This. It's less about the existence of global warming than the use of the existence of global warming as a cudgel for all manner of environmental regulations. That's what's controversial.
I thought I had read someplace that severe hemorrhagic fever diseases (and maybe it was Ebola specifically) weren't large-scale pandemic risks because they incapacitated and killed people too quickly, inhibiting their spread. Whereas other diseases like pandemic flu or smallpox were a bigger pandemic risk because the host wasn't knocked down so fast and could be mobile and communicable for longer.
Despite the alphabet soup of government agencies, surveillance and Federal laws, America is a pretty easy place to move around and generally maintain a low profile. And many "critical infrastructure" sites really aren't well defended/guarded -- take your pick, a handful of people with nominal skill and training could cause all manner of chaos.
If the risk of attack was really that great, why haven't we seen it by now?
I always hesitate to ask this question and post too many specific examples for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention, but let's just take oil refining as an example. The last time they closed a refinery down for maintenance two states away, the price of gas here shot up quite a bit -- we all hear the stories about inadequate refinery capacity. So what happens if 3 or 4 refineries go offline at the same time in close geographic proximity? Are we talking just a buck a gallon price hike, or are we talking shortages worse than the infamous 1970s gas lines along with all the attendant economic disruption?
I think if there were people intent on doing real damage, we would have seen it by now. It's a trivial armchair exercise to think of things that make you go "whoa!" And if you think of actual, organized sabotage involving direct state sponsorship and not just theocratic nutjobs the scenarios get even worse because you're now talking training that goes beyond emptying AK-47s in the desert.
It seems like everyone has to sign these anymore, even me, and I often wonder how many companies bother to attempt enforcement of them for most employees.
Sure, there are high-profile "key employees" who have limited employment options outside of another company doing the same thing, and within an industry you'd be hard-pressed to hide your employment status. A TV news anchor isn't going to don a fake moustache and wig to read the TV news at a competing TV station and fool anyone.
But I think of someone like me, working at a SMB consultancy. If I wanted to work at another consultancy (which, near as I can tell from the boilerplate kind of language in mine is considered competition) it seems like my current employer would have to work pretty hard to enforce the agreement.
I'd quit my job and make up some story about either not having a job or tell them I'm taking a job elsewhere. They'd have to hire a private detective to figure out where I'm working (mine doesn't have an employment disclosure clause). Then they'd have to hire an attorney to go after me.
All this sounds like a lot of money and effort for most employees, all the more so for someone who was really motivated to get around it.
A lot of people are told to "be available" or told they will be working extra hours, often on short notice, with no additional compensation or time off. Even worse is the unstated assumption that stuff sent after hours will get looked at or that you're paying attention to the non-stop barrage of emails.
How do they know it is malfunctioning? It wouldn't surprise me if the system was designed to be tamper-resistant, so they may not have even read-only access to the data collected so they can't even sanity check if it is working.
Maybe an obviously broken antenna would indicate that it wasn't working, but I would imagine that might be assuming a lot about their technical knowledge and they may reasonably assume that some minor damage to an antenna doesn't mean its broken, based on experience with other antennas on other equipment.
I'm sure there's some deliberate malice going on here on some level, but then again, making them wholly responsible for the ongoing technical functionality of equipment they have little or no control or diagnostic ability or skill to manage would be reasonably objectionable.
There's also the unintended consequence of overly-severe penalties, one of which may be over-reporting potential damage due to the risks of not reporting it. The last thing you want is half the cars in a sector sitting in the motor pool and the officers unavailable for calls because they don't know if their widgets are broken.
The AppleSoft Compiler. It seemed like magic, programs ran so much faster than interpreted. I seem to remember a demo BASIC brickout game being basically unplayable compiled because it ran so fast.
I used to have the astronaut on the moon ASCII poster in my bedroom in high school.
We used to print them on the DECwriter instead of the TTY33 because they were faster and looked better. The lab nazis would get pissed if they caught you running posters, but it was easier to get away with if it took less time. The TTYs were only viable if you snuck into one of the non-CompSci labs, like in the psychology building, after hours.
I always thought an electrolysis plant was the ideal power sink/storage system for those renewable energy sources like wind whose availability didn't always line up with grid demand. Another good use would be desalination plants.
I know the processes are "inefficient" but efficiency shouldn't matter much if the input energy is free. It seems more inefficient to build windmills you don't let generate electricity when the wind blows.
Russia might want to consider making friends to the West, their recent history with their neighbor to the East hasn't been friendly, and this neighbor is in a much better position now than they were then..
