If a terrorist wants to use a drone to attack a plane, what regulation is going to stop them? They already are looking at breaking murder laws, so why would they care about drone laws?
Laws like this have nothing to do with preventing crime. It's all about control of the people, and the appearance of "doing something" without all the inconvenience of actually having to do something. This is the same argument we have about gun laws in the states. It's already illegal to shoot someone, so how are more gun laws going to stop that? But they keep passing more restrictive laws banning the use or possession of this and that, without addressing the underlying problems. They banned texting while driving here, and the problem has absolutely gotten worse year after year. Politicians are woefully ill equipped to deal with real world social problems.
It's amazing how many of these "sensational" stories eventually (and sometimes quickly) fall apart. The race to be first post has really made modern journalism nothing more than a professional game of crying wolf. Unless there's clear video of the actual event happening, it's all suspect at this point, and even video needs to be carefully scrutinized in this day and age.
In my experience, they could speed things up a lot if they'd start putting the chip slot on top. I'm 6'3", and can't see those stupid slots on most of the current local checkout terminals. I swipe my card by default, only to have the machine tell me to stick it in some hole I didn't even know was there because the thing is at waist level with the slot on the front of it. I have to bend over and search for the damn thing, and start over. If the slot was on top, I'd know it was there and would just do that from the get go. It also doesn't help that some of these same models of machines don't have the chip reader installed, but do have the slot that's filled with a plastic blank; It's anybody's guess at this point.
Shouldn't the premise for testing hand dryers be that the hands are washed with soap and are "clean" but wet? If we taint the water itself and measure how far that spreads, is that really a realistic test of how hygienic the dryer is?
Last time I checked, these were usually installed in bathrooms, which are far from sterile laboratory conditions. The machine itself may be hygienic if you only dried RO/DI water off a microscope slide while holding it with tongs fresh from autoclave while wearing a hazmat suit, but lets be honest.. most people come straight from the shitter, run a little bit of water on their hands and lather soap just long enough to keep up appearances. Many people don't even use soap; the chlorine in water will get it, right? So, it'd be more realistic to test these after running your hands down your ass crack than with "clean" hands, and these are the conditions that show the true colors of the drying method in question.
tl;dr
a Prius may get "up to" 58 MPG, but here in the real world...
But that of course assumes that somehow this nano-probe can transmit a signal from Alpha Centauri that we can receive, which doesn't seem possible at this point.
With spacecraft this small (and cheap?), it might be possible to send several out in stages, and just have them relay the information back.
No, it's more like 4 years or so, not 9. Why do you think a round-trip is necessary?
It should be obvious that with that much of a time-lag, there's no way to make this a remotely-operated vehicle, and it'll have to be completely autonomous.
If you had read my whole post (which was an entire three sentences), you'd see that I came to the same conclusion: 2-way communication would be completely out of the question due to the immense distance, and the craft would have to rely solely on its initial programming. That's one hell of a crap shoot, risking your entire 30 year mission solely on the knowledge and software available on day one. Your comparison to New Horizons is a bit off. That mission required several course corrections during its flight, and we knew exactly when and where we'd be approaching Pluto. Sending a probe outside of the solar system to a target 4 light years away without the ability to steer, and having no idea when the best time to collect data and send images would be, is going to take a lot of very careful assumptions.
However with a device that small, how do we get a signal back? It will not be able to generate a strong radio or light signal to send back.
Nevermind the fact that it's almost a 9 year round trip from sending a signal to receiving a reply when it arrives at its destination. Commands will have to be sent over 4 years before they're received and executed by the craft, so this thing will have to be preprogrammed for its entire mission before it even gets out of the solar system. I don't see how that can go wrong:)
So you can have a truck that will drive itself to the moon and back, but how do you address certain situations such as inclement weather and mechanical safety? Someone needs to be there to install the chains when the roads get slick. Someone needs to inspect the brakes before heading down a steep incline. Perhaps the load has shifted, and needs straps tightened? Blown tire needs changing? Brake caliper stuck closed? A truck driver isn't just a meatbag that steers the truck and hits the gas and brakes. Even if you completely automate the trucks and eliminate the driver, you're still going to need a human being as a tender to keep those machines moving safely and running well. Out here in the western half of the US, there's some looooong stretches of open road, and an autonomous truck stranded out there hours from help is not good for the bottom line.
