Disclaimer: It's my parents that are the accountants, not me. I recommend speaking to an actual CPA before embarking on any such plot as this.
You must be within a certain percent or dollar amount of your final taxes by Dec 31st or you owe penalties for 'insufficient withholding'. I came within a couple hundred due to a pay snafu where my employer didn't take any withholding for several months after I returned from some overseas work*. Just to be sure I sent the IRS a check for a couple hundred in December.
Uh... ACC(Air Combat Command) has lost a lot of the nuke mission in favor of a new command: Global Strike Command(GSC), which is basically SAC in all but name.
Well, okay not quite - it doesn't have the resources or manpower than SAC did, and it'll take time to build the processes that were dropped when SAC joined TAC.
It is not like the air-force in total have a lack of funding. The problem won't be solved by pushing more tax money their way, the problem in their organization still exists.
Do you realize that military pay is set by congress? An O-3 Captain(Army, AF, and Marines) is paid the same no matter the branch. The services don't have a choice on what they pay him. Levels of each grade is also controlled by congress, so they can't just bump them a grade.
Also, congress has it's fingers so deep in the military budgeting process(you HAVE to buy these tanks, planes, keep that unit operational, etc) that it's not even funny.
There are things that the military does control - certain quality of life matters, for example, but not everything.
Read through the wiki - until relatively recently(we're still talking about decades here) they had to use DC or slip-ring motors, which reduced efficiency, which translates to more batteries needed for a given range, which means more weight and expense.
It's a matter of margins and economy more than whether they could actually do it.
Goes against their training. EVERYTHING to them is checklists. Caller says 'my house is on fire' he goes to the fire binder, flips to 'house' and follows the checklist. Things like getting the address of the fire, calling the appropriate responders, etc...
The two main components, the motors and the battery tech, have also been under continuous development.
The control system which mates the two wasn't really developed over that time. Most of the motors were hooked up to the grid, and battery packs the size of modern EV's were extremely rare, much less mobile versions.
There is no magic technology reason that electric cars are suddenly interesting again. It's environmental and fuel price concerns.
No magic, but I figure the 'bullet' is a combination of LiIon battery technology allowing an EV to finally compete with the unrefueled range of a gasoline vehicle, the development of speed controls that allowed efficient use of AC Induction motors as motor-generators as opposed to less efficient DC motors, combined with the mentioned environmental and fuel price concerns.
Why the hell aren't they all being dishonourably discharged and even court-martialed?
It takes 5 minutes to decertify somebody and pull them from their duties. You can't be 'dishonourably discharged' without a General Court-Martial, which the civilian equivalent is a full up court trial. As such, it takes time to build a case, time to put together a court, time to assemble a jury of equal or higher rank*, time to hold the trial, etc...
Now complicate it by having to do it by x92. A *busy* base might have 1 general court marshal(overseen by a federal judge) per month. Most only have 1 court room, though I suppose they can set up others ad-hoc, but the rooms can't be too bad or it generates a point to base an appeal on.
As such, in order to expediently conduct the trials they'd have to ship the offenders to bases all over the country. Finding enough federal judges would be a problem.
Honestly, I do expect a number of discharges ranging from 'Dishonorable' to 'Other than honorable', even a number of honorable discharges - the military is shrinking so even if the court doesn't find them liable enough for discharge(standards for this are NOT supposed to change year by year), what will happen is that the conviction or article 15 will be a black mark for the 'Quality of Force Review Board' to hook on, forcing them to stand a board and defend themselves as part of a 'whole person' concept, including said black mark, when the board is looking to kick out between 30-70% of those they review.
Their careers in the military are done, even if it might take a couple years for some to be forced out.
'Career Killer' in the sense that they aren't retiring as an O-5, they're retiring as an O-4 if they're lucky, probably 'let go' after 10 years as an O-3.
To be a USAF officer you have to have your Bachelour's. That translates to most officers being at least 22. 42 is their earliest retirement age, 'Late 30's' would be for an enlisted member. An officer retiring that way would have to be an 'OE', or an enlisted member who went officer. They tend not to get stuck in capsules.