Russia is only as powerful as their economy, and the best way to counter them is to hobble them economically. It also is politically destabilizing internally.
Putin has a firm political grip, but the bargain is based on oligarchs making money and staying out of politics. If his foreign policy ambitions hurt enough economically it may begin to cost him political power. Even during the Soviet era leaders were eased out.
I would imagine mass is probably the biggest variable. What's the increase in range for every reduction of 1 kg of battery, presuming the power side stays the same?
Cellular providers aren't in the equipment and RF technology business. All you'll end up with are incompatible variations on the same standard which leads to lock-in and more expensive handset prices. Any opportunity to "innovate" on technology confronts the need to have equipment supporting this innovation and cheap handsets from popular makers to support it.
Can you even own a cable box without any rental fees associated with it?
I know there are cablecard-based devices that you can own, but you still pay a rental fee associated with the cablecard.
It seems like if they are going to charge you for the service and the device to access the service there should be some way to own the equipment outright without paying an add-on fee.
I have two M cards (multiple-tuner) in my HD Tivos and both of them REQUIRED on-site appointments to install, which was completely stupid because all the tech did was put the card in, call the activation center and report some numbers either off the card itself or what was reported by the Tivo's maintenance screen.
The first card I mostly understood; I got the HD Tivo soon after it came out and cablecard availability and support from the cable companies were both spotty. The Tivo forums were filled with issues, so I more or less figured it was new enough that they wanted to avoid self-help nightmares.
The last one, less so, even thought it was in 2010.
Why bother with moneyball? If your stadium is more than 10 years old, just whine you need a new one to provide the revenue to be competitive. You can threaten to leave for another city, promise to get an All-Star game, or just quit spending money on decent players for a while to convince the fan base that you really aren't competitive.
The Twins did a combination of all these things, but of course, the owners decided that more money in their pockets was the real goal as the new money from their shiny, taxpayer financed stadium hasn't bought new players and they have been.407 in each of the last two seasons and are working on a similar outcome this season, already making themselves comfortable at 1-3 in last place.
Volvo blind spot system is optical, not radar. The radar panel is on the front grill for collision avoidance and distance sensing cruise control, which does not use lasers. The parking sensors are ultrasonic.
The advantage of side view mirrors from a situational awareness perspective is that you can check the entire side of your car from front to back very quickly because the whole view is there. Blind spot indicators solve the problem of blind spots (mostly..). Side view mirrors may take away from aerodynamics but they're a very convenient place to look.
A camera image could be nice (night vision, variable view angle, etc), but it seems a downgrade from a safety perspective to use a center console display because it causes you to look away from the side of the car.
Maybe they'd mount mirror-size displays in the dash against the doors? Sounds kind of expensive for any usable resolution and brightness and maybe even distracting, especially at night. Perhaps the displays could have a secondary function or overlay (distance to largest and maybe bonus points for being hackable to display some other display.
Displaying a heads-up type display on the windshield? Some kind of perspective-corrected or floats-outside-the-car-like-a-real-mirror image on the side windows (useless if the windows are rolled down, though).
A rearview mirror option might not be a bad idea because it would then be a complete "behind you" image, but how big could it be without making the rearview mirror into a head-injury risk?
In Minneapolis, we have a pair of one-way streets (Portland and Park Avenues) that are timed so that if you drive 35 MPH (the posted speed limit) you hit nearly every light as green. It falls apart a bit in heavy traffic, but generally works pretty well.
AFAICT, "traffic calming" is mostly an anti-car urban planning term that translates to "makes driving more frustrating and slower".
Most of the time where they have changed roads (like Lyndale Ave. S.) to fit this philosophy, the end result is fewer lanes, slower traffic and more time spent stuck behind someone turning left because the curb extensions prevent you from going around left-turning traffic.
Roundabouts I like, although I'd like them more if more people understood that cars entering the roundabout are supposed to yield to cars in the roundabout and that there's no concept of a merge lane for entering the roundabout. (The ones I drive through all seem to be smaller, single-lane roundabouts, not the larger, European ones with multiple lanes).
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This. It's less about the existence of global warming than the use of the existence of global warming as a cudgel for all manner of environmental regulations. That's what's controversial.
I thought I had read someplace that severe hemorrhagic fever diseases (and maybe it was Ebola specifically) weren't large-scale pandemic risks because they incapacitated and killed people too quickly, inhibiting their spread. Whereas other diseases like pandemic flu or smallpox were a bigger pandemic risk because the host wasn't knocked down so fast and could be mobile and communicable for longer.