Yes, it is. Would you pick up a random needle off the street and stick it into your vein, then wonder how you got AIDS? Would you stick your dick in some random person you found behind a 7-11, then wonder how you got the clap? It's not the computers fault you stuck an unknown, infected USB drive in it. Take some responsibility for your actions already. This is absolutely nobody's fault but your own, so stop doing stupid shit and then playing the victim card.
The problem is that it isn't safe to plug a USB stick into a computer.
Bullshit. It's perfectly safe to insert a USB stick into a computer, as long as there's nothing malicious on it. Knowing whether or not there's anything damaging on it is up to you, and there's always a risk (even fresh out of the package), but to imply that all sticks are dangerous is just FUD. I've never picked one up off the street, or met one in a truck stop bathroom, and I've never had a bad experience with a thumb drive. Just use some common sense, and take the proper precautions.
California hopes to have 50% of their electricity from renewables by 2030. If Scotland has already achieved this then it is likely California lacks ambition.
Here in California, we shit ambition and wipe with the non-believers. Just take a look at our proposed high speed rail line! Nobody said we had the money to make anything happen, though. But anyway, wind farms kill birds, so PETA will fights those. We're out of water, so hydro is no go. Solar? The hippies up north will cry if we trap the spirit of mother Gaia for our selfish needs. Wave generators? Save the whales! Nukes? Jesus Christ, haven't you been listening? And thus it always goes around here. So much butthurt, so little progress, and no funding.
Who the hell thought this "slashvertisement" thing would be funny?
At least it's not as atrocious as last years abortive attempt at humor. And I use that word because it was literally as funny as an abortion. And I use that word because there was nothing figurative about it.
Would I be wrong in guessing that a percentage of your no diploma, no English day workers are working under the table for cash?
If so, legislation about minimum wage won't change much.
Well, we aren't exactly a sweat shop in some seedy neighborhood down by the docks. A lot of this industry relies on a fluctuating workforce, so we rent them out from legit staffing agencies. We let them know the day before how many bodies we need, and they get them here. We pay the agency a set amount per head, which is min wage + fees, and they get to worry about the paperwork. Regardless of the legal status of these workers, we definitely will be required to pay the agency the legal wage for them.
Listen, and understand! That SCO is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until...?
I'm surprised you aren't doing automated fillers and cappers already.
The USA is an advanced high tech country. If you are relying on unskilled, lowly paid, disposable peons to manufacture/assemble product, China, India, and other developing countries are going to eat your lunch anyway. It is only a matter of time. Mechanizing is your only hope.
The case against automation for us is that were a job shop, and fill a huge variety of containers on just ~10 different lines, from tubes to bottles to jars, all different heights,widths, and shapes. Our typical run is fairly small, so we may do 2-3 different products on a line in any given day. Setting up the line with machinery for the smaller jobs would cost more than just parking a $10/hr laborer on the head end to manually hold a container under the automatic meter/dispenser, and one further down to cap it. We do have some rotary fillers and automated induction sealers, wrap labelers, etc.. but a lot of it is more practical to just park a body there and get it done. If labor goes up and we wind up automating more, we'll have to adjust the type of products we'll fill, which means ditching items like.5oz bottles, units with straw pumps, things that don't lend themselves well to automation on our current setup. Even though we don't rely heavily on automation, we still produce units far cheaper than many other filling houses that probably do. We're the cheaper/faster option of the cheap, fast, good triad. If we can't remain cheap, major changes will have to occur. We've been doing well operating as such for the past 40 years, but this massive bump to labor costs is impossible to ignore.
We aren't too concerned to losing business to 3rd world countries. A lot of our materials are customer provided. It would be time and cost prohibitive for them to ship heavy cardboard and bulk chemicals across the world, get the product brewed up and packaged (properly), and ship it all back. The consumers of these products would also balk at a "MADE IN CHINA" stamp on it. These aren't white label shampoos, they're pretty high end products for retail outlets that charge you way too much for them.
