Generally, 2.5mm^2 Twin & Earth cable is used on ring mains as this is suitable for short runs (ie homes), for longer runs or where a single appliance (eg a cooker or a shower) occupies the circuit due to power demand, 4mm cable is used. 2.5mm cable is normally rated for 240V@20A but because of the setup the circuit is rated at 40A, the ring main is fused at 30A.
You didn't understand my post at all, did you? I'll admit: I'm a 'field expedient' electrician* without formal training, but I've read the codebook. If you tried to run a ring circuit here in the USA the inspector would look at you like you're crazy.
The concern is that if you have a ring circuit, you can no longer de-energize the boxes by disconnecting a single set of wires. In addition - 2.5mm cable is rated for 20A. In a ring circuit they 'rate' it at 40A but have you put a 30A breaker on it. Now the NEC presumes people are idiots. Or at least the people who are most at risk for the fires, electrocutions, and shocks they're trying to prevent. The concern is that you have some idiot working the walls and he cuts through one of the ring wires. Because it's a 'ring', you now have two radial branch circuits hooked into the same breaker, each with a max of 20A. It's 'probably' fine if they were cut approximately in the middle, but that's not guaranteed. So let's say all the boxes ended up on one branch. Now you hook up a 30A load to it - where the wires are only rated to 20A in this configuration. Trouble!
As such, in the USA running multiple sets of lines to power a device is seriously frowned upon; you are to use the right size wires, not multiple runs of smaller wires. You don't run 2 lines of 14 gauge wire for a 20A circuit, you run 1 line of 12 gauge
Then again, rereading your original mention of it, maybe I'm missing something: Are we talking about the wiring inside the walls, or in the cord hooking the appliance up to the wall? I was looking at the wiring inside the walls, because that's what came up when I searched for your terms.
The earth pin, for instance, on the plug is thicker and longer and rotated 90 degrees with respect the other two pins.
It's not like this is magic, for example the more modern US NEMA connections also feature an earth pin that is longer, except it's circular vs being rotated. Because we don't always require the circular ground pins, for appliances where keying matters, we make the neutral blade wider so you still can't plug it in backwards.
Finally, on the shielding - while our smaller connectors make foreign object intrusion less likely(most butter knives won't make contact, for example), shielded outlets are available as you mention.
as opposed to radial wiring which is prone to single-point failure not to mention a fire hazard.
References on this? Because my reading indicates that it's probably more of a electrocution hazard than it saves on fire hazards - and given that at least part of the fire hazard is 'Idiot drills the wire', a ring circuit is actually more likely to cause a fire as well. Plus, well, it says in the wiki that it was used to save on copper, so a ring circuit has each connector using less wire - so if said idiot cuts one of the lines, he may not know because his outlets are still powered, but now the breaker is oversized for the capacity of the circuit, leading to overheating and fire hazard.
Well if we use the same definition of WMD that is being used against the Boston Marathon bombings...
When that happened I actually posted that I disagreed with labeling the pressure cooker bombs as 'WMD'. Call them 'destructive devices', 'Improvised Explosive Devices', etc... But save 'WMD' for actual WMD by international definition - Chemical, Biological, Radiological(dirty bomb), Nuclear. Or at least something like a truck bomb. If it can't kill (nearly) everyone in a city block, it's not WMD.
Remember that nobody is altruistic in this politicosphere. The US will want Syria for only strategic value.
Can you identify the strategic value of Syria?
As for actual intervention, it's been my impression that the White House WANTS to stay 'hands off'. While it doesn't particularly like Assad, the rebels consist of a lot of fighters that are even less in the US's interests(though not all). So funneling them guns would actually be contrary to US interests.
Roughly speaking, we'd prefer Syria be stable(good for everyone), but it's like a match between two teams that we don't particularly care about. As such, it falls to other hot-button topics like NBC use, human rights violations, and such to pick a side.
The new suits are much nicer, lighter, easier to put on, and breath better. The new mask is far easier to breath in, and since it has two filters you can swap them without removing the mask and still breath.
