When asked if the government should maintain a database of Muslims entering the country, the right answer is "no, that's ridiculous ". Trump's answer was "we should do a lot of things, it's all about management."
My response: I want a database of everybody entering the country. Leaving too.
"Trump declines to confirm that the govt should not ask refugees and immigrants about their religion".
You know, I think this is something that I'd have to think about before answering. Maybe Trump is the same? Should the government be prohibited in gathering basic census type information from those coming into our country, if only so that it can be charted? Should we start removing race/sex questions from all federal paperwork? The issue becomes more complex the more I think about it.
Note that this is a separate issue from actually discriminating against them.
Sites that are that anal about you *seeing* the ads will often want to show you an ad AGAIN if you rewind.
I also loved the last presidential election - Up here in Alaska one of our senate seats was up for election. The major parties spent something like $120 per registered voter on advertising. Democrat incumbent vs Republican challenger. If you had an IP from AK, everything was about the election of that seat.
Hell, I now have a greasemonkey script to remove the most annoying sites from search results.
I'm not afraid of handling this bit of ore, not in the least. But I wouldn't feel the same about handling the same amount of refined fuel, or the random by-products of a reactor disaster.
Refined fuel is fine. They handle it with cotton gloves - mostly to keep the oils in their hands off the expensive metal stuff.
Random stuff from a reactor disaster? I'm with you.
It's a problem of culture, not physics. Most of us feel safe flying despite knowing that about once a year, somewhere in the world, a planeload of about 200-300 people will be lost.
I'd argue that it's actually the opposite. Many of us fear flying despite it being generally the safest mode of travel, to the point that you're far more likely to die on the drive TO the airport than on the flight.
The damage from coal is steady and persistent, and therefore we come to ignore it. The damage from nuclear power is approximately once every couple decades, so we fear it. Much like how car accidents trickle in the deaths in 1-2s, normally speaking, so we never hear about them - but we certainly hear about that plane - day in and day out, for weeks, and they bring it up again at the anniversary of the accident, just to pound it in more.
Having run the numbers, we'd have to have such a disaster every year, using the mid-high estimates for the deaths from Chernobyl(which are mostly theoretical even today), in order to even start challenging the death toll from coal with nuclear energy.
How many years after mainstream driverless cars are developed will a hack cause more than one thousand simultaneous deaths?
Consider that, once we're at 'driverless cars, on average, prevent 95% of automotive deaths', you'd need approximately 30 of these events each year to simply reach the current death toll.
Plus, well, they've found exploits that could be used to cause fatal crashes in current vehicles and we don't know of any, much less widespread, uses of this.
Will autonomous vehicles allow suicide bombers to become repeat offenders?
Nope, because if they're not in the vehicle they're not a suicide bomber.
How easy will it be to simply reprogram the autopilot and send it on a killing spree like running through a parade at 100mph or taking out a whole major interstate highway?
On the first, it should be fairly hard - there's still lots of slow vehicles in the road, generally speaking, and lots of barriers, especially given current concerns about terrorism - they don't want somebody showing up with a VBIED after all.
On the second - odds are that the car will become disabled sooner rather than later. Indeed, at current technology levels, it'd probably be easier to modify a current car for remote control than to 'take over' the AI of a self-driver.
With greater technology comes greater ability to use it for good or ill. I for one am not convinced that autonomous cars are actually safer when you take all possible uses into account.
Current death toll, in the USA alone, is over 30k a year. Anything that improves that substantially in most use cases makes it very hard to make up for in marginal ones.
If somebody does manage to take over a number of cars and kill 1k people, rather than get rid of them I'd imagine that you'd see insane levels of work to secure them.
And, since you can't actually deny permissions in Android(without more work), and it seems that 'all apps' love having access to way more than they should, it's hard to find 'good' applications that might not be a trojan.
The spot value of the silver in $1.00 worth of silver quarters (or dimes or half dollars) is around $11. If you melted them down, refined them into.999 silver, and cast that silver as part of a "good delivery bar", that's how much you'd get for it in the big exchanges. (Note that "good delivery bars" are a lot bigger than that, though, generally around 1000 troy ounces, currently about $15K per bar.)
Oh, so that's what you meant. Face value is less than melt value is less than actual sale price. Okay, that works.
