If the total number of people dying from cancer is only 10% larger (per capita) in the UK, how can mortality rates be twice as high to six times as high? That's what I meant by the five year survival statistic being misleading. Maybe the British don't develop cancer as often as Americans, but that seems unlikely, and is contradicted by your own link.
Since all medical statistics seem to contradict each other I'm not going to jump to any strong conclusions based on a token analysis.
This is offtopic now, but the difference between your source and mine is rather confusing. Even going with yours though, the difference in cancer death rates is small (10%) and overall lifespan is larger in the UK anyway. There's certainly no evidence for the original claim that the UK "oses many times more people to cancer than the USA".
Your source also indicates that the USA spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as the UK. Given that, I'm surprised the gap is as small as it is, and suggests that America does well by brute force spending rather than having any kind of superior system.
Three different conservative groups as a source? Hmm. I've learned to take stuff that comes out of such things with a more than a pinch of salt, whether they're left-wing or right-wing. "The Mission of the Manhattan Institute is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility"? They know the answer they want going in, and will pick evidence to find it.
The coronary disease is true, but not by a huge factor.
While I'm pretty smart in an academic sense (physics PhD graduate, always found that stuff fairly easy to grasp), when it comes to actually getting things done I'm quite hopeless, and less "smart" people would run circles round me. I mean things like finding a job, organizing on holiday, deciding which to buy (unless tech related), all seem unreasonably hard due to the huge uncertainties involved and the lack of a straightforward structure for analysis and decision making.
I'd probably do a lot better being stupid but more tolerant of uncertainty.
In the case of my house, the sockets are all on an RCD and the lights aren't.
The RCD covers 6 circuits or so, with an over-current circuit breaker per circuit. Lights are separate and protected by over-current circuit breakers only. IIRC, new installations do protect the lights this way but on a separate RCD to avoid the problem you mentioned.
You could conceivably have a fault which would draw a dangerously large current for the cable but not enough to actually blow the fuse/trip the breaker. For example, 10 amps through your normally 0.25 amp cable, which would lead to overheating and could start a fire. A small fuse in the plug would prevent this.
Granted, I don't think that kind of fault is terribly likely, but it's plausible.
Actually, there are fewer cancer deaths in the UK per capita than the USA. And the "5 year survival" thing is mostly a statistical artefact caused by earlier detection in the US, which exaggerates the difference. Earlier detection will improve the 5 year survival stats even if it has no effect on the treatment or lifespan.
The waiting lists are typically for *non*-life threatening conditions. Life threatening ones jump the queue. Not to let facts interfere with your American superiority complex, or anything.
There is one advantage to the fuse - it can be sized appropriately for the appliance in question. Otherwise, every cable would have to be rated for the maximum 13 amps, even if it's only a lamp that needs maybe 0.25 amps. A more sensible place for a GFI would be at the fuse box rather than at every socket, as one breaker can cover the whole circuit (or even installation if you're being cheap).
I have yet to rip any sockets out of the wall by tripping over a cable, and don't know anyone who has. Maybe if they were mounted really, really poorly.
The simple fact of the matter is that the pins on the US plug are so short that by the point it is far enough out of the socket to expose enough of the pins to touch them with your fingers, it's unplugged. No partially insulated pins or other wacky design contrivances are needed.
But is this true for a child's fingers?
Insulating part of the pins is simple, obvious and effective - hardly a "wacky design contrivance". Why *wouldn't* you do it?
GFI (RCD) and a fuse do different jobs entirely. A fuse protects against high currents and an RCD protects against imbalanced currents, protecting against electric shocks which tend to go to earth.
The latest UK wiring standards require both overcurrent protection and RCDs.
Then perhaps you'd care to enlighten me? Both are caused by a greater torque being applied to the wheel (by the engine or brake) than the friction of the tyre on the road can handle, thus causing the wheel to rotate at an incorrect speed.
The two are the same, just in the opposite direction.
Brakes are capable of locking the tyres at any speed (in the absense of ABS). If not, your brakes are not good enough. How many engines are capable of spinning the tyres at any speed?
