Shit I didn't know it was that important. I don't use credit cards or have any loans, so I figured it only mattered to people who were not financially stable.
Is there anything other than a house that most people can't pay with cash? I don't see the point in managing a credit score if I don't use credit to pay for shit.
Wow that sucks. I wish the SSA here in the US would make a notice, something along the lines of "Numbers A through Z are affected." Just so we know if we are at risk for being harassed.
Debt collectors don't even care who they get the money from, as long as they get it. For example, when I was a kid my siblings and I had health insurance from my mother's job. She used to just bring my card to the doctor's office because, as far as she was concerned, our claims were all the same (different than hers).
When I turned 20 a collection agency called my house trying to tell me that I owed $500 to the Where I Live Medical Group. I asked her for details about the charges, and they all turned out to be hospital visits made in my name. They were all about 5 years old. I tried to explain to her that there must be a mistake, but what she said next was a real kicker: "Mr Lastname, aren't you going to take responsibility for your daughters medical bills?" I freaked out (I have no kids) and asked her what she was talking about. She said the name that was filed under patient care was "Mysister Lastname". She thought that my sister was my daughter, just because we had the same last name. She didn't even look at the DOB.
So my mom took my sister to the hospital five years ago with my insurance card, and didn't pay the bill. Then the hospital hunted me down and tried to tell me that my sister was my daughter and I was legally obligated to pay the bill. I asked her to look at the DOB for the patient and myself, and all of a sudden her demeanor changed (she must have realized she screwed up). The worst bit was that she started demanding to know how to get in contact with my parents, she was very aggressive. I called her a cunt and told her to fuck off. Most women who want money from me respond to that.
I just ignored the letters and phone calls until they went away, but the whole thing is fucked up if you think about it. I mean, shouldn't someone have noticed that the names on the forms don't match the name on the card, let alone the blood type and sex type? Birth date too now that I think about it.
What if another cop shows up in his place? That happened to me back in 2005 for a speeding ticket. I told the magistrate dude (or whoever he is) that it wasn't the cop who pulled me over, and he said that it was ok because he was reading from the police log and his personal notes or something.
I know exactly what you are talking about. We had 2000 logic diagrams to change once, and we used a script to do it in AutoCAD. Took the farm 3 hours to do, but it took us 4 weeks to check over. It's even worse when the drawings didn't come from your department, or (god help us) an outside source. We got drawings from a sister company once that were not to scale, and the title blocks were scaled by hand to 'look' right. Half of them don't even use the same blocks either, so when you write the script it only works on half of them and you are left saying 'WTF?'. Then you add in a layer filter, for example, to help the script find the right block. Guess what? Some trade school graduate from drinkachusetts screwed up the layers on every individual drawing. So you add a filter for linetype. Turns out the linetypes are all different to, and in order to make each drawing look consistent they changed the linetype scale so the.5 linetypes look ok. ARGHH we should have just redrawn them.
Speaking of databases, have you ever designed in AutoCAD using Bently AutoPlant? It links the drawings to a database. We use it where I work to design for power plants. It sucks, but we have tried many other solutions over the years and it works the best. Trying to link Pro-E or Microstation or Solidworks to a database we can use to generate Process Flow Diagrams, Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams, and Logic Diagrams is nigh impossible. Sure they are perfect for modeling, but taking the model data and converting it to schematic line drawings is a technological boundary for sure. Oh well.
I'm pretty positive that if a user has already installed adblocking software, they don't respect the site owners opposition to adblocking. Seriously, do admins think they will change their mind the second time around?
I think you are right, people do have different preferences for cable programming.
Myself, for example, only watch Discovery, History, Sci-fi, and Comedy Central. My SO likes to watch the other reality tv channels. So what ends up happening is we pay verizon $130/month for premium programming, even though she only watches 20 of the 800 channels. In order to get those 20 though, we have to buy a whole block of channels we don't need.
What bothers me is how fast it is going. The day before yesterday CNN-dot-com said that, exlcuding victims in mexico, there were only eight (8) confirmed deaths in the US. Yesterday evening there were eleven (11).
Now there are twenty (20). Those are pretty big jumps, right? OR is it to early to tell?
Apparently you have never seen a Logic Diagram. You make thousands of those is minutes, and it would take a team of Instruments & Controls Engineers a few years to go over them.
Ahh now I get it. Thanks for explaining that; I agree with you. When power companies invest in technologies they look at how quickly the system can pay for itself, not what good it does compared to another system as part of the grid.