I'm always careful about 'commemorative' coins. There's a number of people who tried to invest in Franklin Mint stuff and lost their asses doing it. As one site puts it, 'do your homework'.
I'm more interested in the trend year-over-year. Is it increasing, at what rate and why?
A good question. I think what's going on is that the capabilities are increasing, cost is decreasing, and the 'total package' is becoming better known.
For my example of military drones being used for S&R - The first use would be the hardest. However, once an organization has forged the ties with a local(enough) military base to get them to launch a drone for S&R, it becomes easier in the future. When word spreads, other S&R organizations could start reaching out.
Because drones still aren't that common, and S&R isn't an every day thing in most areas, use is still limited, but increases. Same with updating mapping for various cooperating federal agencies. Sure, the process becomes known, but remains specialist.
In addition, when the use is common enough or there are restrictions - such as for law enforcement, then they simply buy their own drones. So the S&R organization that initially used a military drone ends up with their own drone, and stop requesting to use the military's. So military requests remain low.
Silver coins are another story. They actually trade at more than the value of the silver they contain -- their "melt price" is just over 11 times face value, but you can sell them in quantity for more than 12x, and you'll generally need to pay more than that to buy them.
Didn't you just say that trading for 11x their melt value is pretty normal? It's just that silver coins are even more extreme - 11x melt, vs 9x. The only outlier would be old copper pennies, which have a face under that of their melt.
Having being able to sell in quantity at 12X, but needing to pay even more than that to buy them is pretty standard. The way I tend to put it - the more "buy gold coins!" advertisements you hear, the less of a good idea it generally is.
Realistically speaking, from what I've heard most gold coin - ones that aren't actually currency, is that you'll pay that 12X price per coin, but generally when you go to sell them you'll not only only get melt value, but have to pay assessment costs to ensure that they aren't fake and such as well. So you're taken both ways, and that assumes nobody steals the coins from you.
Buying gold futures or such - where the gold never enters your hands, is a different story, but still not going to save you if the market completely collapses.
In a total market collapse, I tend to say that copper plated lead is probably a better investment.;)
Surveilling or gathering intelligence on civilians in the pursuit of aiding law enforcement is not in the list of exceptions.
With 20 missions over the past 10 years, I could see an average of 2 missions a year for 'non-military' purposes also being unrelated to law enforcement. Search & Rescue and map updating also aren't law enforcement use.
fewer than 20 missions a year could amount to a combination of training, research, and special non-law enforcement taskings.
Keep in mind that a training flight is still a "mission", it's just not an operational one. Still, let's figure that training & research are still considered "military"
Some 'non-military' uses I can think of that are also not law enforcement. National Forestry service wants some updated imagery of one of it's parks. Solution: Run a drone over it real quick, done. Other options include virtually every other department. You have a fire situation that you're trying to keep track of? Request a drone flyover. Need some imagery of the highways? Done. Etc...
They could also assist in other R&D things - keeping track of a self-driving off-road vehicle race, etc...
If he tried to batch it over a narrow period of time. $100 once a month, varied between locations, should be enough to avoid connecting him to the crime.
Still, that would take 163 years to launder the whole haul, so that wouldn't be sufficient. You could supplement that with using coins for 'everything' you can. Whenever you buy stuff, give them a couple bucks of quarters along with the other money. Go wild at a quarter slot machine(might be hard to find). Etc...
Per the mint, a quarter is 5.670 grams, 8.33% Nickel, balance copper. So 5.2 grams of copper per coin. $3.65 per pound is about the best you can hope for. At 454 grams per pound, you're looking at about 4 cents per quarter.
You're probably better off just laundering the money through various means. Hit up the coin exchange whenever you go to walmart, for about $100 or so. Etc...
Sounds like all your teachers were testing was your ability to memorize your cheat sheets. And that right there is the #1 problem with our educational system.
I have to agree.
The solution to preventing cheating like this is to, as you said, give problems that aren't just 'plug in numbers', but require understanding the material.
Because, in real life, we're going to be using computers and references to figure out problems if it comes up, not using formula we once memorized years ago and haven't used since.
Hell, there's a lot of positions out there - military, piloting, where they issue checklists and tell you to NOT memorize them, because they want you USING the checklists.