In the USAF (my employer - I'm a former Active Duty civilian), Operational Flying and the career fields that support it are doing quite well, and those that fail to make Major or have some other issue are pushed to UAVs. But yes, as some Lt or Captain in a bunker, you might want to plan an "after-USAF" career. We'll probably always have nukes, but it's a small career field getting smaller with no analog on the "outside".
Think wider. There will always need to be some cross-training done, but 'sits in a bunker waiting to act' does actually cover a number of fields. 911 operator, for example. The cheating is very bad, but for somebody with at clean record and at least a Bachelour's, 911 mostly consists of waiting in a building for a phone call, then working through checklists on the basis of the phone call. Dispachers, sitting watch on non-critical bits of nuclear plants(or getting the training TO sit the critical watches), etc...
A 'Suitably strong ship' isn't something a newb player stupid enough to violate the rules in front of Concord ships would have, and note that I said get away, as opposed to 'doing a lot of damage'. Of course you can do lots of damage if you're willing to write the ship off, but escaping with it intact is a much harder achievement.
In high-sec space you quickly have the problem that you're quickly no longer griefing the Newbs, but fighting the infinitely spawning Concord forces.
You don't need to convert it to UF6 to combine it though. That's part of the reason you might want to use freshly refined(but not enriched/depleted) uranium - You only need to kick up the proportion of 235 a bit with natural, as opposed to providing nearly all of it if you're using depleted.
Never said it was done in the states, and on second thought it's highly unlikely you'd mix it with depleted. 1 kg mixed with 9kg of natural gives you 10kg of 'reactor grade', depending on the reactor, of course, but if you're mixing it with depleted you might only be able to mix it with 4kg for the same effect.
So what happens if you start getting lag or the program crashes or you lose power or your internet connection goes out or you have something to do and can't stay in a protracted battle? That's pretty lame to lose everything you played or paid for.
Depends on how bad it is. If you're NOT in combat once disconnect is seen by the servers your ship will automatically go into what's essentially a 'warp loop', the intra-system FTL drive, you're unattackable in this state and your ship is effectively removed from play. Call it ~2 minutes or so. When you log back in you'll warp to the same spot you left from(gives you some intel before you're attackable). If you're in combat, this will still happen, but takes substantially longer.
As for losing power - buy an UPS, get a better internet connection, etc...
'Losing everything' - unless you're a complete newbie with only 1 ship, highly unlikely. I have ~36 ships hanging out in hangers all over the place, I can only lose 1 from 'surprise disconnect', I'll still have my skills and ISK(in-game currency), etc... Even then you're always guaranteed to be able to get a crappy ship to start over.
Worst case - lose the ship, the clone(have to buy another), some implants. Could be very expensive, but still hardly 'everything'.
For those who haven't played the game 'High Sec spaces' are basically the safe havens of Eve. Protected by the Concord, it's generally safe from PvP. It also compromises a smallish fraction of the systems, and rarer resources are either extremely rare or outright unavailable.
However, it's a bit like being in a courthouse - while there are certainly baliffs ready to stop anybody who commits violence, they aren't necessarily where YOU are, and an enemy sufficiently uncaring of being caught can still cause damage. It's a bit like the major raids on cities on WoW. As you transition from 1.0(most secure) down to.5(least), the response time lengthens and the responding forces shrink.
I've had the privilage of seeing them attack and actually get away - which is incredibly difficult in 1.0 space(most secure). I've also had Newbs open fire on me and get whacked before I could return the favor(they attack you, you and your party is free to attack back).
While permanent death doesn't happen in Eve, the penalties START with the loss of your ship.
Unstated: The dormatories were for enlisted ages 18-22. Very much adults in most people's minds. Probably applies to colleges as well, if not as much because most won't have regular room inspections or other such 'silly' rules.
