The criticism is over the hype. It's totally life saving but we need another year to test that it really is life saving. So which is it, well understood enough to actually be life saving or not well understood enough and requiring more testing?
It's totally fine for it to be a promising idea and needing more refinement, don't release frankendrugs by all means. But if it needs work, testing or any other development stage where it could turn out to be a total bust, then quit hyping it as sine qua non of new therapies.
I'd advocate gun safety training for all people, not just gun owners. It really should be some kind of unit in health education.
Guns in the US are ubiquitous and you could cut down a lot of gun accidents if people had some basic idea on how to safely handle a firearm. Focus on very basic concepts -- don't point it at someone, unload any gun not meant to be fired right away, store it in a secure location.
You could argue that many people "will never own a gun" but this doesn't mean that those same people won't encounter a gun anyway, and they'd be better off knowing how to render it safer.
The larger point is that the solar generation capacity isn't the main challenge with solar roads. Of course we can build solar capacity *now* in better ways with more traditional mounting methods.
The real challenge with solar roads is coming up with an installation method that is durable and inexpensive enough to install as a roadway. Once we do that, we've invented not just roadway solar panels but also come up with a way to lay down roadways that are better and more durable than roadways now.
Right now nobody has a real motivation to improve roadway materials, so we're still mixing sand, gravel and either tar or burnt lime like we have for decades and longer. It works, but not that well -- roads in cold climates turn to crap in short order due to water infiltration, and cracks and erode in all climates.
A roadway that can be deployed with solar panels would be an inherently superior roadway because it would have to be. And even if a solar material system for general highway use proves impossible, it may end up being cheap and durable enough to install in all kinds of places with less severe traffic, like parking ramp roofs, open parking lots, sidewalks, driveways, any place we pave now.
So is this a technology not even worth trying to develop with small scale pilots?
Yes, the challenges are huge but I can't help but think that it's kind of worth experimenting with if only for the improvements in roadway quality. The biggest challenges to solar roads are durability and if that problem can be solved then theoretically it can benefit any road even if you build it without solar generation.
If they can get the cost of it within an order of magnitude of traditional roads, make it last 2x or more longer and generate power it starts to seem like a worthwhile investment. You'll never get there without test segments to try ideas and see what can be made to work.
We spend a ton on roadways now using basically the same construction materials and techniques we've used for 75 years and we're bitching that solar roads won't last. Well no shit, fucking cars would't last long either if we built them like we did in 1950, either, yet we say we can't build a better road? Maybe we're not trying.
Tell me about the Chinese Internet firms that aren't tapped and wired by the Chinese government. Tell me about the African or any other third world Internet companies of any scale. And no, the Indian railways Internet company doesn't count, either, no matter how many zillions of poor Indians use it.
Nearly all the other companies you list have benefited greatly from either access to the American market or from the Pax Americana that guarantees their freedom to operate, and I would wager nearly all of them either appeal directly to the American government through their US subsidiaries or indirectly through their own local governments' diplomatic relationships with the Americans.
In the case of Google specifically, a large measure of its success is that it it is an American company. You're kidding yourself if you think of it as a "global" company -- it is an American company with a global reach, and that global reach is due in large part to the fact that it is American.
So let's call "almost all" of the accidents that are human caused 8 out of 10 of all accidents.
Do you think that any of those 8 will be replaced by machine driven accidents?
Surely there are machine failure modes we can't see yet once SDCs are turned loose at mass adoption levels on the full variety of possible roads and conditions. The tech will get better and those numbers will go down, but you have to introduce it to get any benefit out of it and you can't wait until the potential for machine failure is zero, so at least in the first few years of adoption machine error will replace human error.
I'd like to know how successful a "global" company like Google would be without the political weight of the American economy, diplomacy and ultimately, military behind it.
Google owes its success globally to the extent that it can count on the American government to back it up overseas, otherwise it would be just another listening post and censorship arm of a bunch of third world kleptocracies and dictatorships.
And it's especially bleak when they're paying for advertising that is being "played" to fake users with fake social media profiles visiting fake web sites hosting fake news.
It's good thing that the ads feature products that make fake claims by fake real people for fake results.
Whatever Trump is, he managed to beat both the Republicans and the Democrats at their own game, mostly without using political tactics assumed necessary to win by nearly everyone, and with a mainstream media who were sympathetic to his opponent and often quite hostile to him.