For my calculus classes, no notes combined with constraining time limits meant the tests were more measuring how well you had memorized the various shortcuts they taught(remember, there's normally more than 1 way to integrate a problem), and ability to recognize which applied to the problem they gave you, than understanding the material.
Here in Denver, CO, we monitor from highway on-ramps to determine which cars are in need of repairs.
What about cars that never go near an on-ramp?
Still, I've read enough to have read that, for quite some time, a new car is generally so clean that the emissions from the tailpipe are lower than what it's sucking in, as long as you're not counting CO2 as pollution.
Meanwhile, running a lawn mower for half an hour can spew out more pollutants than said car will all month. A car in poor operating conditions can outweigh literally hundreds of it's peers that are in good operating condition.
So what do you do? Spend thousands to clean up new cars even more, thousands to clean up malfunctioning automobiles, or hundreds cleaning up the lawn mowers? Some mix of the three?
Why guess, it's in the article & summary? It's in line with the way that Tesla does model numbers. The base is a number. The number is the kWh of the battery. So a "70" is a 70 kWh battery, '85' is 85kWh, 90, etc... If it's a performance model, a "P" is prepended. so a P85 would be a Performance edition with an 85kWh battery. Then there's the drive train. If it's all wheel drive, a "D" is appended. So a 70D is a 70kWh battery connected to a 4 wheel drive chassis.
Today, the options are - 70, 70D, 90D, P90D. I listed the 85kWh model because it was before Tesla started transitioning to nearly exclusively all wheel drive models. Given that a 85D could be nursed over 300 miles rather easily, and that a 90D is 270 miles EPA, an extra 10 kWh would give you a realistic range very, very close to 300 miles, maybe even over 300 if you don't drive like an idiot in a P100D.
To be perfectly honest, all nuclear plants I'm aware of use single-pass water cooling. Palo Verde, for example, uses purified sewage for this.
The closest I remember to an air cooled plant was a planned expansion to Palo Verde that never happened. They were going to put in 2-4 additional reactors, where insufficient water for the cooling would be available. Ergo, they would have had to be purely air cooled*. This would have actually been slightly more energy efficient, but would have required a much more extensive, and therefore more expensive cooling system.
*Not counting the closed circuit inner loop, of course.
There are six plants in the usa with precisely the same shitty cooling system as Fukushima. It doesn't matters whose fingers are on the keys, those plants are shit.
They're the same model line, yes. But I'd dispute the use of the word 'precisely'. Can you state that their generators are in the same location? That, unlike Fukushima, they installed the hydrogen recombiners that the manufacturer of the plant had been recommending for over 20 years?
Are the flaws so inherent that the plant needs a total redesign to be 'safe'? Or is it a bit like Tesla's car, where after discovering a danger with specific types of road debris they simply installed a shield to mitigate that specific risk?
I won't dispute that new plants wouldn't be safer. One of my goals with new nuclear plant construction would be the retirement of the older plants. I even have a rough priority list - coal first, then the oldest/most troublesome nuclear plants, working our way up.
It will be cheaper to fix the flaw than to shut down and fixing is an option.
I'm not sure about 'cheaper'. The plants are all roughly 40 years old at this point, and this is only being discovered 'now'? That would tend to indicate a low probability event.
Though yes, I'm sure that as the knowledge of the problem is disseminated, the relevant engineers will design fixes, to be deployed during the next appropriate maintenance cycle.
Said engineering is actually some of the problem - Because nearly every plant is, at this point, unique, the engineering for each is also unique, and therefore must be done individually, expensively.
If we were to replace those plants with, say, 2-3 standardized designs, we'd save a lot of money in the long run.
Probably because most general aviation planes are going slow enough that even a blind cripple of a bird can still avoid them. How many cars hit birds each year? How many cars are hit by birds targeting them?;)
Back shortly after WWII, we developed the ability to tell what was being typed by the sounds of the typewriter being worked. Today, we can often do the same if we know the typer's 'fist', the patterns they use to type. Beyond that, you have electromagnetic patterns - record the radio signals, process them, and you can get the image on the screen, the characters typed, even for wired instruments.
Slashdot Mirror
When asked if the government should maintain a database of Muslims entering the country, the right answer is "no, that's ridiculous ". Trump's answer was "we should do a lot of things, it's all about management."
My response: I want a database of everybody entering the country. Leaving too.
"Trump declines to confirm that the govt should not ask refugees and immigrants about their religion".