I just finished reading the article, I found it interesting that the 'toys' that they provided amounted to 'non-sharp junk' and provided far more entertainment than the 'child-safe' structures that were otherwise approved, resulting in them being very expensive(have to be carefully designed and built, unbreakable by kids), but 'boring' because they're static.
Meanwhile kids are unlikely to hurt themselves in a way that they won't be back up and playing in 5-10 minutes with a used car tire(carefully inspected to make sure no steel belting is exposed), but as they can move it around and do things with it will hold their interest for far longer. It's also essentially free.
In practice, you will limit that voltage to whatever the application actually needs, however
Actually, it's more common to design the application to the voltage that the battery system provides. You try to limit 'limiting voltage' as much as possible because said voltage regulating equipment tends to waste any over-voltage as heat, rather than useful work. They have voltage converters now that are considerably better, but it's still better to design for the 'naturual' voltage of the battery/cells.
Let's try a different approach. I give you a battery that's labeled as '30Amp-Hours'. I also hand you a device that's 30 watts, perhaps it's a small floodlight. It has the necessary design features that it's compatible with the battery I gave you. How long can that battery power the device? Do you need additional information?
Do you know how often they have to swap out engines in the M1 Abrams tank, despite the air filters? They're also less fuel efficient than diesel engine tanks.
Part of that is the age of the M1A1 Abrams. WHEN it was designed the turbine system was state of the art and produced far more power in less space than diesels of that generation could ever hope for.
I've read some possible projects to upgrade the tank, ranging from stuffing a modern diesel in here to putting in an updated turbine to making the tank a hybrid, at which point the turbine would swapped for a highly efficient fixed power one.
Despite "common knowledge" that "PCs are faster", at least if we can trust Valve's statistics (about a third of their PC users run games on an integrated GPU!), no it isn't.
Consider how many laptops are out there... My laptops have both integrated and dedicated GPUs, depending on when Steam's survey comes up they can get quite different results. For that matter I've been playing quite a few 'casual' games that shouldn't stress ANY CPU on my laptop.
Also, to echo the AC - Source on the 7850/7870 thing? I know that all of my cards from the last 5 years handles 1080P rendering just fine.
When the potential difference is constant. having more charge available in a battery means that it will run longer and thus will have been able to do more work before it is depleted.
True, however when you're comparing batteries of different chemistry the potential difference is unlikely to be constant. Ergo, when you go comparing a.13V sugar cell(source elsewhere in thread) to a 3V li-Ion cell, you need 23 times the charge in the former to match the latter.
Charge is as much a measurement of quantity of electricity as volume is a measurements of a quantity of matter.
When we're defining 'quantity' in terms of mass in this context. Let's say we're looking at 1 cubic meter. How many kg is your matter? The quantity depends on what the matter consists of, it will change radically depending if the matter is air, water, sand, iron, or lead.
We're not arguing with you that amp-hours can be used as the equivalent of a gas gauge. What we're trying to tell you is that we can't actually compare this battery with other batteries in terms of energy capacity, IE amount of work available, without knowing an additional bit of knowledge like the voltage.
It's like I have a truck with a 400 mile range and I'm unwilling to replace it with any vehicle with less range. You, as the salesman keep telling me that it has a 20 gallon tank, but refuse to tell me the mpg. Sure, if you tell me that the only differences between Vehicle X and Y are than X has the 'standard' 10 gallon tank and Y has the 'extended' 20 gallon one, I can figure that Y has double the range. I still don't know what that actual range is going to be.
Elon Musk didn't bribe anyone, there's perfectly good legal avenues available. When you bribe an official, you can't stop once you've started. It's a poor business decision. If you depend on him to do business, eventually he will retire or go to jail and you're screwed.
I wasn't actually thinking about anything so official as a 'bribe'.
But yeah, you're right that bribing is a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the obvious solution here, especially given that I'm less offended by a 'beep' than a 'HOOOOONNNNNKKK", is to charge $.10 per second.
Disclaimer: It's my parents that are the accountants, not me. I recommend speaking to an actual CPA before embarking on any such plot as this.