Is he the luckiest imbecile on the planet, merely in the right place at the right time to take advantage of some moment in history that would/could have happened to anyone with roughly the same anti-establishment image?
Or is he possessed of some mad genius that allowed him to plot some kind of victory against overwhelming odds?
And is he a malevolent force, a false prophet working only to advance his own megalomania and the interests of the plutocracy?
Or is he actually motivated to help the common man, however flawed his strategy may be?
"I was shocked, of course," Hanley said, "because IBM has purported to espouse diversity and inclusion, and yet here's Ginni Rometty in an unqualified way reaching out to an admin whose electoral success was based on racist programs."
Is he so naive as to take internal corporate propaganda seriously, as if the most senior management was actually pursuing diversity and inclusion altruistically, and if they were, for any purpose other than cynically as a means to increase profits?
This guy not only had his bubble burst that IBM leadership weren't really ideologically invested in social justice, but that that they're calculating business leaders willing to go along with just about anything if there's money and long term value in it for IBM.
But that was kind of my point, if you're trying to create what amounts to a single, container-sized building you will end up doing so much framing and interior construction to make it usable as an office that I guess I don't see the big advantage of using a container to begin with.
I guess a container might make sense in some corner case where remoteness, sturdiness and primitiveness were all OK.
I do think they are interesting as elements in construction of larger structures where their structural integrity allows them to cantilever or span wide gaps in ways that would probably exceed conventional engineered wood materials like LVLs or TJIs and require the use of steel beams or more elaborate construction methods.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I'm thinking it would be a pretty miserable space with too little done to accommodate the fact that it's just a metal box. It was -24F here yesterday according to the NWS and without heating and insulation, that box would have been like a walk in freezer.
I've done work in similar kinds of industrial control structures (essentially metal boxes but not built as shipping containers) and they are pretty awful in terms of being either hot or cold without full-bore HVAC running. I had to set up a control system in one in late March where it was only 40F and it was like a meat locker inside.
Anything you mechanically heat or cool will also need insulation unless you want to spend a fortune on power. Maybe for a crafts-type workshop you could go extreme minimalism and just glue foam board to the walls, suspend a 5000 BTU electric heater and mount some high-CFM fans for the summer.
But the OP wanted it as a home office space, not a place to do woodwork or ceramics.
At that point, the better pre-fab solution is some kind of construction trailer purpose built for the use.
It's kind of more complicated than that, isn't it?
A bare steel container is like an oven in the summer and freezing in the winter. And dark without windows.
You would need to frame it inside, insulate it, come up with some kind of HVAC solution, maybe cut some kind of windows into it for natural lighting, not to mention safely wiring it and grounding it properly, both for conventional power and against lightning (and maybe even for general safety if its near overhead power lines) and making sure the roof didn't leak.
And pretty much anywhere, but especially in a cold climate, you want it on some kind of footings to get it above ground level. Maybe in Arizona you could get away with it on raised slab only, but I'd want it some level above the ground to keep out water at a minimum and in a cold climate to not leach away my heat into the ground. Plus footings would get the whole thing level which would be helpful.
Containers are kind of an interesting building unit, but they still require much of the same interior construction as stick built. I'd bet stick building a single room outside building would be less hassle than converting a shipping container, unless your idea of a shipping container is the same as a third world refugee.
Shipping containers really get interesting if you want to do unusual multi-level buildings where their structural attributes outweigh their complications. I keep waiting for a post-apocalyptic movie to feature a shipping container fortress or walled city.
It seems like these systems are exploitative by design, even if exploitation wasn't explicitly the goal. They're designed with every possible algorithm and available data to maximize labor output at the lowest possible cost. Individual workers are operating at extreme information asymmetry and against a system which does not negotiate and only offers a take it or leave it choice.
While this reduction in labor costs may have some broader macroeconomic value, making some goods or services cheaper and more widely available it seems like the end result would ultimately just look like labor exploitation.
This would be easier if Owncloud was focused on delivering an appliance in the manner of FreeNAS/NAS4Free or pfSense and the appliance was the primary intended installation and included interfaces for managing all aspects of the system and networking.
The challenge, of course, with anything like Owncloud as an appliance is that they're a conglomeration of multiple packages, plus an OS, and layering a GUI over all of the parts that needs to be managed, including OS and package updates, ends up being nearly more work then core functionality.
