There's no chemical mechanical or logical impediment to refining "bunker oil" so as to remove the sulphur, benzenoid chemicals etc. It just increases the cost of the fuel. Which is why cost-conscious shipping lines use the cheapest fuels they can get. Already, it is normal to have to use a steam line (itself heated from the exhaust gases from the engine) to warm the fuel in the day-tank sufficiently to get it to flow into the fuel injectors.
It's a cost thing - pure and simple. Every time that you vote with your wallet by buying the cheaper of two otherwise similar products, you're supporting the use of bunker oil.
This is a weird segue, but which car does it hit? The more expensive car with better insurance, or the cheaper car that explodes?
Will you be able to buy "don't choose me" premiums?
How will this affect emergency vehicles?
Last point first : Not at all. The only ethically justifiable way of making such an assignment is to establish a metric for "how many people are likely to get hurt in the coming choice of crash", an then minimise that function. Which is going to be difficult. But you assume that the emergency vehicle is fully occupied, which is probably going to make avoiding hitting it a high priority. Same argument for public buses, utility vehicles too.
do you use machine image recognition?
do cars have transponders giving vehicle model and age?
Do ALL cars have transponders?
What about vehicles which are significantly altered from their original structure, such as the registration classification here called "showman's vehicles" which are registered under "Q" plates? (That used to include a lot of special-build utility vehicles, such as trash carts with space for a crew of 6 on board.)
What about foreign-registered vehicles (some 2-3% of the vehicles on the road here).
Which side of the (foreign) car does the driver sit?
And I'm nowhere near finishing thinking of awkward edge cases, without getting into the difficulty of getting millions of existing cars into the transponder database. Doing it by image recognition is going to be even harder.
Then you can get into the huge fun of communicating each vehicle's steering intentions (in crash real time!) to the others so that both can try to cooperate to avoid (or minimise) a crash. That squares (approximately) the solution space to be considered for two vehicles and probably exponentiates to the number of vehicles involved.
Or, be explicit and say "the purpose of this vehicle's driving robot is to minimise injuries to this vehicle's occupants by minimising decelerations". Then hope that will reduce total injuries.
You could possibly address that last question by looking at a (large) database of crashes and running them through your algorithm. But that's going to take a lot of resources and data. The use of formal databases rather than anecdotal bullshit should deal with myths about which cars explode or not. There's no shortage of such bullshit. I don't even know what a "pinot" is or whether it explodes in strong winds, so I deduce that it's a vehicle from your country, not mine.
heh, do you realize how many professors require books THEY wrote?
I don't know about your university, but mine (and I think all in my country) banned it. Which meant that professors in subject A at university B recommended books by professors (or lecturers) at university C. Meanwhile the professors at university C recommended books from university D. D->E ; E->A. Different sequencing for different subjects, and sometimes the order would get shuffled as new books were published without any coordination (it takes years to write a decent text book).
Many of those books are now in 4th or 5th edition, and most were of pretty good quality, because most were published through independent publishing houses, often abroad. No real complaints from me, nor really from other people in my year class.
I've still got (and occasionally refer to) some of those text books.
This scam, OTOH, is disgusting. Typical of land sharks in the land of corporate greed and overlordship.
But they were also popular. Not universally popular - I can't recall ever meeting anyone who seriously disliked pre-1960 (for an approximate deadline) Asimov SF, with our without robots - definitely popular enough.
Different people can honestly hold differing opinions about fiction, and both can be right. It is, after all, science FICTION, not plain science.
I've got most of them on my bookshelf ; its probably 18 years since brought any of them, and I think I've only re-read them once each. But I wouldn't rule out reading them again, which is why they remain on the bookshelf.
A shrug again - better audio isn't going to encourage me to buy anything until I can get some ears that will give me better than the 30% hearing on the left and the 25% on the right. But since I've never noticed any significant changes in my hearing, I've never had more than a utilitarian interest in sound quality and all that guff.
My mate did on several occasions try to convince me that his Blue-Ray and HD system produced a better output than a DVD playing through a standard TV (23in or 26in diagonal - I forget which) but he failed to convince me. The wife didn't give me any choice about changing that TV because it's apparently fashionable to have a HD system these decades, but that's a decision based on fashion trends, not on any logical basis that I can determine.
Actually, I'm not 100% sure if our present TV is HD or not. I'd have to look at the logos.
You probably went onto a list when you downloaded "Ignition!"
OTOH, the list you're on is probably the one of "people who know something about chemistry and are pretty unlikely to do anything worse than blow up their garage with it".
