Sometime soon they will remember that they failed to tax your hindquarters ten years ago and make a tax bill for that, which will require a new round of lobbying for repeal.
Rich sociopaths don't have to worry about taxes. Only the 99% who can't afford to buy politicians will ever have to pay more than a token percentage of their assets.
Of course water intensified the effect... it's an electrical fire!
Just consider everything about the above sentence to be wrong, and let's never speak of it again. Please.
Anyways... I didn't see anything in the article about it. Did the battery actually explode? If not, then there's an argument for increased safety over gasoline, isn't it?
tl;dr version - it's a wash, as far as I can tell.
Neither gasoline nor lithium battery paste really wants to explode. However, both very rapidly generate gas pressure, so if they are contained the container can possibly explode. In the case of batteries, this means the plastic cell splits open, allowing more oxygen to reach the fire, which may cause a chain reaction of other nearby cells igniting. In the case of gasoline, the steel cell can violently rupture, and flaming liquid may be released all over the place.
Once the fire is going, the lithium smoke is more hazardous than the gasoline smoke, but the liquid gasoline is more hazardous than the relatively immobile lithium paste. Both are highly visible and therefore easily avoided - unless you're trapped in a burning car, in which case either one can kill you.
Really, the dangers are different, but roughly equivalent. You could argue that gasoline is slightly more dangerous because of the vapor issue (a near empty tank is vastly more dangerous than a full one) or you could argue that the batteries are more dangerous due to the possibility of electric shock or UV damage to the eyes from arcing, but at that point the argument has devolved to movie-theater plot ridiculousness.
Both technologies are dangerous if abused and should be treated with respect. If you are intelligent and exercise your common sense, though, there's nothing to be afraid of.
War is good business, and presents many opportunities. The markets are always freest when the authorities are occupied with other matters. The same was true in the US during its war for 'independence'.
War is fantastic for promoting sexual slavery, to give just one example. Dick Cheney approves!
Your insightful comment is currently modded "insightful" as it deserves. In the past such a truthful evaluation of Slashdot's pro-pollution lobby would get modded "flamebait" at best.
Your best defense against burglary isn't cops, dogs, or security systems.
Your best defense against burglary is availability of meaningful, good paying work in your geographic area.
That's why the 1% clump together in gated communities or live far away from everybody else. Because they know cops, dogs and security systems are mostly just security theater, and the best way to be truly secure in your belongings is to stay far away from the hungry and unemployed.
The companies who built the reactors payed into a government fund upfront, according to a WP link someone posted above there is currently $25 billion in the fund. I don't think $25 billion is going to clean up the mess but it's a start and also a strong sign that those companies were willing to put their money where their mouth was.
Bush/Cheney gave the 18 companies who failed to pay a complete pass on prosecution. So I don't expect any more payments into the decommissioning fund.
Nuclear plants have to be decommissioned? Just like the builders and designers said, and just like (supposedly) was budgeted for in advance? That's horrible!
It's the damn Greens, I tell you. Dirty hippies making corporations keep their promises are ruining America!
HDMI is a pure digital signal, with error checking. But since there's no means of retransmitting a broken packet (and thus no valid reason for buffering) in actual practice it's less capable of error checking and bit regeneration than methods used by scribes in the ninth century. You can know you lost more bits than you can regenerate, but you can't do anything about it.
I think this is because HDMI is not really a method for clean digital signal transmission, but rather a way to stealthily carry HDCP into the consumer mainstream. The feature set is primarily aimed at preventing users from doing things (like making backups) rather than providing the maximum benefit to end users.
By "toxic aid" I mean stuff sent to people in need that does them more harm than good. It's usually caused by emotionally charged quick-fix efforts. Look, for example, at the way clothing handouts to African communities have wiped out entire segments of local economies, putting weavers, dyers, printmakers, and clothing emporiums out of business and actually increasing the poverty in these communities - now everybody's got an American T-shirt, but fewer people have a job.