Pretty much any car can do 60-0 much faster than 0-60. You really need to get your brakes fixed.
A "floored" engine can produce more kinetic energy than the braking system can dissipate.
I find that hard to believe - all cars I've driven have had much stronger brakes than engines. Perhaps they weren't pushing the brake pedal hard enough.
In the UK at least, a speedometer must be accurate to within +10% and -0%, i.e. it must not underread. The obvious solution is for the manufacturers to design the thing to overread by a bit (e.g. 5%), so that any error is still likely to be in the acceptable range.
The probability of a hash collision for a 256 bit hash (or even a 128 bit one) is negligible.
How negligible? Well, the probability of a collision is never more then N^2 / 2^h, where N is the number of blocks stored and h is the number of bits in the hash. So, if we have 2^64 blocks stored (a mere billion terabytes or so for 128 byte blocks) , the probability of a collision is less than 2^(-128), or 10^(-38). Hardly worth worrying about.
"Bogus" meaning deliberately fraudulent was not a usage I'd encountered until that case - and I'm British, not American.
The libel laws in the UK are a joke, and are in serious need of reform. At the very least, a libel conviction should require that the statements were not just untrue but deliberately intended to lower someone's reputation for personal gain. That clearly doesn't apply here.
Seriously, what programmer has not heard of floating point errors?
I had a similar issue with some code of mine for physics analysis. While I had heard of floating point errors, they're a lot more subtle than it first appears, and I ended up falling victim to one. Fortunately I discovered it before it actually let to any serious problems, it just resulted in wasted time.
Not everyone with a need for programming has a CS background and enough experience to be aware of all the potential problems. You'd hope that someone working on a missile system would have though.
You had a hard drive that could do 25 Mb/sec in 1986? Even if that's megabits per second (which it isn't, I get over 30 Mbytes/sec with USB2), that's well in excess of what I got in the mid-1990s.
I'm in no rush for USB3, but then the only external storage I use is for backups and USB sticks, neither of which really needs the extra speed.
Er, okay looks like you actually made the same point I made. Don't know why I didn't spot it the first time.
However, these automated manuals are still pretty new and most automatics are still of the old torque-converter + planetary gearset variety. The new kind are only available on a few models, mostly from the Volkswagen group.
I'm not disputing that regenerative braking doesn't prevent losses due to air resistance and friction. If you have a car which needs A units of energy to accelerate to speed and then B units to overcome air resistance when driving, perfect regenerative braking would mean you would have only expended B units of energy when you came to a halt.
My "arbitrary" remark was meant to indicate that there was no *fundamental physics* reason why regenerative braking could not be 100% efficient in this way. That's just a matter of engineering - e.g. you could make resistive losses as small as you like by braking slowly, as they go as current^2.
Physics does not require a loss for energy conversion in general - for example, an elliptical planetary orbit will convert kinetic energy to gravitational potential energy losslessly and in a cycle. The thermodynamic limits to efficiency usually occur when heat is involved, as in that case entropy changes occur.
Simply stating "false" makes you sound like an obnoxious ass, incidentally.
Yes, I know. But air resistance/friction doesn't apply as we were talking about what fraction of the vehicle's kinetic energy is recovered by regenerative braking. And the factors that affect this (resistive losses, inefficient batteries) could be improved arbitrarily by advanced technologies, the only thermodynamics limit is the conservation of energy.
No, heat engines are limited by the Carnot efficiency, which depends on the temperatures of the hot source and the cold sink. This is because entropy changes are associated with heat transfers, and entropy of a closed system can't decrease.
Hmm, if you could get the energy out of the fuel without burning it, you may even be able to get over 100% efficiency. The entropy of the products is higher than the entropy of the reactants at the same temperature. So it would be thermodynamically valid to extract a certain amount of heat from the surroundings at the same time and convert it to work.
Slashdot Mirror
If the total number of people dying from cancer is only 10% larger (per capita) in the UK, how can mortality rates be twice as high to six times as high? That's what I meant by the five year survival statistic being misleading. Maybe the British don't develop cancer as often as Americans, but that seems unlikely, and is contradicted by your own link.
