Indeed. I like to say that if I'm not paying less than 2/3rds the cover price, I'm not trying. My local stores(not B&N) START at 25-30% off the cover price.
As such, ebook versions are typically $2-3 MORE than what I'd pay for the paperback. As such, I only buy books that I know I'll want to keep and reread.
The publishers need to take a page from Steam's game sale model - offer sales and deals just like the brick and mortar stores do on physical product. Declare 30% off everything every so often. You'll get loads and loads of purchases then.
Seriously since when do the cops get involved in corporate contract disputes?
When they're one of the parties in the contract, paying licenses for the software?
National media coverage of MicroFocus suing their customers is probably not a good way for them to drum up business.
To me it sounds like they pretty much have a lock on that market. People who need regular access to those police databases need the software, there's no other options that aren't vastly more expensive due to 'duplicating the wheel' problems.
If I was in NSW's shoes, I'd dump that COPS software in favor of something open.
Who says there's any version of the software that's 'open'? It sounds like it interfaces with international criminal databases. It's probably quite specialized.
Like Muad'Dave said, I figure the Tsunami washing away nearly everything in the area to be a bigger reason for people going to 'live in school gymnasiums'. The earthquake alone was actually survivable.
Otherwise the evacuation area is about my commute to work, so it'd be survivable. But I'm not going to happily move to a place without electricity, water, sewer, and such.
As for 'no mood to suck it up', well, it's their choice, but I figure they're going to start recanting when it really starts hitting pocket books and pollution targets.
At this point, nearly every industrial accident resulting in severe injury or death is the result of 'dumbass' moves. Still, I should probably clarify that I don't consider a single mistake enough to be considered a dumbass. A momentary lapse with a bandsaw that costs you a finger is sad, but doesn't qualify you as being a dumbass.
Removing the finger-guards, not wearing the company mandated safety gauntlet, and attempting to cut the piece WITHOUT the supplied(working, but slightly slower) jig qualifies you as a dumbass.
There's a big difference between 'handful' and enough turbines to power a substantial part of a country's electricity needs. That's his point. You can't do it with even several hundred turbines. By the time you're looking at building enough wind turbines to replace a nuclear plant, especially off-shore, you're looking at cost similar to or even exceeding that of a nuclear plant. There's a LOT of sunk costs with a nuclear plant.
Please don't take this to mean that I'm not for renewable power, it's just that I believe that we still need a mixed supply - my 'ideal' carbon-neutral mix is 40% nuclear, 20% wind, 20% solar, and 20% other such as hydro and geothermal.
That means that if I was in charge of Japan, not only would I be reactivating those nuclear plants, I'd be building more - though part of the building would be constructing modern 3rd generation plants to replace the less safe 1st and 2nd generation plants currently in use. One thing I like to note is that the Fukushima plant was older than both TMI and Chernobyl. Modern plants are far safer.
Somebody can be a Muslim without being an Arab. I wonder if they phrased the girl's schools as religious institutions like many of the schools for boys are if they'd attract the same attention. If they publicly released that they were mostly teaching home ec type stuff.
First reaction is taking a baseball bat to the poisoner, second would be to question him(or her!) to find out the reasoning, because only by understanding the problem can we prevent it from happening again.
None at Fukushima, but radiation related to nuclear power tends to kill about 2 people a year. This is a lot less than for radiological medicine.
Japan lost a couple workers at a reprocessing plant that were acting like dumbasses - rather than using the multimillion dollar machine intended to process the waste, they attempted to do it with like 100X the recommended amount* in a stainless steel bucket.
*Remember, with radioactive materials, getting too much of it together can lead to reactions that dramatically increase the radiation level.
If you really think there is a 'tiny' amount of radiation being leaked, why don't you go live there?
Don't speak the language, don't have a job there, and the services in the area suck at the moment. That's why I'm not moving next to Fukushima. That covers Chernobyl just as well, for that matter.