...wouldn't we have seen it by now?
Despite the alphabet soup of government agencies, surveillance and Federal laws, America is a pretty easy place to move around and generally maintain a low profile. And many "critical infrastructure" sites really aren't well defended/guarded -- take your pick, a handful of people with nominal skill and training could cause all manner of chaos.
If the risk of attack was really that great, why haven't we seen it by now?
I always hesitate to ask this question and post too many specific examples for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention, but let's just take oil refining as an example. The last time they closed a refinery down for maintenance two states away, the price of gas here shot up quite a bit -- we all hear the stories about inadequate refinery capacity. So what happens if 3 or 4 refineries go offline at the same time in close geographic proximity? Are we talking just a buck a gallon price hike, or are we talking shortages worse than the infamous 1970s gas lines along with all the attendant economic disruption?
I think if there were people intent on doing real damage, we would have seen it by now. It's a trivial armchair exercise to think of things that make you go "whoa!" And if you think of actual, organized sabotage involving direct state sponsorship and not just theocratic nutjobs the scenarios get even worse because you're now talking training that goes beyond emptying AK-47s in the desert.
"Fewer than 4% of Harvard faculty call on University to Divest..."
"96% of Harvard faculty oppose divestment from fossil fuels..."
It's amazing how you can shape a story simply through the headline..
It seems like everyone has to sign these anymore, even me, and I often wonder how many companies bother to attempt enforcement of them for most employees.
Sure, there are high-profile "key employees" who have limited employment options outside of another company doing the same thing, and within an industry you'd be hard-pressed to hide your employment status. A TV news anchor isn't going to don a fake moustache and wig to read the TV news at a competing TV station and fool anyone.
But I think of someone like me, working at a SMB consultancy. If I wanted to work at another consultancy (which, near as I can tell from the boilerplate kind of language in mine is considered competition) it seems like my current employer would have to work pretty hard to enforce the agreement.
I'd quit my job and make up some story about either not having a job or tell them I'm taking a job elsewhere. They'd have to hire a private detective to figure out where I'm working (mine doesn't have an employment disclosure clause). Then they'd have to hire an attorney to go after me.
All this sounds like a lot of money and effort for most employees, all the more so for someone who was really motivated to get around it.
....and compensation.
A lot of people are told to "be available" or told they will be working extra hours, often on short notice, with no additional compensation or time off. Even worse is the unstated assumption that stuff sent after hours will get looked at or that you're paying attention to the non-stop barrage of emails.
How do they know it is malfunctioning? It wouldn't surprise me if the system was designed to be tamper-resistant, so they may not have even read-only access to the data collected so they can't even sanity check if it is working.
Maybe an obviously broken antenna would indicate that it wasn't working, but I would imagine that might be assuming a lot about their technical knowledge and they may reasonably assume that some minor damage to an antenna doesn't mean its broken, based on experience with other antennas on other equipment.
I'm sure there's some deliberate malice going on here on some level, but then again, making them wholly responsible for the ongoing technical functionality of equipment they have little or no control or diagnostic ability or skill to manage would be reasonably objectionable.
There's also the unintended consequence of overly-severe penalties, one of which may be over-reporting potential damage due to the risks of not reporting it. The last thing you want is half the cars in a sector sitting in the motor pool and the officers unavailable for calls because they don't know if their widgets are broken.
The AppleSoft Compiler. It seemed like magic, programs ran so much faster than interpreted. I seem to remember a demo BASIC brickout game being basically unplayable compiled because it ran so fast.
I used to have the astronaut on the moon ASCII poster in my bedroom in high school.
We used to print them on the DECwriter instead of the TTY33 because they were faster and looked better. The lab nazis would get pissed if they caught you running posters, but it was easier to get away with if it took less time. The TTYs were only viable if you snuck into one of the non-CompSci labs, like in the psychology building, after hours.
As an ethnic German, I keep waiting for my sack of gold coins from Rome as reparations for Roman slavery, genocide and imperialism.
I always thought an electrolysis plant was the ideal power sink/storage system for those renewable energy sources like wind whose availability didn't always line up with grid demand. Another good use would be desalination plants.
I know the processes are "inefficient" but efficiency shouldn't matter much if the input energy is free. It seems more inefficient to build windmills you don't let generate electricity when the wind blows.
Russia might want to consider making friends to the West, their recent history with their neighbor to the East hasn't been friendly, and this neighbor is in a much better position now than they were then..