Since all medical statistics seem to contradict each other I'm not going to jump to any strong conclusions based on a token analysis.
This is offtopic now, but the difference between your source and mine is rather confusing. Even going with yours though, the difference in cancer death rates is small (10%) and overall lifespan is larger in the UK anyway. There's certainly no evidence for the original claim that the UK "oses many times more people to cancer than the USA".
Your source also indicates that the USA spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as the UK. Given that, I'm surprised the gap is as small as it is, and suggests that America does well by brute force spending rather than having any kind of superior system.
Three different conservative groups as a source? Hmm. I've learned to take stuff that comes out of such things with a more than a pinch of salt, whether they're left-wing or right-wing. "The Mission of the Manhattan Institute is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility"? They know the answer they want going in, and will pick evidence to find it.
The coronary disease is true, but not by a huge factor.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_dea_fro_can-health-death-from-cancer
While I'm pretty smart in an academic sense (physics PhD graduate, always found that stuff fairly easy to grasp), when it comes to actually getting things done I'm quite hopeless, and less "smart" people would run circles round me. I mean things like finding a job, organizing on holiday, deciding which to buy (unless tech related), all seem unreasonably hard due to the huge uncertainties involved and the lack of a straightforward structure for analysis and decision making.
I'd probably do a lot better being stupid but more tolerant of uncertainty.
In the case of my house, the sockets are all on an RCD and the lights aren't.
The RCD covers 6 circuits or so, with an over-current circuit breaker per circuit. Lights are separate and protected by over-current circuit breakers only. IIRC, new installations do protect the lights this way but on a separate RCD to avoid the problem you mentioned.
You could conceivably have a fault which would draw a dangerously large current for the cable but not enough to actually blow the fuse/trip the breaker. For example, 10 amps through your normally 0.25 amp cable, which would lead to overheating and could start a fire. A small fuse in the plug would prevent this.
Granted, I don't think that kind of fault is terribly likely, but it's plausible.
Less pride, more "appreciation of good design and engineering".
On the other hand, I really hate our standard light fittings (bayonet). Edison screws are much nicer.
Actually, there are fewer cancer deaths in the UK per capita than the USA. And the "5 year survival" thing is mostly a statistical artefact caused by earlier detection in the US, which exaggerates the difference. Earlier detection will improve the 5 year survival stats even if it has no effect on the treatment or lifespan.
The waiting lists are typically for *non*-life threatening conditions. Life threatening ones jump the queue. Not to let facts interfere with your American superiority complex, or anything.
There is one advantage to the fuse - it can be sized appropriately for the appliance in question. Otherwise, every cable would have to be rated for the maximum 13 amps, even if it's only a lamp that needs maybe 0.25 amps. A more sensible place for a GFI would be at the fuse box rather than at every socket, as one breaker can cover the whole circuit (or even installation if you're being cheap).
I have yet to rip any sockets out of the wall by tripping over a cable, and don't know anyone who has. Maybe if they were mounted really, really poorly.
The simple fact of the matter is that the pins on the US plug are so short that by the point it is far enough out of the socket to expose enough of the pins to touch them with your fingers, it's unplugged. No partially insulated pins or other wacky design contrivances are needed.
But is this true for a child's fingers?
Insulating part of the pins is simple, obvious and effective - hardly a "wacky design contrivance". Why *wouldn't* you do it?
I'd rather have the option than even more regulation.
How can you object to something that improves safety and comes with no inconvenience whatsoever?
GFI (RCD) and a fuse do different jobs entirely. A fuse protects against high currents and an RCD protects against imbalanced currents, protecting against electric shocks which tend to go to earth.
The latest UK wiring standards require both overcurrent protection and RCDs.
Then perhaps you'd care to enlighten me? Both are caused by a greater torque being applied to the wheel (by the engine or brake) than the friction of the tyre on the road can handle, thus causing the wheel to rotate at an incorrect speed.
The two are the same, just in the opposite direction.
Brakes are capable of locking the tyres at any speed (in the absense of ABS). If not, your brakes are not good enough. How many engines are capable of spinning the tyres at any speed?