The best kind of aid is exemplified by the Heifer Project, and to a lesser extent by Habitat for Humanity. Teaching people to help themselves, and encouraging them to pay it forward instead of paying it back, lifts them into the self-supporting donor social caste, instead of maintaining them in debt and spreading poverty to their neighbors.
Here's the first 2 lines of the conclusion synopsis: These studies demonstrated the morally normative effects of lay notions of science. Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms and exhibit more morally normative behavior.
"lay notions of science" = shit people think might be scientific - for some people this includes homeopathy. For nearly everyone it includes some totally bogus nonsense.
"exhibit more morally normative behavior" = behave more in accordance with mainstream dogmas and shibboleths - in the Southern USA in the 1950s, this would definitely include being OK with brutal beatings of gays and "uppity" black people.
Why Nepal is sending troops elsewhere? They're poor as hell and need aid of their own and they have rebels.
For the same reason they always have. Because they are poor as hell and they would rather kill and die in order to send home an honest paycheck than beg the rich for potentially toxic aid.
Thanks! I find this stuff fascinating even though I haven't been in the rocket science biz for quite a while now. If I could get a good-paying job with a commercial spaceflight company without moving my family, I'd be all over it... but the last offer I got would have required I move to the Mojave desert. Not gonna happen.
Anyway the guy on the radio informs me that one of the patients is breathing but not conscious. So I asked him for his Glasgow score. In medicine we use something called the Glasgow score to evaluate the severity of neurological damage. [...snip...] Anyway, the paramedic goes off the radio for a few moments and I can hear him conferring with his buddy. After a while he gets back to me and says "Doc, I'm sorry but we don't have a Glasgowmeter here with us..."
I was expecting "Glasgow zero, Newcastle two and they've got the ball".
I'm pretty sure metal sintering existed before lasers... Wikipedia says the Egyptians were doing it in 3000 BC and I know for sure that the pre-columbian Inca were doing it routinely. And despite the claims of UFO nuts concerning Pumapunku, I don't believe the ancients had laser technology.
AFAIK the early 3D metal sintering printers of the 80s didn't use laser sintering - but honestly I could be wrong. I haven't researched it at all and wasn't involved in the early research and development, everything I know is hearsay.
We used to call it "thrust vector control". I worked in the Morton-Thiokol TVC lab for a while. The video shows a really excellent example of the technique, which is not new or controversial.
You can do TVC with hydraulics (heavy, but parts are easy to source and last longer) but you'll get better impulse numbers for the vehicle as a whole if you can divert some proportion of the pressure from the combustion chamber into mechanical actuators that change the direction the nozzles are physically pointing. With multi-nozzled rocket motors (regardless of whether they have multiple combustion chambers or not) you can point some thrust down and some to the side (which appears to be happening in the video) and get this kind of behavior.
Similar things can be done with moving vanes in the exhaust plume, but those will erode even faster than the mechanism described above, and will be far slower to change the thrust vector. Erosion of parts that have high pressure hot gasses flowing through them is a huge issue in rocketry, although fairly well understood at this point. External aerodynamic vanes like the space shuttle's wings will obviously work too, and won't erode much (during liftoff) but they are also slow and clumsy.
When I say the technique's not new, I do not mean to denigrate the achievement. I can confidently state that it's really, really hard to do it as well as is being shown in this video. I would love to be able to work with these guys, because they are clearly just full of the right stuff.
Another alternative system to TVC is separately fueled ACMs - Attitude Control Motors - such as vernier thrusters or the solid fuel ACMs on hypersonic crusie missiles. When you use gimballed nozzles to achieve TVC, though, you can potentially have the entire force of the main thrusters available for attitude control, and the fuel delivery system can be much more concentrated and simple.
Graphical overview of the common methods of TVC here
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Some of the big banks have been putting Java on top of COBOL backends. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.
Rich sociopaths don't have to worry about taxes. Only the 99% who can't afford to buy politicians will ever have to pay more than a token percentage of their assets.
