The surface of the Moon has been mapped to approximately 1 metre resolution (a bit more than a yard, if you're into measurements based on a horse's ass or a monarch's nose). Mineral mapping has been carried out to a somewhat lower resolutino, but to far higher resolution than for comparable mapping on the American mid-west in the mid-19th century.
So what you're saying is that NASA (with contributions from the ESA and Russians and Chinese and Indians) already own essentially the whole of the Moon, having discovered what is there already.
This is in addition to the harm caused to remote services that may cost $35 billion over the next three years. Then, of course, there are the ways the NSA has made ID theft easier. ID theft cost Americans $1.52 billion in 2011, to say nothing of the time wasted in solving ID theft issues
So, the NSA is responsible for about 8 times as much damage to the AMerican economy as criminal identity thieves. This is terrible! America needs to launch a programme immediately to improve the quality of it's thieving underclass.
And, my friend, my Nigerian Internet Scamming Academy is just the place for you to improve your internet identity theft skills. With our 420 online courses, you too can reach the hallowed degree of Internet Success that Nigeria has. Simply send your name, email and bank details to "Prince Ojimbo's Academy, Lagos 90210" and we'll be back to you in minutes. At the speed of Internet!.
(We have discontinued one course. only 419 courses available now.)
Yeah, outside a few rather narrow cases, modern CPUs have just gotten too complicated to write efficient assembly for.
For general purpose CPUs, that may be true. For more specialised devices (possibly GPUs, other application-specific processors such as DSPs... and lots of other cases), then the reduced complexity of the instruction sets may well reverse the equation.
You're mixing your terms and ending up with a confused state. The insurance industry doesn't deal with certainties, only with probabilities. (Try taking out insurance to cover the accident you had an hour ago if you don't believe this. Or try taking out insurance to cover last year when you didn't have any crashes.)
So your cases are actually:
They increase their accuracy in predicting who is likely to (was "will") be in an accident and change them more.
They increase their accuracy in detecting is likely to not be in an accident (was "good drivers") and charge them less.
This also clarifies that you're assuming that "good drivers" are less likely to be in an accident. The quality of your driving doesn't materially affect the likelihood of you being in an accident caused by someone else driving like an idiot, losing control and hitting you.
Insurance is all about statistics. So when looking at insurance, you have to be careful to think in statistical terms.
(1) the fact that while there may be confusion, it's not necessarily related to the actual purchase of any goods and services;
For once, we can thank McDonalds - purveyors of the finest of sludge-burgers and kiddy-fondling clowns - for doing the hard work on this one. They spent much of the 1990s and around a million quid of their own hard earned (well; paid for by a million sludge-burgers) money sueing the shit out of "the MacDonalds Two" for mis-using MacLogos on posters complaining about Mac-Sludge-Burger's encouraging the maltreatment of their farmer's animals. Nothing to do with the reputation damage (Mac-Slime were doing an excellent job of that themselves, via their Public Relations Disaster Department), it was the mis-use of trademarks that was the core of the case.
Thanks to MacSlime, you don't need to have sales (or loss of sales) in a trademark infringement case.
Oh, Mac-Idiots won the case. After spending a million sludge-burgers worth of landshark fees, they got an award of... I forget ; it was one of a pound, a penny, or a peppercorn. some good payback.
If you didn't have a Chip and Pin card in Europe..could they not just do the transaction the old fashioned way, and manually type in the CC number in the terminal? They still do that here in the US if the mag stripe isn't readable....
The Chip'n'PIN readers do generally (but not exclusively) have magnetic stripe readers in them, so if your chip has died, then you can do a magnetic swipe...
... When the manager has come down to the check out to authorise the transaction. I can't remember the time that I last saw regular check-out staff authorised to take a payment like this. It was probably during the 3-4 year roll-out of Chip'n'PIN, back in the 2005 era.
If your magnetic stripe has gone too, then the manager will probably have to go back to his office to find the mechanical swiping machine. Then he'll need to go back to see if he can find some of the carbon paper foils to go with it. That should buy enough time for the police to arrive, because he'd have called them when he went to the office the first time.