You know, I think this is something that I'd have to think about before answering. Maybe Trump is the same? Should the government be prohibited in gathering basic census type information from those coming into our country, if only so that it can be charted? Should we start removing race/sex questions from all federal paperwork? The issue becomes more complex the more I think about it.
Note that this is a separate issue from actually discriminating against them.
Sites that are that anal about you *seeing* the ads will often want to show you an ad AGAIN if you rewind.
I also loved the last presidential election - Up here in Alaska one of our senate seats was up for election. The major parties spent something like $120 per registered voter on advertising. Democrat incumbent vs Republican challenger. If you had an IP from AK, everything was about the election of that seat.
Hell, I now have a greasemonkey script to remove the most annoying sites from search results.
I'm not afraid of handling this bit of ore, not in the least. But I wouldn't feel the same about handling the same amount of refined fuel, or the random by-products of a reactor disaster.
Refined fuel is fine. They handle it with cotton gloves - mostly to keep the oils in their hands off the expensive metal stuff.
Random stuff from a reactor disaster? I'm with you.
It's a problem of culture, not physics. Most of us feel safe flying despite knowing that about once a year, somewhere in the world, a planeload of about 200-300 people will be lost.
I'd argue that it's actually the opposite. Many of us fear flying despite it being generally the safest mode of travel, to the point that you're far more likely to die on the drive TO the airport than on the flight.
The damage from coal is steady and persistent, and therefore we come to ignore it. The damage from nuclear power is approximately once every couple decades, so we fear it. Much like how car accidents trickle in the deaths in 1-2s, normally speaking, so we never hear about them - but we certainly hear about that plane - day in and day out, for weeks, and they bring it up again at the anniversary of the accident, just to pound it in more.
Having run the numbers, we'd have to have such a disaster every year, using the mid-high estimates for the deaths from Chernobyl(which are mostly theoretical even today), in order to even start challenging the death toll from coal with nuclear energy.
How many years after mainstream driverless cars are developed will a hack cause more than one thousand simultaneous deaths?
Consider that, once we're at 'driverless cars, on average, prevent 95% of automotive deaths', you'd need approximately 30 of these events each year to simply reach the current death toll.
Plus, well, they've found exploits that could be used to cause fatal crashes in current vehicles and we don't know of any, much less widespread, uses of this.
Will autonomous vehicles allow suicide bombers to become repeat offenders?
Nope, because if they're not in the vehicle they're not a suicide bomber.
How easy will it be to simply reprogram the autopilot and send it on a killing spree like running through a parade at 100mph or taking out a whole major interstate highway?
On the first, it should be fairly hard - there's still lots of slow vehicles in the road, generally speaking, and lots of barriers, especially given current concerns about terrorism - they don't want somebody showing up with a VBIED after all.
On the second - odds are that the car will become disabled sooner rather than later. Indeed, at current technology levels, it'd probably be easier to modify a current car for remote control than to 'take over' the AI of a self-driver.
With greater technology comes greater ability to use it for good or ill. I for one am not convinced that autonomous cars are actually safer when you take all possible uses into account.
Current death toll, in the USA alone, is over 30k a year. Anything that improves that substantially in most use cases makes it very hard to make up for in marginal ones.
If somebody does manage to take over a number of cars and kill 1k people, rather than get rid of them I'd imagine that you'd see insane levels of work to secure them.
And, since you can't actually deny permissions in Android(without more work), and it seems that 'all apps' love having access to way more than they should, it's hard to find 'good' applications that might not be a trojan.
The spot value of the silver in $1.00 worth of silver quarters (or dimes or half dollars) is around $11. If you melted them down, refined them into .999 silver, and cast that silver as part of a "good delivery bar", that's how much you'd get for it in the big exchanges. (Note that "good delivery bars" are a lot bigger than that, though, generally around 1000 troy ounces, currently about $15K per bar.)
Oh, so that's what you meant.
Face value is less than melt value is less than actual sale price. Okay, that works.
I'm always careful about 'commemorative' coins. There's a number of people who tried to invest in Franklin Mint stuff and lost their asses doing it. As one site puts it, 'do your homework'.
I'm more interested in the trend year-over-year. Is it increasing, at what rate and why?
A good question. I think what's going on is that the capabilities are increasing, cost is decreasing, and the 'total package' is becoming better known.
