The test doesn't rely entirely on trust; it also relies on there being a substantial penalty for getting caught cheating. That's an important reason not to reduce the fines VW is facing. They and other car companies need to know that trying to cheat the emissions tests has real consequences.
but if the current regulations are already to a point where the amounts being released have a negligible impact on health, pollution, etc. then making them more strict does not amount to much real good, but adds potentially significant costs.
But we aren't at that point yet, so you're engaged in sophistry. The best recent estimate is that air pollution causes about 200,000 early deaths each year in the United States, of which about 53,000 come from road transportation- more than any other source. FWIW, that means that pollution from cars and trucks kills more people every year than traffic accidents. So we still have a very long way to go before we can claim we've reached standards that make automotive exhaust safe.
It seems to me that at least some of this finger pointing should go towards the idiots who created the circumstance where the item under test was informed it was under test.
It doesn't actually work that way, i.e. the EPA doesn't tell the car that it's being tested now. What happens, though, is that the tests are under carefully controlled conditions in the interests of reproducibility. The car is placed on a chassis dynamometer and run at a constant speed. VW programmed their engine computer to look for a combination of constant speed and zero steering input, which would never happen during normal driving, and switched into low emissions mode when it detected that combination.
If ozone's so nasty, why all the hysteria about the missing ozone layer
On the off chance that you actually are this ignorant and aren't just trolling, the difference is that we don't have to breathe the ozone layer. Ozone is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it burns your lungs at quite low concentrations, so it's bad to breathe it. On the other hand, it absorbs some nasty UV radiation that would otherwise cause problems like skin cancer and cataracts (and damaging crops and wildlife, so don't think sunscreen is an adequate substitute). The ozone layer is conveniently located in the stratosphere, where we don't have to breathe it and would suffocate from low pressure long before the ozone could do much damage anyway. So we get the benefits of protection from UV without having to worry about lung damage. Ground level ozone, though, gives us all the problems of destroying our lungs at a concentration that's too low to do much good for UV protection.
At least, that's what our own goverment says; out of one side of their mouth they say this is a public health issue, and out of the other side they tell us that the owners have not been exposed to anything harmful as a result. So which is it?
It's both. The diesels in question produce up to 40x the emissions standard for oxides of nitrogen. Oxides of nitrogen at those levels aren't especially toxic, but in the presence of sunlight they slowly react to produce ozone, which is nasty. High levels of ozone- levels that were regularly produced in the most polluted cities until we instituted smog controls- cause severe respiratory problems in people with existing respiratory problems like asthma. Ozone pollution certainly can kill. So even if the problem isn't so severe that the drivers have to stop driving immediately for their own safety, it's not something we want to allow in the long term.
Obviously they do have what it takes, since they can program their engine computers to pass the smog test. The problem is that they take a performance hit when they do it, and they decided they wanted the higher performance even if it wasn't legal. Chances are the performance difference isn't enough to make the car impractical, but it would make it less attractive.
If Hitler had not betrayed Stalin, he could have held mainland Europe indefinitely.
Or until Stalin decided to betray him first. Long-term peace between Nazi Germany and the USSR was not going to happen; Communism and Fascism were too strongly opposed ideologies for them to avoid war for very long.
Spending $100,000 teaching someone Homer before they get to work spraying for bugs doesn't make their pest control services more valuable. It just wastes their time and our money.
An exterminator may not need to know about Homer for his job, but neither do the vast majority of people whose jobs do require a university education. The reason universities teach about those "unimportant" subjects is because an education is supposed to be about more than just preparing people for a life of work. It's supposed to be preparing them for their entire lives- as workers, yes, but also as friends, parents, citizens, and whatever other roles the may choose to take on in their lives. Maybe we would have a better society and a better polity if we tried as hard as possible to give everyone a first rate education.
But 10 kW, which would recharge in 8 hours, would be entirely feasible with a special circuit wired up to the garage. Thats only 42 amps at 240 V 3-phase. It's a bit more than a fair size electric oven/range with the oven and all burners working full, but not crazy more.