I see they now have a community appliance version, but when I last looked at it the only appliance was a third-party one and it wasn't really comprehensively manageable via the web interface. The guy who put it together did a fair job of adding on additional web management for system-level features, but stuff like SSL certs and other updating were command line driven. IMHO it was also missing an install stage where you could size your VMs and disks, deploy the appliance and then have it configure storage on your intended disks. Storage expansion required command line tinkering with LVM -- I guess kudos for setting it up with LVM to begin with, but it made for a nuisance in setting up a sensible 1+ TB install. In an ideal world the VM config would describe the storage layout and the installer would let you pick your data volume(s).
Shooting sensitive devices might damage them, but wouldn't likely be that much of a value in terms of losing valuable intelligence or technology because bullets simply wouldn't do enough damage, or at least the amount you could reasonably fire from a handgun.
It further would be a major risk to the guy firing them -- bullets ricochet. I just finished a book about combat helicopters in Viet Nam, and they faced the same risk -- if a chopper went down they had to disable the radios, because if the VC or NVA got ahold of a radio they would compromise communications until radio protocols could be adjusted. One of the anecdotes in the book was about a helicopter that had a malfunction and a hard landing. The pilot whipped out his.45 and began shooting at the radio to disable it and ended up wounding his co-pilot from ricochets.
Incendiary grenades seem like ideal backup methods. Quick to deploy and if stored properly, unlikely to be a significant risk in flight to the crew. They could also be given longer fuzing, like say 30-60 seconds, allowing for several to be placed while still allowing the crew time to evacuate. They'd burn hot enough to remove most intelligence value from the damaged equipment.
You'd obviously have other, preferred methods if time allowed -- wipe and self-destruct methods that only destroyed the minimal amount necessary to protect security interests, but if there wasn't time for those procedures -- which would likely be somewhat complicated to prevent accidental destruction -- the extra damage from thermite grenades, like loss of the aircraft, would probably be desirable.
In the case of the forced-down US airplane where the Chinese were immediately on scene, they really couldn't stop the resulting fire, either, as no conventional fire fighting methods would extinguish thermite,
I don't really know much of the chemistry involved, all I've heard is that butane extraction is relatively simple, operating at reasonable pressures and the most complex moving part is a vacuum pump for extracting out the butane. The downside being the butane is flammable or potentially explosive if mishandled.
I've also heard that butane leaves a foul taste in extracts, but I'm not sure if that's from crappy sources of butane or bad extraction technique.
CO2 supposedly is better tasting and not flammable, the downside being that the system runs at about 75 bar, so you kind of buy back into the explosion problem, not from the gas itself but from the operating pressures.
I'm not sure I'd want to be around either system home-rolled unless somebody knew what they were doing. Provided decent ventilation, I'd wager butane is arguably easier to work with. It's probably harder for the average person to come up with parts safe at 75 bar.
I have come to the sad conclusion that in the USA at least we're living in a "post-fact, post-truth" world where it no longer matters if anything is truthful or accurate if enough people believe it. Too many people I know just don't care anymore about whether anything is accurate if it matches up with their political beliefs or attacks those they disagree with.
I think somewhere along the line sociopolitical positions (which, IMHO, in the broad center are neither good nor bad, true nor false) began to get pushed using selectively chosen "facts" to make the advocated policy seem as if it, too, was factual in nature. It was a kind of rhetorical persuasion, almost like sales techniques -- "Everybody knows that that less housework makes a wife happy, and the Vacuum2000 really reduces housework. If you won't buy one, ask yourself why you want an unhappy wife."
Anyway, I think this began to highlight a conceptual difference between truth and facts. I would argue that nearly every thing that is *true* is made up of a constellation of related facts. Cherry-picking facts allows you to manufacture a truth, but when that truth diverges significantly from reality it causes a cognitive dissonance, and people generally tend to side with the truth most closely aligned with their perceived reality.
I think this has led us to the point where people ignore facts -- too often they're not used to try to accurately describe a perceived truth, but to create a truth.
I think globalism is probably a great example. Lots of people using facts to advocate for it as embodying the ideal outcome, yet for millions of people, despite the facts that seem to support it, see their life undermined by globalism -- jobs moved away, problems with immigrants, and so on. Do you believe the facts or the truth around you?
(And I'm not meaning to take a position on globalism. I'm sure the benefits of trade are great, but they're poorly distributed. Cultural diversity is nice, in a Disney Epcot way, but I think humans generally do poorly when they hold divergent views on many topics, and the results are usually ugly at best or grinding warfare at worst).