The marginal('fly away') cost of a F-22 is around $200M per plane. If we were buying a thousand of them, it'd likely drop closer to $100M, just because more planes produced make more automation viable, dropping the cost of parts & assembly. That's just for construction.
With military planes, due to exclusivity, the purchasing country has to pay the R&D, because the company can't sell the plane to anybody else to recoup costs. People want to know what things cost them, and R&D is a legitimate expense. Boeing can at least simply state the development costs for the 747, because it's now a profit generator. If you're buying 1 or 132 747s, there's R&D costs built into the plane, it's just that Boeing produces thousands of those planes, so the R&D is spread out. Even more technically, said costs aren't for paying back the 747 research, it's for paying for the future research of the next generation of aircraft.
One interesting rumor I've heard is that Honda has spent more R&D money on the Civic than NASA has spent on the shuttle. The difference is tha the R&D costs have been spread over millions and millions of cars, vs less than a dozen shuttles. Less than $100 of design work per car for Honda, millions per shuttle for NASA.
First thought: As others said, environmental rules, low quantities, and all that. Another thought was 'aren't DC circuit breakers much more expensive?'
So I went looking, and found stuff like this - HKD3400. It's Surplus Price is $2,391, for a 14 pound 400 Amp 3 pole 600 VAC industrial breaker, basically 9X the power level of a modern home. The FD3200 is 'only' 200A 3 pole 600V, weighs 5 pounds, and runs $976.
How do you get a breaker that's $600-1k in a plane? We'll start with your 'standard' $10 home breaker, which is made in massive quantities. 1. AC vs DC. Lots of plane stuff runs off of DC, not AC. Price check shows $10 going to $50 to go from a 15A 120V breaker to a 60V DC one (5X) 2. High voltage - Going from 120V to 240V almost triples the price. ($8 vs $21) (3X) Want 600V? $257 (10X) 3. High Amperage - Is it a 5, 15, 50, or 400 amp breaker? Fast or slow trip? Makes a difference. The military probably has a graph of how fast at different amperages it wants the breaker to trip at. (2X) 4. 'Severe duty'. Let's make it temperature insensitive between 'LOX' and 'Boiling', vibration resistant to 'paint can mixer doesn't phase it', and longevity of 'you might want to replace it in a hundred years'. (2X) 5. Limited run - We're making 100 of the things, thus they're all basically hand made. (2X)
Starting with $10, we have 5*10*2*2*2, or ~$4k for a specialized 50A 600V DC severe duty breaker. Such as might be in the plane for the radar system, thus why there's both civilian and military versions of it. It might also have features like remote or auto reset, as the pilot can't just make a trip to the breaker box, which will add to the price.
Basically, there's a lot of options that would have you ending up with a $600-1k breaker.
Personal 'golden toilet seat' explanation? It's for a hammer. Turned out that it was for use in a bunker areas where they were having to dispose of old munitions/explosives that had started to become instable. It was for a set of special non-sparking, non-magnetic hammers in an area where a spark in the wrong spot(or magnetic material, some of the fuses were triggered that way), could have resulted in a kiloton level boom. Yes, there was that much explosives stockpiled there, which is why they were having to do a lot of the work by hand.
So the fail is in using innocents to protect oneself, and perhaps also in the decision to bomb
This is why you're NOT supposed to use 'innocents' to shield military targets; per the geneva conventions and law of war, as long as the attacking military is targeting a valid military target, any damage to non-valid targets such as non-combatants and other protected targets like schools, hospitals, and churches is simply 'collateral'. Even if the munition misses.
The USA does go 'above and beyond' and introduces the concept of proportionality. We're not going to hit an Infantry Fighting Vehicle(IFV) parked next to a schook with a 2k pound bomb. The famous story is that when Saddam parked some tanks next to a school, we pulled up some training bombs, basically the same steel shell but filled with concrete rather than explosives, stuck the fancy guidance package on them, and dropped those on the tanks. A live 2k bomb would have been cheaper and surer, but would have also taken out the school, which was deemed disproportionate.