So I'm an asshole because it irritates me to no end that some people can't even be bothered to learn the difference between there, their, and they're? Typos ar one thign, even I makes thme, but when a 'typo' is really pure, unadulterated ignorance, is it really the readers fault that they're bothered by it? The English language is complex and full of silly rules, but there are some things so basic and so often called out that there really is no excuse to continually make those errors past grade school.
Here in Ontario, Canada, we raised the minimum wage from $10.25 to $11.00
That's about a 7% increase. We're talking a 50% increase here. The company I work for relies heavily on minimum wage-ish laborers for the manufacturing jobs, which are basically screwing caps on bottles, putting them in boxes. Real unskilled stuff, diploma and English not required. We're in Los Angeles, and when they announced the minimum wage hike, eyes immediately pointed just over the border to Ventura County, where no such increase was proposed. Now that this is looking to be a state-wide thing, a 50% increase in labor costs for the bulk of our production workers is going to make the automated fillers and cappers pretty much sell themselves. Either way it goes, it's going to drive the price per unit up. Labor isn't the main cost for producing products here, but when we price out to the tenth of a cent per unit, and we roll off hundreds of thousands of units per run, it begins to add up. This cost will either be passed on to the customer, or more likely, will lose us business as clients take their filling operations to states with lower labor costs and less distance to their distribution houses. Most of our min-wage laborers are day workers, so if there's no work, they don't show up or get paid. If work starts disappearing, the $15/hr doesn't mean a damn thing to them, and ultimately the whole scheme will hurt the very people it's supposedly helping.
Slashdot Mirror
If a terrorist wants to use a drone to attack a plane, what regulation is going to stop them? They already are looking at breaking murder laws, so why would they care about drone laws?
Laws like this have nothing to do with preventing crime. It's all about control of the people, and the appearance of "doing something" without all the inconvenience of actually having to do something. This is the same argument we have about gun laws in the states. It's already illegal to shoot someone, so how are more gun laws going to stop that? But they keep passing more restrictive laws banning the use or possession of this and that, without addressing the underlying problems. They banned texting while driving here, and the problem has absolutely gotten worse year after year. Politicians are woefully ill equipped to deal with real world social problems.
It's amazing how many of these "sensational" stories eventually (and sometimes quickly) fall apart. The race to be first post has really made modern journalism nothing more than a professional game of crying wolf. Unless there's clear video of the actual event happening, it's all suspect at this point, and even video needs to be carefully scrutinized in this day and age.
In my experience, they could speed things up a lot if they'd start putting the chip slot on top. I'm 6'3", and can't see those stupid slots on most of the current local checkout terminals. I swipe my card by default, only to have the machine tell me to stick it in some hole I didn't even know was there because the thing is at waist level with the slot on the front of it. I have to bend over and search for the damn thing, and start over. If the slot was on top, I'd know it was there and would just do that from the get go. It also doesn't help that some of these same models of machines don't have the chip reader installed, but do have the slot that's filled with a plastic blank; It's anybody's guess at this point.
Ingenious Americans
That word.. I do not think it means what you think it means.
yes I know Ben Franklin wasnt a president but come on, presidents on money is just logical.
Franklin was the 6th President of Pennsylvania.
and you know what else we didn't have 100 years ago?
...the aqueducts?
"Shoot, I can see all of that from my house sometimes. I'm an expert."
Just like she's an expert cartographer, what with all that Russia and stuff she can see from her house. Sometimes.
Well I say Bill Nye is the greatest god damn scientist of all time. OF ALL TIME. I'm just as qualified to make that judgement as Palin is, so suck it.
Remind me again why they keep giving that washed up gas bag air time? I thought she'd dried up and blown away already.
Shouldn't the premise for testing hand dryers be that the hands are washed with soap and are "clean" but wet? If we taint the water itself and measure how far that spreads, is that really a realistic test of how hygienic the dryer is?
Last time I checked, these were usually installed in bathrooms, which are far from sterile laboratory conditions. The machine itself may be hygienic if you only dried RO/DI water off a microscope slide while holding it with tongs fresh from autoclave while wearing a hazmat suit, but lets be honest.. most people come straight from the shitter, run a little bit of water on their hands and lather soap just long enough to keep up appearances. Many people don't even use soap; the chlorine in water will get it, right? So, it'd be more realistic to test these after running your hands down your ass crack than with "clean" hands, and these are the conditions that show the true colors of the drying method in question.
tl;dr
a Prius may get "up to" 58 MPG, but here in the real world...
