Sure, a good $20k NAS RAID does more. Question is, is it really needed?
I mean, you could deploy 10 times as many of these as you could your array, giving me 10 times the storage.
Depending on what you do, it has to hit the network sometime. For example - we have a big expensive SAN solution. What's it used for? As a massive shared drive.
For a fraction the price we could of put a similarly sized one of these in every organization. Sure, it wouldn't be able to serve quite as much data, but most of our stuff isn't accessed extremely often anyways.
I've noted before that in many cases it'd be cheaper for us to backup to IDE hard drives than to tape. The tape alone costs more per megabyte than a HD, and has slower transfer rates to boot. Our backup solution could be several of these, connected by fiber to another building(so we don't have to move them).
What I'm trying to say is that we're fighing so clean we're giving up on attacks of known targets in order to avoid collateral casualties. It doesn't help that one of their techniques is to 'clean up' after a battle and try to characterize their own fighters as 'civilian casualties'. They're fighting a war on the propaganda front, we don't seem to be. It's still an important part of any war. While we think it quaint today - just look at WWII posters.
Of course, I think that we should also be a heck of a lot more proactive in protecting anybody willing to turn insurgents and terrorists* over.
*Though at this point they're mostly terrorists. Attacking civilian markets and such doesn't make you an insurgent.
Where have I made a judgement as to the necessity of various wars? Where did I express that I feel our entry into Iraq was necessary, good, or even advisable?
Hell, Bush is doing everything he can to make certain the American people don't feel anything from the war. No tax hikes. No rationing(well except the high price of gas). Nothing. Go about your business. IN FACT, GO SHOPPING!
Yes, this might suck a bit. On the other hand, war material production has become a rather specialized industry. It's just not as easy to redirect a car manufacturing plant into a tank one. It may even be easier to simply build a new one. The same with body armor, even humvees are produced in a specialized plant.
It's a plain simple fact. Don't go to war unles you HAVE TO. This has been the rule since at least Sun Tzu. If you are not willing to commit everything to the victory, it's not worth fighting.
Oh, I agree with this entirely. However, we're involved in Iraq at this point. Whether our justification was right or not, we have to finish this, one way or another. I happen to feel that it's our best bet to stick the course, until the Iraqi government is strong enough to stand on it's own. That takes time.
And I've heard all of the excuses from the moron classes to last me a lifetime. Boo hoo, we lost vietnam/iraq because of the media. Boo hoo, it was because they don't fight fair. Boo hoo, it was the American people are defeatists who run in the face of danger.
Where did I mention the media in my post? Sure, I feel that our media has been helping to bolster our enemies's will to fight. Propaganda works. If we could present a vision of a unified nation against them, they wouldn't quite so willing to believe that this or that attack might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Still, it's only one side. We didn't have nearly the propaganda during the Vietnam war as we do now.
Finally, I'll just mention something that your post makes me think you believe, despite you not posting it: I don't believe that 9/11 provoked Bush to invade Iraq, to the contrary, I believe that it delayed the invasion. I figured that we were going to do something about Iraq when he was elected the first time.
How does this turn into "dumb roughneck hicks with guns"?
I'm talking about strategy at a level conducted by four star generals, each with 25-40 years of experience, who have college degrees in the art of war. By the time they make Colonel, they have the equivalent of a master's degree. By the time they make General, they have the equivalent of a doctorate.
Yes, I DO believe that the generals, on average, know far more about running a war than politicians. Politicians know more about politics(though by necessity generals are up there as well).
As for Vietnam, if we'd fought it smarter, fought it to win, our soldiers wouldn't have been stuck in the muck for so long, they wouldn't have been quite so inclined to commit atrocities(which were still fairly rare).
Actually, most of those are objecting to the fact that China is actually allowed to increase it's emissions under Kyoto, and looks to be doing so, to the point that even if the USA had followed kyoto(at great cost), there would be no net gain.