You make some good points about a 'heavily' contaminated environment, but my point would be that for the most part you can avoid said areas. It takes an awful lot of chemicals to contaminate an area badly enough that you can't simply drive around it and wait for it to break down before entering the area.
You are right though, it's still a huge pain in the ass.
The slowing down gives a major disadvantage to a fast moving offensive. Blitzkrieg becomes sitzkrieg. Or more accurately "sweat like hell while getting done a fraction of normal"-krieg
Doesn't really matter if your opposition has air dominance - they simply bomb your fortifications, troops, etc... It might slow the ground forces a bit, but US tanks have NBC filtration, so they aren't slowed at all(though cleanup can be an annoyance).
Hardly. We have a lot more options than just (invade | do-not-invade). We can help the refugees for one.
Certainly. Which is why I said 'depending on our actions' as opposed to 'invade or not'.
Right now this smacks too much of "wag the dog".
To me, hardly. This is a situation that has been brewing long before the NSA leaks and Obama has been mostly sitting on it period - and remember that he hasn't actually announced anything about the latest situation. This is a reporter making a story about standard military actions: 1. The CIC has made certain policy statements concerning actions in specific circumstances 2. It appears that the 'specific circumstances' has occurred. Ergo the DoD, in line with the policy statements, is presenting the president with a set of options to fulfill those policy statements.
This is a reaction to a foreign event. NSA activities are being shoved into the background by the standard newsflow, no 'wag the dog' needed.
The problem with that is that it is just as easy to kill thousands of people with regular bullets and bombs as it is with chemical weapons.
What a coincidence, I just had a chemical warfare exercise yesterday. As the AC and geekoid mentions, there's operational differences between chemical weapons and regular ones. It's my personal opinion that chemical weapons make a more effective weapon against civilians, both terror and effective, than it does against prepared military forces. Bullets and bombs still work against a prepared military, while chemical attacks are reduced to a mere annoyance by protective equipment.
It's not going to deny terrain or soften a hardened target occupied by military personnel ready for chemical attack. Especially hardened targets will likely have the filters and systems to keep contamination from penetrating the facilities.
And that gets back to it being just as easy to kill people with bombs and bullets as it is with chemical weapons.
Why do we care so much that it is *CHEMICAL WEAPONS* as opposed to *BULLETS*?
Cultural perception is that chemical weapons are worse than bombs and bullets.
Why would we not want to get involved if 10,000 people are killed by bullets? But 100 people killed by nerve agent and we're in an uproar?
It's more that 'more than 10k people have already been killed by artillery and small arms fire; now they're adding in chemical weapon attacks'. They're upping their 'game', much like how more Japanese died from conventional and fire bombs during WWII than both nuclear bombs, but it's the nuclear bombs that get 90% of the attention.
I guarantee that we will kill/cripple more civilians in a war than they have killed/crippled with chemicals.
True, but would we match their combined count? They've already killed a lot with conventional weapons. There's still motive to intervene even when the slaughter is mostly knives, there's motive when it's only conventional arms, but for some reason NBC has special meaning on the political front. Obama has made that distinction, not I.
leading rhetoric, mostly because I believe the tertiary effects are impossible to determine, but it'd be stupid to deny them. There's also problems with regimes doing things they think they can get away with because 'the USA/UN/NATO is occupied elsewhere'.
Yes, but you do not have the lion's share of the collective will of the nations
True, but my intended point was more that US presence is often noted first, whether the operation is UN driven or not. It also means that if the USA really doesn't want to be involved in some operation it can cripple the operations of other countries that do want to be involved.
More tax = more votes? Interesting proposal...;) I like making people think, I once proposed something along the lines of you getting 1 vote per OOM of tax you pay. $1-9, 1 vote, $10-99, 2, etc... Most people would end up with 3-4 votes, but even Bill Gates would only get 7-8.
