Releasing the documentation has actually been a lengthy internal process that started long ago. The present timing hasn't been strongly motivated by any external event, although there was a little extra push to release at least one document before the X Developer's Conference.
Milk is a reasonable component of a tasty coffee drink.
The fats in the milk bind with the bitter acids, changing the nature and taste of both. People that add regular milk or cream often prefer a stronger and therefore more bitter brew because the bitterness is mellowed while the tastes they prefer remain strong.
This effect is well known with wine. Red wines heavy on tannic acid are paired with fatty foods, especially fatty meat and cheese. But the "in" thing in the coffee world is to have a very strong brew with nothing added.
Don't assume that your biases or tastes are correct, or will even remain the same. My wife used to complain about how I was ruining the coffee by adding milk. After she became pregnant her taste changed to prefer milk and eventually cream in her coffee.
The current they produce is trivial, just enough to keep up with the self-discharge of a new car battery and the light car-off load (usual spec -- under 40mA, with under 20mA the design goal). It's not even enough to keep up with the self-discharge of an older battery.
An EV has on the order of 100x the battery capacity. The self discharge rate isn't quite as high, but even 50x the area of that battery maintaining solar cell isn't feasible. And that would just keep up, not really add charge.
All matter is "recyclable". But most things are not recycled.
Automotive and larger lead-acid batteries are among the most completely recycled items. That's because they have a simple, easily separated structure. Once shredded, the metal plates are trivially separated from the plastic. Sometimes by simply floating away in the rinse water that dilutes the acid. The lead-antimony is melted off any support grid at low temperature, then the grid is melted down at high temperature. After reduction and slag removal, the still-molten lead alloy can be directly cast as new grids. The battery cases are molded with a higher percentage of virgin PE, but excess scrap is still usable in other plastic products.
You could pretty much do that in your backyard.
Now, how do you recycle LiFePO4 batteries (or any lithium chemistry)? Would any part of the recovered material be acceptable as an input to make new batteries? If we can't do it today, why believe that a recycling process is feasible?
Rapid acceleration is a prominent advertised feature of electric because it's relative easy. Better performance comes along almost automatically once you put enough batteries in to get acceptable range, with impressive performance when you have reasonable range.
If you keep the battery structure the same, doubling the range also doubles the available instantaneous power from the battery. And electric motors are mostly thermally limited -- you can put 10x or 20x the continuous current into a small motor for a few seconds, until the wires melt (really until the resin bonding the coils starts to break down). This combination means that even a slow car with short range can feel like a muscle car for a few seconds.
Of course you can go too far. We bought a used motor for our EV project that had (undisclosed) spun the rotor on the shaft. Now that it was loose, it would slip again under load when hot. Based on the length and diameter of the press fit section of the shaft it was putting out many hundreds of horsepower when it broke loose the first time.
Serial numbers derived from a vehicle master serial number sounds reasonable, until you hit real life.
Road wheels on tanks had a fairly short life between rebuilds, so the serial numbers would be quickly mixed up. And besides, explicitly transmitting the production information to every factory producing parts would be a huge, obvious security risk.
Yes, the Germans could have easily scrambled any specific serial number if they knew this was happening. But changing production to scramble or eliminate every serial number would have been almost impossible. Just keeping production active was almost impossible, when they couldn't predict which factories and parts shipments would be lost overnight.
About 3/4 of the population lives in Whitehorse, which is a still a small town.
Only two or three other villages have more than 1000 people. And they are counting people that are a few miles from a road.
When the population and population density is that low, the only feasible approach is to accept that preventing fires, keeping them from spreading, and getting people out is the only approach for most of the area.
And with a population that low, they aren't going to be paying their own way. The territory is like an empty woodland lot. It's value is in its future use and the natural resources that may be discovered.
Knowing Comcast and similar ISPs, I expected being assigned a single IPv6 address, with an extra fee for every additional address.
Many here might not remember, but in the 1990s ISP contracts usually specified that a residential / small business connection was for a single machine. You had to upgrade to a more expensive contract to use multiple machines at once. Linux led the way with cheaply available NAT, and it was initially banned as being against the terms of service by many ISPs. Not that they could do much about NAT -- it's difficult to do NAT detection, and at the time those were the customers you didn't want to lose.