Indeed, ideally safety is many layers deep. You shut the power off AND you use an insulated screwdriver AND you wear non-conductive boots AND you have somebody else there ready to disengage you if you're shocked, etc...
Not entirely true on 'overall gas mileage'. I've been seeing more and more cars with 6 speed automatics that are rating for better gas mileage than their manual counterparts. It's especially true for hybrids.
Figure out a way to keep fresh filtered oil flowing through it and keep it cool via an upgraded radiator and I would say that years wouldn't be out of question.
Are laws against drunk driving questionable as well?
Actually, at this point - YES. And this is coming from somebody who gets more alcohol from using mouthwash after brushing than actually drinking the stuff.
I've read the news and statistics for quite some time, and as a result have the following problems/questions: 1. Why.08? At this low of a level, the accident rate/damage isn't significantly impacted. As you mentioned, texting and cell phone use are actually worse. Other things that degrade driving that much include: Not enough sleep, depressed, angry, sick, kids in the car, legal medicines properly used, etc... The vast majority of DUIs causing serious harm/damage are.12 and up..16, double the current limit, seems to be a spot where the rate really jumps. 2. Why are we arresting people for 'constructive DUI' when they're 'sleeping it off' in their cars with the keys in their pocket, with a dead cold engine? This only encourages DUI in my mind, as their risk of being caught driving(~15-30 minutes of risk) vs sleeping it off (8 hours of risk).
Don't get me wrong, I actually support DUI laws, but I want them sensible, just like I want any 'distracted driving' laws to be sensible.
The other thing is to - get this - turn the car off. Just turn the ignition and pull the keys. Either way, you have to then try to control the car to a stop.
Fore the crash in question, there was no key to turn off - it was a push button ignition. Apparently he didn't know the 'hold for 3 seconds to force off' trick.
I'm not too worried about that stuff, driving a manual. Besides all the things the slushbox drivers can do, I can also just depress the clutch and/or force the shift lever into neutral.
I think I misstated a bit. There were so many 'fringe' groups back then that they all feared THEIR group being oppressed if the government got into religion, but wanted relative freedom to do the oppressing, at least in their local community.
Basically, protect the government from the pressure to follow religious mandates.
The USA was conceived as having a separation between church and state exactly because the early settlers arrived here in an effort to avoid religious persecution.
Correct, just be aware that in many cases it was to avoid persecution because their religion was seen as 'extreme', and thus they promptly formed communities that were religiously homogonous and relatively intolerant otherwise, at least within the community. The early federal government needed the protection from all the curches and such.
audio books lack the extreme profitability of an initial movie release to recover the majority of the costs, plus there's not as large of a market for them.
Of course, the larger price tag does tend to reduce the audience even more.
The trick here isn't to look at the next competitior, it's not like there will be a lock on fusion technology to one company; at least not all that long. It's to look at the production model. Grid Electric is a 'natural monopoly', so I believe that the best model for it is as a customer-owned cooperative business. Their goal should be the stable and reliable production of low cost electricity for it's customers/owners.
Nuclear plants became expensive because of all the fear about them delaying construction and introducing byzantine regulation; that much capital is expensive when you're not producing income to pay off the interest.
I have to point out one thing here: This is all regional. UPS, Fedex, and USPS all have good and bad regions. Sometimes it can be down to the driver of your particular route.
One difference I've seen, at least in my area, is that Fedex ground is a different organization than Fedex air; different sorting centers and everything. UPS is 'all in one'. Fedex Air has the best drivers, UPS is middle ground, Fedex ground is the worst.
Thus if I'm shipping something fast, I'd go with fedex, slow UPS.
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Indeed. I like to say that if I'm not paying less than 2/3rds the cover price, I'm not trying. My local stores(not B&N) START at 25-30% off the cover price.
As such, ebook versions are typically $2-3 MORE than what I'd pay for the paperback. As such, I only buy books that I know I'll want to keep and reread.
