And if the cars prove as much safer than human drivers as has been predicted, the cost of a $5 million insurance policy on them (while driven by the robot) might well be cheaper than $1 million while driven by a human.
I would like to know why you classify a backer of the KeystoneXL pipeline as someone who hates the oil industry. Perhaps he hates some part of it, that wouldn't be a surprise, but to claim that he hates it in general while being a crucial supporter of the Keystone pipeline I find difficult to understand.
The problem with nuclear plants are that they are hideously expensive. This has a multidude of causes, and most of them have potential, but unproven, solutions. But what we have right now is...
NOBODY has properly budgeted to decomission a nuclear plant. One result it that current plants are being run considerbly beyond their designed life. This isn't necessarily a problem, but it sure hasn't been proven that it's not a problem. The extension process is too highly politicized to allow that. Some plants clearly need to be shut down and decommissioned, but nobody has been able to do it. There isn't any approved storage site for high level nuclear waste, so the current plants are storing it locally. This is potentially disasterous. Etc. And if a storage site existed, current attempts to decommission obsolete plants seem to indicate that the cost estimates being used underestimate the cost of decomissioning a plant by at least a factor of 5, and probably considerably more. (That said, there haven't been enough attempts to come to a valid estimate on emperical grounds. And industry estimates have been nearly worthless.)
N.B.: I am not an expert on this, I merely follow the news. If you can show examples of where this is wrong I would be interrested.
Actually, depending on the size of the nation this is quite reasonable. In the US one could say "within the state" and be reasonable. It's not such a good idea in California as in Texas, but in Rhode Island it's clearly reasonable.
The problem is "What speed is high speed rail?" There are speeds at which this is just silly. (One example is the hyper-sonic rail being developed in China that's going to need a vacuum tube enclosing the rail to be able to work.) With careful design you could probably get up to 300 kph (that's about 200 mph) reasonably. But you'd need to straighten a lot of curves, and you couldn't stop very often, so you'd need a lot of sidings, and probably even lots of places where the tracks were doubled. You'd also need separate grade for the rapid trains, unless you re-engineered ALL the slow trains to fit the wider tracks that the rapid trains would require.
P.S.: If you're going to do this, it might pay to put in a bit extra time and effort and design trains that can drop and add cars without slowing down. This means each car needs motors in its wheels (well the carriages that hold the wheels) so it can speed up and slow down. Then the main train would (nearly) never stop. Different cars would have different destinations, and people would need to move to the correct car once it joined the train. This makes baggage handling quite a problem, so you'ld probably need to send your baggage on ahead of you by a couple of days, or wait a couple of days for it to join you.
But do note that 300 Kph is a lot slower than an airplane, so if you're going a long distance. it will take longer. Also note that the system would need to be highly automated.
I actually think it's a quite good idea, but you have no idea of the up front costs that you are talking about. Even demonstration lines tend to run into horrendous cost overruns. (Of course, they often tend to be too bleeding edge...but that's not the only reason. Cost overruns happen even in well understood processes, like freeway construction.)
I'm not sure that abolishing the guilds was a net gain for freedom. To me it seems that it mainly removed entry into the skilled trades to those with limited means and transferred the subservience of the skilled workers to people more interested in accumulaitng wealth than in being highly skilled. Perhaps at the time it looked like a step towards liberty, but I don't think it actually was such.
OTOH, the guilds did tend to lock traditional techniques into practice (rather like building codes do...except that that benefits lawyers rather than masters of the craft) and thus make trades inflexible. This, however, is nearly orthogonal to liberty.
It's not just the names that changed. And the NAME of the party of the North during the civil was was the Republican party. The relation of that party to the current Republican party is historical rather than ideological. Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
I680 approaching the Bay Bridge is pretty bad. Not as bad as the local streets, but the traffic is faster, so small defects are worse.
And why did you specify freeways? The DMV money is also used for local & county streets and roads. A lot of the gas tax is state taxes, at least locally, and it, also, is supposed to be used for transportation improvements...like street maintenance.