Actually, that's 42 amps at 240V single phase. You may be confused because many 50A home circuits (under NEC, at least) are 4 wire, single phase 120/240V circuits. They have 2 hot wires, a neutral, and a ground wire, so they can provide either 240 V (between the hot wires) or 120V (between one hot wire and neutral). That's the same kind of circuit that's typically used to supply an electric range, which are often rated at about 12kW (240V x 50A). A true 3-phase, 50A 240V circuit would be able to provide just under 21 kW peak power (240V x 50A x sqrt(3)). Note that those kW ratings are for non-continuous operation; circuits intended for continuous (i.e. >3 hours at a stretch) operation may not operate at over 80% of the nominal capacity. A range can get away with using full circuit power because it's practically impossible to operate all the burners and the oven at maximum capacity for very long, but the expected 8-10 hour charging times would classify the car charger as continuous and prevent it from operating at more than 80% of nominal power.
The 15 minutes to 80% charged is not for the home charger; it's for the Porsche equivalent of Tesla's superchargers. I would assume they'll be fed from the local medium voltage distribution system- typically around 10kV to ground- rather than from household voltage. Home charging will probably be with a conventional 240V/50A system, which should be able to get the car fully charged overnight.
Big deal. Porsche is unveiling a prototype of a car that can compete with what Tesla has been doing for a few years. That's great, except that Tesla is a moving target. If Porsche wants to get some excitement going, they need to put out something that will compete with where Tesla will be in a few years when this thing actually makes it into production.
it will be always be a challenge to have these control systems anticipate what human drivers intend to do.
It would help if more human drivers used their turn signals regularly. There's a device specifically designed to let other drivers know what you're intending to do, but most drivers refuse to use it.
California requires warnings about metal concentrations on virutally ALL FOOD
No, it doesn't. There are two requirements for labeling. Individual food items that require labels have to have them, and anyone shopping can see that only a tiny fraction of the items are labeled. There's also a requirement that the entrance to the store have a label if any food item requires one. Since most food stores carry at least one item that requires a warning, almost all stores require one. That might make you think that all food requires labeling, but that impression is incorrect.
But the question is actually if it makes sense to have many authors on a paper.
That depends on the nature of the paper. Yes, a large number of authors is suspicious on a paper that represents the amount of work that could be carried out by a few researchers in a reasonable length of time. But there are more and more papers out there that come from and could only practically be produced by large-scale collaborations. For those papers, there is no longer a single dominant contributor, or even a small group that can be considered the primary contributors. In those cases, it makes sense to include everyone who was involved in a scientific capacity as an author.
The best explanation I've heard is that the Minix community was pretty much waiting for something like Linux to come along. Minix gave the access to the source code and the ability to write patches, but Andy Tanenbaum didn't accept them. When Linus introduced the Linux kernel, all the frustrated, would-be contributors to Minix were eager to get on board. A lot of their patches could be adapted to Linux with relatively little effort, and that backlog of patches was able to boost Linux from hobby to working kernel really quickly. Linux could do that because it tapped into the right group of contributors, and because Linus was willing to accept patches from them.
Maybe the brakes were too good, resulting in all the rear-endings?
Or the positioning of the gas tank that made it vulnerable in rear-end collisions made it less vulnerable in other kinds of collisions. That's exactly the kind of tradeoff real safety engineers have to make.
If the officer had started a 15 minute search after placing the defendant in his car to ensure he was safe would that have made this incident ok?
Probably not. The point is that officers aren't allowed to deliberately drag things out in order to give the dog time to arrive. The search of a vehicle without an arrest is supposed to be limited to protecting the officers' safety, i.e. looking for easily available weapons, so extending it to 15 minutes would still count as dragging it out to wait for the dog. If they actually take the driver to their car, that would count as detaining him, and they need some evidence beyond "swerved to avoid a pothole" to do that.
it's been the only way anti-death penalty folks could make even the slightest bit of progress in the States.
This is simply untrue. It's certainly true that there are large portions of the country where capital punishment remains popular, and judicial challenges have been the only effective way of challenging it there. But there have been several states that have recently abolished capital punishment through the normal legislative process, most recently Maryland in 2013. Notably, few states that have abolished the death penalty legislatively have any real prospect of bringing it back.
One thing that any language needs is a reason for people to want to learn and use it. Some people are willing to learn a new language for commercial or professional reasons, but having an actual culture built around the language is very important. People still learn dead languages like Latin, Classical Greek, and Biblical Hebrew because they want to read the important works of literature written in them. People learn Italian because they want to understand opera and Japanese so they can watch Anime. And they learn English at least in part so they can read Shakespeare and watch Hollywood movies in their original language. If your constructed language lacks that kind of culture, it's going to be at an inevitable disadvantage.