I think I read they use supercritical CO2 for extracting THC from marijuana plants, or were at least migrating to it from earlier systems that used butane as the solvent.
Kinsey said 75% of men only lasted two minutes, and more recent results suggest half only last two minutes, with the average something like 7 minutes. Older (and perhaps less reliable) research suggested no correlation with perceived orgasm quality and duration of intercourse. Both sexes claim that they want intercourse to last longer, but men want it to last longer than women.
It doesn't surprise me that the duration for a large number of men is short. Men's primary biological goal with intercourse is to ejaculate into your partner, and its purpose to provide the stimulation necessary for ejaculation. You might even argue that men who take longer than average may be struggling to achieve orgasm versus just having great endurance.
I also wonder how duration is influenced by the script or process of sexual activity. I would imagine that among couples where female orgasm is achieved during foreplay, such as manual or oral stimulation, men may feel both greater arousal and less compulsion for long endurance sex because their partners have already achieved orgasm. Partners with shorter foreplay where vaginal stimulation is the precursor to female orgasm may have longer duration intercourse for the female to obtain sufficient arousal for orgasm, and thus more pressure on the male to last longer.
I'd also wager that in longer-term monogamous couples sex becomes more functionary, with many sex acts basically women complying with their male partner's desire for gratification, ultimately resulting in shorter duration intercourse. She's not interested or seeking orgasmic gratification, so getting it over with, so to speak, is actually desirable.
From the experience-is-not-data department, in my experience women capable of orgasm solely from intercourse usually orgasmed quickly, reducing the demand for longer duration intercourse to achieve stimulation necessary for orgasm. And most women didn't orgasm solely from vaginal intercourse, needing some kind of direct clitoral stimulation. I've also been told by women that they disliked intercourse lasting too long, it can result in genital discomfort or orthopedic discomfort from maintaining some kind of position.
I'd wager it was because under the Ceausescu regime, telephones were probably both a luxury and considered an existential threat to his regime, so the phone network was essentially junk when he was overthrown and not really useful.
If the UK had to basically rebuild the entire telecommunications network from scratch in the early 1990s, I'm sure a lot of basic infrastructure and engineering choices would have been far more data favorable.
Countries which had a decent and usable telecommunications network seem to suffer from the economics of good enough and the demands of profit which make extensive reconstruction impossible. The networks get expanded and improved, but only incrementally and the small end user likely sees the best improvements last if not at all.
The problem with time is that it's a dependent function based on usage patterns and past usage may not be representative of future usage. On my recent Windows portables, the time remaining for battery varies a lot including during use. I may have 6 hours left, do something intensive, and it goes down to 2.5 hours, do something very light, and it's back up to 4.
Think of this way, cars have always had a gas gauge which was a generic graph representative of the fuel level in the tank. Nobody really worried about "how far they could drive" and we didn't have legions of people stuck out of gas.
Modern cars usually have some kind of trip computer that shows how much range is left, but I don't know anybody who actually drives to this figure. When I fill up my car resets to a value that is close (10-20%) to what my actual miles were at last fill (and I'm prone to running to within 1-2 gallons of empty), but it also seems to represent whatever my mileage was on the last tank which may not represent the mileage driven on my next tank, let alone long-term MPG.
I'm fine with including a "time remaining" value, too, but it'd also be nice to see historical statistics on power consumption -- past hour of use, since last charge, 7 days, heaviest use, and lightest use and be able to pick the time remaining based on the power consumption stats that represented their likely use patterns.
An attempt to "force" a time remaining measurement seems likely to be misleading at best or completely inaccurate. At best, the system should base power remaining on your actual usage pattern power consumption and the measurable state of battery charge, but is your average usage actually representative of how you plan to use the system, or worse, do you have extreme usage patterns of very light vs. very heavy?
At worst, they don't even work that hard to gather statistics and use numbers from internal research which may suffer from the "nobody is average" problem where averages don't represent any actual person's use, and they would likely also be inclined to game these figures to make people feel good about the product.
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The criticism is over the hype. It's totally life saving but we need another year to test that it really is life saving. So which is it, well understood enough to actually be life saving or not well understood enough and requiring more testing?
It's totally fine for it to be a promising idea and needing more refinement, don't release frankendrugs by all means. But if it needs work, testing or any other development stage where it could turn out to be a total bust, then quit hyping it as sine qua non of new therapies.