As implimented Kyoto more an economic leveling strategy than a global warming prevention one. Heck, for that matter I believe that there are only one or two European countries that are on target to meet their goals. Which, on average, were a whole lot easier than the target Al Gore got for the USA.
We weren't allowed to go after major NV cities/production centers, we weren't allowed to bomb Chinese supply convoys, often weren't allowed to go north of an imaginary line drawn on the map by our politicians.
Yeah, Vietnam is such an example of how unrestrained warfare can't work.
Please note that I don't like some of what happen in vietnam. On the other hand, we could of avoided much of it if it wasn't for politicians running the war. You don't win a war by holding back.
I also feel that part of the problems we're having in Iraq is that we've gotten too clean with our attacks. People are more afraid of the terrorists than they are of us.
Not to mention potentially eliminate them for another 50 years once recycling technology gets good enough that going back into those landfills is profitable.
In addition, given that it took seven years before seeing other products based on the expired patent, and a certain amount of assuming that neither Best nor his company were complete asses, it was probably technical issues that prevented cheap radiant grills; not licensing or royalty issues with the patent. The sustainable price point for a professional paint shop or restaurant is an order of magnitude higher than what the typical home consumer can afford.
For a paint shop - if it allows twice as many cars to be painted in any given booth - tens of thousands of dollars can be justified. When you've spent $10k for your spraying system alone, $40/hour for the painter, it makes sense. Thousands of dollars for a professional grill in a restaurant is the same thing.
I've seen radient heating in several hangers. It's a lot like standing in sunlight. I've also read about some radient cooktops(one's in Bill Gate's house).
To put it another way - if it took them seven years to come out with an economical grill after the patent expiration, something's obviously non-obvious about the adoption, indeed, it may even be worthy of another patent.
I suggest you look into the amount of taxpayer money that is going into those similar US plants - which are currently the best you have in service so "US knowhow" is no excuse when the knowlege was shared and the plants are of that vintage and of almost identical designs - Westinghouse was busy in both places and their newest designs that have never been constucted are very similar.
Virtually none. Companies pay for their own certifications, inspections and whatnot. Insurance starts as self-insured, then there's something like 200 million of private insurance per plant, then there's a group coverage where all the plants pitch in if there's an incident that goes past the $200 million, that's sitting somewhere around 9.5 Billion. Only after that does the government step in. Even counting TMI, the government's never paid out. Little fact: There are chemical plants in the USA that would cause similar levels of contamination and deaths, if not more, if they suffered a Chernobyl type containment failure. They don't have that much insurance.
Really, Britain seems to be a mostly isolated incident. Another article
I thought the whole point of what I've said on this long thread is that evidence is superior to blinding people with bullshit. Remember that anybody that pushes a single power source over everything else in every circumstance is selling something and also lying a great deal.
I believe that I've stated a number of power sources - I've just noted that many of them have already been maxed out, or are of limited use/restricted in install areas. On the one hand you complain about me brining up coal, and on the other complain about me not mentioning other power sources?
Wind can make sense in certain areas, solar makes sense in specific circumstances such as where a grid connection is impractical. Solar heating is very economical; I've tried to get my grandparents to install it for their hot water needs. Of course, they live in Florida, I live in North Dakota. I've looked at solar heating; but I just don't get enough sun and it'd need to wait until I replace the roof anyways. I've looked at wind generation, but I wouldn't be able to raise a tower high enough to get consistent winds for a price that'd come anywhere near the $.08/kwh I pay for electricity.
Is it really fair to count CO2 per capita when comparing countries where one still has a significant percentage of their population that are still mostly subsidence farmers? And have the lifespan and quality of life that hasn't changed much for the last thousand years?
Many of the plants China is building today aren't much cleaner than what was built in the USA 40 years ago. They're going through their industrial revolution much as we did, though I believe that it'll be quicker and easier for them because they have our example to go by. IE they can skip many steps.