NAT only became widespread when it was pre-configured into small routers. At that point it was too late for ISPs to do much about it.
If the software had the support at the time, I'm certain ISPs would have allocated a narrow port range instead of a whole IP address. Even back when there were plenty of IPv4 addresses.
And of course there is economic value to "piracy": advertising and lock-in.
Microsoft's lock on the market happened because of illicit, unauthorized and implicitly authorized copies. Their resulting monopoly position has been worth vastly more than any revenue foregone or lost.
Even if a software publisher doesn't end up with a monopoly, no-cost copies can create a viable market size where none existed before.
There have been serious economic analyses that suggest the market has a below-optimal illicit copying ratio. Yes, overall productivity and software/service revenue would both be higher with more relaxed rules and actions. I have a much more of a level playing field / follow-the-rules attitude, but bogus press releases like these push me away from that viewpoint. Bogus, biased "studies" leave me opposed to anything that such organization want -- if it's the best they could come up with, they are definitely wrong.
$400 will get you taxi-quality paint job. You'll get a single stage (non-clearcoat), not very durable layer of paint over everything. You'll be lucky if they don't paint over the tires and windows.
A repaint like that will hurt the resale value of most cars rather than help it. It's only slightly better than mismatched body panels and heavy rust.
A presentable paint job costs about $2000, and that doesn't include door frames, trunk interior and engine compartment.
The word "flashlight" was actually a derogatory term. The carbon-zinc batteries developed insulating bubbles under high load, and the light flickered and flashed. I'm sure most readers here have experienced this -- imagine how bad it was when the technology was new and barely understood.
That said, I have to agree: torches are what the mob from the village carries when they come to break down the door of your lab.
Not in California. Not even if the central valley is a dust bowl to save the river smelt. Not even if the state paid the highest electric rates in the nation due to horribly botched deregulation. Not even if the manufactured crisis was easy to trigger because the total electric power available is very close to peak usage.
And yes, if California seceded from the Union, the only liquid flowing in most of California would be untreated sewage and contaminated field run-off. Water quality regulations are only important when they impact voters.
I think that some people do not know why NJ is called "the armpit of America". It's not just the smell of its refineries and chemical plants along the coast. Look at its position on the map.
Most visitors just see the part of NJ along I95, missing the sections further inland which gave it the name "The Garden State".
Hitting escape velocity won't help -- whatever is sent out will be unrecoverable. It will roughly be on Earth's orbit around the Sun, but likely won't coincide.
There is some flexibility by shooting the object past the moon, and getting a little bit of a 'slingshot' effect to modify the resulting orbit. But it would still require steering rockets because even a slight error in the initial path or orbital calculation would make a huge different in the resulting orbit.
This topic would make for a great physics and geometry lesson. Why inertial orbits starting from the surface always intersect the surface (the original topic). Why going from a one-body system to a two-body system might be able to change this, but at the expense of extreme sensitivity. How the complexity of potential orbits vastly increases as you add more bodies.
Even more interesting, is the extreme state sensitivity of the "interesting" configurations. A few seconds of arc difference in the initial course can put you someplace completely different. Simple orbital calculations assume point sources of gravity. That's not a bad approximation if you are far enough away, but a "slingshot" breaks that assumption. You can't even model the objects as uniform spheres -- the earth isn't spherical, and it doesn't have a uniform mass distribution. And for objects such as the Earth that have significant magnetic fields, there will be a deflection on approach and departure.
Bottom line is that anything done in space requires a significant ability to steer, and most operations require the ability to dynamically navigate.
That's completely understandable in this case of programming in Prolog.
Prolog is a declarative language.
You declare the rules, and the system figures out a result that matches those rules.
The problem is that this basically doesn't work. So a Prolog programmer has to write the "declarative" rules in a procedural order so that the run-time system doesn't have to try every possible combination to find (or fail to find) a matching result.
The proper ordering of declarations can be quite subtle. With a modestly complex program you can make a seemingly unimportant change in the order of the declarations and have the runtime go from a second to a week.