For stuff to watch once, I still like Netflix by mail, but sadly Netflix doesn't - they seem determined to abandon the business.
Don't you have Lovefilm in the US? (Are you in the US?)
To be honest, I still haven't seen a Blu-Ray which gave me any reason to want to replace the DVD player. Then again, since I rarely actually look at the TV while it's playing (you can work out what's going on from the sound, while doing something interesting), I still fail to see the reason for this HD thing. It's not as if there's any content for it.
If you aren't ready for advancements in technology then what are you doing reading this website?
Seriously.
I'd take you more seriously if you weren't an AC. Whatever.
The question to me is, is a push button system an advance over an ignition key?
Yes, one has more bells and whistles, possibly even a machine that goes 'Ping', while the other uses mechanical systems. However the bells and whistles system will still need a mechanical lock somewhere to lock the steering. Maybe it'll be a solenoid instead of a keyed barrel, but it'll still be a mechanical lock. So it'll still have all of the problems of the key-operated system. Plus the problems of the bells and whistles.
I also question how they're going to handle security more generally. Already cars are controlled by an RFID (-ish) chip in the key, with the mechanical lock of the key too. Get rid of the key and replace it with a push button, and you're still going to have to have some physical token to control access to the vehicle. A password?... which people forget. A phone app?... which you forget to transfer when your old phone goes for a swim in the toilet bowl. An RFID-ring (as for some guns, IIRC)?... which offers no real advantages over a key.
Whatever sort of physical security token you choose to use, it's going to end up acting in many ways like a physical key. So the actual impetus for change is pretty slight.
Caveats : the last car of mine that was stolen, they broke the steering lock off with a hammer and bypassed the ignition switch. Harder these days, I'm told. They got in by smashing a window. And until we get transparent aluminium, that's going to remain an issue. OTOH, I've never had a key break off in the ignition lock, and I can't think of hearing of it happen. But that's an argument against crap locks and crap keys in particular, not an argument against locks and keys in general.
This area was tested for nuclear waste disposal, Yucca Mountain won out.
Are you referring to the Oak Ridge complex? ISTR that that was only being considered as a nuclear waste storage/ disposal site because it already had a lot of material on site. And it's in Tennessee, several hundred miles away from the area under discussion.
This area is a basalt range, and no problem for future earthquakes (claimed), yes we have Mt.s St. Helen but that's the edge of two plates.
I don't know much about the geology of America, not being an American and having no intention of going to America to work as a geologist (I have worked as a geologist on 3 other continents though, as well as in Canada). But my first glance at the landscape around ORNL, Tennessee linked to above makes me think "not a flood basalt region". This link to the Oklahoma geological survey is a bit slow... try this one... but tells me that Oklahoma isn't a flood basalt province either (that's not ruled out by Oklahoma being popular for hydraulic fracturing enhanced oil and gas production (popularly "fracking", but being in the trade I'll give it it's proper name). So, I'm guessing that you're getting confused with the Hanford site in (IIRC) Washington State. Which is half a fucking continent away, but is on a flood basalt province. And close to a number of volcanoes. Which doesn't really sound good for long term storage.
but if Oklahoma is having earthquake warnings, not sure what to say actually
I'm not sure what you're trying to say either. Was Oklahoma ever on a long (or short) list for nuclear waste disposal? Not being an American, I don't know. However, since it's a fairly large place, then an increased probability of moderate earthquakes in the near future doesn't necessarily preclude there being parts of Oklahoma which may remain suitable for (nuclear) waste storage/ disposal. Then again, as a geologist and scientist, living in one of the two most radioactive cities in my country, I have a rather more robust (and frankly, realistic) attitude to radiation than the hysteria which the popular press treat the topic with.
You know, I really ought to get my Geiger counter working again. But it's not something that I consider particularly important.
(nothing can reflect anywhere close to well enough for starters).
... nothing that we have technological access to at the moment. You might manage to reflect light with a high-enough magnetic field, but getting it flat enough to form a lasing cavity isn't going to be easy.
That almost had me going for a few minutes. But they do say:
This was a thought experiment brought to you through the Critical Making Hackathon by:
So... a thought experiment.
Several years ago, the last time we had the "random testers" come to work and piss-test everyone for drugs (using clinisticks - how the fuck accurate or not are they? and how foolable?), I considered how to do truly randomised drug testing in our environment. and the idea was, simply, test the effluent from the accommodation and offices block (where the site's toilets and rest facilities are - and in a 14-day hitch, you're going to shit and piss sometime). Since the work units have their own sewage processing plant on board, there are sampling points for that (and also for clearing the blockages in the lines - a job which the motor man hates). That, combined with the crew-on and crew-off records would be more than sufficient to narrow down which crew, and which part of crew is the one with the drug users in it. A crew being 15 to 20 people, depending on the installation.