Actually, I completed a carbon paper transaction just a few months ago - I cleared the counterfoil out of my wallet last week. It was for entry to a visitor attraction which didn't have a phone line, and couldn't have one installed (at a credible price) because it was a Grade 3 Listed building. So that system does still work. Unless you've got one of those cards without the embossed numbers.
Oh, sorry, mis-read you . Yes, typing in the numbers works too. The details vary, but yes, that does work. Also used for "Customer Not Present" transactions too, i.e. mail order.
Fuel economy is no better now than it was in the 80's; in fact,
Bull shit.
It was really hard to get a car in the 1980s with much better than 40mpg. I know - I was looking at getting my first, used, car in 1989, and looked at lots of figures for that relating to 1980s models.
I got a new car 18 months ago and did the same process. It's difficult to get a new car with a list mileage under 60mpg for the combined cycle, and 70mpg is typical.
Of course, the situation in America may be different. But they've never given a shit about fuel efficiency any way.
Fuel Injection - the computer can monitor O2 and fuel precisely resulting in much better efficiency.
Is there an option. You haven't been able to get a carburetted car for twenty, going on twenty-five years. So you've got a choice of some sort of fuel injection. But that doesn't require a computer to monitor it. It's probably easier to do it with a programmable digital computer, but it has been done for years with analogue computers or electromechanical control systems.
ABS - a computer senses when your car is skidding and rapidly pumps the brakes so you can still steer.
That can be, and has been, done for decades using electromechanicals. Again, you might be able to do it better or quicker with a computer, but the performance is perfectly adequate with an electromechanical system.
ESC/Traction control - when loss of steering or wheel spin is detected it will automatically start braking to enable steering and stop the skidding
Isn't that the driver's job? Or do you not learn how to control your clutch if you're using an automatic (I''ve only driven automatics for a couple of miles in total, with no specific training.)?
I can think of numerous vast military-controlled test ranges that would be infinitely more appropriate than areas with US civilians in them.
Though most of the US military ranges that get mentioned over on this side of the Pond are out in the desert, that doesn't mean that they're unpopulated, does it? Low-populated, but not unpopulated.
But... desert ranges might be fine. If you didn't need to train your pilots to (1) fly in rain and low cloud with squally winds, or (2) to conduct searches for heat signals on water surfaces (i.e. imitating marine search and rescue, even if that is just flim-flam for the sheeple). Desert ranges aren't so good for practising that sort of work.
I guess we should have stopped taking flights in Boeing air planes after they had electrical fire issues right?
You mean you didn't already?
That said, I take very little note of what particular aircraft I'm flying in. The only ones I've noticed in the last few months have been Embraers (Brazilian? Yes.) and various AirBuses. But to be honest, I only notice the model if I have to pick up the flight safety card to check if there's an exit behind me. Normally I notice that when I'm getting on board, because I try to avoid the crush by boarding as late as possible.
They've known this for a long time. What they're attempting to do is prevent the general populace from becoming aware of this.
The basic techniques for fooling a polygraph were published before I was born. They've never excited attention here because no one uses a polygraph except as a prop in cheap foreign cop shows (and in spoofs thereof).
The TPP is a proposed free trade agreement under negotiation by (as of August 2013) Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam.[10](From Wikipedia)
Why are European politicians involved in "negotiations" at all?
Disassembly for purposes such as backwards compatibility (I forget the exact terms ; they're probably different between your country and mine) is already legal.
That sounds to me like a perfectly calibrated warranty.
The purpose of a warranty is not to cover the failure of your hard drive ; it is to draw a line under the liability which the manufacturer carries on it's books for potential claims for replacement from people with old equipment. So a rational company will either time the warranty to expire shortly after the (say) 1% failure rate is achieved for all of a model produced, or they'll adjust the design details (bearings and motor I'd guess being the most likely failure points) until the projected lifetime of the new model exceeds the warranty period by a small amount.
Sounds like at that time your supplier had a very good understanding of the wear characteristics of their drives. My bet would also be that they offset the bad publicity from cases like yours by being very forthcoming for people whose drives fail a month before the warranty expires.
That's life. It's not as if you lost anything other than a lump of aluminium, plastic and glass with traces of copper.