I believe that this is also part of the reason for stagnant wages in the USA and the rest of the developed world. In a free market system things tend to even out, and our wages are very high compared to developing nations. Thus, business tends to shift there. I think that if we're lucky, we'll manage to stay about even, maybe even gain due to technology advances. But we won't be seeing leaps forward until the developing countries catch up to us, wage wise.
It would take decades for the new forest growth to sequester the same amount of carbon as released. So any use of wood as an energy source needs to consider not just the total ultimate carbon flow but the rate of this flow.
Actually, I don't believe this to be that big of a deal. Sure, it make take a decade(we're not talking old growth here), but a decade's emissions, on the whole, actually aren't that big of a deal compared with the sheer acreage it'd take.
An interim solution might be the use of fast regrowth such as coppicing, but I can see this being much more energy expensive and costly to harvest.
For usage this wide I'd see an annual being used; much faster growing and easier to harvest than trees.
As for fertalizer; I'd preferably collect the wastes to be used as fertalizers.
, but you can find the 100% juice stuff which has the natural sugers that are easier for you body to digest.
Huh, I thought it was the opposite. Well, 'easier' and 'harder' aren't necessarily the best words, but HFCS is actually faster to metabolize than sugar, which is faster than most fruit sugars.
Therefore HFCS creates more of a spike than even sugar, making kids hyper then crashing(wanting more). Because this spike is WAY too much to be used immediatly, it triggers storage mechanisms, leading to fat.
Yeah, I actually encountered a guy like this - He said that the bible was infallible, I asked him about translation errors, and he said even the translation was perfect - so I asked which translation he read. He didn't even know that there are dozens of translations into english alone. He couldn't even name which one it was. But it was still infallible - written by god, Yessir.
What devilspgd said. Take them to court. Before you ever consider buying an insurance plan, read the paperwork very carefully. Before pressing a claim, make sure it's covered.
I never buy extended warranties for that stuff, their profit margin is something like 200%, vs 10% or so for large-cap insurance items like homes and cars(I don't count healthcare plans as insurance anymore).
You see, unless you're using a non-standard definition, the standard warranty is offered by the manufacturer of the item, not Best Buy. The extended warranty IS through BB(or at least their contractor). Thus, if you didn't buy the extended warranty, and the 30 day* return period has passed, then they are indeed correct to tell you that you're trying to get service from the wrong people.
I was shopping for my first laptop around 8 years ago. I was going over to the desert(yes, USAF was over there even then, we never really left), and wanted a laptop. I was also an E3, so I didn't have a lot of money.
I was barely able to afford one of the cheapest laptops, and the guy tried to sell me a plan. I looked it over, saw that it covered the USA only, and said no, it wouldn't do me any good. He then proceeded to try to sell me a deluxe plan that cost more than the laptop. I said that I didn't need the laptop that bad, and couldn't afford it. Their response was to offer credit programs. They just wouldn't give up. Well, after wasting almost an hour of my time, and that of two associates and a manager, I walked two stores down and bought the same laptop for the same price without the service plan hassle.
I did not see a single thing that can be traced back to the performance of a real plant - just rubbery derivative figures taken on trust and then the discounting of publicly available information as being warped due to completely supposed incompetance based apparently on railways!
Sure, it's a conglomeration of all plants in operation. It's statistically more proof than posting numbers for a single plant - which can be cherry picked. For every plant that's worse than the average, there has to be a plant or plants operating a corresponding amount above the average.
A for the point about rail, I was pointing out that England's government, on average, is more incompetant than many. Of course, the US government is down there too(especially for nuclear waste disposal), but at least we try to keep our hands out of many things. I could have said the same thing about healthcare and the problems that they're experiencing.
Funny you mentioned France as having economical plants - google will help you there (you advocate nuclear power but have never heard of fast breeders like Superphoenix?), and as most are dual use facilities as part of a weapons program nobody really expects them to be able to produce economical power as distinct from purpose built plants.