Might makes right: Not necessarily good, but something of reality when you consider countries something like a primitive pre-government tribe. IE there's no real 'law enforcement' but on a part time voluntary basis, and what would be a crime for one isn't for another if nobody can be arsed to make an argument about it.
As for your idea about Syria - major reforms to the UN is a different topic and would take years, and the question becomes how long would it take to win said mandate from the UN. The UN is hardly perfect, it might make sense to have a NATO intervention instead.
The Syrian government is a bunch of amateur pikers next to us.
Wasn't talking about the Syrian government. And I contest the 'deliberate' part of mishandling Iraq. That screwup required no 'deliberate' on the macroscale* to be as bad as it was.
*Plenty of corrupt people on the microscale to go for as much money as they could.
Will there really be more dead innocents if we don't intercede here, thus signaling to other brutal regimes that there are no limits on the slaughter they can impose within their own country? I won't say 'against their own people', because those that commit these slaughters don't see those they target as fellow people.
Turkey the 'smarter' of the two? Perhaps, but the rest of your post doesn't prove it: 1. The USA has yet to declare that they're going to intervene. That will only be done by explicit order of the POTUS, Barack Obama. Thus far we've kept out of the conflict. 2. The military is 'standing by', because it monitors the situation and keeps the POTUS's stated intentions/orders in mind - which in this case is 'definitive proof of chemical weapon use will result in intervention'. 3. Turkey is a heck of a lot closer than the USA when it comes to helping refugees; it's logical that they'd be involved more.
What do you mean by "those"? Chemical weapons? It's open knowledge that Iraq had chemical weapons under Saddam's regime, and that he used them in warfare against Iran(with mixed results) and against the Kurds in his own country(with much less mixed results).
The question is whether he still had them when we went in under the excuse that he might still have them, which we now know was 'either no or effectively no*'
*IE buried so deep and forgotten that employment was only a dream.
The only reason the rest of the world gives a damn is those nukes as well as the fact those countries also have large enough military organizations that you can't screw them over without a big fight. Is that really a reason to give somebody special privileges?
Given that I tend to view inter-country relations a bit like primitive human relations before the development of government, IE rule of the strong, the answer is 'pretty much'.
You don't get any action unless somebody with the power can be arsed to spend the effort. The more effort required, the less likely any country is to do it.
The problem is that the rules are phenomenally complex.
Sure they are, but that doesn't stop 90% of people from filing on time, or at least filing for the automatic extension. For that matter, nearly every church in the country manages to do the same.
I get the idea that the IRS doesn't revoke the status for 'simple' mistakes, they revoke it for major things like not filing for 3+ years. If they're acting within the rules of an exempt organization, even an audit isn't going to turn up more than minor fines at most, and at best it'd amount to IRS agents helping to fix the paperwork.
FTA:
"The status of the 501c3 is lost because we (me) failed to file the 3 past years' tax returns on time. Note that we've Never filed returns since our first re-organization to the LLC in 2005.
Don't know about the latter situations, but I remember reading about Rwanda. The problem there was that while we knew trouble was brewing, it happened both far more quickly and far quieter on the news/communications side than we anticipated. Roughly speaking, it was over by the time the politicians got around to authorizing military intercession, UN and elsewhere. Politicians are slow.
Other than that, the UN, including US assets, has interceded in many more occasions than those you list. First that comes to mind is Bosnia.
I like how TemperedAlchemist points out Russia and China and you counter with the USA having human rights violations... We're still peanuts compared to them.
Still, this is icky, I'll admit. My isolationist side wants to let Syrians do what they want, the humanitarian side perks up at 'using chemical weapons against it's own people' and wants to intercede.
No 'ordainment by God' necessary. We're in a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation. It's just that we'll be condemned by different groups depending on our actions.
As for the 'collective will of the nations', I'd like to point out that the USA provides the lion's share of expeditionary support to forces in situations like this. We might not have more fighter planes than the rest of the world, but we have more aerial refuelers, more cargo airlift, more transport.