China currently has the general capability to put someone into orbit, though the technical details of docking equipment and protocols may differ. I'm not sure if they've proved EVA capabilities yet (and can't be bothered to search), but it must be on their "in development" list if they haven't done it already. So, even without the details of docking equipment, they can get a person on board if they really wanted to. I take their increasing payload and orbital height capabilities as a given ; they've demonstrated that they want to be in space, and they've demonstrated the willingness to fund these developments, so they're going to happen, and quite soon. It's not, uh, rocket science after all. Except that it is. But you know what I mean.
Shock! Horror! There is commercial insurance that covers this sort of thing. Which is priced appropriately to the risk. By people who can do the mathematics.
I'm not privy to the details of their insurance. But do a back of the thumbnail estimate :
[1] number of airplanes that have been hit by falling space debris
divided by [2] the number of airplanes that have fallen out of the sky since 1957 (Sputnik) multiplied by [3] Warsaw Convention limits on liability for an airline passenger (a couple of hundred thousand dollars ; the number varies from time to time, but isn't as high as you'd think)
= [1] * [3] / [2]
~= 0 * 100,000 / ~ 50
So, to a first approximation, the potential liability is, umm, zero.
The main liability for flight insurance is that of the launch failing in one of several ways. That's around a 10% probability, so for a mid-range science satellite, that would imply an insurance premium of a few tens of millions of dollars. Paid before launch. The liability for landing issues would probably be small change in that premium.
Or they may just choose to not take out insurance. It's far more likely that a field or a rusty car gets hit than an airliner (see above calculation ; several buildings and cars have been hit for some hundreds of satellites coming down and damages of hundreds of dollars ; with an insurance claim excess of a few thousand dollars, it's not worth insuring against).
Try this for shits'n'giggles : estimate the area of the Earth occupied by all the airliners ever made, and then try to draw it to scale on a globe. Then try throwing darts at the globe and see if you can hit your mark at normal dart board range. I bet you wouldn't even be able to see the mark, let alone hit it.
Plenty of other biologists have ended up hosting organisms that they're studying. Sometime they're studying the organism before they get parasitized ; sometimes they get parasitized first and then study the organism(s) living on or in them.
Well-known evolutionary biologist and website publisher (it's not a bl*g!), Jerry Coyne falls into the latter category, as he relates on his website here, which includes links to the original broadcast, [blocked by my firewall on this location, so I can't check if they're still live].
No major disagreements with your comment, but you've left out a significant case.
We need legislation to prevent milk from cows treated with antibiotics from being sold in supermarkets cheaper than untreated milk.
ITYM "cows prophyllactically treated" rather than "cows therapeutically treated in response to a bacterial infection".
There's nothing wrong with treating a cow with (say) an infected cut with antibiotics. It's the mass dosing of the herds with sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics that are stimulating the development of antibiotic resistance.
One way of achieving that would be to (1) make veterinary antibiotics available only on prescription by a licensed veterinarian (that may or may not be the case in your country at the moment ; I don't know) - the cost of getting the vet out would be sufficient discouragement to severely reduce the competitive advantage that the farmers would otherwise gain ; and (2) treat possession of (say) a kilo of un-prescribed antibiotics the same way that possession of a kilo of un-prescribed di-acetyl morphine would be treated (that's heroin to the rest of us).
I wonder... if the antibiotic resistance genes used as markers for gene insertion are for antibiotics that work against bacteria, but only at doses that would be economically unproductive to make enough of the drug, or at doses that would kill the patient before it kills the bacteria. Or antibiotics that are only effective against a narrow range of bacteria? (Which wouldn't be a problem in lab testing, but would render the antibiotic unimportant from a therapeutic POV.) IANA biologist, but this sounds almost interesting.
Why do modern military planes even have a canopy anymore?
Why do you discuss modern plane design in relation to an article about retrofitting new canopies to a 40-year-old design of plane? Or are you going to use your time machine to take the revised canopy design back to the mid-1960s when the plane was designed to avoid the problem.
Actually, TFA obscures the problem. They already know at least one way of avoiding killing their pilots, and they admit it.