You must be within a certain percent or dollar amount of your final taxes by Dec 31st or you owe penalties for 'insufficient withholding'. I came within a couple hundred due to a pay snafu where my employer didn't take any withholding for several months after I returned from some overseas work*. Just to be sure I sent the IRS a check for a couple hundred in December.
*My salary wasn't taxable while I was overseas.
Uh... ACC(Air Combat Command) has lost a lot of the nuke mission in favor of a new command: Global Strike Command(GSC), which is basically SAC in all but name.
Well, okay not quite - it doesn't have the resources or manpower than SAC did, and it'll take time to build the processes that were dropped when SAC joined TAC.
It is not like the air-force in total have a lack of funding. The problem won't be solved by pushing more tax money their way, the problem in their organization still exists.
Do you realize that military pay is set by congress? An O-3 Captain(Army, AF, and Marines) is paid the same no matter the branch. The services don't have a choice on what they pay him. Levels of each grade is also controlled by congress, so they can't just bump them a grade.
Also, congress has it's fingers so deep in the military budgeting process(you HAVE to buy these tanks, planes, keep that unit operational, etc) that it's not even funny.
There are things that the military does control - certain quality of life matters, for example, but not everything.
Read through the wiki - until relatively recently(we're still talking about decades here) they had to use DC or slip-ring motors, which reduced efficiency, which translates to more batteries needed for a given range, which means more weight and expense.
It's a matter of margins and economy more than whether they could actually do it.
Goes against their training. EVERYTHING to them is checklists. Caller says 'my house is on fire' he goes to the fire binder, flips to 'house' and follows the checklist. Things like getting the address of the fire, calling the appropriate responders, etc...
The two main components, the motors and the battery tech, have also been under continuous development.
The control system which mates the two wasn't really developed over that time. Most of the motors were hooked up to the grid, and battery packs the size of modern EV's were extremely rare, much less mobile versions.
There is no magic technology reason that electric cars are suddenly interesting again. It's environmental and fuel price concerns.
No magic, but I figure the 'bullet' is a combination of LiIon battery technology allowing an EV to finally compete with the unrefueled range of a gasoline vehicle, the development of speed controls that allowed efficient use of AC Induction motors as motor-generators as opposed to less efficient DC motors, combined with the mentioned environmental and fuel price concerns.
Why the hell aren't they all being dishonourably discharged and even court-martialed?
It takes 5 minutes to decertify somebody and pull them from their duties. You can't be 'dishonourably discharged' without a General Court-Martial, which the civilian equivalent is a full up court trial. As such, it takes time to build a case, time to put together a court, time to assemble a jury of equal or higher rank*, time to hold the trial, etc...
Now complicate it by having to do it by x92. A *busy* base might have 1 general court marshal(overseen by a federal judge) per month. Most only have 1 court room, though I suppose they can set up others ad-hoc, but the rooms can't be too bad or it generates a point to base an appeal on.
As such, in order to expediently conduct the trials they'd have to ship the offenders to bases all over the country. Finding enough federal judges would be a problem.
Honestly, I do expect a number of discharges ranging from 'Dishonorable' to 'Other than honorable', even a number of honorable discharges - the military is shrinking so even if the court doesn't find them liable enough for discharge(standards for this are NOT supposed to change year by year), what will happen is that the conviction or article 15 will be a black mark for the 'Quality of Force Review Board' to hook on, forcing them to stand a board and defend themselves as part of a 'whole person' concept, including said black mark, when the board is looking to kick out between 30-70% of those they review.
Their careers in the military are done, even if it might take a couple years for some to be forced out.
*Easy for enlisted, not so easy for officers.
'Career Killer' in the sense that they aren't retiring as an O-5, they're retiring as an O-4 if they're lucky, probably 'let go' after 10 years as an O-3.
To be a USAF officer you have to have your Bachelour's. That translates to most officers being at least 22. 42 is their earliest retirement age, 'Late 30's' would be for an enlisted member. An officer retiring that way would have to be an 'OE', or an enlisted member who went officer. They tend not to get stuck in capsules.