Of course, they (the management) really want to have a named person they can point at to terrorise other people into thinking that they (the people who hire your employers equipment, and inter alia, you) control what you do in your leave time. Arseholes.
You can criticize DVD all you want, but it is more lines of resolution than VHS.
So? What are you going to put into those extra lines? Copies of the original lines from the scan? Interpolated lines - according to what algorithm (hint: in 6 months you'll decide you should have used a different algorithm)? Your mother's cookie dough recipe?
It's like using Word4DOS to edit autoexec.bat (if you go back that far) : sure you can do it, but it's a massive overkill for the actual task required, and there's a lot of opportunities to get it wrong.
So the claims aren't as specific as some make it out to be.
Pretty much what I'd suspected from RTFA, but I didn't try to follow the references.
placed a quarter of them in their villages and most of the rest within 50km of their villages.
Considering that Sardinia is less than 100km wide by 130km long (eyeballed from Gogle Maps), then getting more than 50km from the correct location is quite likely to involve getting one's feet and neck wet.
The problem with that is that at 10pm on a Friday night, after a server failure, when your only tape drive won't read the tape back properly... who do you call?
The manager who turned down your requisition for a hot spare tape drive because it wouldn't be necessary.
Two million miles per hour is less than 0.003c, but still quite a clip, even in astronomical terms.
Agreed.
My preferred rule of thumb for "is that fast?" is to work out how fast an object traverses it's own diameter. In this case, for an individual star, about a half an hour for a sun-size star. A lot, lot more than that for the entire cluster/ cluster core.
'If we can identify the fractures that threaten to destroy the innovation machine, we might be able to patch them up and keep the system going for a while longer
It's in the nature of materials or systems under stress that they'll break somewhere else, if you apply a patch to one identified weak point.
I mean, most of the others have been linked to "objectionable practices" (in some people's opinions, and those are a separate range of issues), but coin dealers?
OK. I may be biased, but I just brought £200 worth of coins from the Royal Mint. What's illegal or unethical about that?
where the ratio 235/238 is different from the sample nextdoor as a clue for variable universal constants, then one is really in the middle of bollocks territory.
I'd suggest that you read the Arxiv paper, and find out what the actual researchers are saying, not what "science journalists" are saying.
an very large (the size of the mine)and extremely low density (the concentration of natural ore) nuclear reactor.
The actual reactor zones are much smaller than the mine. Only a few tens of metres across for some of them. The mine as a whole contained 14 to 17 reactor zones (counts vary) at different levels in the mine from near-surface to deep underground. Now that the mine has been mined out, there's just the one un-mined example at a mine 30-odd kilometres away. And that mine has been shut down for a couple of decades, because it wasn't competitive with the main mine, and uneconomic without the main mine's infrastructure.
Is there a non-tablet-friendly version of the article?
The paper cited is a standard PDF written to "Letter" size or "B4" (I can't tell the difference at a glance). Nothing blinding. I didn't waste time looking at the linked "science journalism" - why would you if you've got the paper to read?
To be more precise, by comparing the various decay product chains, they constrain the amount of change that could have happened in parameters such as the fine structure constant. Which is an effort the astronomers are making too, at the other end of the periodic table.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a cost thing - pure and simple. Every time that you vote with your wallet by buying the cheaper of two otherwise similar products, you're supporting the use of bunker oil.
Why did you feel the need to buy something new? Oh, sorry ; I'm being a heretic for thinking that question.
Last point first : Not at all. The only ethically justifiable way of making such an assignment is to establish a metric for "how many people are likely to get hurt in the coming choice of crash", an then minimise that function. Which is going to be difficult. But you assume that the emergency vehicle is fully occupied, which is probably going to make avoiding hitting it a high priority. Same argument for public buses, utility vehicles too.
And I'm nowhere near finishing thinking of awkward edge cases, without getting into the difficulty of getting millions of existing cars into the transponder database. Doing it by image recognition is going to be even harder.
Then you can get into the huge fun of communicating each vehicle's steering intentions (in crash real time!) to the others so that both can try to cooperate to avoid (or minimise) a crash. That squares (approximately) the solution space to be considered for two vehicles and probably exponentiates to the number of vehicles involved.