Pretty much any car can do 60-0 much faster than 0-60. You really need to get your brakes fixed.
A "floored" engine can produce more kinetic energy than the braking system can dissipate.
I find that hard to believe - all cars I've driven have had much stronger brakes than engines. Perhaps they weren't pushing the brake pedal hard enough.
In the UK at least, a speedometer must be accurate to within +10% and -0%, i.e. it must not underread. The obvious solution is for the manufacturers to design the thing to overread by a bit (e.g. 5%), so that any error is still likely to be in the acceptable range.
Is the law similar elsewhere?
The 2^-256 is only the probability if all of the people are independent. That clearly isn't the case in your example.
Is there an equivalent scenario for hash based deduplication? The only ones I can think of involve poor hash algorithms.
The probability of a hash collision for a 256 bit hash (or even a 128 bit one) is negligible.
How negligible? Well, the probability of a collision is never more then N^2 / 2^h, where N is the number of blocks stored and h is the number of bits in the hash. So, if we have 2^64 blocks stored (a mere billion terabytes or so for 128 byte blocks) , the probability of a collision is less than 2^(-128), or 10^(-38). Hardly worth worrying about.
And that's an upper limit, not the actual value.
"Bogus" meaning deliberately fraudulent was not a usage I'd encountered until that case - and I'm British, not American.
The libel laws in the UK are a joke, and are in serious need of reform. At the very least, a libel conviction should require that the statements were not just untrue but deliberately intended to lower someone's reputation for personal gain. That clearly doesn't apply here.
Seriously, what programmer has not heard of floating point errors?
I had a similar issue with some code of mine for physics analysis. While I had heard of floating point errors, they're a lot more subtle than it first appears, and I ended up falling victim to one. Fortunately I discovered it before it actually let to any serious problems, it just resulted in wasted time.
Not everyone with a need for programming has a CS background and enough experience to be aware of all the potential problems. You'd hope that someone working on a missile system would have though.
You had a hard drive that could do 25 Mb/sec in 1986? Even if that's megabits per second (which it isn't, I get over 30 Mbytes/sec with USB2), that's well in excess of what I got in the mid-1990s.
I'm in no rush for USB3, but then the only external storage I use is for backups and USB sticks, neither of which really needs the extra speed.
Er, okay looks like you actually made the same point I made. Don't know why I didn't spot it the first time.
However, these automated manuals are still pretty new and most automatics are still of the old torque-converter + planetary gearset variety. The new kind are only available on a few models, mostly from the Volkswagen group.
I'm not disputing that regenerative braking doesn't prevent losses due to air resistance and friction. If you have a car which needs A units of energy to accelerate to speed and then B units to overcome air resistance when driving, perfect regenerative braking would mean you would have only expended B units of energy when you came to a halt.
My "arbitrary" remark was meant to indicate that there was no *fundamental physics* reason why regenerative braking could not be 100% efficient in this way. That's just a matter of engineering - e.g. you could make resistive losses as small as you like by braking slowly, as they go as current^2.
Physics does not require a loss for energy conversion in general - for example, an elliptical planetary orbit will convert kinetic energy to gravitational potential energy losslessly and in a cycle. The thermodynamic limits to efficiency usually occur when heat is involved, as in that case entropy changes occur.
Simply stating "false" makes you sound like an obnoxious ass, incidentally.
Yes, I know. But air resistance/friction doesn't apply as we were talking about what fraction of the vehicle's kinetic energy is recovered by regenerative braking. And the factors that affect this (resistive losses, inefficient batteries) could be improved arbitrarily by advanced technologies, the only thermodynamics limit is the conservation of energy.
No, heat engines are limited by the Carnot efficiency, which depends on the temperatures of the hot source and the cold sink. This is because entropy changes are associated with heat transfers, and entropy of a closed system can't decrease.
Hmm, if you could get the energy out of the fuel without burning it, you may even be able to get over 100% efficiency. The entropy of the products is higher than the entropy of the reactants at the same temperature. So it would be thermodynamically valid to extract a certain amount of heat from the surroundings at the same time and convert it to work.