I also apologize, that anger was misdirected at you and really has everything to do with teaching my son how to drive without actually using our insurance policy.
Investors don't give a crap about cost savings or net power generation - at least directly
You have no idea what you are talking about. The only figure in a proposal that is actually read is the cost per watt. That is the only reason nuclear hasn't gone big. These companies don't give a flying fuck about plant disasters. That is the kind of silly thing a civilian would be concerned with. I don't know how your comment got modded insightful, because you are trolling so hard the local fishing industry can't keep up with you.
Sorry for the wait. There is only so much I can tell you, you know? Here is a link to a company we own. This PDF details our CO2 removal process, and why it is better than General Electric's.
General Electric has a system where they cool the flue gas down to a temperature where the CO2 condenses, and then they extract it and put the mixture in a landfill. It is complicated and adds a lot of cost per watt. Most of this is related to pumping and cooling the glycol down to a low enough temperature.
Our system increases the pressure of the flue gas using latent water trapped in the flue gas. We use roughly 1200psi (as you will read) to allow the CO2 to condense at roughly 303 degrees celcius. We then collect it and sell it as dry ice. By using the latent heat already in the flue gas to increase the pressure we remove the cost of cooling the gas, thereby simplifying the whole process and cutting out a lot of systems that add cost. The power company actually makes money off of the dry ice, which pays for the cost we charge them for retrofitting the plant.
A lot of companies do what we do, but our goal is to eliminate the need for landfills. For example, we have an absorber system that extracts sulphuric acid from the flue gas. So do our competitors. The difference is that we do it by spraying limestone slurry into the absorber tower, and recycling the mixture. This creates gypsum which is non-radioactive and can be sold to drywall manufacturers. The system actually makes money, helping the power company to gain back the cost of design manufacture and installation. Our competitors just put the chemical gook in a landfill.
We can guarantee a 93-95 percent removal rate for every chemical in flue gas, even CO2. We usually do that by making the system multipass, ie we will circulate the flue gas through our systems until the sensors say we have achieved our gurantee point and then release the 98% pure water vapor into the atmosphere.
Now, this whole industry is run by private companies, so whenever we make breakthroughs in technology it never hits the news. I think that it is sad that people like http://www.thisisreality.org/, for example, don't know what the fuck they are talking about. And trying to talk to those people is so hard because they already think they know everything. Every summer some environmentalist-hippie kids from the college come door-knocking with pamphlets. They don't listen to me either. I had to call the police on a few of them last year; once I told them who I worked for they started to tear down the picket fence in front of my house. Idiots.
But in case you guys were wondering why the government isn't concerned, that is why. Because you guys are pretty much complaining about a problem that doesn't exist. If every coal burning system was equipped with our systems, they would actually be cleaner than nuclear. Go figure *laughs*
We have enough coal for ourselves here in the USA, so the cost of retrofitting the existing plants compared to building brand-new reactors all over the place is a no-brainer.
It might be worth it to research retrofitting existing plants with scrubbers and filters, but in terms of our future energy supply coal seems like a dead end.
It is worth it, and many companies have already done it. Most of the work is not made public, so I don't expect anyone to know about it. Scrubbers that clean flue gas cost effectively have been sold since the 80's. CO2 is the only chemical left to clean up, and that is what is holding everyone back today.
Absolutely right. CO2 is the one chemical that can't seem to be scrubbed out. I work for Babcock Power, and I can tell you that Alcoa Is working with us on some technology to handle that. But the guys I know working in that department say that the technology is at least 7 years away. Management won't task more of us on the project either.
We sell systems that we can guarantee will remove 98% of mercury, several SOX, carbon, sulfur and Sulphuric Acid, aluminum, but not CO2. It's the one thing left coming out of smoke stacks in america.
I love how we sell 90 of these things every year but people keep complaining that there is no clean coal. After we get rid of the CO2 I swear I expect them to complain about the water vapor next. And no that was not a joke.
I would like to point out that the real problem is in how the government classifies a station as "clean". Lets say that power company a has 30 stations. They each generate "points" on a point system developed by the feds. There is a chart that says they must have a certain number of points, depending on the number of stations, that will qualify them to be clean. These companies will invest in our systems to the minimum extent possible to qualify, and then leave the other stations dirty. It is usually less than half of their systems.
There is so much I could tell you guys, I had no idea you were interested in clean power. I thought this was a technology site, but I guess it is more broad than that.