In this case the professor didn't (couldn't) know how long a Prolog program to solve this problem should take. He just assumed that you had found a more efficient ordering for the declarations. He might even have thought it was luck rather than deep insight that your program was faster than his. But you have to a decent understanding of the limits of Prolog to get a complex program to complete in a reasonable time, so you had to be good before you could get that lucky.
If you couldn't already tell, I have a low opinion of Prolog and declarative languages. They are "parlor tricks". Much like computer 'Life' and neural networks, simple programs can produce unexpected seemingly-sophisticated results. But they don't get better from those initial results. To compute the answers or results you want in a reasonable time, you end up with at least the complexity of writing things in the traditional explicitly procedural method.
The promoters of declarative language typically don't mention that you end up writing rules in an explicitly procedural order if you want the program to work. If you press them on the issue, they then say "well, OK, it's not actually any easier to write, but it's easier to verify that you've correctly specified the desired result." But if you have to carefully shuffle declarations around, and even then some results unpredictably take centuries to compute, pretty much no one cares.
How much energy does it take to get out of earth orbit? How much power capacity needs to be held in reserve for unexpected events?
I don't expect that power usage for entertainment communications is an issue. The ship will no doubt have antennas and transmitters large enough to transmit video and telemetry both for control and for the benefit of the citizens that paid for the mission. The bits needed to request something is trivial in comparison.
On the other side, there is plenty of power on earth to transmit por... entertainment during the slow periods.
I also don't see any problem with the latency. You obviously wouldn't be able to play online games, but most of what you view in a day could be pre-cached or just waited for without a problem.
For the first year or two of a policy 'mistake' like this, contractors make extra money. After that the increase in profitability is taken into account on the next bid. So at most there was a temporary extra expenditure four decades ago.
If the rates were changed today, the market reaction would be almost instant. Contractors would insist on the old terms for existing contracts, and increase the rates for new contracts. And charge a little extra to compensate for the new risk of additional changes. (If you make your suppliers nervous, they rationally will spend extra to mitigate their new risk and will pass that cost onto you.)
The RIAA gathers license fees, and distributes them among the record companies and artists.. after taking out an administrative fee (100% in some cases).
The payments for "covenants not to sue" are not license fees.
No doubt some small fraction will be treated as a license fee, just to put a veneer of legitimacy on the scheme. But I've no doubt that the RIAA will use the extra layers of administration to make reduce the amount and skew the payout distribution to record companies that play the game.
It's not uncommon for rent payments to be less than the mortgage in high cost areas like San Francisco. The owners are hoping to make their money on rapid property value increases. The renters are just there to keep the place occupied and help qualify for the mortgage.
If a $700K house will be worth $800K next year, you aren't that concerned if the renters are paying $2K/month or $3K/month.
Everything changes when the $800K house will be worth $750K next year. The owner can't sell. They would probably need to get rid of the tenants to put the house on the market, but they can't afford to pay the full mortgage when the house doesn't sell in the slow market. They can't raise the rent much, until all of the other rental properties go up as well.
Most of the hardware on my laptop works with Ubuntu out-of-the-box. Only the fingerprint reader doesn't, and Bluetooth isn't especially useful.
The only flaky part is the Atheros WiFi, which will hang the machine when connecting to some access points. That's clearly the fault of Atheros, not the Linux distribution.
I know to not even try Vista. Some significant devices won't work with Vista, and the 1GHz processor is far too slow to run Vista well.
The peak demand problem for the foreseeable future is the air conditioning load. That's difficult to change for a simple reason: the generating efficiency and power handling capacity of the system is lowest during hot weather. Those small substation transformers and "pole pigs" are thermally limited, and are carrying the highest load during hot, sunny days.
A secondary, much lower, peak during the evening hours isn't an operational problem, just a curiosity.
My guess is that 400 watt PCs and 100 watt LCD TVs (that replaced 500 watt CRTs) aren't really the issue. How do they compare to a 3KW stove running 20 minutes to boil water for pasta? Or a 4KW oven warming up for a frozen pizza?