But that of course assumes that somehow this nano-probe can transmit a signal from Alpha Centauri that we can receive, which doesn't seem possible at this point.
With spacecraft this small (and cheap?), it might be possible to send several out in stages, and just have them relay the information back.
No, it's more like 4 years or so, not 9. Why do you think a round-trip is necessary?
It should be obvious that with that much of a time-lag, there's no way to make this a remotely-operated vehicle, and it'll have to be completely autonomous.
If you had read my whole post (which was an entire three sentences), you'd see that I came to the same conclusion: 2-way communication would be completely out of the question due to the immense distance, and the craft would have to rely solely on its initial programming. That's one hell of a crap shoot, risking your entire 30 year mission solely on the knowledge and software available on day one. Your comparison to New Horizons is a bit off. That mission required several course corrections during its flight, and we knew exactly when and where we'd be approaching Pluto. Sending a probe outside of the solar system to a target 4 light years away without the ability to steer, and having no idea when the best time to collect data and send images would be, is going to take a lot of very careful assumptions.
Let's hope they can keep the lights on...
And the beam focused to a point the size of a SIM card at a distance of 40,000,000,000,000,000 meters.
However with a device that small, how do we get a signal back? It will not be able to generate a strong radio or light signal to send back.
Nevermind the fact that it's almost a 9 year round trip from sending a signal to receiving a reply when it arrives at its destination. Commands will have to be sent over 4 years before they're received and executed by the craft, so this thing will have to be preprogrammed for its entire mission before it even gets out of the solar system. I don't see how that can go wrong :)
As in ALL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Except for those that aren't.
So you can have a truck that will drive itself to the moon and back, but how do you address certain situations such as inclement weather and mechanical safety? Someone needs to be there to install the chains when the roads get slick. Someone needs to inspect the brakes before heading down a steep incline. Perhaps the load has shifted, and needs straps tightened? Blown tire needs changing? Brake caliper stuck closed? A truck driver isn't just a meatbag that steers the truck and hits the gas and brakes. Even if you completely automate the trucks and eliminate the driver, you're still going to need a human being as a tender to keep those machines moving safely and running well. Out here in the western half of the US, there's some looooong stretches of open road, and an autonomous truck stranded out there hours from help is not good for the bottom line.
He's living consequence-free in Putin's Russia,
I'm pretty sure having to live in Putin's Russia would be considered a consequence by most Americans.
The problem isn't that people are idiots
Yes, it is. Would you pick up a random needle off the street and stick it into your vein, then wonder how you got AIDS? Would you stick your dick in some random person you found behind a 7-11, then wonder how you got the clap? It's not the computers fault you stuck an unknown, infected USB drive in it. Take some responsibility for your actions already. This is absolutely nobody's fault but your own, so stop doing stupid shit and then playing the victim card.
The problem is that it isn't safe to plug a USB stick into a computer.
Bullshit. It's perfectly safe to insert a USB stick into a computer, as long as there's nothing malicious on it. Knowing whether or not there's anything damaging on it is up to you, and there's always a risk (even fresh out of the package), but to imply that all sticks are dangerous is just FUD. I've never picked one up off the street, or met one in a truck stop bathroom, and I've never had a bad experience with a thumb drive. Just use some common sense, and take the proper precautions.
California hopes to have 50% of their electricity from renewables by 2030. If Scotland has already achieved this then it is likely California lacks ambition.
Here in California, we shit ambition and wipe with the non-believers. Just take a look at our proposed high speed rail line! Nobody said we had the money to make anything happen, though. But anyway, wind farms kill birds, so PETA will fights those. We're out of water, so hydro is no go. Solar? The hippies up north will cry if we trap the spirit of mother Gaia for our selfish needs. Wave generators? Save the whales! Nukes? Jesus Christ, haven't you been listening? And thus it always goes around here. So much butthurt, so little progress, and no funding.