You can't hold someone responsible to show up for a court date for which you have not made sufficient effort to make sure that the person is aware.
The problem is that it sounds very much as if the husband is deliberately avoiding service. He is apparently still in contact with the wife by phone and Facebook, but claims to have no stable residence or workplace where he could be served with papers. The judge is allowing service on Facebook as a last resort because other ways of serving the papers are unavailable and his Facebook contact is known to be good. And, FWIW, if the wife is only able to contact her husband by phone and Facebook for years at a time, the divorce is a formality anyway; that marriage is long over.
This is important as a matter of principle. People shouldn't be allowed to duck out on the legal system by making themselves impossible to find. If you don't allow something like this, then the person who's trying to handle things responsibly through the legal system loses out because they don't get their day in court. One way or the other, somebody is not getting a chance to present their case. It makes sense for that somebody to be the one who's avoiding the process and who could present their side just by showing up rather than the one who is doing everything they can to handle things through the legal system.
Most people would be smarter to buy a car that's suitable for their most common driving and renting on the rare occasion when they need to do something their daily car can't do. They'll save more money on fuel by having a very fuel efficient daily driver- and by avoiding wear and tear on their car on longer drives- to more than make up the difference.
No. Refactoring is when you take the awful, unmaintainable spaghetti code you produced when you were in a deadline crunch and convert it into something maintainable. The goal is to restructure the source code without changing the functionality at all.
Calling it the most dangerous toy seems like a gross overstatement. Yeah, Uranium ore is scary, but it's a fairly low-level radiation source and as an alpha emitter it's only dangerous internally. Chemical and physical hazards are a lot more serious. Toys with lead paint that kids were likely to chew on were probably more dangerous, not to mention ones that could catch kids on fire (ordinary chemical sets) or get them run over in traffic (like bicycles).
How should I make sure that I retain access to today's data 20 years from now?
If you really want to be able to keep your data that long, you need a serious plan. You need to back up everything to at least two separate devices other than your main storage, and you need to keep at least one of those devices off-site so your data can't be destroyed in a local disaster. You need to test your backups regularly to know if/when your medium is failing.
When a medium fails- or if you think it might be about to fail- get a replacement that uses more modern technology, and make a fresh copy. If you are ever about to replace your computer with a new one that can't read your old backup medium, buy newer media that does work with the new computer and make copies while you can still read the old ones. If you keep doing that regularly, you can always have a good copy that will work with your computer. It's more effort than copying to the cloud and trusting, but it means you're in control of your own data.
The real key is to keep making regular backups and regular tests. If you expect to be able to put something into a box and still use it 20 years later, you're in for an unpleasant surprise. You have to keep copying, testing, and updating your technology in order to have a serious hope of keeping up. If you do that, though, you have a very good chance of keeping access to your data at least as long as you have software that will still read it. I have 20+ year old data at work that I can still access because we've been careful about moving it to new media, and because the company that wrote the software is good about backward compatibility.
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The test doesn't rely entirely on trust; it also relies on there being a substantial penalty for getting caught cheating. That's an important reason not to reduce the fines VW is facing. They and other car companies need to know that trying to cheat the emissions tests has real consequences.
But we aren't at that point yet, so you're engaged in sophistry. The best recent estimate is that air pollution causes about 200,000 early deaths each year in the United States, of which about 53,000 come from road transportation- more than any other source. FWIW, that means that pollution from cars and trucks kills more people every year than traffic accidents. So we still have a very long way to go before we can claim we've reached standards that make automotive exhaust safe.
It doesn't actually work that way, i.e. the EPA doesn't tell the car that it's being tested now. What happens, though, is that the tests are under carefully controlled conditions in the interests of reproducibility. The car is placed on a chassis dynamometer and run at a constant speed. VW programmed their engine computer to look for a combination of constant speed and zero steering input, which would never happen during normal driving, and switched into low emissions mode when it detected that combination.
On the off chance that you actually are this ignorant and aren't just trolling, the difference is that we don't have to breathe the ozone layer. Ozone is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it burns your lungs at quite low concentrations, so it's bad to breathe it. On the other hand, it absorbs some nasty UV radiation that would otherwise cause problems like skin cancer and cataracts (and damaging crops and wildlife, so don't think sunscreen is an adequate substitute). The ozone layer is conveniently located in the stratosphere, where we don't have to breathe it and would suffocate from low pressure long before the ozone could do much damage anyway. So we get the benefits of protection from UV without having to worry about lung damage. Ground level ozone, though, gives us all the problems of destroying our lungs at a concentration that's too low to do much good for UV protection.