Or, be explicit and say "the purpose of this vehicle's driving robot is to minimise injuries to this vehicle's occupants by minimising decelerations". Then hope that will reduce total injuries.
You could possibly address that last question by looking at a (large) database of crashes and running them through your algorithm. But that's going to take a lot of resources and data. The use of formal databases rather than anecdotal bullshit should deal with myths about which cars explode or not. There's no shortage of such bullshit. I don't even know what a "pinot" is or whether it explodes in strong winds, so I deduce that it's a vehicle from your country, not mine.
I don't know about your university, but mine (and I think all in my country) banned it. Which meant that professors in subject A at university B recommended books by professors (or lecturers) at university C. Meanwhile the professors at university C recommended books from university D. D->E ; E->A. Different sequencing for different subjects, and sometimes the order would get shuffled as new books were published without any coordination (it takes years to write a decent text book).
Many of those books are now in 4th or 5th edition, and most were of pretty good quality, because most were published through independent publishing houses, often abroad. No real complaints from me, nor really from other people in my year class.
I've still got (and occasionally refer to) some of those text books.
This scam, OTOH, is disgusting. Typical of land sharks in the land of corporate greed and overlordship.
But they were also popular. Not universally popular - I can't recall ever meeting anyone who seriously disliked pre-1960 (for an approximate deadline) Asimov SF, with our without robots - definitely popular enough.
Different people can honestly hold differing opinions about fiction, and both can be right. It is, after all, science FICTION, not plain science.
I've got most of them on my bookshelf ; its probably 18 years since brought any of them, and I think I've only re-read them once each. But I wouldn't rule out reading them again, which is why they remain on the bookshelf.
A shrug again - better audio isn't going to encourage me to buy anything until I can get some ears that will give me better than the 30% hearing on the left and the 25% on the right. But since I've never noticed any significant changes in my hearing, I've never had more than a utilitarian interest in sound quality and all that guff.
My mate did on several occasions try to convince me that his Blue-Ray and HD system produced a better output than a DVD playing through a standard TV (23in or 26in diagonal - I forget which) but he failed to convince me. The wife didn't give me any choice about changing that TV because it's apparently fashionable to have a HD system these decades, but that's a decision based on fashion trends, not on any logical basis that I can determine.
Actually, I'm not 100% sure if our present TV is HD or not. I'd have to look at the logos.
OTOH, the list you're on is probably the one of "people who know something about chemistry and are pretty unlikely to do anything worse than blow up their garage with it".
Don't you have Lovefilm in the US? (Are you in the US?)
To be honest, I still haven't seen a Blu-Ray which gave me any reason to want to replace the DVD player. Then again, since I rarely actually look at the TV while it's playing (you can work out what's going on from the sound, while doing something interesting), I still fail to see the reason for this HD thing. It's not as if there's any content for it.
I'd take you more seriously if you weren't an AC. Whatever.
The question to me is, is a push button system an advance over an ignition key?
Yes, one has more bells and whistles, possibly even a machine that goes 'Ping', while the other uses mechanical systems. However the bells and whistles system will still need a mechanical lock somewhere to lock the steering. Maybe it'll be a solenoid instead of a keyed barrel, but it'll still be a mechanical lock. So it'll still have all of the problems of the key-operated system. Plus the problems of the bells and whistles.
I also question how they're going to handle security more generally. Already cars are controlled by an RFID (-ish) chip in the key, with the mechanical lock of the key too. Get rid of the key and replace it with a push button, and you're still going to have to have some physical token to control access to the vehicle. A password? ... which people forget. A phone app? ... which you forget to transfer when your old phone goes for a swim in the toilet bowl. An RFID-ring (as for some guns, IIRC)? ... which offers no real advantages over a key.
Whatever sort of physical security token you choose to use, it's going to end up acting in many ways like a physical key. So the actual impetus for change is pretty slight.
Caveats : the last car of mine that was stolen, they broke the steering lock off with a hammer and bypassed the ignition switch. Harder these days, I'm told. They got in by smashing a window. And until we get transparent aluminium, that's going to remain an issue. OTOH, I've never had a key break off in the ignition lock, and I can't think of hearing of it happen. But that's an argument against crap locks and crap keys in particular, not an argument against locks and keys in general.
Are you referring to the Oak Ridge complex? ISTR that that was only being considered as a nuclear waste storage/ disposal site because it already had a lot of material on site. And it's in Tennessee, several hundred miles away from the area under discussion.