'the proposal was cancelled due to the high cost of the modification.'"
But they've decided that the cost of implementing the change would be higher than the cost of continuing to pay damages, pensions etc to the families of the pilots they kill. That calculation is probably going to change after they have a plane hit the ground after a bird strike, and the pilot survives but the wreckage impacts a bus full of schoolchildren, putting 40 of them into wheelchairs needing 24x7x365 care for the next 120 years. You'll note that the Air Force have implicitly put a cost on replacing a pilot with a newly-trained one, and paying off their family - probably a handful of millions of dollars ; maybe 10 million. And they're not willing to pay that sort of money to protect their pilots.
I do hope that I haven't given the impression that the Air Force include a bunch of cold-hearted calculating bean-counters who supervise their aircraft safety department. That would be really morale-boosting.
Slashdot Mirror
Periodically, I uninstall apps on the leftmost screen. They're obviously not necessary.
The surface of the Moon has been mapped to approximately 1 metre resolution (a bit more than a yard, if you're into measurements based on a horse's ass or a monarch's nose). Mineral mapping has been carried out to a somewhat lower resolutino, but to far higher resolution than for comparable mapping on the American mid-west in the mid-19th century.
So what you're saying is that NASA (with contributions from the ESA and Russians and Chinese and Indians) already own essentially the whole of the Moon, having discovered what is there already.
So, the NSA is responsible for about 8 times as much damage to the AMerican economy as criminal identity thieves. This is terrible! America needs to launch a programme immediately to improve the quality of it's thieving underclass.
And, my friend, my Nigerian Internet Scamming Academy is just the place for you to improve your internet identity theft skills. With our 420 online courses, you too can reach the hallowed degree of Internet Success that Nigeria has. Simply send your name, email and bank details to "Prince Ojimbo's Academy, Lagos 90210" and we'll be back to you in minutes. At the speed of Internet!.
(We have discontinued one course. only 419 courses available now.)
For general purpose CPUs, that may be true. For more specialised devices (possibly GPUs, other application-specific processors such as DSPs ... and lots of other cases), then the reduced complexity of the instruction sets may well reverse the equation.
So your cases are actually :
This also clarifies that you're assuming that "good drivers" are less likely to be in an accident. The quality of your driving doesn't materially affect the likelihood of you being in an accident caused by someone else driving like an idiot, losing control and hitting you.
Insurance is all about statistics. So when looking at insurance, you have to be careful to think in statistical terms.
For once, we can thank McDonalds - purveyors of the finest of sludge-burgers and kiddy-fondling clowns - for doing the hard work on this one. They spent much of the 1990s and around a million quid of their own hard earned (well; paid for by a million sludge-burgers) money sueing the shit out of "the MacDonalds Two" for mis-using MacLogos on posters complaining about Mac-Sludge-Burger's encouraging the maltreatment of their farmer's animals. Nothing to do with the reputation damage (Mac-Slime were doing an excellent job of that themselves, via their Public Relations Disaster Department), it was the mis-use of trademarks that was the core of the case.
Thanks to MacSlime, you don't need to have sales (or loss of sales) in a trademark infringement case.
Oh, Mac-Idiots won the case. After spending a million sludge-burgers worth of landshark fees, they got an award of ... I forget ; it was one of a pound, a penny, or a peppercorn. some good payback.
Oh, and some literally priceless PR.
So sad, to see such severe depression go untreated and proceed to such a spectacular self-harm.
The Chip'n'PIN readers do generally (but not exclusively) have magnetic stripe readers in them, so if your chip has died, then you can do a magnetic swipe ...
... When the manager has come down to the check out to authorise the transaction. I can't remember the time that I last saw regular check-out staff authorised to take a payment like this. It was probably during the 3-4 year roll-out of Chip'n'PIN, back in the 2005 era.
If your magnetic stripe has gone too, then the manager will probably have to go back to his office to find the mechanical swiping machine. Then he'll need to go back to see if he can find some of the carbon paper foils to go with it. That should buy enough time for the police to arrive, because he'd have called them when he went to the office the first time.