It's both. The diesels in question produce up to 40x the emissions standard for oxides of nitrogen. Oxides of nitrogen at those levels aren't especially toxic, but in the presence of sunlight they slowly react to produce ozone, which is nasty. High levels of ozone- levels that were regularly produced in the most polluted cities until we instituted smog controls- cause severe respiratory problems in people with existing respiratory problems like asthma. Ozone pollution certainly can kill. So even if the problem isn't so severe that the drivers have to stop driving immediately for their own safety, it's not something we want to allow in the long term.
Obviously they do have what it takes, since they can program their engine computers to pass the smog test. The problem is that they take a performance hit when they do it, and they decided they wanted the higher performance even if it wasn't legal. Chances are the performance difference isn't enough to make the car impractical, but it would make it less attractive.
Or until Stalin decided to betray him first. Long-term peace between Nazi Germany and the USSR was not going to happen; Communism and Fascism were too strongly opposed ideologies for them to avoid war for very long.
An exterminator may not need to know about Homer for his job, but neither do the vast majority of people whose jobs do require a university education. The reason universities teach about those "unimportant" subjects is because an education is supposed to be about more than just preparing people for a life of work. It's supposed to be preparing them for their entire lives- as workers, yes, but also as friends, parents, citizens, and whatever other roles the may choose to take on in their lives. Maybe we would have a better society and a better polity if we tried as hard as possible to give everyone a first rate education.
Actually, that's 42 amps at 240V single phase. You may be confused because many 50A home circuits (under NEC, at least) are 4 wire, single phase 120/240V circuits. They have 2 hot wires, a neutral, and a ground wire, so they can provide either 240 V (between the hot wires) or 120V (between one hot wire and neutral). That's the same kind of circuit that's typically used to supply an electric range, which are often rated at about 12kW (240V x 50A). A true 3-phase, 50A 240V circuit would be able to provide just under 21 kW peak power (240V x 50A x sqrt(3)). Note that those kW ratings are for non-continuous operation; circuits intended for continuous (i.e. >3 hours at a stretch) operation may not operate at over 80% of the nominal capacity. A range can get away with using full circuit power because it's practically impossible to operate all the burners and the oven at maximum capacity for very long, but the expected 8-10 hour charging times would classify the car charger as continuous and prevent it from operating at more than 80% of nominal power.
The 15 minutes to 80% charged is not for the home charger; it's for the Porsche equivalent of Tesla's superchargers. I would assume they'll be fed from the local medium voltage distribution system- typically around 10kV to ground- rather than from household voltage. Home charging will probably be with a conventional 240V/50A system, which should be able to get the car fully charged overnight.
Big deal. Porsche is unveiling a prototype of a car that can compete with what Tesla has been doing for a few years. That's great, except that Tesla is a moving target. If Porsche wants to get some excitement going, they need to put out something that will compete with where Tesla will be in a few years when this thing actually makes it into production.
It would help if more human drivers used their turn signals regularly. There's a device specifically designed to let other drivers know what you're intending to do, but most drivers refuse to use it.
No, it doesn't. There are two requirements for labeling. Individual food items that require labels have to have them, and anyone shopping can see that only a tiny fraction of the items are labeled. There's also a requirement that the entrance to the store have a label if any food item requires one. Since most food stores carry at least one item that requires a warning, almost all stores require one. That might make you think that all food requires labeling, but that impression is incorrect.
That depends on the nature of the paper. Yes, a large number of authors is suspicious on a paper that represents the amount of work that could be carried out by a few researchers in a reasonable length of time. But there are more and more papers out there that come from and could only practically be produced by large-scale collaborations. For those papers, there is no longer a single dominant contributor, or even a small group that can be considered the primary contributors. In those cases, it makes sense to include everyone who was involved in a scientific capacity as an author.
The best explanation I've heard is that the Minix community was pretty much waiting for something like Linux to come along. Minix gave the access to the source code and the ability to write patches, but Andy Tanenbaum didn't accept them. When Linus introduced the Linux kernel, all the frustrated, would-be contributors to Minix were eager to get on board. A lot of their patches could be adapted to Linux with relatively little effort, and that backlog of patches was able to boost Linux from hobby to working kernel really quickly. Linux could do that because it tapped into the right group of contributors, and because Linus was willing to accept patches from them.