Sure I've heard of Superphoenix. And no, most of France's plants are NOT dual use facilities. Yes, an experimental breeder reactor, larger than any ever previously constructed, turned out to be uneconomical at the time. Meanwhile the smaller Phoenix, another breeder, remains an important part of their nuclear program, mostly for waste transformation, but it also generates power.
One thing that France did right was to stanardize their costs. Right now our nuclear system is a lot like space programs; every plant is unique. This drastically increases costs because you can't really share lessons learned or development costs.
If nothing, else, look at the latest fusion plant test - A test plant, costing as much as a gigawatt nuclear plant, taking up the same footprint, yet NO allocation or allowances to ever generate power from it. So it's a pure test plant. At least with the breeder there was the hope to produce power from it.
I'll also note that they started construction before I was born. We've learned a lot about nuclear processes and material science since then.
Why does this differ from the results about British plants published in the New Scientist a few years back - a real reason now please and not just insulting the British nuclear industry. Find that out and you'll be better able to talk about this instead of reguritating advertising and trying to distract people by talking about how bad coal is. You mean an article like this? You know, where they acknowledge that they messed things up by playing politics with it?
And again, I'm not trying to distract people with coal, I'm comparing them. Nuclear power isn't 100% safe, but then, pretty much nothing is. To not acknowledge this is to hide in the closet sucking your thumb, accomplishing nothing. What Nuclear power is is safer than all other power methods of it's availability and economy. It even beats hydro.
No, neither of them were trained snipers. John Allen Muhammad qualified as expert in the M-16, but was NOT a trained sniper. Lee Boyd Malvo, being only 17 at the time, was too young to have served.
On the other hand, John's military experience may have led to their choosing of the AR-15 for the attacks, as it was what he was familiar with(except for missing the full-auto option).
Finally, from what I've read most of the shootings occured from ranges that anybody who can PASS qualification shouldn't be missing at.
I remember reading, and seeing, that there's been a substantial decrease in the percentage of teens in the workforce(meaning 15-18), at least in my area.
Parents are now prosperous enough that they can support their teen's needs and wants to the point that they don't want to go out and work part time for $5.15 or even $7/hour for extra spending money.
I read up on the Chicago install a few years back. They replaced 7 oil cooled copper lines with 3 superconducting ones.
Nitrogen supply can be from either end, not 'all points'. These are NOT the general use 240 volt lines running all over, these are specialized interconnects shipping vast amounts of power.
The insulation is interesting: It's liquid tight but not air tight. As the nitrogen heats up some of it boils and the gas simply escapes the insulation. This means that keeping it filled with nitrogen is fairly easy. A nitrogen reserve tank that you keep topped off is sufficient; more liquid flows down to replace that turned to gas.
In addition; between the insulation and amount of nitrogen in the lines it would actually take around a week of not adding nitrogen before the line would warm up enough to no longer be superconducting. The insulation is actually good enough that you can hold the pipe in your bare hands. Remember, only outside temperature matters; superconductors despite transfering megawatts don't produce heat because there's no resistance.
So for this run there's likely only going to be one chilling plant, not many.
That didn't stop them from building civil defense bunkers in the 50's.
To keep people alive
They even built a massive bunker for Congress in West Virginia so they could administer the rubble.
'Destroy the earth X times over' comments aside, they never expected even a nuclear exchange to utterly obliterate the country; there would have been plenty of surviving small towns.
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Sure, a good $20k NAS RAID does more. Question is, is it really needed?
I mean, you could deploy 10 times as many of these as you could your array, giving me 10 times the storage.
Depending on what you do, it has to hit the network sometime. For example - we have a big expensive SAN solution. What's it used for? As a massive shared drive.
For a fraction the price we could of put a similarly sized one of these in every organization. Sure, it wouldn't be able to serve quite as much data, but most of our stuff isn't accessed extremely often anyways.