I'd advocate gun safety training for all people, not just gun owners. It really should be some kind of unit in health education.
Guns in the US are ubiquitous and you could cut down a lot of gun accidents if people had some basic idea on how to safely handle a firearm. Focus on very basic concepts -- don't point it at someone, unload any gun not meant to be fired right away, store it in a secure location.
You could argue that many people "will never own a gun" but this doesn't mean that those same people won't encounter a gun anyway, and they'd be better off knowing how to render it safer.
The larger point is that the solar generation capacity isn't the main challenge with solar roads. Of course we can build solar capacity *now* in better ways with more traditional mounting methods.
The real challenge with solar roads is coming up with an installation method that is durable and inexpensive enough to install as a roadway. Once we do that, we've invented not just roadway solar panels but also come up with a way to lay down roadways that are better and more durable than roadways now.
Right now nobody has a real motivation to improve roadway materials, so we're still mixing sand, gravel and either tar or burnt lime like we have for decades and longer. It works, but not that well -- roads in cold climates turn to crap in short order due to water infiltration, and cracks and erode in all climates.
A roadway that can be deployed with solar panels would be an inherently superior roadway because it would have to be. And even if a solar material system for general highway use proves impossible, it may end up being cheap and durable enough to install in all kinds of places with less severe traffic, like parking ramp roofs, open parking lots, sidewalks, driveways, any place we pave now.
So is this a technology not even worth trying to develop with small scale pilots?
Yes, the challenges are huge but I can't help but think that it's kind of worth experimenting with if only for the improvements in roadway quality. The biggest challenges to solar roads are durability and if that problem can be solved then theoretically it can benefit any road even if you build it without solar generation.
If they can get the cost of it within an order of magnitude of traditional roads, make it last 2x or more longer and generate power it starts to seem like a worthwhile investment. You'll never get there without test segments to try ideas and see what can be made to work.
We spend a ton on roadways now using basically the same construction materials and techniques we've used for 75 years and we're bitching that solar roads won't last. Well no shit, fucking cars would't last long either if we built them like we did in 1950, either, yet we say we can't build a better road? Maybe we're not trying.
Tell me about the Chinese Internet firms that aren't tapped and wired by the Chinese government. Tell me about the African or any other third world Internet companies of any scale. And no, the Indian railways Internet company doesn't count, either, no matter how many zillions of poor Indians use it.
Nearly all the other companies you list have benefited greatly from either access to the American market or from the Pax Americana that guarantees their freedom to operate, and I would wager nearly all of them either appeal directly to the American government through their US subsidiaries or indirectly through their own local governments' diplomatic relationships with the Americans.
In the case of Google specifically, a large measure of its success is that it it is an American company. You're kidding yourself if you think of it as a "global" company -- it is an American company with a global reach, and that global reach is due in large part to the fact that it is American.
So let's call "almost all" of the accidents that are human caused 8 out of 10 of all accidents.
Do you think that any of those 8 will be replaced by machine driven accidents?
Surely there are machine failure modes we can't see yet once SDCs are turned loose at mass adoption levels on the full variety of possible roads and conditions. The tech will get better and those numbers will go down, but you have to introduce it to get any benefit out of it and you can't wait until the potential for machine failure is zero, so at least in the first few years of adoption machine error will replace human error.
I'd like to know how successful a "global" company like Google would be without the political weight of the American economy, diplomacy and ultimately, military behind it.
Google owes its success globally to the extent that it can count on the American government to back it up overseas, otherwise it would be just another listening post and censorship arm of a bunch of third world kleptocracies and dictatorships.
And it's especially bleak when they're paying for advertising that is being "played" to fake users with fake social media profiles visiting fake web sites hosting fake news.
It's good thing that the ads feature products that make fake claims by fake real people for fake results.
Whatever Trump is, he managed to beat both the Republicans and the Democrats at their own game, mostly without using political tactics assumed necessary to win by nearly everyone, and with a mainstream media who were sympathetic to his opponent and often quite hostile to him.
Is he the luckiest imbecile on the planet, merely in the right place at the right time to take advantage of some moment in history that would/could have happened to anyone with roughly the same anti-establishment image?
Or is he possessed of some mad genius that allowed him to plot some kind of victory against overwhelming odds?
And is he a malevolent force, a false prophet working only to advance his own megalomania and the interests of the plutocracy?