There is a potential problem: imagine 10% of the commuter vehicles being plug-in hybrids or even all-electric. Everyone gets home at 6pm and plugs in their car, sucking 10KW or 15KW from the grid. The answer to this is pretty easy if started now: off-peak chargers, with an option for paying a much higher rate for a "need it now" recharge.
I don't recall reading anywhere that McDonalds had been warned by the FDA about the temperature of their coffee. The phrase "several times" implies a specific warning that was ignored, presumably something that would have been brought up at the trial and mentioned in the extensive press coverage.
And where did the "20% of her body" number come from? The number quoted from all credible sources is 6%. You should review your sources, or perhaps consider if you have an extreme bias.
It didn't happen in this case, but there is a failure mode that is worse than a stuck clutch.
Most power transistors fail in switched-on full conductive mode. This happens when the substrate overheats enough to cause dopant diffusion. The overheating can happen from overcurrent, a manufacturing flaw, or from the transistor being not-quite-on.
Anyone that has had a wall mounted light dimmer fail has likely experienced this. The dimmer usually fails when a bulb filament burns out by shorting, emitting a bright flash in the last few milliseconds of its life. When you install a new bulb it lights, but the dimmer no longer dims. The thyristor has shorted out.
On a traditional motorcycle or car you have three ways to reduce power: cut the throttle or activate the clutch. On a direct-drive electric vehicle you have only the electrical switching. The obvious design of motor speed and power control will apply full power when the switching fails-- the opposite of a fail-safe design. You probably wanted your dining room lit even when the dimmer fails, but you didn't want your electric vehicle running at full speed into a parked minivan.
There are configurations that avoid this problem. The easiest is using motorsm e.g. stepper motors, that require power to be switched on and off to turn . Constant power to one coil will slow or lock up the motor. Another approach is putting switching devices on all power leads, and having a control circuit that immediately turns all of them off if a fault is detected.
The key is knowing about the problem so that you know to think through the failure modes. Something tells me that this guy isn't someone that spends much time thinking through what happens if something (entirely foreseeable!) happens...
Slashdot Mirror
Releasing the documentation has actually been a lengthy internal process that started long ago. The present timing hasn't been strongly motivated by any external event, although there was a little extra push to release at least one document before the X Developer's Conference.
Milk is a reasonable component of a tasty coffee drink.
The fats in the milk bind with the bitter acids, changing the nature and taste of both. People that add regular milk or cream often prefer a stronger and therefore more bitter brew because the bitterness is mellowed while the tastes they prefer remain strong.
This effect is well known with wine. Red wines heavy on tannic acid are paired with fatty foods, especially fatty meat and cheese. But the "in" thing in the coffee world is to have a very strong brew with nothing added.
Don't assume that your biases or tastes are correct, or will even remain the same. My wife used to complain about how I was ruining the coffee by adding milk. After she became pregnant her taste changed to prefer milk and eventually cream in her coffee.
The current they produce is trivial, just enough to keep up with the self-discharge of a new car battery and the light car-off load (usual spec -- under 40mA, with under 20mA the design goal). It's not even enough to keep up with the self-discharge of an older battery.
An EV has on the order of 100x the battery capacity. The self discharge rate isn't quite as high, but even 50x the area of that battery maintaining solar cell isn't feasible. And that would just keep up, not really add charge.
All matter is "recyclable". But most things are not recycled.
Automotive and larger lead-acid batteries are among the most completely recycled items. That's because they have a simple, easily separated structure. Once shredded, the metal plates are trivially separated from the plastic. Sometimes by simply floating away in the rinse water that dilutes the acid. The lead-antimony is melted off any support grid at low temperature, then the grid is melted down at high temperature. After reduction and slag removal, the still-molten lead alloy can be directly cast as new grids. The battery cases are molded with a higher percentage of virgin PE, but excess scrap is still usable in other plastic products.
You could pretty much do that in your backyard.
Now, how do you recycle LiFePO4 batteries (or any lithium chemistry)? Would any part of the recovered material be acceptable as an input to make new batteries? If we can't do it today, why believe that a recycling process is feasible?
Rapid acceleration is a prominent advertised feature of electric because it's relative easy. Better performance comes along almost automatically once you put enough batteries in to get acceptable range, with impressive performance when you have reasonable range.