But I wasn't concerned about glutamate. Only salt. And I used salt-free tomato sauce. I think it was the sugar in to tomato sauce that caused the bubbles to be so large, I don't know what made them hard. If this is so, however, I could have solved the problem by growing some yeast in the tomato sauce before I used it.
I have frequently made bread without salt. This caused no major problems, though one did need to adapt the recepie. Just use other spices. A good one is curry. (The curry I use is salt-free.) Another is Italian Herb mix. I should try Chinese 5-spice, but I never have. Tomato sauce, however, tends to produce bread with large, hard, sharp bubbles. I could probably tinker with the recipie to improve it, but I haven't. There are MANY alternatives that yield quite good bread.
OTOH, making bread is a lot of work, so I've basically stopped doing it. I'm not really interested in cooking.
Whether the only problem is the high salt content of processed foods depends on your body. Some people need to be a lot more restrictive than that. Some people actually need extra salt.
The specific requirement appears to be that the word, e.g. problem, not appear in an e-mail. Sorry, but that's something I find unacceptable. More specifically, it's frequently useful to specify something as a problem in areas (e.g. the subject line) where readable text is limited.
Another place it's useful, and nearly mandatory, is when making repeated references to a problem which has been described at length elsewhere...either earlier in the same e-mail, or in a prior communication. And since they seem to have gone to much trouble to also eliminate all synonyms....no thank you, I don't think I'll trust them.
A) That's the worst case scenario. You don't expect those to be very reasonable. B) Antarctica has shown signs of melting a lot faster than was projected as reasonable. And some of the factors that have sped it's melt are still increasing.
FWIW, I don't think of that as a worst case scenario. I can imagine scenarios that would be a lot more drastic. It's the worst one they wanted to make in a public prediction. You could get a lot worse, however, with a large meteor impact in various different places. Or some forms of vulcanism under Antarctica. Etc. There's lots of ways, each highly improbable. But just remember, the current situation was highly improbable a couple of decades ago. (Not just "we thought of it as highly improbable", we wouldn't be here without a tremendous number of improbable events. Each person conceived is highly improbable. Granted, many of the alternative possibilities would be very like the current one...at least as far as we could tell.)
So people don't try to predict what WILL happen, but rather what's most likely to happen, and what kind of spread can we expect. "Worst case scenario"s are one edge case that are given a low probability of occurence. But they aren't really the worst that could happen. If the worst really happens, we won't be around to be upset by it...or not for long.
FWIW, all the plants listed were above predicted storm surges in the worst case scenario. Probably they should have their protection improved, dikes with pumps to keep them dry, protected electrical generators, etc., but even without that failure isn't really to be expected from that cause.
FWIW, I'd be more worried about the Hanford plant on the Columbia. And not because of rising sea levels.
THAT said, these plants are all nearing, or beyond, their designed end of life. That they have been given extensions to continue operation is more due to politics than to safety. It would be expensive to replace them, nobody has properly budgeted to decommission them. (*That's* an expensive process.) And there's no agreed upon location to dispose of nuclear waste. Whoops!
Yeah, there are problems with these plants, but I don't expect rising sea level to be a major one. There are too many other problems.
No. There *IS* no need for added salt. None. The salt that is normally present, if you eat a reasonable quantity of ocean fish, is sufficient. You don't need any more.
My wife has been on a strictly limited diet since her extreme youth, and (outside of results from a congenital heart problem) has no trouble with a salt free diet. I will admit that those who physically labor in a hot environment have additional need for salt. Usually, however, this is not expected to be addressed via spicing of food.
It's not just cooking. You got it right the first time, it's high temperature cooking. Boiled hot dogs don't have increased nitroseamines. (Not sure about microwaved hot dogs.) Grilled hot dogs do. So do fried hot dogs. Steamed hot dogs are safe (except for some brands that add nitroseamines in ahead of time to improve the flavor).
Now I'll grant you that most people eat so much salt that they shouldn't be bothered by that increased dosage, but others are (and have reason to be) more careful. Glutamate is useful and important, but the added sodium is concerning, and needs to be carefully counted into ones daily sodium intake.