Or is he actually motivated to help the common man, however flawed his strategy may be?
"I was shocked, of course," Hanley said, "because IBM has purported to espouse diversity and inclusion, and yet here's Ginni Rometty in an unqualified way reaching out to an admin whose electoral success was based on racist programs."
Is he so naive as to take internal corporate propaganda seriously, as if the most senior management was actually pursuing diversity and inclusion altruistically, and if they were, for any purpose other than cynically as a means to increase profits?
This guy not only had his bubble burst that IBM leadership weren't really ideologically invested in social justice, but that that they're calculating business leaders willing to go along with just about anything if there's money and long term value in it for IBM.
But that was kind of my point, if you're trying to create what amounts to a single, container-sized building you will end up doing so much framing and interior construction to make it usable as an office that I guess I don't see the big advantage of using a container to begin with.
I guess a container might make sense in some corner case where remoteness, sturdiness and primitiveness were all OK.
I do think they are interesting as elements in construction of larger structures where their structural integrity allows them to cantilever or span wide gaps in ways that would probably exceed conventional engineered wood materials like LVLs or TJIs and require the use of steel beams or more elaborate construction methods.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I'm thinking it would be a pretty miserable space with too little done to accommodate the fact that it's just a metal box. It was -24F here yesterday according to the NWS and without heating and insulation, that box would have been like a walk in freezer.
I've done work in similar kinds of industrial control structures (essentially metal boxes but not built as shipping containers) and they are pretty awful in terms of being either hot or cold without full-bore HVAC running. I had to set up a control system in one in late March where it was only 40F and it was like a meat locker inside.
Anything you mechanically heat or cool will also need insulation unless you want to spend a fortune on power. Maybe for a crafts-type workshop you could go extreme minimalism and just glue foam board to the walls, suspend a 5000 BTU electric heater and mount some high-CFM fans for the summer.
But the OP wanted it as a home office space, not a place to do woodwork or ceramics.
At that point, the better pre-fab solution is some kind of construction trailer purpose built for the use.
It's kind of more complicated than that, isn't it?
A bare steel container is like an oven in the summer and freezing in the winter. And dark without windows.
You would need to frame it inside, insulate it, come up with some kind of HVAC solution, maybe cut some kind of windows into it for natural lighting, not to mention safely wiring it and grounding it properly, both for conventional power and against lightning (and maybe even for general safety if its near overhead power lines) and making sure the roof didn't leak.
And pretty much anywhere, but especially in a cold climate, you want it on some kind of footings to get it above ground level. Maybe in Arizona you could get away with it on raised slab only, but I'd want it some level above the ground to keep out water at a minimum and in a cold climate to not leach away my heat into the ground. Plus footings would get the whole thing level which would be helpful.
Containers are kind of an interesting building unit, but they still require much of the same interior construction as stick built. I'd bet stick building a single room outside building would be less hassle than converting a shipping container, unless your idea of a shipping container is the same as a third world refugee.
Shipping containers really get interesting if you want to do unusual multi-level buildings where their structural attributes outweigh their complications. I keep waiting for a post-apocalyptic movie to feature a shipping container fortress or walled city.
It seems like these systems are exploitative by design, even if exploitation wasn't explicitly the goal. They're designed with every possible algorithm and available data to maximize labor output at the lowest possible cost. Individual workers are operating at extreme information asymmetry and against a system which does not negotiate and only offers a take it or leave it choice.
While this reduction in labor costs may have some broader macroeconomic value, making some goods or services cheaper and more widely available it seems like the end result would ultimately just look like labor exploitation.
Let's not get too hasty here. Obama might have to *draft* a stern letter. Nobody said anything about actually *issuing* a sternly worded letter.
This would be easier if Owncloud was focused on delivering an appliance in the manner of FreeNAS/NAS4Free or pfSense and the appliance was the primary intended installation and included interfaces for managing all aspects of the system and networking.
The challenge, of course, with anything like Owncloud as an appliance is that they're a conglomeration of multiple packages, plus an OS, and layering a GUI over all of the parts that needs to be managed, including OS and package updates, ends up being nearly more work then core functionality.