I've noted before that in many cases it'd be cheaper for us to backup to IDE hard drives than to tape. The tape alone costs more per megabyte than a HD, and has slower transfer rates to boot. Our backup solution could be several of these, connected by fiber to another building(so we don't have to move them).
What I'm trying to say is that we're fighing so clean we're giving up on attacks of known targets in order to avoid collateral casualties. It doesn't help that one of their techniques is to 'clean up' after a battle and try to characterize their own fighters as 'civilian casualties'. They're fighting a war on the propaganda front, we don't seem to be. It's still an important part of any war. While we think it quaint today - just look at WWII posters.
Of course, I think that we should also be a heck of a lot more proactive in protecting anybody willing to turn insurgents and terrorists* over.
*Though at this point they're mostly terrorists. Attacking civilian markets and such doesn't make you an insurgent.
Dumbass.
Where have I made a judgement as to the necessity of various wars?
Where did I express that I feel our entry into Iraq was necessary, good, or even advisable?
Hell, Bush is doing everything he can to make certain the American people don't feel anything from the war. No tax hikes. No rationing(well except the high price of gas). Nothing. Go about your business. IN FACT, GO SHOPPING!
Yes, this might suck a bit. On the other hand, war material production has become a rather specialized industry. It's just not as easy to redirect a car manufacturing plant into a tank one. It may even be easier to simply build a new one. The same with body armor, even humvees are produced in a specialized plant.
It's a plain simple fact. Don't go to war unles you HAVE TO. This has been the rule since at least Sun Tzu. If you are not willing to commit everything to the victory, it's not worth fighting.
Oh, I agree with this entirely. However, we're involved in Iraq at this point. Whether our justification was right or not, we have to finish this, one way or another. I happen to feel that it's our best bet to stick the course, until the Iraqi government is strong enough to stand on it's own. That takes time.
And I've heard all of the excuses from the moron classes to last me a lifetime. Boo hoo, we lost vietnam/iraq because of the media. Boo hoo, it was because they don't fight fair. Boo hoo, it was the American people are defeatists who run in the face of danger.
Where did I mention the media in my post? Sure, I feel that our media has been helping to bolster our enemies's will to fight. Propaganda works. If we could present a vision of a unified nation against them, they wouldn't quite so willing to believe that this or that attack might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Still, it's only one side. We didn't have nearly the propaganda during the Vietnam war as we do now.
Finally, I'll just mention something that your post makes me think you believe, despite you not posting it: I don't believe that 9/11 provoked Bush to invade Iraq, to the contrary, I believe that it delayed the invasion. I figured that we were going to do something about Iraq when he was elected the first time.
Forgive me, I was responding while not quite awake myself.
How does this turn into "dumb roughneck hicks with guns"?
I'm talking about strategy at a level conducted by four star generals, each with 25-40 years of experience, who have college degrees in the art of war. By the time they make Colonel, they have the equivalent of a master's degree. By the time they make General, they have the equivalent of a doctorate.
Yes, I DO believe that the generals, on average, know far more about running a war than politicians. Politicians know more about politics(though by necessity generals are up there as well).
As for Vietnam, if we'd fought it smarter, fought it to win, our soldiers wouldn't have been stuck in the muck for so long, they wouldn't have been quite so inclined to commit atrocities(which were still fairly rare).
Actually, most of those are objecting to the fact that China is actually allowed to increase it's emissions under Kyoto, and looks to be doing so, to the point that even if the USA had followed kyoto(at great cost), there would be no net gain.
As implimented Kyoto more an economic leveling strategy than a global warming prevention one. Heck, for that matter I believe that there are only one or two European countries that are on target to meet their goals. Which, on average, were a whole lot easier than the target Al Gore got for the USA.
Politicians always run wars, particularly in modern times.
Politicians start and end wars, they should stay out of the fighting of them, or at least listen to the military advisors.
Basically, they should give the military a goal, then let the military figure out how to impliment it.