If I thought your "step 2" would have any negative impact on the media companies, I'd be all in favor of it. Your "step 1" has a lot more effect than your "step 2", which is just used as an excuse for more repressive laws.
More effective would be to publish the home address of their secretaries. (They probably have their own homes already protected.)
No. Please write "MSWindows computers". Microsoft does not own the trademark on windows in English speaking countries. It is a common word in descriptive use and is therefore not eligible for trademark protection.
WRT Eniac, there were even earlier general purpose electronic computers, though they were basically toys and research tools (At least one of them was German.)
P.S.: The IBM 7090 didn't use transistors. It used vacum tubes. And it was definitely a modern computer.
No, there will be countries that would recognize the US having a right to extradite these people. You'ld need to study up on extradtion treaties before visiting any foreign country. Austrailia and New Zealand might be out, e.g. OTOH, Thailand, Viet Nam, Cambodia, etc. are probably safe. Don't know about India or Sri Lanka. Might want to take careful precautions before stepping outside of Russia in Europe. Etc. And that's for legal extradition. There have been occasions where "extradition" was a polite term for kidnapping.
OTOH, China's a big place, and many of the near-by countries would not ignore its preferences. The accused are not exactly confined. And China could easily decide to make it the kind of issue that the US wouldn't want to confront. But they probably won't. These *are* low level actors.
You may be correct, but an Anonymous Coward doesn't have much credibility. Do you have any links to evidence?
Please note, Japan used to be famous for shoddy merchandise. This was a correct reputation, and well earned. At some point this changed, and now their merchandise is more trustworthy than US merchandise.
China has been, correctly nortorious for shoddy merchandise. And for merchandise where different products are sold with the same description. Has this changed? Any evidence?
P.S.: I am resident in the US, so I'm only talking about goods purchased via mail-order, and not goods that you can examine prior to purchase. Also, if the quality of these goods has become reliable, it is only wthin the last 3 years.
The reality is that OpenBSD has a better security track record than ALL the commercial vendors and as far as we know doesn't come with a rootkit installed by default.
This may be correct. Now you need to start checking your chips.
What do you mean "security"? The appropriate level of security depends on what you are doing. Real security depends on building all of your devices yourself out of discrete components. And using one-time pads for communication. (Well, that's *almost* enough.) Just about nobody is going to go that far. Personally, I don't *worry* about government surveilance. I don't approve of it, but I don't worry about it. I'm too boring for them to bother with. OTOH, I won't bank on-line. I don't trust that level of security with my finances. (If I could, I'd convince my Bank to tighten things up WRT on-line transactions.) I may not be wealthy, but it doesn't take much to interest a thief in an account...and they wouldn't know until after they'd broken in anyway, and at that point they might as well clean it out. And government (as well as commercial) decisions have weakened on-line security to the point where *I* won't trust it for financial transactions. Sometimes I do it anyway, because it's just too convenient to buy specialized merchandise over the internet...but exposing my credit card that way always makes me nervous.
Actually, they may HAVE just found out about that particular technique.
The better question is: "What steps have you taken to secure your routers against intrusion?" One can guess that the answer is "none", but it's just a guess. There've been an awful lot of stories about how this or that Cisco or Linksys router is vulnerable to this or that intrusion. Why should they be trusted? That the NSA could infiltrate (possibly with NSL letters) the company without upper management knowing is quite reasonable...even if one may doubt that's what happened. That Cisco should continue to sell routers with known vulnerabilities without patching them is less forgiveable. So get a statement from them on THAT. Then check it against what's actually happening.
My guess is that Cisco is totally untrustworthy, but this is just a guess. I don't KNOW that they are intentionally shipping routers that can easily be 0wn3d by J. Random Hacker. (And for that one, you can't really blame the govt. That one clearly is Cisco.)
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And if the cars prove as much safer than human drivers as has been predicted, the cost of a $5 million insurance policy on them (while driven by the robot) might well be cheaper than $1 million while driven by a human.