I see they now have a community appliance version, but when I last looked at it the only appliance was a third-party one and it wasn't really comprehensively manageable via the web interface. The guy who put it together did a fair job of adding on additional web management for system-level features, but stuff like SSL certs and other updating were command line driven. IMHO it was also missing an install stage where you could size your VMs and disks, deploy the appliance and then have it configure storage on your intended disks. Storage expansion required command line tinkering with LVM -- I guess kudos for setting it up with LVM to begin with, but it made for a nuisance in setting up a sensible 1+ TB install. In an ideal world the VM config would describe the storage layout and the installer would let you pick your data volume(s).
Shooting sensitive devices might damage them, but wouldn't likely be that much of a value in terms of losing valuable intelligence or technology because bullets simply wouldn't do enough damage, or at least the amount you could reasonably fire from a handgun.
It further would be a major risk to the guy firing them -- bullets ricochet. I just finished a book about combat helicopters in Viet Nam, and they faced the same risk -- if a chopper went down they had to disable the radios, because if the VC or NVA got ahold of a radio they would compromise communications until radio protocols could be adjusted. One of the anecdotes in the book was about a helicopter that had a malfunction and a hard landing. The pilot whipped out his .45 and began shooting at the radio to disable it and ended up wounding his co-pilot from ricochets.
Incendiary grenades seem like ideal backup methods. Quick to deploy and if stored properly, unlikely to be a significant risk in flight to the crew. They could also be given longer fuzing, like say 30-60 seconds, allowing for several to be placed while still allowing the crew time to evacuate. They'd burn hot enough to remove most intelligence value from the damaged equipment.
You'd obviously have other, preferred methods if time allowed -- wipe and self-destruct methods that only destroyed the minimal amount necessary to protect security interests, but if there wasn't time for those procedures -- which would likely be somewhat complicated to prevent accidental destruction -- the extra damage from thermite grenades, like loss of the aircraft, would probably be desirable.
In the case of the forced-down US airplane where the Chinese were immediately on scene, they really couldn't stop the resulting fire, either, as no conventional fire fighting methods would extinguish thermite,
They should pack in a few dozen thermite grenades into those planes so when they are forced down they can just torch it if necessary.
Might as well keep using the "Amazon Basics" brand tied in with the "Amazon Now" functionality. With that in mind:
Amazon Basics Prostitution: Clean, average-looking girls and boys for a minimum price.
Amazon Basics Marijuana: Average, seedless marijuana with a predictable THC content
Amazon Basics Firearms: Simple, high-capacity autoloading pistols and rifles
I don't really know much of the chemistry involved, all I've heard is that butane extraction is relatively simple, operating at reasonable pressures and the most complex moving part is a vacuum pump for extracting out the butane. The downside being the butane is flammable or potentially explosive if mishandled.
I've also heard that butane leaves a foul taste in extracts, but I'm not sure if that's from crappy sources of butane or bad extraction technique.
CO2 supposedly is better tasting and not flammable, the downside being that the system runs at about 75 bar, so you kind of buy back into the explosion problem, not from the gas itself but from the operating pressures.
I'm not sure I'd want to be around either system home-rolled unless somebody knew what they were doing. Provided decent ventilation, I'd wager butane is arguably easier to work with. It's probably harder for the average person to come up with parts safe at 75 bar.
I have come to the sad conclusion that in the USA at least we're living in a "post-fact, post-truth" world where it no longer matters if anything is truthful or accurate if enough people believe it. Too many people I know just don't care anymore about whether anything is accurate if it matches up with their political beliefs or attacks those they disagree with.
I think somewhere along the line sociopolitical positions (which, IMHO, in the broad center are neither good nor bad, true nor false) began to get pushed using selectively chosen "facts" to make the advocated policy seem as if it, too, was factual in nature. It was a kind of rhetorical persuasion, almost like sales techniques -- "Everybody knows that that less housework makes a wife happy, and the Vacuum2000 really reduces housework. If you won't buy one, ask yourself why you want an unhappy wife."
Anyway, I think this began to highlight a conceptual difference between truth and facts. I would argue that nearly every thing that is *true* is made up of a constellation of related facts. Cherry-picking facts allows you to manufacture a truth, but when that truth diverges significantly from reality it causes a cognitive dissonance, and people generally tend to side with the truth most closely aligned with their perceived reality.
I think this has led us to the point where people ignore facts -- too often they're not used to try to accurately describe a perceived truth, but to create a truth.
I think globalism is probably a great example. Lots of people using facts to advocate for it as embodying the ideal outcome, yet for millions of people, despite the facts that seem to support it, see their life undermined by globalism -- jobs moved away, problems with immigrants, and so on. Do you believe the facts or the truth around you?