If you keep the battery structure the same, doubling the range also doubles the available instantaneous power from the battery. And electric motors are mostly thermally limited -- you can put 10x or 20x the continuous current into a small motor for a few seconds, until the wires melt (really until the resin bonding the coils starts to break down). This combination means that even a slow car with short range can feel like a muscle car for a few seconds.
Of course you can go too far. We bought a used motor for our EV project that had (undisclosed) spun the rotor on the shaft. Now that it was loose, it would slip again under load when hot. Based on the length and diameter of the press fit section of the shaft it was putting out many hundreds of horsepower when it broke loose the first time.
That's why 24" racks (instead of the 19" standard "relay" rack) are becoming much more common.
Serial numbers derived from a vehicle master serial number sounds reasonable, until you hit real life.
Road wheels on tanks had a fairly short life between rebuilds, so the serial numbers would be quickly mixed up. And besides, explicitly transmitting the production information to every factory producing parts would be a huge, obvious security risk.
Yes, the Germans could have easily scrambled any specific serial number if they knew this was happening. But changing production to scramble or eliminate every serial number would have been almost impossible. Just keeping production active was almost impossible, when they couldn't predict which factories and parts shipments would be lost overnight.
I've kayaked in the Yukon.
About 3/4 of the population lives in Whitehorse, which is a still a small town.
Only two or three other villages have more than 1000 people. And they are counting people that are a few miles from a road.
When the population and population density is that low, the only feasible approach is to accept that preventing fires, keeping them from spreading, and getting people out is the only approach for most of the area.
And with a population that low, they aren't going to be paying their own way. The territory is like an empty woodland lot. It's value is in its future use and the natural resources that may be discovered.
That surprises me a bit.
Knowing Comcast and similar ISPs, I expected being assigned a single IPv6 address, with an extra fee for every additional address.
Many here might not remember, but in the 1990s ISP contracts usually specified that a residential / small business connection was for a single machine. You had to upgrade to a more expensive contract to use multiple machines at once. Linux led the way with cheaply available NAT, and it was initially banned as being against the terms of service by many ISPs. Not that they could do much about NAT -- it's difficult to do NAT detection, and at the time those were the customers you didn't want to lose.
NAT only became widespread when it was pre-configured into small routers. At that point it was too late for ISPs to do much about it.
If the software had the support at the time, I'm certain ISPs would have allocated a narrow port range instead of a whole IP address. Even back when there were plenty of IPv4 addresses.
And of course there is economic value to "piracy": advertising and lock-in.
Microsoft's lock on the market happened because of illicit, unauthorized and implicitly authorized copies. Their resulting monopoly position has been worth vastly more than any revenue foregone or lost.
Even if a software publisher doesn't end up with a monopoly, no-cost copies can create a viable market size where none existed before.
There have been serious economic analyses that suggest the market has a below-optimal illicit copying ratio. Yes, overall productivity and software/service revenue would both be higher with more relaxed rules and actions. I have a much more of a level playing field / follow-the-rules attitude, but bogus press releases like these push me away from that viewpoint. Bogus, biased "studies" leave me opposed to anything that such organization want -- if it's the best they could come up with, they are definitely wrong.
$400 will get you taxi-quality paint job. You'll get a single stage (non-clearcoat), not very durable layer of paint over everything. You'll be lucky if they don't paint over the tires and windows.
A repaint like that will hurt the resale value of most cars rather than help it. It's only slightly better than mismatched body panels and heavy rust.
A presentable paint job costs about $2000, and that doesn't include door frames, trunk interior and engine compartment.
The word "flashlight" was actually a derogatory term. The carbon-zinc batteries developed insulating bubbles under high load, and the light flickered and flashed. I'm sure most readers here have experienced this -- imagine how bad it was when the technology was new and barely understood.
That said, I have to agree: torches are what the mob from the village carries when they come to break down the door of your lab.
Build WHAT?!
Not in California. Not even if the central valley is a dust bowl to save the river smelt. Not even if the state paid the highest electric rates in the nation due to horribly botched deregulation. Not even if the manufactured crisis was easy to trigger because the total electric power available is very close to peak usage.