There's been rumors of Syria using chemical weapons for a while now, Barack Obama has reinforced the US policy of 'We'll go after anybody who uses CBRNE/NBC weapons', but has been waffling that Syrian weapon use has been unconfirmed. Well, if this is confirmation...
The idea is to save lives in the long run by putting limits on harsh regimes in that they don't want to risk the UN/USA coming down on them.
I'd be worried about the prism; heavy radiation can do some weird things, it might rapidly 'age' the prism to the point it's no longer transparent enough.
Also, you can get a level on the tanks without installing anything on them with the infrared camera idea. With the laser-prism idea you still need to install the prisms and align the lasers.
There's a reason I linked the MT site - it has lots of images of them using infrared technology to determine tank levels and more.
Depending on the size of the tank, radiation isn't going to do much at all. Worst case you might have to replace the sensors more often, but remember that you're not 'testing' a narrow strip, you're taking an image of the whole tank.
If you do have rad-hard electronics in place, an optical sensor for the stripes, or a hall effect sensor for a rod with magnets at intervals, or similar, are easy to add. If not, the amount of protruding rod can be read from some hundreds of meters or more with a wholly unexciting pair of binoculars.
A bit more high-tech, but which allows you to keep a goodly distance away would be a simple infrared sensor system POINTED at the tanks.
Reasoning: Liquids tend to keep their temperature more stable than solids. Tanks tend to not be well insulated(if they are, get a more sensitive sensor). Temperatures vary through the day, but the liquid shouldn't change much. Ergo if you point a infrared sensor at a tank, you should be able to easily draw the water line. A little calibration for temperature of the liquid if you need to account for expansion/contraction due to it(how handy that you already know it's temperature!) and you have a very accurate measure of how much water is in the tank.
Heck, MIT has a page with fancy images about doing just that and more...
Like I said, an expandable trunk doesn't require folding. It needn't be a part of the car. It can just be like a basket out the back.
A basket off the back wouldn't be stable, and might provide less protection(theft, rain, privacy).
Oh, and 'not optimal' is far different than 'totally useless'. It doesn't have to be the best solution to still be viable. If nothing else, 'cool looking' is an option. And this is the first post where you mentioned safety, and I only partially agree with the 'no-side impact' because, well, first it's a concept car built by college students when I'm willing to bet that 99% of concept cars, even ones by professionals, are deathtraps in collisions, and 2, plastic can be structural. I don't know what basis you're using to say that you can fold it yourself.
The thing might be light enough that in a sub 40 mph impact(remember it's intended for inner-city) you could design the plastic to deform and have the whole car shoved to the side.
Well bringing the discussion back on point, (I know, I know), how would Wiki predict a flop ahead of time?
I think it ends up being a bit like Netflix's recommendation system. If you use enough computing power to find even seemingly random correlations, if they hold up for long enough there has to be a common factor somewhere and it can be used to predict with surprising accuracy.
Of course, the prediction itself will change the end result once companies start using it to alter their own actions.
It would appear TFA addresses none of this. They don't appear to throw out updates and page views that pre-date the actual release date. The look at AFTER-THE FACT data.
While it's poorly worded, it looks like they do indeed look at data available during pre-release; wikipedia logging is detailed enough to collect historical pre-release activity after film release so they can look into the past to build their models/look for correlation.
The problem is still there, even if you remember the groceries. If I bought those groceries on the way to work, I do not want to have to take them all into the office with me when I get there.
You buy groceries on the way to work? I buy them on the way home - not wanting my cold stuff to warm up, fresh greens to wilt during the heat of the day, etc... Plus, well, I'm not a morning person.
Frankly speaking, you don't buy a vehicle like this without accepting compromise. If that's you can't buy groceries before work, so be it. It's still better than a motorcycle cargo capability wise.
For that matter the compromise for morning grocery purchase(or just hauling something for after work) might be to pay the extra $ for a bigger parking spot where you don't need to fold it up for the day.
