gasoline engines make peak power above that. For a given displacement, a diesel engine will "pull harder", due to more torque, from a lower rpm than a gas engine. As rpm builds, the favor shifts to the gasoline engine as it has more rpm headroom than a diesel. However, more rpm = more fuel, which is one of the main reasons why diesels are more efficient than gasoline engines. You don't need high rpm with a diesel to get equivalent power compared to a gasoline engine.
Now, there are ways to get diesel-like torque (and efficiency) from a small gasoline engine, like the VW TSI engines. These employ both a supercharger and turbo in series. The supercharger provides tons of low-end boost at low rpm (practically from 1000 rpm) giving a good amount of diesel-like low end torque while the turbo starts to kick in around 1500 rpm and takes over from the supercharger. Eventually the supercharger is bypassed completely and disconnected to avoid parasitic power loss from the compressor. This twincharger system allows a relatively small displacement 1.4 liter engine to perform like a much larger one, while retaining very good fuel efficiency as long as you don't drive with your foot on the floor. I have an 09 Golf with the TSI and it develops 160 horsepower and 220 NM torque, which gets it from zero to 60 mph in under 8 sec, while still being able to pull 40+ mpg on the highway. And I can tell you, the secret sauce is the low end torque courtesy of the supercharger, that makes it hella fun to drive.
Are you really saying that we CAN'T control asteroids with a Wiimote? Who overlooked this? We _are_ screwed...
It's ok, I'm sure the president of the US will save us, just like in Hollywood.
Checks? We haven't had those in wide use in Finland for at least 15 years. Every bank here and many local shops have secure electronic terminals where you can pay your bills, if you do not want to do it online. I have paid all my bills online for about 10 years now, and never had a single issue. We can also order from many Finnish-based online stores and make transfers directly from personal bank accounts, a direct debit transaction. No credit cards are needed in many cases and the approval takes no longer than a credit card transaction. Direct-debit from your own bank account is also possible in practically any shop using a so-called "bank card". In most cases, the credit cards issued by the local banks are also bank cards. When I ring up a purchase, I just tell the clerk to either charge the purchase to credit or direct-debit from my account. Easy, simple. I absolutely hated paper checks when I was living in the US. Keeping the checkbook balanced (which it never was), etc.
I don't understand this fear of online payment in the US. It seems most people in the US would gladly give out their credit card number over an unsecure landline to an unknown person/company at the other end, but paying bills online using a secure site is just too risky. Get over it and join the 21st century already.
As an American living abroad, it really frustrates me to see how totally awful some systems are in the US, when I have seen the alternatives available elsewhere. Don't get me started on healthcare, or mobile phone providers, or ISPs... or...
+10
Here in Finland, the law requires the manufacturer to provide a 2-year warranty for many common types of consumer electronics/appliances.
I have a 3rd gen iPod which I just happened to buy in a duty free shop at the Paris airport several years ago. Unfortunately, France had a similar law regarding the output volume of mobile devices and my iPod was limited (great, thanks). It really sucked when I tried to use high quality full size Sennheiser headphones with this iPod, it just would not drive them enough to get decent volume levels. I'm not talking deafening levels, but decent music listening levels. I had to resort to a firmware hack on the iPod that disabled the volume limit and I vowed never to buy any mobile electronics in France ever again, thanks to this ridiculous law.
Now, I wonder if this is yet again another French law being forced onto the rest of the EU by France. They seem to be getting good at this lately (three strikes anyone...?)
Except that in the US, the *marketing* budgets of the major pharma's far outweigh their R&D budgets. One of the major reasons why drugs are so expensive in the US is due to the marketing of drugs directly to consumers. This is something that has really bothered me a long time. You should never buy a drug based on the marketing of that drug by the manufacturer, e.g. TV ads. You should buy a drug that is selected by your doctor based on your illness, among other factors. Of course if you're in the US, hopefully your doc is not in bed with a pharma company, otherwise you are screwed. Another sad topic...
When I moved out of the US, I really noticed the lack of pharma advertising. No viagra ads on TV, no XYZ drug of the week ads, etc. Here in the EU pharma advertising is regulated, as it should be. And our drugs are far cheaper.
Before I mention LED's, the 3 main problems I see with CFL's today are:
1. They last nowhere near as long as they are marketed. We moved into an old house about 1.5 years ago. We almost immediately started replacing all incandescents with CFL's and that was completed within a few months. Until today, we have had to replace about 10-20% of the CFL's. Which means multiple failures within 1.5 years. Most of the CFL's sold here are marketed with a 6-10 year lifetime, so how is it that many are failing after a year or so? I stay away from the generic brands and only buy the more expensive CFL's from the major manufacturers (including the one mentioned in TFA). I know that CFL's should not be switched on and off at short intervals and we avoid that as much as we can, but this can only be taken so far. CFL's don't come anywhere near their stated lifetimes today.