Requiring senatorial approval to target individual SAM sites isn't how you should run things.
Oh wait...
We weren't allowed to go after major NV cities/production centers, we weren't allowed to bomb Chinese supply convoys, often weren't allowed to go north of an imaginary line drawn on the map by our politicians.
Yeah, Vietnam is such an example of how unrestrained warfare can't work.
Please note that I don't like some of what happen in vietnam. On the other hand, we could of avoided much of it if it wasn't for politicians running the war. You don't win a war by holding back.
I also feel that part of the problems we're having in Iraq is that we've gotten too clean with our attacks. People are more afraid of the terrorists than they are of us.
Not to mention potentially eliminate them for another 50 years once recycling technology gets good enough that going back into those landfills is profitable.
This ain't your 4000 year old pottery.
This is a piece of pottery that can go from 70F to 900F in, at most, a couple minutes without cracking.
That's the complicated part.
In addition, given that it took seven years before seeing other products based on the expired patent, and a certain amount of assuming that neither Best nor his company were complete asses, it was probably technical issues that prevented cheap radiant grills; not licensing or royalty issues with the patent. The sustainable price point for a professional paint shop or restaurant is an order of magnitude higher than what the typical home consumer can afford.
For a paint shop - if it allows twice as many cars to be painted in any given booth - tens of thousands of dollars can be justified. When you've spent $10k for your spraying system alone, $40/hour for the painter, it makes sense. Thousands of dollars for a professional grill in a restaurant is the same thing.
I've seen radient heating in several hangers. It's a lot like standing in sunlight. I've also read about some radient cooktops(one's in Bill Gate's house).
To put it another way - if it took them seven years to come out with an economical grill after the patent expiration, something's obviously non-obvious about the adoption, indeed, it may even be worthy of another patent.
I suggest you look into the amount of taxpayer money that is going into those similar US plants - which are currently the best you have in service so "US knowhow" is no excuse when the knowlege was shared and the plants are of that vintage and of almost identical designs - Westinghouse was busy in both places and their newest designs that have never been constucted are very similar.
Virtually none. Companies pay for their own certifications, inspections and whatnot. Insurance starts as self-insured, then there's something like 200 million of private insurance per plant, then there's a group coverage where all the plants pitch in if there's an incident that goes past the $200 million, that's sitting somewhere around 9.5 Billion. Only after that does the government step in. Even counting TMI, the government's never paid out. Little fact: There are chemical plants in the USA that would cause similar levels of contamination and deaths, if not more, if they suffered a Chernobyl type containment failure. They don't have that much insurance.
Really, Britain seems to be a mostly isolated incident. Another article
I thought the whole point of what I've said on this long thread is that evidence is superior to blinding people with bullshit. Remember that anybody that pushes a single power source over everything else in every circumstance is selling something and also lying a great deal.
I believe that I've stated a number of power sources - I've just noted that many of them have already been maxed out, or are of limited use/restricted in install areas. On the one hand you complain about me brining up coal, and on the other complain about me not mentioning other power sources?
Wind can make sense in certain areas, solar makes sense in specific circumstances such as where a grid connection is impractical. Solar heating is very economical; I've tried to get my grandparents to install it for their hot water needs. Of course, they live in Florida, I live in North Dakota. I've looked at solar heating; but I just don't get enough sun and it'd need to wait until I replace the roof anyways. I've looked at wind generation, but I wouldn't be able to raise a tower high enough to get consistent winds for a price that'd come anywhere near the $.08/kwh I pay for electricity.
Yes, but China's catching up.
Is it really fair to count CO2 per capita when comparing countries where one still has a significant percentage of their population that are still mostly subsidence farmers? And have the lifespan and quality of life that hasn't changed much for the last thousand years?
Many of the plants China is building today aren't much cleaner than what was built in the USA 40 years ago. They're going through their industrial revolution much as we did, though I believe that it'll be quicker and easier for them because they have our example to go by. IE they can skip many steps.