I would like to know why you classify a backer of the KeystoneXL pipeline as someone who hates the oil industry. Perhaps he hates some part of it, that wouldn't be a surprise, but to claim that he hates it in general while being a crucial supporter of the Keystone pipeline I find difficult to understand.
The problem with nuclear plants are that they are hideously expensive. This has a multidude of causes, and most of them have potential, but unproven, solutions. But what we have right now is...
NOBODY has properly budgeted to decomission a nuclear plant. One result it that current plants are being run considerbly beyond their designed life. This isn't necessarily a problem, but it sure hasn't been proven that it's not a problem. The extension process is too highly politicized to allow that. Some plants clearly need to be shut down and decommissioned, but nobody has been able to do it. There isn't any approved storage site for high level nuclear waste, so the current plants are storing it locally. This is potentially disasterous. Etc. And if a storage site existed, current attempts to decommission obsolete plants seem to indicate that the cost estimates being used underestimate the cost of decomissioning a plant by at least a factor of 5, and probably considerably more. (That said, there haven't been enough attempts to come to a valid estimate on emperical grounds. And industry estimates have been nearly worthless.)
N.B.: I am not an expert on this, I merely follow the news. If you can show examples of where this is wrong I would be interrested.
Actually, depending on the size of the nation this is quite reasonable. In the US one could say "within the state" and be reasonable. It's not such a good idea in California as in Texas, but in Rhode Island it's clearly reasonable.
The problem is "What speed is high speed rail?" There are speeds at which this is just silly. (One example is the hyper-sonic rail being developed in China that's going to need a vacuum tube enclosing the rail to be able to work.) With careful design you could probably get up to 300 kph (that's about 200 mph) reasonably. But you'd need to straighten a lot of curves, and you couldn't stop very often, so you'd need a lot of sidings, and probably even lots of places where the tracks were doubled. You'd also need separate grade for the rapid trains, unless you re-engineered ALL the slow trains to fit the wider tracks that the rapid trains would require.
P.S.: If you're going to do this, it might pay to put in a bit extra time and effort and design trains that can drop and add cars without slowing down. This means each car needs motors in its wheels (well the carriages that hold the wheels) so it can speed up and slow down. Then the main train would (nearly) never stop. Different cars would have different destinations, and people would need to move to the correct car once it joined the train. This makes baggage handling quite a problem, so you'ld probably need to send your baggage on ahead of you by a couple of days, or wait a couple of days for it to join you.
But do note that 300 Kph is a lot slower than an airplane, so if you're going a long distance. it will take longer. Also note that the system would need to be highly automated.
I actually think it's a quite good idea, but you have no idea of the up front costs that you are talking about. Even demonstration lines tend to run into horrendous cost overruns. (Of course, they often tend to be too bleeding edge...but that's not the only reason. Cost overruns happen even in well understood processes, like freeway construction.)
I'm not sure that abolishing the guilds was a net gain for freedom. To me it seems that it mainly removed entry into the skilled trades to those with limited means and transferred the subservience of the skilled workers to people more interested in accumulaitng wealth than in being highly skilled. Perhaps at the time it looked like a step towards liberty, but I don't think it actually was such.
OTOH, the guilds did tend to lock traditional techniques into practice (rather like building codes do...except that that benefits lawyers rather than masters of the craft) and thus make trades inflexible. This, however, is nearly orthogonal to liberty.
It's not just the names that changed. And the NAME of the party of the North during the civil was was the Republican party. The relation of that party to the current Republican party is historical rather than ideological. Please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
I680 approaching the Bay Bridge is pretty bad. Not as bad as the local streets, but the traffic is faster, so small defects are worse.
And why did you specify freeways? The DMV money is also used for local & county streets and roads. A lot of the gas tax is state taxes, at least locally, and it, also, is supposed to be used for transportation improvements...like street maintenance.
But I wasn't concerned about glutamate. Only salt. And I used salt-free tomato sauce. I think it was the sugar in to tomato sauce that caused the bubbles to be so large, I don't know what made them hard. If this is so, however, I could have solved the problem by growing some yeast in the tomato sauce before I used it.