BTW those wikipedia articles are almost completely wrong, the systems I am working on don't work anything like how they describe, not even close. The ones from our competitors don't work that way either. If those articles are what slashdot is basing it's opinions on I can understand why there is so much confusion.
The funny thing is that we are based in MA, and we are selling more of these in the middle east than we are here in the US. They pay us in gold. Real gold. They have so much money floating around over there that they can invest in hundreds of these systems every year, and that is where the real innovation is happening. The power industry in India far outpaces our own, it's actually amazing how much work they have done in the last two decades.
If the point system went away, if a legislator grew the balls to do it that is, then all of the power grid in america could be clean within 5 years. The problem is they don't have to buy any more than they need to qualify for the tax credit.
That is equivalent to Toyota only putting in enough seat belts to qualify for a tax credit, instead of putting them in every seat because it is the right thing to do.
I'm sorry, its 41, not 42. Click on the "Green" tab. There are a few different engines, the numbers you have are for the 2.5 liter 4 cylinder. There is a hybrid engine and a six cylinder engine too.
Just scroll down a bit. There is actually a lot of info on the website, but it's silly because you have to click through a ton of menus to get to it.
Completely unrelated, but it says that the hybrid system for the 2010 Fusion is an "Atkinson Cycle". Does anyone know what this is?
http://www.fordvehicles.com/cars/fusion/http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/9712/72418797.jpg
How can it make economic sense? I'd much rather have a VW Sharan that gets 7 and still gets 40+ to the gallon. Why on earth are we trying to build electric cars that make no sense instead of using cheap, proven turbo-diesel technologies? Why can't I buy a car that will ride 7 and get 40+ to the gallon in the US? I'm baffled...
Slashdot Mirror
Finally Linux will have one user friendly feature that people making the switch will understand.
"This is a Pre telling a competitors service that it is an iPhone. Is that legal"-I can't fucking believe you got modded insightful.
This whole article is conjecture.
Shit I didn't know it was that important. I don't use credit cards or have any loans, so I figured it only mattered to people who were not financially stable.
Is there anything other than a house that most people can't pay with cash? I don't see the point in managing a credit score if I don't use credit to pay for shit.
There must be something I am missing here...
Wow that sucks. I wish the SSA here in the US would make a notice, something along the lines of "Numbers A through Z are affected." Just so we know if we are at risk for being harassed.
Debt collectors don't even care who they get the money from, as long as they get it. For example, when I was a kid my siblings and I had health insurance from my mother's job. She used to just bring my card to the doctor's office because, as far as she was concerned, our claims were all the same (different than hers).
When I turned 20 a collection agency called my house trying to tell me that I owed $500 to the Where I Live Medical Group. I asked her for details about the charges, and they all turned out to be hospital visits made in my name. They were all about 5 years old. I tried to explain to her that there must be a mistake, but what she said next was a real kicker: "Mr Lastname, aren't you going to take responsibility for your daughters medical bills?" I freaked out (I have no kids) and asked her what she was talking about. She said the name that was filed under patient care was "Mysister Lastname". She thought that my sister was my daughter, just because we had the same last name. She didn't even look at the DOB.
So my mom took my sister to the hospital five years ago with my insurance card, and didn't pay the bill. Then the hospital hunted me down and tried to tell me that my sister was my daughter and I was legally obligated to pay the bill. I asked her to look at the DOB for the patient and myself, and all of a sudden her demeanor changed (she must have realized she screwed up). The worst bit was that she started demanding to know how to get in contact with my parents, she was very aggressive. I called her a cunt and told her to fuck off. Most women who want money from me respond to that.
I just ignored the letters and phone calls until they went away, but the whole thing is fucked up if you think about it. I mean, shouldn't someone have noticed that the names on the forms don't match the name on the card, let alone the blood type and sex type? Birth date too now that I think about it.
BULLSHIT the Gameboy Advance didn't have a headphone jack. I friggin owned one, and I used headphones all the time. Now the 'SP' on the other hand...
What if another cop shows up in his place? That happened to me back in 2005 for a speeding ticket. I told the magistrate dude (or whoever he is) that it wasn't the cop who pulled me over, and he said that it was ok because he was reading from the police log and his personal notes or something.