The publishers need to take a page from Steam's game sale model - offer sales and deals just like the brick and mortar stores do on physical product. Declare 30% off everything every so often. You'll get loads and loads of purchases then.
Seriously since when do the cops get involved in corporate contract disputes?
When they're one of the parties in the contract, paying licenses for the software?
National media coverage of MicroFocus suing their customers is probably not a good way for them to drum up business.
To me it sounds like they pretty much have a lock on that market. People who need regular access to those police databases need the software, there's no other options that aren't vastly more expensive due to 'duplicating the wheel' problems.
If I was in NSW's shoes, I'd dump that COPS software in favor of something open.
Who says there's any version of the software that's 'open'? It sounds like it interfaces with international criminal databases. It's probably quite specialized.
Like Muad'Dave said, I figure the Tsunami washing away nearly everything in the area to be a bigger reason for people going to 'live in school gymnasiums'. The earthquake alone was actually survivable.
Otherwise the evacuation area is about my commute to work, so it'd be survivable. But I'm not going to happily move to a place without electricity, water, sewer, and such.
As for 'no mood to suck it up', well, it's their choice, but I figure they're going to start recanting when it really starts hitting pocket books and pollution targets.
At this point, nearly every industrial accident resulting in severe injury or death is the result of 'dumbass' moves. Still, I should probably clarify that I don't consider a single mistake enough to be considered a dumbass. A momentary lapse with a bandsaw that costs you a finger is sad, but doesn't qualify you as being a dumbass.
Removing the finger-guards, not wearing the company mandated safety gauntlet, and attempting to cut the piece WITHOUT the supplied(working, but slightly slower) jig qualifies you as a dumbass.
There's a big difference between 'handful' and enough turbines to power a substantial part of a country's electricity needs. That's his point. You can't do it with even several hundred turbines. By the time you're looking at building enough wind turbines to replace a nuclear plant, especially off-shore, you're looking at cost similar to or even exceeding that of a nuclear plant. There's a LOT of sunk costs with a nuclear plant.
Please don't take this to mean that I'm not for renewable power, it's just that I believe that we still need a mixed supply - my 'ideal' carbon-neutral mix is 40% nuclear, 20% wind, 20% solar, and 20% other such as hydro and geothermal.
That means that if I was in charge of Japan, not only would I be reactivating those nuclear plants, I'd be building more - though part of the building would be constructing modern 3rd generation plants to replace the less safe 1st and 2nd generation plants currently in use. One thing I like to note is that the Fukushima plant was older than both TMI and Chernobyl. Modern plants are far safer.
Somebody can be a Muslim without being an Arab. I wonder if they phrased the girl's schools as religious institutions like many of the schools for boys are if they'd attract the same attention. If they publicly released that they were mostly teaching home ec type stuff.
First reaction is taking a baseball bat to the poisoner, second would be to question him(or her!) to find out the reasoning, because only by understanding the problem can we prevent it from happening again.
I wonder what effects this will have on the health of people as well.
Long term it'll kill more people every year than Chernobyl did it's worst year, and Fukushima is better contained.
increased prices last summer and that mention the summer of 2012 is likely to be worse
When they see the increased electric bills staying is when I figure that most of the nuclear plants will be turned back on.
Deaths by radiation? Not one...
None at Fukushima, but radiation related to nuclear power tends to kill about 2 people a year. This is a lot less than for radiological medicine.
Japan lost a couple workers at a reprocessing plant that were acting like dumbasses - rather than using the multimillion dollar machine intended to process the waste, they attempted to do it with like 100X the recommended amount* in a stainless steel bucket.
*Remember, with radioactive materials, getting too much of it together can lead to reactions that dramatically increase the radiation level.
If you really think there is a 'tiny' amount of radiation being leaked, why don't you go live there?
Don't speak the language, don't have a job there, and the services in the area suck at the moment. That's why I'm not moving next to Fukushima. That covers Chernobyl just as well, for that matter.