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Generally, 2.5mm^2 Twin & Earth cable is used on ring mains as this is suitable for short runs (ie homes), for longer runs or where a single appliance (eg a cooker or a shower) occupies the circuit due to power demand, 4mm cable is used. 2.5mm cable is normally rated for 240V@20A but because of the setup the circuit is rated at 40A, the ring main is fused at 30A.
You didn't understand my post at all, did you? I'll admit: I'm a 'field expedient' electrician* without formal training, but I've read the codebook. If you tried to run a ring circuit here in the USA the inspector would look at you like you're crazy.
The concern is that if you have a ring circuit, you can no longer de-energize the boxes by disconnecting a single set of wires. In addition - 2.5mm cable is rated for 20A. In a ring circuit they 'rate' it at 40A but have you put a 30A breaker on it. Now the NEC presumes people are idiots. Or at least the people who are most at risk for the fires, electrocutions, and shocks they're trying to prevent. The concern is that you have some idiot working the walls and he cuts through one of the ring wires. Because it's a 'ring', you now have two radial branch circuits hooked into the same breaker, each with a max of 20A. It's 'probably' fine if they were cut approximately in the middle, but that's not guaranteed. So let's say all the boxes ended up on one branch. Now you hook up a 30A load to it - where the wires are only rated to 20A in this configuration. Trouble!
As such, in the USA running multiple sets of lines to power a device is seriously frowned upon; you are to use the right size wires, not multiple runs of smaller wires. You don't run 2 lines of 14 gauge wire for a 20A circuit, you run 1 line of 12 gauge
Then again, rereading your original mention of it, maybe I'm missing something: Are we talking about the wiring inside the walls, or in the cord hooking the appliance up to the wall? I was looking at the wiring inside the walls, because that's what came up when I searched for your terms.
The earth pin, for instance, on the plug is thicker and longer and rotated 90 degrees with respect the other two pins.
It's not like this is magic, for example the more modern US NEMA connections also feature an earth pin that is longer, except it's circular vs being rotated. Because we don't always require the circular ground pins, for appliances where keying matters, we make the neutral blade wider so you still can't plug it in backwards.
Finally, on the shielding - while our smaller connectors make foreign object intrusion less likely(most butter knives won't make contact, for example), shielded outlets are available as you mention.
as opposed to radial wiring which is prone to single-point failure not to mention a fire hazard.
References on this? Because my reading indicates that it's probably more of a electrocution hazard than it saves on fire hazards - and given that at least part of the fire hazard is 'Idiot drills the wire', a ring circuit is actually more likely to cause a fire as well. Plus, well, it says in the wiki that it was used to save on copper, so a ring circuit has each connector using less wire - so if said idiot cuts one of the lines, he may not know because his outlets are still powered, but now the breaker is oversized for the capacity of the circuit, leading to overheating and fire hazard.
Well if we use the same definition of WMD that is being used against the Boston Marathon bombings...
When that happened I actually posted that I disagreed with labeling the pressure cooker bombs as 'WMD'. Call them 'destructive devices', 'Improvised Explosive Devices', etc... But save 'WMD' for actual WMD by international definition - Chemical, Biological, Radiological(dirty bomb), Nuclear. Or at least something like a truck bomb. If it can't kill (nearly) everyone in a city block, it's not WMD.
Remember that nobody is altruistic in this politicosphere. The US will want Syria for only strategic value.
Can you identify the strategic value of Syria?
As for actual intervention, it's been my impression that the White House WANTS to stay 'hands off'. While it doesn't particularly like Assad, the rebels consist of a lot of fighters that are even less in the US's interests(though not all). So funneling them guns would actually be contrary to US interests.
Roughly speaking, we'd prefer Syria be stable(good for everyone), but it's like a match between two teams that we don't particularly care about. As such, it falls to other hot-button topics like NBC use, human rights violations, and such to pick a side.
The new suits are much nicer, lighter, easier to put on, and breath better. The new mask is far easier to breath in, and since it has two filters you can swap them without removing the mask and still breath.