2. They have a long warm-up time after switching them on. Most CFL's take about 10-20 seconds before they reach about 90% of their peak light output. This is just not acceptable in many cases. Take a closet for example. You turn on the light to look for something. But with a CFL, you have to stand there and wait while the light warms up before you can see anything. So you are standing there, waiting for the bulb to reach an acceptable brightness. This is unacceptable. In this case, you need light NOW. Not 10-20 seconds from now, but NOW. Some of the smaller CFL's meant to replace halogen spots are even worse, I have 3 in a coatroom and they have to be on almost a full minute before they reach 90% output.
3. Performance in the cold is far worse. Warm-up times increase exponentially in the cold. I have many outdoor lamps around my house and yard. Over time, these have also been replaced with CFL's. Some are on a twilight timer and this eliminates the problem of slow warm up (for the most part), but if I need extra light outdoors I need to switch the lights on a couple of minutes before I actually NEED the light, to give the bulbs a chance to warm up and produce usable light.
As I'm pretty fed up with CFL's weaknesses, I'm all ready for LED's once they solve the current problems:
- Broad spectrum daylight output is needed (today's LED's emit a fairly narrow spectrum or output a too cold color temperature)
- Better light diffusion and dispersion is needed to mimic incandescents (many LED's are too "point-source")
- Cost, the current prices for LED's are ridiculous
Waiting...
PS: I don't mention mercury and recycling because I live in Finland which has a good recycling system. Here, it is not a problem (or inconvenience) to recycle and we don't just throw everything in a landfill.
Or hierarchical storage management (HSM). Really not new idea.
I wasn't commenting on their use of the technology, obviously. Or did you read something into my comments?
I really could not care less what "sheeple" are listening to or how "compatible" their music tastes are to mine. I *know* my musical tastes do not necessarily match up with others, especially when it concerns new popular music. So please explain why should I let others decide what is hot, for me?
This is precisely why I rarely listen to radio, whether it's streamed or broadcast over the air. They place too much weight on "the hottest new music", and this causes otherwise good music, which may not be "today's hottest new music" to be buried in the background noise. Not to mention that "the hottest new music" then gets played over and over, 100's of times a day on popular radio stations. This get boring and monotonous really quick. While radio can be a good way to discover new bands, I rarely listen to it for long periods of time because it just repeats the same tracks over and over. It's a very lopsided system that promotes the hottest single-of-the-day at the expense of everything else.
Mikogo. I've been using it for months now at home and occasionally at work. Early versions lacked some features such as being able to launch a remote control session from your PC to a remote host, but these have long since been addressed by the developers. I found it works fine through routers and firewalls and over VPN. Accounts are free for personal use. It's very easy to set up and use.
Please let us know who you work for so we can all avoid your company, if this is how you really feel based on TFA. This kind of BS aggressive attitude is what is wrong in a lot of companies. Basically you are saying screw the customers and you don't care if you step on toes to get rich. Go F yourself.
Isn't it common knowledge that consoles are sold as a loss-leader because the money is made back on games and games licensing? You want cheaper games, buy a PC. Of course these days, the cost difference is negligible on many popular games.
Consoles have now been around long enough that this must be common knowledge. Not to mention that consoles are a closed platform. You try to modify the platform and of course you are not going to be able to play with anyone else. Besides, if you are modding your console to play pirated/copied games, do you really think the manufacturer will go along nicely with that?
Not to mention that everyone has a slightly different ideal body weight. This has nothing to do with what you *think* you should weigh, how you look or what your BMI is (which I believe is a completely useless number). Muscle mass and bone structure or density can vary quite a lot from one person to the next, and both of these can be significant influences to your overall weight. As several posts have already pointed out, muscle weighs more than fat, so converting fat into muscle through exercise is not going to make you lose weight. Exercise can help develop lean muscle tissue and contributes to burning more calories, but the issues behind weight gain/loss are much more complex than that.
Great, just what we need, more profiling in place of real security. And just how is this supposed to work with psychopaths who do not experience the emotion of fear?
Well for one thing, the LHC is not analogous to power station gear, and secondly even if you put a tin roof over something what's to stop birds from flying under the tin roof? Ever seen a bird indoors?
When you build something as big and complex as the LHC, there are bound to be issues like this that you just can't predict beforehand or prevent completely.
Exactly. Nothing was ever found wrong with Audi's cars. I remember that case went on for a couple years, yet no evidence could be found that the car was at fault. If I remember correctly, in the end Audi was forced to pay out to some of the "victims", even though they were never proven to have been at fault.
Pretty soon we will not have to be responsible for our own actions in anything we ever do, we can just blame some company or product for our own mistakes.
Maybe that's true in the US, but as a previous poster mentioned, here in Scandinavia the line has to be able to support at least 75% of it's specified speed over a 24 hour period. Clearly this tactic would be illegal here. Once again, you are getting screwed.
No shocker here, put an MBA-type in charge of a tech company and watch it make more money in the short term, but fail to innovate. Of course, to make more money you invest less in R&D. After all, how many stockholders truly care about investing in R&D, because if the money is going into R&D, it's _not_ going into _their_ pockets. Eventually, this strategy will fail in the long run and the company will then be too far behind to compete. It will get gobbled up by a larger and more successful competitor and will disappear...
You are correct. It opens the door for faster prototypes and PCB designs. This is actually a fairly expensive area for any company that makes products that use PCB's. One-off PCB's are very expensive today.