I'd assume they still have some form of Food Network over there, for those lucky enough to not have had to burn their tv set for fuel this winter.
Who the hell thought this "slashvertisement" thing would be funny?
At least it's not as atrocious as last years abortive attempt at humor. And I use that word because it was literally as funny as an abortion. And I use that word because there was nothing figurative about it.
Would I be wrong in guessing that a percentage of your no diploma, no English day workers are working under the table for cash?
If so, legislation about minimum wage won't change much.
Well, we aren't exactly a sweat shop in some seedy neighborhood down by the docks. A lot of this industry relies on a fluctuating workforce, so we rent them out from legit staffing agencies. We let them know the day before how many bodies we need, and they get them here. We pay the agency a set amount per head, which is min wage + fees, and they get to worry about the paperwork. Regardless of the legal status of these workers, we definitely will be required to pay the agency the legal wage for them.
Listen, and understand! That SCO is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until...?
I'm surprised you aren't doing automated fillers and cappers already. The USA is an advanced high tech country. If you are relying on unskilled, lowly paid, disposable peons to manufacture/assemble product, China, India, and other developing countries are going to eat your lunch anyway. It is only a matter of time. Mechanizing is your only hope.
The case against automation for us is that were a job shop, and fill a huge variety of containers on just ~10 different lines, from tubes to bottles to jars, all different heights,widths, and shapes. Our typical run is fairly small, so we may do 2-3 different products on a line in any given day. Setting up the line with machinery for the smaller jobs would cost more than just parking a $10/hr laborer on the head end to manually hold a container under the automatic meter/dispenser, and one further down to cap it. We do have some rotary fillers and automated induction sealers, wrap labelers, etc.. but a lot of it is more practical to just park a body there and get it done. If labor goes up and we wind up automating more, we'll have to adjust the type of products we'll fill, which means ditching items like .5oz bottles, units with straw pumps, things that don't lend themselves well to automation on our current setup. Even though we don't rely heavily on automation, we still produce units far cheaper than many other filling houses that probably do. We're the cheaper/faster option of the cheap, fast, good triad. If we can't remain cheap, major changes will have to occur. We've been doing well operating as such for the past 40 years, but this massive bump to labor costs is impossible to ignore.
We aren't too concerned to losing business to 3rd world countries. A lot of our materials are customer provided. It would be time and cost prohibitive for them to ship heavy cardboard and bulk chemicals across the world, get the product brewed up and packaged (properly), and ship it all back. The consumers of these products would also balk at a "MADE IN CHINA" stamp on it. These aren't white label shampoos, they're pretty high end products for retail outlets that charge you way too much for them.
So I'm an asshole because it irritates me to no end that some people can't even be bothered to learn the difference between there, their, and they're? Typos ar one thign, even I makes thme, but when a 'typo' is really pure, unadulterated ignorance, is it really the readers fault that they're bothered by it? The English language is complex and full of silly rules, but there are some things so basic and so often called out that there really is no excuse to continually make those errors past grade school.
Here in Ontario, Canada, we raised the minimum wage from $10.25 to $11.00
That's about a 7% increase. We're talking a 50% increase here. The company I work for relies heavily on minimum wage-ish laborers for the manufacturing jobs, which are basically screwing caps on bottles, putting them in boxes. Real unskilled stuff, diploma and English not required. We're in Los Angeles, and when they announced the minimum wage hike, eyes immediately pointed just over the border to Ventura County, where no such increase was proposed. Now that this is looking to be a state-wide thing, a 50% increase in labor costs for the bulk of our production workers is going to make the automated fillers and cappers pretty much sell themselves. Either way it goes, it's going to drive the price per unit up. Labor isn't the main cost for producing products here, but when we price out to the tenth of a cent per unit, and we roll off hundreds of thousands of units per run, it begins to add up. This cost will either be passed on to the customer, or more likely, will lose us business as clients take their filling operations to states with lower labor costs and less distance to their distribution houses. Most of our min-wage laborers are day workers, so if there's no work, they don't show up or get paid. If work starts disappearing, the $15/hr doesn't mean a damn thing to them, and ultimately the whole scheme will hurt the very people it's supposedly helping.