You make some good points about a 'heavily' contaminated environment, but my point would be that for the most part you can avoid said areas. It takes an awful lot of chemicals to contaminate an area badly enough that you can't simply drive around it and wait for it to break down before entering the area.
You are right though, it's still a huge pain in the ass.
The slowing down gives a major disadvantage to a fast moving offensive. Blitzkrieg becomes sitzkrieg. Or more accurately "sweat like hell while getting done a fraction of normal"-krieg
Doesn't really matter if your opposition has air dominance - they simply bomb your fortifications, troops, etc... It might slow the ground forces a bit, but US tanks have NBC filtration, so they aren't slowed at all(though cleanup can be an annoyance).
Hardly. We have a lot more options than just (invade | do-not-invade). We can help the refugees for one.
Certainly. Which is why I said 'depending on our actions' as opposed to 'invade or not'.
Right now this smacks too much of "wag the dog".
To me, hardly. This is a situation that has been brewing long before the NSA leaks and Obama has been mostly sitting on it period - and remember that he hasn't actually announced anything about the latest situation. This is a reporter making a story about standard military actions:
1. The CIC has made certain policy statements concerning actions in specific circumstances
2. It appears that the 'specific circumstances' has occurred. Ergo the DoD, in line with the policy statements, is presenting the president with a set of options to fulfill those policy statements.
This is a reaction to a foreign event. NSA activities are being shoved into the background by the standard newsflow, no 'wag the dog' needed.
The problem with that is that it is just as easy to kill thousands of people with regular bullets and bombs as it is with chemical weapons.
What a coincidence, I just had a chemical warfare exercise yesterday. As the AC and geekoid mentions, there's operational differences between chemical weapons and regular ones. It's my personal opinion that chemical weapons make a more effective weapon against civilians, both terror and effective, than it does against prepared military forces. Bullets and bombs still work against a prepared military, while chemical attacks are reduced to a mere annoyance by protective equipment.
It's not going to deny terrain or soften a hardened target occupied by military personnel ready for chemical attack. Especially hardened targets will likely have the filters and systems to keep contamination from penetrating the facilities.
And that gets back to it being just as easy to kill people with bombs and bullets as it is with chemical weapons.
Why do we care so much that it is *CHEMICAL WEAPONS* as opposed to *BULLETS*?
Cultural perception is that chemical weapons are worse than bombs and bullets.
Why would we not want to get involved if 10,000 people are killed by bullets? But 100 people killed by nerve agent and we're in an uproar?
It's more that 'more than 10k people have already been killed by artillery and small arms fire; now they're adding in chemical weapon attacks'. They're upping their 'game', much like how more Japanese died from conventional and fire bombs during WWII than both nuclear bombs, but it's the nuclear bombs that get 90% of the attention.
I guarantee that we will kill/cripple more civilians in a war than they have killed/crippled with chemicals.
True, but would we match their combined count? They've already killed a lot with conventional weapons. There's still motive to intervene even when the slaughter is mostly knives, there's motive when it's only conventional arms, but for some reason NBC has special meaning on the political front. Obama has made that distinction, not I.
leading rhetoric, mostly because I believe the tertiary effects are impossible to determine, but it'd be stupid to deny them. There's also problems with regimes doing things they think they can get away with because 'the USA/UN/NATO is occupied elsewhere'.
Tossing money at defense contractors, sure, but deliberately aiming for the effort to fail? Not so much.
Yes, but you do not have the lion's share of the collective will of the nations
True, but my intended point was more that US presence is often noted first, whether the operation is UN driven or not. It also means that if the USA really doesn't want to be involved in some operation it can cripple the operations of other countries that do want to be involved.
More tax = more votes? Interesting proposal... ;) I like making people think, I once proposed something along the lines of you getting 1 vote per OOM of tax you pay. $1-9, 1 vote, $10-99, 2, etc... Most people would end up with 3-4 votes, but even Bill Gates would only get 7-8.