Actually, I completed a carbon paper transaction just a few months ago - I cleared the counterfoil out of my wallet last week. It was for entry to a visitor attraction which didn't have a phone line, and couldn't have one installed (at a credible price) because it was a Grade 3 Listed building. So that system does still work. Unless you've got one of those cards without the embossed numbers.
Oh, sorry, mis-read you . Yes, typing in the numbers works too. The details vary, but yes, that does work. Also used for "Customer Not Present" transactions too, i.e. mail order.
Bull shit.
It was really hard to get a car in the 1980s with much better than 40mpg. I know - I was looking at getting my first, used, car in 1989, and looked at lots of figures for that relating to 1980s models.
I got a new car 18 months ago and did the same process. It's difficult to get a new car with a list mileage under 60mpg for the combined cycle, and 70mpg is typical.
Of course, the situation in America may be different. But they've never given a shit about fuel efficiency any way.
Is there an option. You haven't been able to get a carburetted car for twenty, going on twenty-five years. So you've got a choice of some sort of fuel injection. But that doesn't require a computer to monitor it. It's probably easier to do it with a programmable digital computer, but it has been done for years with analogue computers or electromechanical control systems.
That can be, and has been, done for decades using electromechanicals. Again, you might be able to do it better or quicker with a computer, but the performance is perfectly adequate with an electromechanical system.
Isn't that the driver's job? Or do you not learn how to control your clutch if you're using an automatic (I''ve only driven automatics for a couple of miles in total, with no specific training.)?
Anti-lock braking predates the use of in-car computing by some decades ; you can do it with electro-mechanical systems (and people did).
Variable ignition timing ... some degrees have been done for approaching a century. Pre-computer.
Crash detection - also using acceleratometers, Also for decades - from the first airbags. Actually, before air bags ; seatbelt pre-tensioners.
Though most of the US military ranges that get mentioned over on this side of the Pond are out in the desert, that doesn't mean that they're unpopulated, does it? Low-populated, but not unpopulated.
But ... desert ranges might be fine. If you didn't need to train your pilots to (1) fly in rain and low cloud with squally winds, or (2) to conduct searches for heat signals on water surfaces (i.e. imitating marine search and rescue, even if that is just flim-flam for the sheeple). Desert ranges aren't so good for practising that sort of work.
You mean you didn't already?
That said, I take very little note of what particular aircraft I'm flying in. The only ones I've noticed in the last few months have been Embraers (Brazilian? Yes.) and various AirBuses. But to be honest, I only notice the model if I have to pick up the flight safety card to check if there's an exit behind me. Normally I notice that when I'm getting on board, because I try to avoid the crush by boarding as late as possible.
The basic techniques for fooling a polygraph were published before I was born. They've never excited attention here because no one uses a polygraph except as a prop in cheap foreign cop shows (and in spoofs thereof).
Yes, why indeed?
Oh, bollocks, it's another crack-smoking AC.
No need to waste effort or consideration on that. Nobody is innocent.
Problem solved.
Disassembly for purposes such as backwards compatibility (I forget the exact terms ; they're probably different between your country and mine) is already legal.
That sounds to me like a perfectly calibrated warranty.
The purpose of a warranty is not to cover the failure of your hard drive ; it is to draw a line under the liability which the manufacturer carries on it's books for potential claims for replacement from people with old equipment. So a rational company will either time the warranty to expire shortly after the (say) 1% failure rate is achieved for all of a model produced, or they'll adjust the design details (bearings and motor I'd guess being the most likely failure points) until the projected lifetime of the new model exceeds the warranty period by a small amount.
Sounds like at that time your supplier had a very good understanding of the wear characteristics of their drives. My bet would also be that they offset the bad publicity from cases like yours by being very forthcoming for people whose drives fail a month before the warranty expires.
That's life. It's not as if you lost anything other than a lump of aluminium, plastic and glass with traces of copper.
What - no backup? And you admit it here?
If you don't like being told you're pathetic, try not being pathetic.