Russia is only as powerful as their economy, and the best way to counter them is to hobble them economically. It also is politically destabilizing internally.
Putin has a firm political grip, but the bargain is based on oligarchs making money and staying out of politics. If his foreign policy ambitions hurt enough economically it may begin to cost him political power. Even during the Soviet era leaders were eased out.
I would imagine mass is probably the biggest variable. What's the increase in range for every reduction of 1 kg of battery, presuming the power side stays the same?
Cellular providers aren't in the equipment and RF technology business. All you'll end up with are incompatible variations on the same standard which leads to lock-in and more expensive handset prices. Any opportunity to "innovate" on technology confronts the need to have equipment supporting this innovation and cheap handsets from popular makers to support it.
You misspelled "suppressed truth".
Can you even own a cable box without any rental fees associated with it?
I know there are cablecard-based devices that you can own, but you still pay a rental fee associated with the cablecard.
It seems like if they are going to charge you for the service and the device to access the service there should be some way to own the equipment outright without paying an add-on fee.
"...the best way to raise an atheist is to send the child to a Church of England school.."
That's a great quote, is it original?
How long ago?
I have two M cards (multiple-tuner) in my HD Tivos and both of them REQUIRED on-site appointments to install, which was completely stupid because all the tech did was put the card in, call the activation center and report some numbers either off the card itself or what was reported by the Tivo's maintenance screen.
The first card I mostly understood; I got the HD Tivo soon after it came out and cablecard availability and support from the cable companies were both spotty. The Tivo forums were filled with issues, so I more or less figured it was new enough that they wanted to avoid self-help nightmares.
The last one, less so, even thought it was in 2010.
Why bother with moneyball? If your stadium is more than 10 years old, just whine you need a new one to provide the revenue to be competitive. You can threaten to leave for another city, promise to get an All-Star game, or just quit spending money on decent players for a while to convince the fan base that you really aren't competitive.
The Twins did a combination of all these things, but of course, the owners decided that more money in their pockets was the real goal as the new money from their shiny, taxpayer financed stadium hasn't bought new players and they have been .407 in each of the last two seasons and are working on a similar outcome this season, already making themselves comfortable at 1-3 in last place.
We'll have thousands of potential colonists who can exist in that environment for months.
Maybe a little warning to Ivan that despite their recent upgrades in kit, Uncle Sam is still in the game.
Volvo blind spot system is optical, not radar. The radar panel is on the front grill for collision avoidance and distance sensing cruise control, which does not use lasers. The parking sensors are ultrasonic.
And you know you can mute bands on the V1, right?
The advantage of side view mirrors from a situational awareness perspective is that you can check the entire side of your car from front to back very quickly because the whole view is there. Blind spot indicators solve the problem of blind spots (mostly..). Side view mirrors may take away from aerodynamics but they're a very convenient place to look.
A camera image could be nice (night vision, variable view angle, etc), but it seems a downgrade from a safety perspective to use a center console display because it causes you to look away from the side of the car.
Maybe they'd mount mirror-size displays in the dash against the doors? Sounds kind of expensive for any usable resolution and brightness and maybe even distracting, especially at night. Perhaps the displays could have a secondary function or overlay (distance to largest and maybe bonus points for being hackable to display some other display.
Displaying a heads-up type display on the windshield? Some kind of perspective-corrected or floats-outside-the-car-like-a-real-mirror image on the side windows (useless if the windows are rolled down, though).
A rearview mirror option might not be a bad idea because it would then be a complete "behind you" image, but how big could it be without making the rearview mirror into a head-injury risk?
In Minneapolis, we have a pair of one-way streets (Portland and Park Avenues) that are timed so that if you drive 35 MPH (the posted speed limit) you hit nearly every light as green. It falls apart a bit in heavy traffic, but generally works pretty well.
AFAICT, "traffic calming" is mostly an anti-car urban planning term that translates to "makes driving more frustrating and slower".
Most of the time where they have changed roads (like Lyndale Ave. S.) to fit this philosophy, the end result is fewer lanes, slower traffic and more time spent stuck behind someone turning left because the curb extensions prevent you from going around left-turning traffic.
Roundabouts I like, although I'd like them more if more people understood that cars entering the roundabout are supposed to yield to cars in the roundabout and that there's no concept of a merge lane for entering the roundabout. (The ones I drive through all seem to be smaller, single-lane roundabouts, not the larger, European ones with multiple lanes).