Or the positioning of the gas tank that made it vulnerable in rear-end collisions made it less vulnerable in other kinds of collisions. That's exactly the kind of tradeoff real safety engineers have to make.
Probably not. The point is that officers aren't allowed to deliberately drag things out in order to give the dog time to arrive. The search of a vehicle without an arrest is supposed to be limited to protecting the officers' safety, i.e. looking for easily available weapons, so extending it to 15 minutes would still count as dragging it out to wait for the dog. If they actually take the driver to their car, that would count as detaining him, and they need some evidence beyond "swerved to avoid a pothole" to do that.
This is simply untrue. It's certainly true that there are large portions of the country where capital punishment remains popular, and judicial challenges have been the only effective way of challenging it there. But there have been several states that have recently abolished capital punishment through the normal legislative process, most recently Maryland in 2013. Notably, few states that have abolished the death penalty legislatively have any real prospect of bringing it back.
One thing that any language needs is a reason for people to want to learn and use it. Some people are willing to learn a new language for commercial or professional reasons, but having an actual culture built around the language is very important. People still learn dead languages like Latin, Classical Greek, and Biblical Hebrew because they want to read the important works of literature written in them. People learn Italian because they want to understand opera and Japanese so they can watch Anime. And they learn English at least in part so they can read Shakespeare and watch Hollywood movies in their original language. If your constructed language lacks that kind of culture, it's going to be at an inevitable disadvantage.
The problem is that it sounds very much as if the husband is deliberately avoiding service. He is apparently still in contact with the wife by phone and Facebook, but claims to have no stable residence or workplace where he could be served with papers. The judge is allowing service on Facebook as a last resort because other ways of serving the papers are unavailable and his Facebook contact is known to be good. And, FWIW, if the wife is only able to contact her husband by phone and Facebook for years at a time, the divorce is a formality anyway; that marriage is long over.
This is important as a matter of principle. People shouldn't be allowed to duck out on the legal system by making themselves impossible to find. If you don't allow something like this, then the person who's trying to handle things responsibly through the legal system loses out because they don't get their day in court. One way or the other, somebody is not getting a chance to present their case. It makes sense for that somebody to be the one who's avoiding the process and who could present their side just by showing up rather than the one who is doing everything they can to handle things through the legal system.
Most people would be smarter to buy a car that's suitable for their most common driving and renting on the rare occasion when they need to do something their daily car can't do. They'll save more money on fuel by having a very fuel efficient daily driver- and by avoiding wear and tear on their car on longer drives- to more than make up the difference.
No. Refactoring is when you take the awful, unmaintainable spaghetti code you produced when you were in a deadline crunch and convert it into something maintainable. The goal is to restructure the source code without changing the functionality at all.
Calling it the most dangerous toy seems like a gross overstatement. Yeah, Uranium ore is scary, but it's a fairly low-level radiation source and as an alpha emitter it's only dangerous internally. Chemical and physical hazards are a lot more serious. Toys with lead paint that kids were likely to chew on were probably more dangerous, not to mention ones that could catch kids on fire (ordinary chemical sets) or get them run over in traffic (like bicycles).
If you really want to be able to keep your data that long, you need a serious plan. You need to back up everything to at least two separate devices other than your main storage, and you need to keep at least one of those devices off-site so your data can't be destroyed in a local disaster. You need to test your backups regularly to know if/when your medium is failing.
When a medium fails- or if you think it might be about to fail- get a replacement that uses more modern technology, and make a fresh copy. If you are ever about to replace your computer with a new one that can't read your old backup medium, buy newer media that does work with the new computer and make copies while you can still read the old ones. If you keep doing that regularly, you can always have a good copy that will work with your computer. It's more effort than copying to the cloud and trusting, but it means you're in control of your own data.
The real key is to keep making regular backups and regular tests. If you expect to be able to put something into a box and still use it 20 years later, you're in for an unpleasant surprise. You have to keep copying, testing, and updating your technology in order to have a serious hope of keeping up. If you do that, though, you have a very good chance of keeping access to your data at least as long as you have software that will still read it. I have 20+ year old data at work that I can still access because we've been careful about moving it to new media, and because the company that wrote the software is good about backward compatibility.