China currently has the general capability to put someone into orbit, though the technical details of docking equipment and protocols may differ. I'm not sure if they've proved EVA capabilities yet (and can't be bothered to search), but it must be on their "in development" list if they haven't done it already. So, even without the details of docking equipment, they can get a person on board if they really wanted to. I take their increasing payload and orbital height capabilities as a given ; they've demonstrated that they want to be in space, and they've demonstrated the willingness to fund these developments, so they're going to happen, and quite soon. It's not, uh, rocket science after all. Except that it is. But you know what I mean.
Nowhere was ever safe, any where at any time. Ever.
Have a nice day.
I'm not privy to the details of their insurance. But do a back of the thumbnail estimate :
[1] number of airplanes that have been hit by falling space debris
divided by [2] the number of airplanes that have fallen out of the sky since 1957 (Sputnik)
multiplied by [3] Warsaw Convention limits on liability for an airline passenger (a couple of hundred thousand dollars ; the number varies from time to time, but isn't as high as you'd think)
= [1] * [3] / [2]
~= 0 * 100,000 / ~ 50
So, to a first approximation, the potential liability is, umm, zero.
The main liability for flight insurance is that of the launch failing in one of several ways. That's around a 10% probability, so for a mid-range science satellite, that would imply an insurance premium of a few tens of millions of dollars. Paid before launch. The liability for landing issues would probably be small change in that premium.
Or they may just choose to not take out insurance. It's far more likely that a field or a rusty car gets hit than an airliner (see above calculation ; several buildings and cars have been hit for some hundreds of satellites coming down and damages of hundreds of dollars ; with an insurance claim excess of a few thousand dollars, it's not worth insuring against).
Try this for shits'n'giggles : estimate the area of the Earth occupied by all the airliners ever made, and then try to draw it to scale on a globe. Then try throwing darts at the globe and see if you can hit your mark at normal dart board range. I bet you wouldn't even be able to see the mark, let alone hit it.
Well-known evolutionary biologist and website publisher (it's not a bl*g!), Jerry Coyne falls into the latter category, as he relates on his website here, which includes links to the original broadcast, [blocked by my firewall on this location, so I can't check if they're still live].
ITYM "cows prophyllactically treated" rather than "cows therapeutically treated in response to a bacterial infection".
There's nothing wrong with treating a cow with (say) an infected cut with antibiotics. It's the mass dosing of the herds with sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics that are stimulating the development of antibiotic resistance.
One way of achieving that would be to (1) make veterinary antibiotics available only on prescription by a licensed veterinarian (that may or may not be the case in your country at the moment ; I don't know) - the cost of getting the vet out would be sufficient discouragement to severely reduce the competitive advantage that the farmers would otherwise gain ; and (2) treat possession of (say) a kilo of un-prescribed antibiotics the same way that possession of a kilo of un-prescribed di-acetyl morphine would be treated (that's heroin to the rest of us).
I wonder ... if the antibiotic resistance genes used as markers for gene insertion are for antibiotics that work against bacteria, but only at doses that would be economically unproductive to make enough of the drug, or at doses that would kill the patient before it kills the bacteria. Or antibiotics that are only effective against a narrow range of bacteria? (Which wouldn't be a problem in lab testing, but would render the antibiotic unimportant from a therapeutic POV.) IANA biologist, but this sounds almost interesting.
Why do you discuss modern plane design in relation to an article about retrofitting new canopies to a 40-year-old design of plane? Or are you going to use your time machine to take the revised canopy design back to the mid-1960s when the plane was designed to avoid the problem.
Actually, TFA obscures the problem. They already know at least one way of avoiding killing their pilots, and they admit it.
But they've decided that the cost of implementing the change would be higher than the cost of continuing to pay damages, pensions etc to the families of the pilots they kill. That calculation is probably going to change after they have a plane hit the ground after a bird strike, and the pilot survives but the wreckage impacts a bus full of schoolchildren, putting 40 of them into wheelchairs needing 24x7x365 care for the next 120 years. You'll note that the Air Force have implicitly put a cost on replacing a pilot with a newly-trained one, and paying off their family - probably a handful of millions of dollars ; maybe 10 million. And they're not willing to pay that sort of money to protect their pilots.
I do hope that I haven't given the impression that the Air Force include a bunch of cold-hearted calculating bean-counters who supervise their aircraft safety department. That would be really morale-boosting.