Just consider everything about the above sentence to be wrong, and let's never speak of it again. Please.
tl;dr version - it's a wash, as far as I can tell.
Neither gasoline nor lithium battery paste really wants to explode. However, both very rapidly generate gas pressure, so if they are contained the container can possibly explode. In the case of batteries, this means the plastic cell splits open, allowing more oxygen to reach the fire, which may cause a chain reaction of other nearby cells igniting. In the case of gasoline, the steel cell can violently rupture, and flaming liquid may be released all over the place.
Once the fire is going, the lithium smoke is more hazardous than the gasoline smoke, but the liquid gasoline is more hazardous than the relatively immobile lithium paste. Both are highly visible and therefore easily avoided - unless you're trapped in a burning car, in which case either one can kill you.
Really, the dangers are different, but roughly equivalent. You could argue that gasoline is slightly more dangerous because of the vapor issue (a near empty tank is vastly more dangerous than a full one) or you could argue that the batteries are more dangerous due to the possibility of electric shock or UV damage to the eyes from arcing, but at that point the argument has devolved to movie-theater plot ridiculousness.
Both technologies are dangerous if abused and should be treated with respect. If you are intelligent and exercise your common sense, though, there's nothing to be afraid of.
Cops can't tell the difference between games and reality. Give Major Wolfe some credit for honesty!
Also, they can't tell the difference between a gun and a taser. Sorry about that.
C'mon, people, it's hard to find PhD rocket surgeons willing to violently suppress peaceful demonstrators for craptastic pay. Cut the PD some slack!
War is fantastic for promoting sexual slavery, to give just one example. Dick Cheney approves!
In Chicago, traders are working faster than light.
You have to be a rich bankster to achieve faster than light trading, though. If anybody else does it it's cheating.
If you really feel that way, it only takes about ten minutes apiece to switch them all over to G+.
Not that I'm endorsing Google; I'm just saying there are other options for keeping in touch with family online.
Well, who actually looks happier to you - Torvalds or Ballmer?
And Linus didn't have to be a millionaire before he could get an awesome wife, either.
Your insightful comment is currently modded "insightful" as it deserves. In the past such a truthful evaluation of Slashdot's pro-pollution lobby would get modded "flamebait" at best.
Your best defense against burglary isn't cops, dogs, or security systems.
Your best defense against burglary is availability of meaningful, good paying work in your geographic area.
That's why the 1% clump together in gated communities or live far away from everybody else. Because they know cops, dogs and security systems are mostly just security theater, and the best way to be truly secure in your belongings is to stay far away from the hungry and unemployed.
Bush/Cheney gave the 18 companies who failed to pay a complete pass on prosecution. So I don't expect any more payments into the decommissioning fund.
Because a soldier isn't technologically advantaged to disincentivise enemy combatant functionality utilizing post-9/11 paradigms.
Nuclear plants have to be decommissioned? Just like the builders and designers said, and just like (supposedly) was budgeted for in advance? That's horrible!
It's the damn Greens, I tell you. Dirty hippies making corporations keep their promises are ruining America!
"in practice... HDMI errors never happen?"
I don't know how to reply to that, since I've seen uncountable thousands of them. Are you serious?
Not so; have you ever been in a "sports bar"? Tens of thousands of HDMI errors clearly visible on screen!
I don't usually patronize such places, but even I see HDMI errors all the time - usually because of cheap cables and RFI/EMI.
Buffer the signal. Trivial problem.
HDMI is a pure digital signal, with error checking. But since there's no means of retransmitting a broken packet (and thus no valid reason for buffering) in actual practice it's less capable of error checking and bit regeneration than methods used by scribes in the ninth century. You can know you lost more bits than you can regenerate, but you can't do anything about it.
I think this is because HDMI is not really a method for clean digital signal transmission, but rather a way to stealthily carry HDCP into the consumer mainstream. The feature set is primarily aimed at preventing users from doing things (like making backups) rather than providing the maximum benefit to end users.