I don't know much about the geology of America, not being an American and having no intention of going to America to work as a geologist (I have worked as a geologist on 3 other continents though, as well as in Canada). But my first glance at the landscape around ORNL, Tennessee linked to above makes me think "not a flood basalt region". This link to the Oklahoma geological survey is a bit slow ... try this one ... but tells me that Oklahoma isn't a flood basalt province either (that's not ruled out by Oklahoma being popular for hydraulic fracturing enhanced oil and gas production (popularly "fracking", but being in the trade I'll give it it's proper name). So, I'm guessing that you're getting confused with the Hanford site in (IIRC) Washington State. Which is half a fucking continent away, but is on a flood basalt province. And close to a number of volcanoes. Which doesn't really sound good for long term storage.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say either. Was Oklahoma ever on a long (or short) list for nuclear waste disposal? Not being an American, I don't know. However, since it's a fairly large place, then an increased probability of moderate earthquakes in the near future doesn't necessarily preclude there being parts of Oklahoma which may remain suitable for (nuclear) waste storage/ disposal. Then again, as a geologist and scientist, living in one of the two most radioactive cities in my country, I have a rather more robust (and frankly, realistic) attitude to radiation than the hysteria which the popular press treat the topic with.
You know, I really ought to get my Geiger counter working again. But it's not something that I consider particularly important.
... nothing that we have technological access to at the moment. You might manage to reflect light with a high-enough magnetic field, but getting it flat enough to form a lasing cavity isn't going to be easy.
"4 informative" now.
So ... a thought experiment.
Several years ago, the last time we had the "random testers" come to work and piss-test everyone for drugs (using clinisticks - how the fuck accurate or not are they? and how foolable?), I considered how to do truly randomised drug testing in our environment. and the idea was, simply, test the effluent from the accommodation and offices block (where the site's toilets and rest facilities are - and in a 14-day hitch, you're going to shit and piss sometime). Since the work units have their own sewage processing plant on board, there are sampling points for that (and also for clearing the blockages in the lines - a job which the motor man hates). That, combined with the crew-on and crew-off records would be more than sufficient to narrow down which crew, and which part of crew is the one with the drug users in it. A crew being 15 to 20 people, depending on the installation.
Of course, they (the management) really want to have a named person they can point at to terrorise other people into thinking that they (the people who hire your employers equipment, and inter alia, you) control what you do in your leave time. Arseholes.
So? What are you going to put into those extra lines? Copies of the original lines from the scan? Interpolated lines - according to what algorithm (hint: in 6 months you'll decide you should have used a different algorithm)? Your mother's cookie dough recipe?
It's like using Word4DOS to edit autoexec.bat (if you go back that far) : sure you can do it, but it's a massive overkill for the actual task required, and there's a lot of opportunities to get it wrong.
Pretty much what I'd suspected from RTFA, but I didn't try to follow the references.
Considering that Sardinia is less than 100km wide by 130km long (eyeballed from Gogle Maps), then getting more than 50km from the correct location is quite likely to involve getting one's feet and neck wet.
The manager who turned down your requisition for a hot spare tape drive because it wouldn't be necessary.
Not so ; the suggestion is that the black hole interactions stripped the outer parts of the cluster off, leaving the most-tightly bound core region.
Agreed.
My preferred rule of thumb for "is that fast?" is to work out how fast an object traverses it's own diameter. In this case, for an individual star, about a half an hour for a sun-size star. A lot, lot more than that for the entire cluster/ cluster core.
It's in the nature of materials or systems under stress that they'll break somewhere else, if you apply a patch to one identified weak point.
OK. I may be biased, but I just brought £200 worth of coins from the Royal Mint. What's illegal or unethical about that?
I'd suggest that you read the Arxiv paper, and find out what the actual researchers are saying, not what "science journalists" are saying.
The actual reactor zones are much smaller than the mine. Only a few tens of metres across for some of them. The mine as a whole contained 14 to 17 reactor zones (counts vary) at different levels in the mine from near-surface to deep underground. Now that the mine has been mined out, there's just the one un-mined example at a mine 30-odd kilometres away. And that mine has been shut down for a couple of decades, because it wasn't competitive with the main mine, and uneconomic without the main mine's infrastructure.
The paper cited is a standard PDF written to "Letter" size or "B4" (I can't tell the difference at a glance). Nothing blinding. I didn't waste time looking at the linked "science journalism" - why would you if you've got the paper to read?
To be more precise, by comparing the various decay product chains, they constrain the amount of change that could have happened in parameters such as the fine structure constant. Which is an effort the astronomers are making too, at the other end of the periodic table.
This is contradicted by the geology of the deposit.