Might makes right: Not necessarily good, but something of reality when you consider countries something like a primitive pre-government tribe. IE there's no real 'law enforcement' but on a part time voluntary basis, and what would be a crime for one isn't for another if nobody can be arsed to make an argument about it.
As for your idea about Syria - major reforms to the UN is a different topic and would take years, and the question becomes how long would it take to win said mandate from the UN. The UN is hardly perfect, it might make sense to have a NATO intervention instead.
The Syrian government is a bunch of amateur pikers next to us.
Wasn't talking about the Syrian government. And I contest the 'deliberate' part of mishandling Iraq. That screwup required no 'deliberate' on the macroscale* to be as bad as it was.
*Plenty of corrupt people on the microscale to go for as much money as they could.
Will there really be more dead innocents if we don't intercede here, thus signaling to other brutal regimes that there are no limits on the slaughter they can impose within their own country? I won't say 'against their own people', because those that commit these slaughters don't see those they target as fellow people.
Turkey the 'smarter' of the two? Perhaps, but the rest of your post doesn't prove it:
1. The USA has yet to declare that they're going to intervene. That will only be done by explicit order of the POTUS, Barack Obama. Thus far we've kept out of the conflict.
2. The military is 'standing by', because it monitors the situation and keeps the POTUS's stated intentions/orders in mind - which in this case is 'definitive proof of chemical weapon use will result in intervention'.
3. Turkey is a heck of a lot closer than the USA when it comes to helping refugees; it's logical that they'd be involved more.
What do you mean by "those"? Chemical weapons? It's open knowledge that Iraq had chemical weapons under Saddam's regime, and that he used them in warfare against Iran(with mixed results) and against the Kurds in his own country(with much less mixed results).
The question is whether he still had them when we went in under the excuse that he might still have them, which we now know was 'either no or effectively no*'
*IE buried so deep and forgotten that employment was only a dream.
The only reason the rest of the world gives a damn is those nukes as well as the fact those countries also have large enough military organizations that you can't screw them over without a big fight. Is that really a reason to give somebody special privileges?
Given that I tend to view inter-country relations a bit like primitive human relations before the development of government, IE rule of the strong, the answer is 'pretty much'.
You don't get any action unless somebody with the power can be arsed to spend the effort. The more effort required, the less likely any country is to do it.
The problem is that the rules are phenomenally complex.
Sure they are, but that doesn't stop 90% of people from filing on time, or at least filing for the automatic extension. For that matter, nearly every church in the country manages to do the same.
I get the idea that the IRS doesn't revoke the status for 'simple' mistakes, they revoke it for major things like not filing for 3+ years. If they're acting within the rules of an exempt organization, even an audit isn't going to turn up more than minor fines at most, and at best it'd amount to IRS agents helping to fix the paperwork.
FTA:
"The status of the 501c3 is lost because we (me) failed to file the 3 past years' tax returns on time. Note that we've Never filed returns since our first re-organization to the LLC in 2005.
Don't know about the latter situations, but I remember reading about Rwanda. The problem there was that while we knew trouble was brewing, it happened both far more quickly and far quieter on the news/communications side than we anticipated. Roughly speaking, it was over by the time the politicians got around to authorizing military intercession, UN and elsewhere. Politicians are slow.
Other than that, the UN, including US assets, has interceded in many more occasions than those you list. First that comes to mind is Bosnia.
I like how TemperedAlchemist points out Russia and China and you counter with the USA having human rights violations... We're still peanuts compared to them.
Still, this is icky, I'll admit. My isolationist side wants to let Syrians do what they want, the humanitarian side perks up at 'using chemical weapons against it's own people' and wants to intercede.
No 'ordainment by God' necessary. We're in a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation. It's just that we'll be condemned by different groups depending on our actions.
As for the 'collective will of the nations', I'd like to point out that the USA provides the lion's share of expeditionary support to forces in situations like this. We might not have more fighter planes than the rest of the world, but we have more aerial refuelers, more cargo airlift, more transport.