I have frequently made bread without salt. This caused no major problems, though one did need to adapt the recepie. Just use other spices. A good one is curry. (The curry I use is salt-free.) Another is Italian Herb mix. I should try Chinese 5-spice, but I never have. Tomato sauce, however, tends to produce bread with large, hard, sharp bubbles. I could probably tinker with the recipie to improve it, but I haven't. There are MANY alternatives that yield quite good bread.
OTOH, making bread is a lot of work, so I've basically stopped doing it. I'm not really interested in cooking.
Whether the only problem is the high salt content of processed foods depends on your body. Some people need to be a lot more restrictive than that. Some people actually need extra salt.
The specific requirement appears to be that the word, e.g. problem, not appear in an e-mail. Sorry, but that's something I find unacceptable. More specifically, it's frequently useful to specify something as a problem in areas (e.g. the subject line) where readable text is limited.
Another place it's useful, and nearly mandatory, is when making repeated references to a problem which has been described at length elsewhere...either earlier in the same e-mail, or in a prior communication. And since they seem to have gone to much trouble to also eliminate all synonyms....no thank you, I don't think I'll trust them.
If the list of forbidden words includes "problem", then I'm not going to trust the company.
A) That's the worst case scenario. You don't expect those to be very reasonable.
B) Antarctica has shown signs of melting a lot faster than was projected as reasonable. And some of the factors that have sped it's melt are still increasing.
FWIW, I don't think of that as a worst case scenario. I can imagine scenarios that would be a lot more drastic. It's the worst one they wanted to make in a public prediction. You could get a lot worse, however, with a large meteor impact in various different places. Or some forms of vulcanism under Antarctica. Etc. There's lots of ways, each highly improbable. But just remember, the current situation was highly improbable a couple of decades ago. (Not just "we thought of it as highly improbable", we wouldn't be here without a tremendous number of improbable events. Each person conceived is highly improbable. Granted, many of the alternative possibilities would be very like the current one...at least as far as we could tell.)
So people don't try to predict what WILL happen, but rather what's most likely to happen, and what kind of spread can we expect. "Worst case scenario"s are one edge case that are given a low probability of occurence. But they aren't really the worst that could happen. If the worst really happens, we won't be around to be upset by it...or not for long.
FWIW, all the plants listed were above predicted storm surges in the worst case scenario. Probably they should have their protection improved, dikes with pumps to keep them dry, protected electrical generators, etc., but even without that failure isn't really to be expected from that cause.
FWIW, I'd be more worried about the Hanford plant on the Columbia. And not because of rising sea levels.
THAT said, these plants are all nearing, or beyond, their designed end of life. That they have been given extensions to continue operation is more due to politics than to safety. It would be expensive to replace them, nobody has properly budgeted to decommission them. (*That's* an expensive process.) And there's no agreed upon location to dispose of nuclear waste. Whoops!
Yeah, there are problems with these plants, but I don't expect rising sea level to be a major one. There are too many other problems.
No. There *IS* no need for added salt. None. The salt that is normally present, if you eat a reasonable quantity of ocean fish, is sufficient. You don't need any more.
My wife has been on a strictly limited diet since her extreme youth, and (outside of results from a congenital heart problem) has no trouble with a salt free diet. I will admit that those who physically labor in a hot environment have additional need for salt. Usually, however, this is not expected to be addressed via spicing of food.
It's not just cooking. You got it right the first time, it's high temperature cooking. Boiled hot dogs don't have increased nitroseamines. (Not sure about microwaved hot dogs.) Grilled hot dogs do. So do fried hot dogs. Steamed hot dogs are safe (except for some brands that add nitroseamines in ahead of time to improve the flavor).
And the sodium in MSG isn't worrisome?
Now I'll grant you that most people eat so much salt that they shouldn't be bothered by that increased dosage, but others are (and have reason to be) more careful. Glutamate is useful and important, but the added sodium is concerning, and needs to be carefully counted into ones daily sodium intake.