In the USAF (my employer - I'm a former Active Duty civilian), Operational Flying and the career fields that support it are doing quite well, and those that fail to make Major or have some other issue are pushed to UAVs. But yes, as some Lt or Captain in a bunker, you might want to plan an "after-USAF" career. We'll probably always have nukes, but it's a small career field getting smaller with no analog on the "outside".
Think wider. There will always need to be some cross-training done, but 'sits in a bunker waiting to act' does actually cover a number of fields. 911 operator, for example. The cheating is very bad, but for somebody with at clean record and at least a Bachelour's, 911 mostly consists of waiting in a building for a phone call, then working through checklists on the basis of the phone call. Dispachers, sitting watch on non-critical bits of nuclear plants(or getting the training TO sit the critical watches), etc...
A 'Suitably strong ship' isn't something a newb player stupid enough to violate the rules in front of Concord ships would have, and note that I said get away, as opposed to 'doing a lot of damage'. Of course you can do lots of damage if you're willing to write the ship off, but escaping with it intact is a much harder achievement.
In high-sec space you quickly have the problem that you're quickly no longer griefing the Newbs, but fighting the infinitely spawning Concord forces.
You don't need to convert it to UF6 to combine it though. That's part of the reason you might want to use freshly refined(but not enriched/depleted) uranium - You only need to kick up the proportion of 235 a bit with natural, as opposed to providing nearly all of it if you're using depleted.
Never said it was done in the states, and on second thought it's highly unlikely you'd mix it with depleted. 1 kg mixed with 9kg of natural gives you 10kg of 'reactor grade', depending on the reactor, of course, but if you're mixing it with depleted you might only be able to mix it with 4kg for the same effect.
No, but all you have to do is mix it with either depleted uranium or even freshly refined unenriched stuff to get it to the ranges necessary for use.
So what happens if you start getting lag or the program crashes or you lose power or your internet connection goes out or you have something to do and can't stay in a protracted battle? That's pretty lame to lose everything you played or paid for.
Depends on how bad it is. If you're NOT in combat once disconnect is seen by the servers your ship will automatically go into what's essentially a 'warp loop', the intra-system FTL drive, you're unattackable in this state and your ship is effectively removed from play. Call it ~2 minutes or so. When you log back in you'll warp to the same spot you left from(gives you some intel before you're attackable). If you're in combat, this will still happen, but takes substantially longer.
As for losing power - buy an UPS, get a better internet connection, etc...
'Losing everything' - unless you're a complete newbie with only 1 ship, highly unlikely. I have ~36 ships hanging out in hangers all over the place, I can only lose 1 from 'surprise disconnect', I'll still have my skills and ISK(in-game currency), etc... Even then you're always guaranteed to be able to get a crappy ship to start over.
Worst case - lose the ship, the clone(have to buy another), some implants. Could be very expensive, but still hardly 'everything'.
For those who haven't played the game 'High Sec spaces' are basically the safe havens of Eve. Protected by the Concord, it's generally safe from PvP. It also compromises a smallish fraction of the systems, and rarer resources are either extremely rare or outright unavailable.
However, it's a bit like being in a courthouse - while there are certainly baliffs ready to stop anybody who commits violence, they aren't necessarily where YOU are, and an enemy sufficiently uncaring of being caught can still cause damage. It's a bit like the major raids on cities on WoW. As you transition from 1.0(most secure) down to .5(least), the response time lengthens and the responding forces shrink.
I've had the privilage of seeing them attack and actually get away - which is incredibly difficult in 1.0 space(most secure). I've also had Newbs open fire on me and get whacked before I could return the favor(they attack you, you and your party is free to attack back).
While permanent death doesn't happen in Eve, the penalties START with the loss of your ship.
Unstated: The dormatories were for enlisted ages 18-22. Very much adults in most people's minds. Probably applies to colleges as well, if not as much because most won't have regular room inspections or other such 'silly' rules.