And yes, if California seceded from the Union, the only liquid flowing in most of California would be untreated sewage and contaminated field run-off. Water quality regulations are only important when they impact voters.
I think that some people do not know why NJ is called "the armpit of America". It's not just the smell of its refineries and chemical plants along the coast. Look at its position on the map.
Most visitors just see the part of NJ along I95, missing the sections further inland which gave it the name "The Garden State".
Hitting escape velocity won't help -- whatever is sent out will be unrecoverable. It will roughly be on Earth's orbit around the Sun, but likely won't coincide.
There is some flexibility by shooting the object past the moon, and getting a little bit of a 'slingshot' effect to modify the resulting orbit. But it would still require steering rockets because even a slight error in the initial path or orbital calculation would make a huge different in the resulting orbit.
This topic would make for a great physics and geometry lesson. Why inertial orbits starting from the surface always intersect the surface (the original topic). Why going from a one-body system to a two-body system might be able to change this, but at the expense of extreme sensitivity. How the complexity of potential orbits vastly increases as you add more bodies.
Even more interesting, is the extreme state sensitivity of the "interesting" configurations. A few seconds of arc difference in the initial course can put you someplace completely different. Simple orbital calculations assume point sources of gravity. That's not a bad approximation if you are far enough away, but a "slingshot" breaks that assumption. You can't even model the objects as uniform spheres -- the earth isn't spherical, and it doesn't have a uniform mass distribution. And for objects such as the Earth that have significant magnetic fields, there will be a deflection on approach and departure.
Bottom line is that anything done in space requires a significant ability to steer, and most operations require the ability to dynamically navigate.
That's completely understandable in this case of programming in Prolog.
Prolog is a declarative language.
You declare the rules, and the system figures out a result that matches those rules.
The problem is that this basically doesn't work. So a Prolog programmer has to write the "declarative" rules in a procedural order so that the run-time system doesn't have to try every possible combination to find (or fail to find) a matching result.
The proper ordering of declarations can be quite subtle. With a modestly complex program you can make a seemingly unimportant change in the order of the declarations and have the runtime go from a second to a week.
In this case the professor didn't (couldn't) know how long a Prolog program to solve this problem should take. He just assumed that you had found a more efficient ordering for the declarations. He might even have thought it was luck rather than deep insight that your program was faster than his. But you have to a decent understanding of the limits of Prolog to get a complex program to complete in a reasonable time, so you had to be good before you could get that lucky.
If you couldn't already tell, I have a low opinion of Prolog and declarative languages. They are "parlor tricks". Much like computer 'Life' and neural networks, simple programs can produce unexpected seemingly-sophisticated results. But they don't get better from those initial results. To compute the answers or results you want in a reasonable time, you end up with at least the complexity of writing things in the traditional explicitly procedural method.
The promoters of declarative language typically don't mention that you end up writing rules in an explicitly procedural order if you want the program to work. If you press them on the issue, they then say "well, OK, it's not actually any easier to write, but it's easier to verify that you've correctly specified the desired result." But if you have to carefully shuffle declarations around, and even then some results unpredictably take centuries to compute, pretty much no one cares.
How much energy does it take to get out of earth orbit? How much power capacity needs to be held in reserve for unexpected events?
I don't expect that power usage for entertainment communications is an issue. The ship will no doubt have antennas and transmitters large enough to transmit video and telemetry both for control and for the benefit of the citizens that paid for the mission. The bits needed to request something is trivial in comparison.
On the other side, there is plenty of power on earth to transmit por... entertainment during the slow periods.
I also don't see any problem with the latency. You obviously wouldn't be able to play online games, but most of what you view in a day could be pre-cached or just waited for without a problem.
For the first year or two of a policy 'mistake' like this, contractors make extra money. After that the increase in profitability is taken into account on the next bid. So at most there was a temporary extra expenditure four decades ago.
If the rates were changed today, the market reaction would be almost instant. Contractors would insist on the old terms for existing contracts, and increase the rates for new contracts. And charge a little extra to compensate for the new risk of additional changes. (If you make your suppliers nervous, they rationally will spend extra to mitigate their new risk and will pass that cost onto you.)