I believe that this is also part of the reason for stagnant wages in the USA and the rest of the developed world. In a free market system things tend to even out, and our wages are very high compared to developing nations. Thus, business tends to shift there. I think that if we're lucky, we'll manage to stay about even, maybe even gain due to technology advances. But we won't be seeing leaps forward until the developing countries catch up to us, wage wise.
It would take decades for the new forest growth to sequester the same amount of carbon as released. So any use of wood as an energy source needs to consider not just the total ultimate carbon flow but the rate of this flow.
Actually, I don't believe this to be that big of a deal. Sure, it make take a decade(we're not talking old growth here), but a decade's emissions, on the whole, actually aren't that big of a deal compared with the sheer acreage it'd take.
An interim solution might be the use of fast regrowth such as coppicing, but I can see this being much more energy expensive and costly to harvest.
For usage this wide I'd see an annual being used; much faster growing and easier to harvest than trees.
As for fertalizer; I'd preferably collect the wastes to be used as fertalizers.
Maybe its because the CO2 would come from a renewable resource - starch grown now with plants?
Bingo. Wood, ethanol, peat, biodiesel all get a 'free' ride for their CO2 production because CO2 is removed from the atmosphere in it's creation.
H2O + CO2 + energy -> hydrocarbons(CH4 and up) -> H2O + CO2 + energy
it's a closed loop.
, but you can find the 100% juice stuff which has the natural sugers that are easier for you body to digest.
Huh, I thought it was the opposite. Well, 'easier' and 'harder' aren't necessarily the best words, but HFCS is actually faster to metabolize than sugar, which is faster than most fruit sugars.
Therefore HFCS creates more of a spike than even sugar, making kids hyper then crashing(wanting more). Because this spike is WAY too much to be used immediatly, it triggers storage mechanisms, leading to fat.
Yeah, I actually encountered a guy like this - He said that the bible was infallible, I asked him about translation errors, and he said even the translation was perfect - so I asked which translation he read. He didn't even know that there are dozens of translations into english alone. He couldn't even name which one it was. But it was still infallible - written by god, Yessir.
What devilspgd said. Take them to court. Before you ever consider buying an insurance plan, read the paperwork very carefully. Before pressing a claim, make sure it's covered.
I never buy extended warranties for that stuff, their profit margin is something like 200%, vs 10% or so for large-cap insurance items like homes and cars(I don't count healthcare plans as insurance anymore).
I'd be careful there...
You see, unless you're using a non-standard definition, the standard warranty is offered by the manufacturer of the item, not Best Buy. The extended warranty IS through BB(or at least their contractor). Thus, if you didn't buy the extended warranty, and the 30 day* return period has passed, then they are indeed correct to tell you that you're trying to get service from the wrong people.
*Or whatever it is for that particular product
That reminded me.
I was shopping for my first laptop around 8 years ago. I was going over to the desert(yes, USAF was over there even then, we never really left), and wanted a laptop. I was also an E3, so I didn't have a lot of money.
I was barely able to afford one of the cheapest laptops, and the guy tried to sell me a plan. I looked it over, saw that it covered the USA only, and said no, it wouldn't do me any good. He then proceeded to try to sell me a deluxe plan that cost more than the laptop. I said that I didn't need the laptop that bad, and couldn't afford it. Their response was to offer credit programs. They just wouldn't give up. Well, after wasting almost an hour of my time, and that of two associates and a manager, I walked two stores down and bought the same laptop for the same price without the service plan hassle.
I did not see a single thing that can be traced back to the performance of a real plant - just rubbery derivative figures taken on trust and then the discounting of publicly available information as being warped due to completely supposed incompetance based apparently on railways!
Sure, it's a conglomeration of all plants in operation. It's statistically more proof than posting numbers for a single plant - which can be cherry picked. For every plant that's worse than the average, there has to be a plant or plants operating a corresponding amount above the average.