If I thought your "step 2" would have any negative impact on the media companies, I'd be all in favor of it. Your "step 1" has a lot more effect than your "step 2", which is just used as an excuse for more repressive laws.
More effective would be to publish the home address of their secretaries. (They probably have their own homes already protected.)
No. Please write "MSWindows computers". Microsoft does not own the trademark on windows in English speaking countries. It is a common word in descriptive use and is therefore not eligible for trademark protection.
Babbage, if you're trying to find the invention.
WRT Eniac, there were even earlier general purpose electronic computers, though they were basically toys and research tools (At least one of them was German.)
P.S.: The IBM 7090 didn't use transistors. It used vacum tubes. And it was definitely a modern computer.
No, there will be countries that would recognize the US having a right to extradite these people. You'ld need to study up on extradtion treaties before visiting any foreign country. Austrailia and New Zealand might be out, e.g. OTOH, Thailand, Viet Nam, Cambodia, etc. are probably safe. Don't know about India or Sri Lanka. Might want to take careful precautions before stepping outside of Russia in Europe. Etc. And that's for legal extradition. There have been occasions where "extradition" was a polite term for kidnapping.
OTOH, China's a big place, and many of the near-by countries would not ignore its preferences. The accused are not exactly confined. And China could easily decide to make it the kind of issue that the US wouldn't want to confront. But they probably won't. These *are* low level actors.
You may be correct, but an Anonymous Coward doesn't have much credibility. Do you have any links to evidence?
Please note, Japan used to be famous for shoddy merchandise. This was a correct reputation, and well earned. At some point this changed, and now their merchandise is more trustworthy than US merchandise.
China has been, correctly nortorious for shoddy merchandise. And for merchandise where different products are sold with the same description. Has this changed? Any evidence?
P.S.: I am resident in the US, so I'm only talking about goods purchased via mail-order, and not goods that you can examine prior to purchase. Also, if the quality of these goods has become reliable, it is only wthin the last 3 years.
The reality is that OpenBSD has a better security track record than ALL the commercial vendors and as far as we know doesn't come with a rootkit installed by default.
This may be correct. Now you need to start checking your chips.
What do you mean "security"? The appropriate level of security depends on what you are doing. Real security depends on building all of your devices yourself out of discrete components. And using one-time pads for communication. (Well, that's *almost* enough.) Just about nobody is going to go that far. Personally, I don't *worry* about government surveilance. I don't approve of it, but I don't worry about it. I'm too boring for them to bother with. OTOH, I won't bank on-line. I don't trust that level of security with my finances. (If I could, I'd convince my Bank to tighten things up WRT on-line transactions.) I may not be wealthy, but it doesn't take much to interest a thief in an account...and they wouldn't know until after they'd broken in anyway, and at that point they might as well clean it out. And government (as well as commercial) decisions have weakened on-line security to the point where *I* won't trust it for financial transactions. Sometimes I do it anyway, because it's just too convenient to buy specialized merchandise over the internet...but exposing my credit card that way always makes me nervous.
You never know. Cisco is a powerful and wealthy corporation. He might suppor them.
Actually, they may HAVE just found out about that particular technique.
The better question is:
"What steps have you taken to secure your routers against intrusion?" One can guess that the answer is "none", but it's just a guess. There've been an awful lot of stories about how this or that Cisco or Linksys router is vulnerable to this or that intrusion. Why should they be trusted? That the NSA could infiltrate (possibly with NSL letters) the company without upper management knowing is quite reasonable...even if one may doubt that's what happened. That Cisco should continue to sell routers with known vulnerabilities without patching them is less forgiveable. So get a statement from them on THAT. Then check it against what's actually happening.
My guess is that Cisco is totally untrustworthy, but this is just a guess. I don't KNOW that they are intentionally shipping routers that can easily be 0wn3d by J. Random Hacker. (And for that one, you can't really blame the govt. That one clearly is Cisco.)
Proof is too much to ask for to justify an assertion. Evidence would be reasonable to ask for, however.