I know exactly what you are talking about. We had 2000 logic diagrams to change once, and we used a script to do it in AutoCAD. Took the farm 3 hours to do, but it took us 4 weeks to check over. It's even worse when the drawings didn't come from your department, or (god help us) an outside source. We got drawings from a sister company once that were not to scale, and the title blocks were scaled by hand to 'look' right. Half of them don't even use the same blocks either, so when you write the script it only works on half of them and you are left saying 'WTF?'. Then you add in a layer filter, for example, to help the script find the right block. Guess what? Some trade school graduate from drinkachusetts screwed up the layers on every individual drawing. So you add a filter for linetype. Turns out the linetypes are all different to, and in order to make each drawing look consistent they changed the linetype scale so the .5 linetypes look ok. ARGHH we should have just redrawn them.
Speaking of databases, have you ever designed in AutoCAD using Bently AutoPlant? It links the drawings to a database. We use it where I work to design for power plants. It sucks, but we have tried many other solutions over the years and it works the best. Trying to link Pro-E or Microstation or Solidworks to a database we can use to generate Process Flow Diagrams, Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams, and Logic Diagrams is nigh impossible. Sure they are perfect for modeling, but taking the model data and converting it to schematic line drawings is a technological boundary for sure. Oh well.
"dogs can be trained to tell the difference between a legit copy of a DVD and one from those pesky pirates"
Are you fucking kidding me?
"Look at Firefox 3 vs 2. Seems to be a marked improvement in speed to me."
Speak for yourself.
I'm pretty positive that if a user has already installed adblocking software, they don't respect the site owners opposition to adblocking. Seriously, do admins think they will change their mind the second time around?
I think you are right, people do have different preferences for cable programming.
Myself, for example, only watch Discovery, History, Sci-fi, and Comedy Central. My SO likes to watch the other reality tv channels. So what ends up happening is we pay verizon $130/month for premium programming, even though she only watches 20 of the 800 channels. In order to get those 20 though, we have to buy a whole block of channels we don't need.
Good thing I asked, I've heard a lot of stuff on fox news with my grandfather. Do you guys think I should buy some relenza or tamiflu?
What bothers me is how fast it is going. The day before yesterday CNN-dot-com said that, exlcuding victims in mexico, there were only eight (8) confirmed deaths in the US. Yesterday evening there were eleven (11).
Now there are twenty (20). Those are pretty big jumps, right? OR is it to early to tell?
Apparently you have never seen a Logic Diagram. You make thousands of those is minutes, and it would take a team of Instruments & Controls Engineers a few years to go over them.
Ahh now I get it. Thanks for explaining that; I agree with you. When power companies invest in technologies they look at how quickly the system can pay for itself, not what good it does compared to another system as part of the grid.
I also apologize, that anger was misdirected at you and really has everything to do with teaching my son how to drive without actually using our insurance policy.
Investors don't give a crap about cost savings or net power generation - at least directly
You have no idea what you are talking about. The only figure in a proposal that is actually read is the cost per watt. That is the only reason nuclear hasn't gone big. These companies don't give a flying fuck about plant disasters. That is the kind of silly thing a civilian would be concerned with. I don't know how your comment got modded insightful, because you are trolling so hard the local fishing industry can't keep up with you.
Sorry for the wait. There is only so much I can tell you, you know? Here is a link to a company we own. This PDF details our CO2 removal process, and why it is better than General Electric's.
http://www.thermoenergy.com/userfiles/File/Clearwater%20Conference%20TIPS%20Paper%204-19-05.pdf
General Electric has a system where they cool the flue gas down to a temperature where the CO2 condenses, and then they extract it and put the mixture in a landfill. It is complicated and adds a lot of cost per watt. Most of this is related to pumping and cooling the glycol down to a low enough temperature.
Our system increases the pressure of the flue gas using latent water trapped in the flue gas. We use roughly 1200psi (as you will read) to allow the CO2 to condense at roughly 303 degrees celcius. We then collect it and sell it as dry ice. By using the latent heat already in the flue gas to increase the pressure we remove the cost of cooling the gas, thereby simplifying the whole process and cutting out a lot of systems that add cost. The power company actually makes money off of the dry ice, which pays for the cost we charge them for retrofitting the plant.
A lot of companies do what we do, but our goal is to eliminate the need for landfills. For example, we have an absorber system that extracts sulphuric acid from the flue gas. So do our competitors. The difference is that we do it by spraying limestone slurry into the absorber tower, and recycling the mixture. This creates gypsum which is non-radioactive and can be sold to drywall manufacturers. The system actually makes money, helping the power company to gain back the cost of design manufacture and installation. Our competitors just put the chemical gook in a landfill.