By "toxic aid" I mean stuff sent to people in need that does them more harm than good. It's usually caused by emotionally charged quick-fix efforts. Look, for example, at the way clothing handouts to African communities have wiped out entire segments of local economies, putting weavers, dyers, printmakers, and clothing emporiums out of business and actually increasing the poverty in these communities - now everybody's got an American T-shirt, but fewer people have a job.
The best kind of aid is exemplified by the Heifer Project, and to a lesser extent by Habitat for Humanity. Teaching people to help themselves, and encouraging them to pay it forward instead of paying it back, lifts them into the self-supporting donor social caste, instead of maintaining them in debt and spreading poverty to their neighbors.
Here's the first 2 lines of the conclusion synopsis: These studies demonstrated the morally normative effects of lay notions of science. Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms and exhibit more morally normative behavior.
"lay notions of science" = shit people think might be scientific - for some people this includes homeopathy. For nearly everyone it includes some totally bogus nonsense.
"exhibit more morally normative behavior" = behave more in accordance with mainstream dogmas and shibboleths - in the Southern USA in the 1950s, this would definitely include being OK with brutal beatings of gays and "uppity" black people.
For the same reason they always have. Because they are poor as hell and they would rather kill and die in order to send home an honest paycheck than beg the rich for potentially toxic aid.
Thanks! I find this stuff fascinating even though I haven't been in the rocket science biz for quite a while now. If I could get a good-paying job with a commercial spaceflight company without moving my family, I'd be all over it... but the last offer I got would have required I move to the Mojave desert. Not gonna happen.
I was expecting "Glasgow zero, Newcastle two and they've got the ball".
I'm pretty sure metal sintering existed before lasers... Wikipedia says the Egyptians were doing it in 3000 BC and I know for sure that the pre-columbian Inca were doing it routinely. And despite the claims of UFO nuts concerning Pumapunku, I don't believe the ancients had laser technology.
AFAIK the early 3D metal sintering printers of the 80s didn't use laser sintering - but honestly I could be wrong. I haven't researched it at all and wasn't involved in the early research and development, everything I know is hearsay.
Thanks for the titanium price checkpoint!
We used to call it "thrust vector control". I worked in the Morton-Thiokol TVC lab for a while. The video shows a really excellent example of the technique, which is not new or controversial.
You can do TVC with hydraulics (heavy, but parts are easy to source and last longer) but you'll get better impulse numbers for the vehicle as a whole if you can divert some proportion of the pressure from the combustion chamber into mechanical actuators that change the direction the nozzles are physically pointing. With multi-nozzled rocket motors (regardless of whether they have multiple combustion chambers or not) you can point some thrust down and some to the side (which appears to be happening in the video) and get this kind of behavior.
Similar things can be done with moving vanes in the exhaust plume, but those will erode even faster than the mechanism described above, and will be far slower to change the thrust vector. Erosion of parts that have high pressure hot gasses flowing through them is a huge issue in rocketry, although fairly well understood at this point. External aerodynamic vanes like the space shuttle's wings will obviously work too, and won't erode much (during liftoff) but they are also slow and clumsy.
When I say the technique's not new, I do not mean to denigrate the achievement. I can confidently state that it's really, really hard to do it as well as is being shown in this video. I would love to be able to work with these guys, because they are clearly just full of the right stuff.
Another alternative system to TVC is separately fueled ACMs - Attitude Control Motors - such as vernier thrusters or the solid fuel ACMs on hypersonic crusie missiles. When you use gimballed nozzles to achieve TVC, though, you can potentially have the entire force of the main thrusters available for attitude control, and the fuel delivery system can be much more concentrated and simple.
Graphical overview of the common methods of TVC here
If /dev/null is faster than OpenStack I will use it.
Sun licensing was always intended to prevent a free Java implementation on a mobile phone.
Dalvik is Google's free Java implementation for mobile phones, is it not?
So Google might've complied with the terms as written (the US courts seem to think so) but they certainly took an end run around Sun's intentions.
All that being said, the sooner people stop wasting their money on Oracle products the better.