(And I'm not meaning to take a position on globalism. I'm sure the benefits of trade are great, but they're poorly distributed. Cultural diversity is nice, in a Disney Epcot way, but I think humans generally do poorly when they hold divergent views on many topics, and the results are usually ugly at best or grinding warfare at worst).
I think I read they use supercritical CO2 for extracting THC from marijuana plants, or were at least migrating to it from earlier systems that used butane as the solvent.
Kinsey said 75% of men only lasted two minutes, and more recent results suggest half only last two minutes, with the average something like 7 minutes. Older (and perhaps less reliable) research suggested no correlation with perceived orgasm quality and duration of intercourse. Both sexes claim that they want intercourse to last longer, but men want it to last longer than women.
It doesn't surprise me that the duration for a large number of men is short. Men's primary biological goal with intercourse is to ejaculate into your partner, and its purpose to provide the stimulation necessary for ejaculation. You might even argue that men who take longer than average may be struggling to achieve orgasm versus just having great endurance.
I also wonder how duration is influenced by the script or process of sexual activity. I would imagine that among couples where female orgasm is achieved during foreplay, such as manual or oral stimulation, men may feel both greater arousal and less compulsion for long endurance sex because their partners have already achieved orgasm. Partners with shorter foreplay where vaginal stimulation is the precursor to female orgasm may have longer duration intercourse for the female to obtain sufficient arousal for orgasm, and thus more pressure on the male to last longer.
I'd also wager that in longer-term monogamous couples sex becomes more functionary, with many sex acts basically women complying with their male partner's desire for gratification, ultimately resulting in shorter duration intercourse. She's not interested or seeking orgasmic gratification, so getting it over with, so to speak, is actually desirable.
From the experience-is-not-data department, in my experience women capable of orgasm solely from intercourse usually orgasmed quickly, reducing the demand for longer duration intercourse to achieve stimulation necessary for orgasm. And most women didn't orgasm solely from vaginal intercourse, needing some kind of direct clitoral stimulation. I've also been told by women that they disliked intercourse lasting too long, it can result in genital discomfort or orthopedic discomfort from maintaining some kind of position.
I'd wager it was because under the Ceausescu regime, telephones were probably both a luxury and considered an existential threat to his regime, so the phone network was essentially junk when he was overthrown and not really useful.
If the UK had to basically rebuild the entire telecommunications network from scratch in the early 1990s, I'm sure a lot of basic infrastructure and engineering choices would have been far more data favorable.
Countries which had a decent and usable telecommunications network seem to suffer from the economics of good enough and the demands of profit which make extensive reconstruction impossible. The networks get expanded and improved, but only incrementally and the small end user likely sees the best improvements last if not at all.
The problem with time is that it's a dependent function based on usage patterns and past usage may not be representative of future usage. On my recent Windows portables, the time remaining for battery varies a lot including during use. I may have 6 hours left, do something intensive, and it goes down to 2.5 hours, do something very light, and it's back up to 4.
Think of this way, cars have always had a gas gauge which was a generic graph representative of the fuel level in the tank. Nobody really worried about "how far they could drive" and we didn't have legions of people stuck out of gas.
Modern cars usually have some kind of trip computer that shows how much range is left, but I don't know anybody who actually drives to this figure. When I fill up my car resets to a value that is close (10-20%) to what my actual miles were at last fill (and I'm prone to running to within 1-2 gallons of empty), but it also seems to represent whatever my mileage was on the last tank which may not represent the mileage driven on my next tank, let alone long-term MPG.
I'm fine with including a "time remaining" value, too, but it'd also be nice to see historical statistics on power consumption -- past hour of use, since last charge, 7 days, heaviest use, and lightest use and be able to pick the time remaining based on the power consumption stats that represented their likely use patterns.
An attempt to "force" a time remaining measurement seems likely to be misleading at best or completely inaccurate. At best, the system should base power remaining on your actual usage pattern power consumption and the measurable state of battery charge, but is your average usage actually representative of how you plan to use the system, or worse, do you have extreme usage patterns of very light vs. very heavy?
At worst, they don't even work that hard to gather statistics and use numbers from internal research which may suffer from the "nobody is average" problem where averages don't represent any actual person's use, and they would likely also be inclined to game these figures to make people feel good about the product.