We can guarantee a 93-95 percent removal rate for every chemical in flue gas, even CO2. We usually do that by making the system multipass, ie we will circulate the flue gas through our systems until the sensors say we have achieved our gurantee point and then release the 98% pure water vapor into the atmosphere.
Now, this whole industry is run by private companies, so whenever we make breakthroughs in technology it never hits the news. I think that it is sad that people like http://www.thisisreality.org/, for example, don't know what the fuck they are talking about. And trying to talk to those people is so hard because they already think they know everything. Every summer some environmentalist-hippie kids from the college come door-knocking with pamphlets. They don't listen to me either. I had to call the police on a few of them last year; once I told them who I worked for they started to tear down the picket fence in front of my house. Idiots.
But in case you guys were wondering why the government isn't concerned, that is why. Because you guys are pretty much complaining about a problem that doesn't exist. If every coal burning system was equipped with our systems, they would actually be cleaner than nuclear. Go figure *laughs*
We have enough coal for ourselves here in the USA, so the cost of retrofitting the existing plants compared to building brand-new reactors all over the place is a no-brainer.
It might be worth it to research retrofitting existing plants with scrubbers and filters, but in terms of our future energy supply coal seems like a dead end.
It is worth it, and many companies have already done it. Most of the work is not made public, so I don't expect anyone to know about it. Scrubbers that clean flue gas cost effectively have been sold since the 80's. CO2 is the only chemical left to clean up, and that is what is holding everyone back today.
Now that is a good idea. I second this.
Absolutely right. CO2 is the one chemical that can't seem to be scrubbed out. I work for Babcock Power, and I can tell you that Alcoa Is working with us on some technology to handle that. But the guys I know working in that department say that the technology is at least 7 years away. Management won't task more of us on the project either. We sell systems that we can guarantee will remove 98% of mercury, several SOX, carbon, sulfur and Sulphuric Acid, aluminum, but not CO2. It's the one thing left coming out of smoke stacks in america. I love how we sell 90 of these things every year but people keep complaining that there is no clean coal. After we get rid of the CO2 I swear I expect them to complain about the water vapor next. And no that was not a joke. I would like to point out that the real problem is in how the government classifies a station as "clean". Lets say that power company a has 30 stations. They each generate "points" on a point system developed by the feds. There is a chart that says they must have a certain number of points, depending on the number of stations, that will qualify them to be clean. These companies will invest in our systems to the minimum extent possible to qualify, and then leave the other stations dirty. It is usually less than half of their systems. There is so much I could tell you guys, I had no idea you were interested in clean power. I thought this was a technology site, but I guess it is more broad than that. BTW those wikipedia articles are almost completely wrong, the systems I am working on don't work anything like how they describe, not even close. The ones from our competitors don't work that way either. If those articles are what slashdot is basing it's opinions on I can understand why there is so much confusion. The funny thing is that we are based in MA, and we are selling more of these in the middle east than we are here in the US. They pay us in gold. Real gold. They have so much money floating around over there that they can invest in hundreds of these systems every year, and that is where the real innovation is happening. The power industry in India far outpaces our own, it's actually amazing how much work they have done in the last two decades. If the point system went away, if a legislator grew the balls to do it that is, then all of the power grid in america could be clean within 5 years. The problem is they don't have to buy any more than they need to qualify for the tax credit. That is equivalent to Toyota only putting in enough seat belts to qualify for a tax credit, instead of putting them in every seat because it is the right thing to do.
I'm sorry, its 41, not 42. Click on the "Green" tab. There are a few different engines, the numbers you have are for the 2.5 liter 4 cylinder. There is a hybrid engine and a six cylinder engine too. Just scroll down a bit. There is actually a lot of info on the website, but it's silly because you have to click through a ton of menus to get to it. Completely unrelated, but it says that the hybrid system for the 2010 Fusion is an "Atkinson Cycle". Does anyone know what this is? http://www.fordvehicles.com/cars/fusion/ http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/9712/72418797.jpg
How can it make economic sense? I'd much rather have a VW Sharan that gets 7 and still gets 40+ to the gallon. Why on earth are we trying to build electric cars that make no sense instead of using cheap, proven turbo-diesel technologies? Why can't I buy a car that will ride 7 and get 40+ to the gallon in the US? I'm baffled...
The new Ford Fusion seats 7 and gets 42mpg.