They didn't "dumb it down", they hyped it up.
"Animals with built-in GPS!! Planet facing imminent destruction!! More at 11."
The RIAA gathers license fees, and distributes them among the record companies and artists.. after taking out an administrative fee (100% in some cases).
The payments for "covenants not to sue" are not license fees.
No doubt some small fraction will be treated as a license fee, just to put a veneer of legitimacy on the scheme. But I've no doubt that the RIAA will use the extra layers of administration to make reduce the amount and skew the payout distribution to record companies that play the game.
It's not uncommon for rent payments to be less than the mortgage in high cost areas like San Francisco. The owners are hoping to make their money on rapid property value increases. The renters are just there to keep the place occupied and help qualify for the mortgage.
If a $700K house will be worth $800K next year, you aren't that concerned if the renters are paying $2K/month or $3K/month.
Everything changes when the $800K house will be worth $750K next year. The owner can't sell. They would probably need to get rid of the tenants to put the house on the market, but they can't afford to pay the full mortgage when the house doesn't sell in the slow market. They can't raise the rent much, until all of the other rental properties go up as well.
Most of the hardware on my laptop works with Ubuntu out-of-the-box. Only the fingerprint reader doesn't, and Bluetooth isn't especially useful.
The only flaky part is the Atheros WiFi, which will hang the machine when connecting to some access points. That's clearly the fault of Atheros, not the Linux distribution.
I know to not even try Vista. Some significant devices won't work with Vista, and the 1GHz processor is far too slow to run Vista well.
The peak demand problem for the foreseeable future is the air conditioning load. That's difficult to change for a simple reason: the generating efficiency and power handling capacity of the system is lowest during hot weather. Those small substation transformers and "pole pigs" are thermally limited, and are carrying the highest load during hot, sunny days.
A secondary, much lower, peak during the evening hours isn't an operational problem, just a curiosity.
My guess is that 400 watt PCs and 100 watt LCD TVs (that replaced 500 watt CRTs) aren't really the issue. How do they compare to a 3KW stove running 20 minutes to boil water for pasta? Or a 4KW oven warming up for a frozen pizza?
There is a potential problem: imagine 10% of the commuter vehicles being plug-in hybrids or even all-electric. Everyone gets home at 6pm and plugs in their car, sucking 10KW or 15KW from the grid. The answer to this is pretty easy if started now: off-peak chargers, with an option for paying a much higher rate for a "need it now" recharge.
I don't recall reading anywhere that McDonalds had been warned by the FDA about the temperature of their coffee. The phrase "several times" implies a specific warning that was ignored, presumably something that would have been brought up at the trial and mentioned in the extensive press coverage.
And where did the "20% of her body" number come from? The number quoted from all credible sources is 6%. You should review your sources, or perhaps consider if you have an extreme bias.
It didn't happen in this case, but there is a failure mode that is worse than a stuck clutch.
Most power transistors fail in switched-on full conductive mode. This happens when the substrate overheats enough to cause dopant diffusion. The overheating can happen from overcurrent, a manufacturing flaw, or from the transistor being not-quite-on.
Anyone that has had a wall mounted light dimmer fail has likely experienced this. The dimmer usually fails when a bulb filament burns out by shorting, emitting a bright flash in the last few milliseconds of its life. When you install a new bulb it lights, but the dimmer no longer dims. The thyristor has shorted out.
On a traditional motorcycle or car you have three ways to reduce power: cut the throttle or activate the clutch. On a direct-drive electric vehicle you have only the electrical switching. The obvious design of motor speed and power control will apply full power when the switching fails-- the opposite of a fail-safe design. You probably wanted your dining room lit even when the dimmer fails, but you didn't want your electric vehicle running at full speed into a parked minivan.
There are configurations that avoid this problem. The easiest is using motorsm e.g. stepper motors, that require power to be switched on and off to turn . Constant power to one coil will slow or lock up the motor. Another approach is putting switching devices on all power leads, and having a control circuit that immediately turns all of them off if a fault is detected.
The key is knowing about the problem so that you know to think through the failure modes. Something tells me that this guy isn't someone that spends much time thinking through what happens if something (entirely foreseeable!) happens...