I just finished reading the article, I found it interesting that the 'toys' that they provided amounted to 'non-sharp junk' and provided far more entertainment than the 'child-safe' structures that were otherwise approved, resulting in them being very expensive(have to be carefully designed and built, unbreakable by kids), but 'boring' because they're static.
Meanwhile kids are unlikely to hurt themselves in a way that they won't be back up and playing in 5-10 minutes with a used car tire(carefully inspected to make sure no steel belting is exposed), but as they can move it around and do things with it will hold their interest for far longer. It's also essentially free.
In my experience attempting too much control can and will lead to more misbehavior, I've seen it in dormitories.
When you try to organize things too much, you often end up with periods of nothing(misbehavior opportunities) due to scheduling, lagging, etc...
In practice, you will limit that voltage to whatever the application actually needs, however
Actually, it's more common to design the application to the voltage that the battery system provides. You try to limit 'limiting voltage' as much as possible because said voltage regulating equipment tends to waste any over-voltage as heat, rather than useful work. They have voltage converters now that are considerably better, but it's still better to design for the 'naturual' voltage of the battery/cells.
Let's try a different approach. I give you a battery that's labeled as '30Amp-Hours'. I also hand you a device that's 30 watts, perhaps it's a small floodlight. It has the necessary design features that it's compatible with the battery I gave you. How long can that battery power the device? Do you need additional information?
Do you know how often they have to swap out engines in the M1 Abrams tank, despite the air filters? They're also less fuel efficient than diesel engine tanks.
Part of that is the age of the M1A1 Abrams. WHEN it was designed the turbine system was state of the art and produced far more power in less space than diesels of that generation could ever hope for.
I've read some possible projects to upgrade the tank, ranging from stuffing a modern diesel in here to putting in an updated turbine to making the tank a hybrid, at which point the turbine would swapped for a highly efficient fixed power one.
Despite "common knowledge" that "PCs are faster", at least if we can trust Valve's statistics (about a third of their PC users run games on an integrated GPU!), no it isn't.
Consider how many laptops are out there... My laptops have both integrated and dedicated GPUs, depending on when Steam's survey comes up they can get quite different results. For that matter I've been playing quite a few 'casual' games that shouldn't stress ANY CPU on my laptop.
Also, to echo the AC - Source on the 7850/7870 thing? I know that all of my cards from the last 5 years handles 1080P rendering just fine.
When the potential difference is constant. having more charge available in a battery means that it will run longer and thus will have been able to do more work before it is depleted.
True, however when you're comparing batteries of different chemistry the potential difference is unlikely to be constant. Ergo, when you go comparing a .13V sugar cell(source elsewhere in thread) to a 3V li-Ion cell, you need 23 times the charge in the former to match the latter.
Charge is as much a measurement of quantity of electricity as volume is a measurements of a quantity of matter.
When we're defining 'quantity' in terms of mass in this context. Let's say we're looking at 1 cubic meter. How many kg is your matter? The quantity depends on what the matter consists of, it will change radically depending if the matter is air, water, sand, iron, or lead.
We're not arguing with you that amp-hours can be used as the equivalent of a gas gauge. What we're trying to tell you is that we can't actually compare this battery with other batteries in terms of energy capacity, IE amount of work available, without knowing an additional bit of knowledge like the voltage.
It's like I have a truck with a 400 mile range and I'm unwilling to replace it with any vehicle with less range. You, as the salesman keep telling me that it has a 20 gallon tank, but refuse to tell me the mpg. Sure, if you tell me that the only differences between Vehicle X and Y are than X has the 'standard' 10 gallon tank and Y has the 'extended' 20 gallon one, I can figure that Y has double the range. I still don't know what that actual range is going to be.
Elon Musk didn't bribe anyone, there's perfectly good legal avenues available. When you bribe an official, you can't stop once you've started. It's a poor business decision. If you depend on him to do business, eventually he will retire or go to jail and you're screwed.
I wasn't actually thinking about anything so official as a 'bribe'.
But yeah, you're right that bribing is a bad idea.