The marginal('fly away') cost of a F-22 is around $200M per plane. If we were buying a thousand of them, it'd likely drop closer to $100M, just because more planes produced make more automation viable, dropping the cost of parts & assembly. That's just for construction.
With military planes, due to exclusivity, the purchasing country has to pay the R&D, because the company can't sell the plane to anybody else to recoup costs. People want to know what things cost them, and R&D is a legitimate expense. Boeing can at least simply state the development costs for the 747, because it's now a profit generator. If you're buying 1 or 132 747s, there's R&D costs built into the plane, it's just that Boeing produces thousands of those planes, so the R&D is spread out. Even more technically, said costs aren't for paying back the 747 research, it's for paying for the future research of the next generation of aircraft.
One interesting rumor I've heard is that Honda has spent more R&D money on the Civic than NASA has spent on the shuttle. The difference is tha the R&D costs have been spread over millions and millions of cars, vs less than a dozen shuttles. Less than $100 of design work per car for Honda, millions per shuttle for NASA.
First thought: As others said, environmental rules, low quantities, and all that. Another thought was 'aren't DC circuit breakers much more expensive?'
So I went looking, and found stuff like this - HKD3400. It's Surplus Price is $2,391, for a 14 pound 400 Amp 3 pole 600 VAC industrial breaker, basically 9X the power level of a modern home. The FD3200 is 'only' 200A 3 pole 600V, weighs 5 pounds, and runs $976.
How do you get a breaker that's $600-1k in a plane? We'll start with your 'standard' $10 home breaker, which is made in massive quantities.
1. AC vs DC. Lots of plane stuff runs off of DC, not AC. Price check shows $10 going to $50 to go from a 15A 120V breaker to a 60V DC one (5X)
2. High voltage - Going from 120V to 240V almost triples the price. ($8 vs $21) (3X) Want 600V? $257 (10X)
3. High Amperage - Is it a 5, 15, 50, or 400 amp breaker? Fast or slow trip? Makes a difference. The military probably has a graph of how fast at different amperages it wants the breaker to trip at. (2X)
4. 'Severe duty'. Let's make it temperature insensitive between 'LOX' and 'Boiling', vibration resistant to 'paint can mixer doesn't phase it', and longevity of 'you might want to replace it in a hundred years'. (2X)
5. Limited run - We're making 100 of the things, thus they're all basically hand made. (2X)
Starting with $10, we have 5*10*2*2*2, or ~$4k for a specialized 50A 600V DC severe duty breaker. Such as might be in the plane for the radar system, thus why there's both civilian and military versions of it. It might also have features like remote or auto reset, as the pilot can't just make a trip to the breaker box, which will add to the price.
Basically, there's a lot of options that would have you ending up with a $600-1k breaker.
Personal 'golden toilet seat' explanation? It's for a hammer. Turned out that it was for use in a bunker areas where they were having to dispose of old munitions/explosives that had started to become instable. It was for a set of special non-sparking, non-magnetic hammers in an area where a spark in the wrong spot(or magnetic material, some of the fuses were triggered that way), could have resulted in a kiloton level boom. Yes, there was that much explosives stockpiled there, which is why they were having to do a lot of the work by hand.
So the fail is in using innocents to protect oneself, and perhaps also in the decision to bomb
This is why you're NOT supposed to use 'innocents' to shield military targets; per the geneva conventions and law of war, as long as the attacking military is targeting a valid military target, any damage to non-valid targets such as non-combatants and other protected targets like schools, hospitals, and churches is simply 'collateral'. Even if the munition misses.
The USA does go 'above and beyond' and introduces the concept of proportionality. We're not going to hit an Infantry Fighting Vehicle(IFV) parked next to a schook with a 2k pound bomb. The famous story is that when Saddam parked some tanks next to a school, we pulled up some training bombs, basically the same steel shell but filled with concrete rather than explosives, stuck the fancy guidance package on them, and dropped those on the tanks. A live 2k bomb would have been cheaper and surer, but would have also taken out the school, which was deemed disproportionate.