A for the point about rail, I was pointing out that England's government, on average, is more incompetant than many. Of course, the US government is down there too(especially for nuclear waste disposal), but at least we try to keep our hands out of many things. I could have said the same thing about healthcare and the problems that they're experiencing.
Funny you mentioned France as having economical plants - google will help you there (you advocate nuclear power but have never heard of fast breeders like Superphoenix?), and as most are dual use facilities as part of a weapons program nobody really expects them to be able to produce economical power as distinct from purpose built plants.
Sure I've heard of Superphoenix. And no, most of France's plants are NOT dual use facilities. Yes, an experimental breeder reactor, larger than any ever previously constructed, turned out to be uneconomical at the time. Meanwhile the smaller Phoenix, another breeder, remains an important part of their nuclear program, mostly for waste transformation, but it also generates power.
One thing that France did right was to stanardize their costs. Right now our nuclear system is a lot like space programs; every plant is unique. This drastically increases costs because you can't really share lessons learned or development costs.
If nothing, else, look at the latest fusion plant test - A test plant, costing as much as a gigawatt nuclear plant, taking up the same footprint, yet NO allocation or allowances to ever generate power from it. So it's a pure test plant. At least with the breeder there was the hope to produce power from it.
I'll also note that they started construction before I was born. We've learned a lot about nuclear processes and material science since then.
Why does this differ from the results about British plants published in the New Scientist a few years back - a real reason now please and not just insulting the British nuclear industry. Find that out and you'll be better able to talk about this instead of reguritating advertising and trying to distract people by talking about how bad coal is.
You mean an article like this? You know, where they acknowledge that they messed things up by playing politics with it?
And again, I'm not trying to distract people with coal, I'm comparing them. Nuclear power isn't 100% safe, but then, pretty much nothing is. To not acknowledge this is to hide in the closet sucking your thumb, accomplishing nothing. What Nuclear power is is safer than all other power methods of it's availability and economy. It even beats hydro.
No, neither of them were trained snipers. John Allen Muhammad qualified as expert in the M-16, but was NOT a trained sniper. Lee Boyd Malvo, being only 17 at the time, was too young to have served.
On the other hand, John's military experience may have led to their choosing of the AR-15 for the attacks, as it was what he was familiar with(except for missing the full-auto option).
Finally, from what I've read most of the shootings occured from ranges that anybody who can PASS qualification shouldn't be missing at.
I remember reading, and seeing, that there's been a substantial decrease in the percentage of teens in the workforce(meaning 15-18), at least in my area.
Parents are now prosperous enough that they can support their teen's needs and wants to the point that they don't want to go out and work part time for $5.15 or even $7/hour for extra spending money.
I did it to help pay for my car and games.
Sigh...
I read up on the Chicago install a few years back. They replaced 7 oil cooled copper lines with 3 superconducting ones.
Nitrogen supply can be from either end, not 'all points'. These are NOT the general use 240 volt lines running all over, these are specialized interconnects shipping vast amounts of power.
The insulation is interesting: It's liquid tight but not air tight. As the nitrogen heats up some of it boils and the gas simply escapes the insulation. This means that keeping it filled with nitrogen is fairly easy. A nitrogen reserve tank that you keep topped off is sufficient; more liquid flows down to replace that turned to gas.
In addition; between the insulation and amount of nitrogen in the lines it would actually take around a week of not adding nitrogen before the line would warm up enough to no longer be superconducting. The insulation is actually good enough that you can hold the pipe in your bare hands. Remember, only outside temperature matters; superconductors despite transfering megawatts don't produce heat because there's no resistance.
So for this run there's likely only going to be one chilling plant, not many.
That didn't stop them from building civil defense bunkers in the 50's.
To keep people alive
They even built a massive bunker for Congress in West Virginia so they could administer the rubble.
'Destroy the earth X times over' comments aside, they never expected even a nuclear exchange to utterly obliterate the country; there would have been plenty of surviving small towns.