There's been rumors of Syria using chemical weapons for a while now, Barack Obama has reinforced the US policy of 'We'll go after anybody who uses CBRNE/NBC weapons', but has been waffling that Syrian weapon use has been unconfirmed. Well, if this is confirmation...
The idea is to save lives in the long run by putting limits on harsh regimes in that they don't want to risk the UN/USA coming down on them.
I'd be worried about the prism; heavy radiation can do some weird things, it might rapidly 'age' the prism to the point it's no longer transparent enough.
Also, you can get a level on the tanks without installing anything on them with the infrared camera idea. With the laser-prism idea you still need to install the prisms and align the lasers.
There's a reason I linked the MT site - it has lots of images of them using infrared technology to determine tank levels and more.
Depending on the size of the tank, radiation isn't going to do much at all. Worst case you might have to replace the sensors more often, but remember that you're not 'testing' a narrow strip, you're taking an image of the whole tank.
If you do have rad-hard electronics in place, an optical sensor for the stripes, or a hall effect sensor for a rod with magnets at intervals, or similar, are easy to add. If not, the amount of protruding rod can be read from some hundreds of meters or more with a wholly unexciting pair of binoculars.
A bit more high-tech, but which allows you to keep a goodly distance away would be a simple infrared sensor system POINTED at the tanks.
Reasoning: Liquids tend to keep their temperature more stable than solids. Tanks tend to not be well insulated(if they are, get a more sensitive sensor). Temperatures vary through the day, but the liquid shouldn't change much. Ergo if you point a infrared sensor at a tank, you should be able to easily draw the water line. A little calibration for temperature of the liquid if you need to account for expansion/contraction due to it(how handy that you already know it's temperature!) and you have a very accurate measure of how much water is in the tank.
Heck, MIT has a page with fancy images about doing just that and more...
Like I said, an expandable trunk doesn't require folding. It needn't be a part of the car. It can just be like a basket out the back.
A basket off the back wouldn't be stable, and might provide less protection(theft, rain, privacy).
Oh, and 'not optimal' is far different than 'totally useless'. It doesn't have to be the best solution to still be viable. If nothing else, 'cool looking' is an option. And this is the first post where you mentioned safety, and I only partially agree with the 'no-side impact' because, well, first it's a concept car built by college students when I'm willing to bet that 99% of concept cars, even ones by professionals, are deathtraps in collisions, and 2, plastic can be structural. I don't know what basis you're using to say that you can fold it yourself.
The thing might be light enough that in a sub 40 mph impact(remember it's intended for inner-city) you could design the plastic to deform and have the whole car shoved to the side.
Well bringing the discussion back on point, (I know, I know), how would Wiki predict a flop ahead of time?
I think it ends up being a bit like Netflix's recommendation system. If you use enough computing power to find even seemingly random correlations, if they hold up for long enough there has to be a common factor somewhere and it can be used to predict with surprising accuracy.
Of course, the prediction itself will change the end result once companies start using it to alter their own actions.
It would appear TFA addresses none of this. They don't appear to throw out updates and page views that pre-date the actual release date. The look at AFTER-THE FACT data.
While it's poorly worded, it looks like they do indeed look at data available during pre-release; wikipedia logging is detailed enough to collect historical pre-release activity after film release so they can look into the past to build their models/look for correlation.
The problem is still there, even if you remember the groceries. If I bought those groceries on the way to work, I do not want to have to take them all into the office with me when I get there.
You buy groceries on the way to work? I buy them on the way home - not wanting my cold stuff to warm up, fresh greens to wilt during the heat of the day, etc... Plus, well, I'm not a morning person.
Frankly speaking, you don't buy a vehicle like this without accepting compromise. If that's you can't buy groceries before work, so be it. It's still better than a motorcycle cargo capability wise.
For that matter the compromise for morning grocery purchase(or just hauling something for after work) might be to pay the extra $ for a bigger parking spot where you don't need to fold it up for the day.