Safety doesn't have to be one layer deep.
Indeed, ideally safety is many layers deep. You shut the power off AND you use an insulated screwdriver AND you wear non-conductive boots AND you have somebody else there ready to disengage you if you're shocked, etc...
Not entirely true on 'overall gas mileage'. I've been seeing more and more cars with 6 speed automatics that are rating for better gas mileage than their manual counterparts. It's especially true for hybrids.
Figure out a way to keep fresh filtered oil flowing through it and keep it cool via an upgraded radiator and I would say that years wouldn't be out of question.
Pretty much but I think they were allowed to also cut engine power when they hit the brakes. They weren't allowed to use the thrust reversers though.
Fully loaded 747, over 200 mph. The brakes were glowing at the end.
Are laws against drunk driving questionable as well?
Actually, at this point - YES. And this is coming from somebody who gets more alcohol from using mouthwash after brushing than actually drinking the stuff.
I've read the news and statistics for quite some time, and as a result have the following problems/questions: .08? At this low of a level, the accident rate/damage isn't significantly impacted. As you mentioned, texting and cell phone use are actually worse. Other things that degrade driving that much include: Not enough sleep, depressed, angry, sick, kids in the car, legal medicines properly used, etc... The vast majority of DUIs causing serious harm/damage are .12 and up. .16, double the current limit, seems to be a spot where the rate really jumps.
1. Why
2. Why are we arresting people for 'constructive DUI' when they're 'sleeping it off' in their cars with the keys in their pocket, with a dead cold engine? This only encourages DUI in my mind, as their risk of being caught driving(~15-30 minutes of risk) vs sleeping it off (8 hours of risk).
Don't get me wrong, I actually support DUI laws, but I want them sensible, just like I want any 'distracted driving' laws to be sensible.
The other thing is to - get this - turn the car off. Just turn the ignition and pull the keys. Either way, you have to then try to control the car to a stop.
Fore the crash in question, there was no key to turn off - it was a push button ignition. Apparently he didn't know the 'hold for 3 seconds to force off' trick.
I'm not too worried about that stuff, driving a manual. Besides all the things the slushbox drivers can do, I can also just depress the clutch and/or force the shift lever into neutral.
I think I misstated a bit. There were so many 'fringe' groups back then that they all feared THEIR group being oppressed if the government got into religion, but wanted relative freedom to do the oppressing, at least in their local community.
Basically, protect the government from the pressure to follow religious mandates.
The USA was conceived as having a separation between church and state exactly because the early settlers arrived here in an effort to avoid religious persecution.
Correct, just be aware that in many cases it was to avoid persecution because their religion was seen as 'extreme', and thus they promptly formed communities that were religiously homogonous and relatively intolerant otherwise, at least within the community. The early federal government needed the protection from all the curches and such.
audio books lack the extreme profitability of an initial movie release to recover the majority of the costs, plus there's not as large of a market for them.
Of course, the larger price tag does tend to reduce the audience even more.
The trick here isn't to look at the next competitior, it's not like there will be a lock on fusion technology to one company; at least not all that long. It's to look at the production model. Grid Electric is a 'natural monopoly', so I believe that the best model for it is as a customer-owned cooperative business. Their goal should be the stable and reliable production of low cost electricity for it's customers/owners.
Nuclear plants became expensive because of all the fear about them delaying construction and introducing byzantine regulation; that much capital is expensive when you're not producing income to pay off the interest.
I have to point out one thing here: This is all regional. UPS, Fedex, and USPS all have good and bad regions. Sometimes it can be down to the driver of your particular route.
One difference I've seen, at least in my area, is that Fedex ground is a different organization than Fedex air; different sorting centers and everything. UPS is 'all in one'. Fedex Air has the best drivers, UPS is middle ground, Fedex ground is the worst.
Thus if I'm shipping something fast, I'd go with fedex, slow UPS.