For my example of military drones being used for S&R - The first use would be the hardest. However, once an organization has forged the ties with a local(enough) military base to get them to launch a drone for S&R, it becomes easier in the future. When word spreads, other S&R organizations could start reaching out.
Because drones still aren't that common, and S&R isn't an every day thing in most areas, use is still limited, but increases. Same with updating mapping for various cooperating federal agencies. Sure, the process becomes known, but remains specialist.
In addition, when the use is common enough or there are restrictions - such as for law enforcement, then they simply buy their own drones. So the S&R organization that initially used a military drone ends up with their own drone, and stop requesting to use the military's. So military requests remain low.
Silver coins are another story. They actually trade at more than the value of the silver they contain -- their "melt price" is just over 11 times face value, but you can sell them in quantity for more than 12x, and you'll generally need to pay more than that to buy them.
Didn't you just say that trading for 11x their melt value is pretty normal? It's just that silver coins are even more extreme - 11x melt, vs 9x. The only outlier would be old copper pennies, which have a face under that of their melt.
Having being able to sell in quantity at 12X, but needing to pay even more than that to buy them is pretty standard. The way I tend to put it - the more "buy gold coins!" advertisements you hear, the less of a good idea it generally is.
Realistically speaking, from what I've heard most gold coin - ones that aren't actually currency, is that you'll pay that 12X price per coin, but generally when you go to sell them you'll not only only get melt value, but have to pay assessment costs to ensure that they aren't fake and such as well. So you're taken both ways, and that assumes nobody steals the coins from you.
Buying gold futures or such - where the gold never enters your hands, is a different story, but still not going to save you if the market completely collapses.
In a total market collapse, I tend to say that copper plated lead is probably a better investment. ;)
I'll give people a hint: 99% of the US population LIVES within where they can go.
Surveilling or gathering intelligence on civilians in the pursuit of aiding law enforcement is not in the list of exceptions.
With 20 missions over the past 10 years, I could see an average of 2 missions a year for 'non-military' purposes also being unrelated to law enforcement. Search & Rescue and map updating also aren't law enforcement use.
fewer than 20 missions a year could amount to a combination of training, research, and special non-law enforcement taskings.
Keep in mind that a training flight is still a "mission", it's just not an operational one. Still, let's figure that training & research are still considered "military"
Some 'non-military' uses I can think of that are also not law enforcement.
National Forestry service wants some updated imagery of one of it's parks. Solution: Run a drone over it real quick, done. Other options include virtually every other department. You have a fire situation that you're trying to keep track of? Request a drone flyover. Need some imagery of the highways? Done. Etc...
They could also assist in other R&D things - keeping track of a self-driving off-road vehicle race, etc...
Hit up 10 different casinos for roughly $9k each and you'll be done in 2 years.
Coinstar use would easily get him caught.
If he tried to batch it over a narrow period of time. $100 once a month, varied between locations, should be enough to avoid connecting him to the crime.
Still, that would take 163 years to launder the whole haul, so that wouldn't be sufficient. You could supplement that with using coins for 'everything' you can. Whenever you buy stuff, give them a couple bucks of quarters along with the other money. Go wild at a quarter slot machine(might be hard to find). Etc...
Something that can be readily checked.
Per the mint, a quarter is 5.670 grams, 8.33% Nickel, balance copper. So 5.2 grams of copper per coin. $3.65 per pound is about the best you can hope for.
At 454 grams per pound, you're looking at about 4 cents per quarter.
You're probably better off just laundering the money through various means. Hit up the coin exchange whenever you go to walmart, for about $100 or so. Etc...
Sounds like all your teachers were testing was your ability to memorize your cheat sheets. And that right there is the #1 problem with our educational system.
I have to agree.
The solution to preventing cheating like this is to, as you said, give problems that aren't just 'plug in numbers', but require understanding the material.
Because, in real life, we're going to be using computers and references to figure out problems if it comes up, not using formula we once memorized years ago and haven't used since.
Hell, there's a lot of positions out there - military, piloting, where they issue checklists and tell you to NOT memorize them, because they want you USING the checklists.
For my calculus classes, no notes combined with constraining time limits meant the tests were more measuring how well you had memorized the various shortcuts they taught(remember, there's normally more than 1 way to integrate a problem), and ability to recognize which applied to the problem they gave you, than understanding the material.
Here in Denver, CO, we monitor from highway on-ramps to determine which cars are in need of repairs.
What about cars that never go near an on-ramp?
Still, I've read enough to have read that, for quite some time, a new car is generally so clean that the emissions from the tailpipe are lower than what it's sucking in, as long as you're not counting CO2 as pollution.
Meanwhile, running a lawn mower for half an hour can spew out more pollutants than said car will all month. A car in poor operating conditions can outweigh literally hundreds of it's peers that are in good operating condition.
So what do you do? Spend thousands to clean up new cars even more, thousands to clean up malfunctioning automobiles, or hundreds cleaning up the lawn mowers? Some mix of the three?
I guess 100 must be the weight of it in stone.
Why guess, it's in the article & summary? It's in line with the way that Tesla does model numbers.
The base is a number. The number is the kWh of the battery. So a "70" is a 70 kWh battery, '85' is 85kWh, 90, etc...
If it's a performance model, a "P" is prepended. so a P85 would be a Performance edition with an 85kWh battery.
Then there's the drive train. If it's all wheel drive, a "D" is appended. So a 70D is a 70kWh battery connected to a 4 wheel drive chassis.
Today, the options are - 70, 70D, 90D, P90D. I listed the 85kWh model because it was before Tesla started transitioning to nearly exclusively all wheel drive models.
Given that a 85D could be nursed over 300 miles rather easily, and that a 90D is 270 miles EPA, an extra 10 kWh would give you a realistic range very, very close to 300 miles, maybe even over 300 if you don't drive like an idiot in a P100D.
To be perfectly honest, all nuclear plants I'm aware of use single-pass water cooling. Palo Verde, for example, uses purified sewage for this.
The closest I remember to an air cooled plant was a planned expansion to Palo Verde that never happened. They were going to put in 2-4 additional reactors, where insufficient water for the cooling would be available. Ergo, they would have had to be purely air cooled*. This would have actually been slightly more energy efficient, but would have required a much more extensive, and therefore more expensive cooling system.
*Not counting the closed circuit inner loop, of course.
Websites can be hard to use. A decade ago day laborers didn't have smart phones.
There are six plants in the usa with precisely the same shitty cooling system as Fukushima. It doesn't matters whose fingers are on the keys, those plants are shit.
They're the same model line, yes. But I'd dispute the use of the word 'precisely'. Can you state that their generators are in the same location? That, unlike Fukushima, they installed the hydrogen recombiners that the manufacturer of the plant had been recommending for over 20 years?
Are the flaws so inherent that the plant needs a total redesign to be 'safe'? Or is it a bit like Tesla's car, where after discovering a danger with specific types of road debris they simply installed a shield to mitigate that specific risk?
I won't dispute that new plants wouldn't be safer. One of my goals with new nuclear plant construction would be the retirement of the older plants. I even have a rough priority list - coal first, then the oldest/most troublesome nuclear plants, working our way up.
It will be cheaper to fix the flaw than to shut down and fixing is an option.
I'm not sure about 'cheaper'. The plants are all roughly 40 years old at this point, and this is only being discovered 'now'? That would tend to indicate a low probability event.
Though yes, I'm sure that as the knowledge of the problem is disseminated, the relevant engineers will design fixes, to be deployed during the next appropriate maintenance cycle.
Said engineering is actually some of the problem - Because nearly every plant is, at this point, unique, the engineering for each is also unique, and therefore must be done individually, expensively.
If we were to replace those plants with, say, 2-3 standardized designs, we'd save a lot of money in the long run.
Many (most?) general aviation planes aren't.
Probably because most general aviation planes are going slow enough that even a blind cripple of a bird can still avoid them. How many cars hit birds each year? How many cars are hit by birds targeting them? ;)
Back shortly after WWII, we developed the ability to tell what was being typed by the sounds of the typewriter being worked. Today, we can often do the same if we know the typer's 'fist', the patterns they use to type. Beyond that, you have electromagnetic patterns - record the radio signals, process them, and you can get the image on the screen, the characters typed, even for wired instruments.
In short, this is neat, but really no big deal.
As a techie, I think I'd promptly set up for a brute force decrypt. We'll let you know when it's done.
I'm complying with the order, honest.