I'd be a bit more concerned with the level of care rather than the method of delivering any bad medical news. One of the reasons (in theory) for telepresence is so that you can consult specialists nationally/internationally without them spending hours/days traveling for each patient when they could be lending their expertise to numerous patients in that same time period. I'm not sure if this specific situation fits that scenario, the specialist could live next door to the hospital for all i know, and even if he lived on the other side of the planet there are definitely ways to handle it a little better (having a generalist onsite to handle consults), but without knowing a bit more I'd cut the hospital a little slack.
While it makes sense in a few niche cases, rail/subway public transport is a technology who's time has come and gone. It requires too large of a footprint, is too complicated to administer, and to expensive to maintain. The future is going to be more fluid and decentralized transport, something like driverless bus and large vans tied to some kind of automated route management system. Think of something like Lyft/Uber, only with driverless vehicles of various sizes and MUCH more prevalent. A transportation system that costs tens of millions per mile with stations that run into the tens/hundreds of millions of dollars each has no chance on even footing with a system that costs tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle and has no stations necessary.
I wonder if this has to do with their big changes to the "Starship" from a carbon fiber/PICA-X design to an actively cooled stainless steel design. Shedding one focused workforce (carbon fiber) so they can eventually rehire another (metal work). It is also (for better or worse) a pretty standard procedure in competitive industries to "cull the heard" as it were once in a while to keep the company from getting too complacent. It stinks for those being cut no doubt, but it's better than ending up like the behemoths they're competing against who are still using 1970-80s tech and burning up insane amounts of money on their way to obscurity.
Which is a good thing for this application. Assuming the craft in this instance (and assuming there was an actual incident to begin with) were relatively standard consumer grade drones they would be unable to resist even basic bird-shot. Bird-shot is so widely used for hunting birds BECAUSE its pattern spreads out increasing the chances of hitting the target and upon coming back down to the ground it is relatively harmless due to its fairly low terminal velocity. If you do need a little extra range a "choke" on a shotgun will allow for hitting targets up to around 50 yards. Even if you're stupid enough to shoot directly at a vehicle at close range the pellets often have difficulty piercing even the thin metal of a car body let alone the more robust hull of an aircraft. Most responsible gun owners know to check what's behind the target BEFORE pulling the trigger, which is why even in a country where the number of guns outnumber people the accidental shootings pear year are 0.02% of he mortality statistics.
We have information suggesting that it may be a binary contact pair, could it be tidally locked to the sun and thus have no light curve? Another possibility is that being out so far with so little gravitational interference maybe it is encased in a relatively uniform "snowdrift" of ice and dirt. Either way we should know in a week or so, hopefully it will be a heck of a show no matter what.
I'm not really sure I see the point in Virgins/Blue Origins suborbital hoppers. They can't really go very far, they don't give you much time in weightlessness (less than 6 minutes), they're not terribly reusable and they're wickedly expensive. For better or worse I think the BFR/Starship/Superheavy is really the only launcher with a chance of opening up access to space at this point, even their BFR/S/SH craft in its point to point transport roll would be a better ride than SS2/NS. Blue Origins New Glenn seems to be the next in line, but they're still years away from achieving what SpaceX did three years ago. It almost sounds like SpaceX will be conducting suborbital hops with its Starship before/around when the New Glenn flies for the first time. I hope that SpaceX gets competition to keep them honest/motivated, but I'm just not seeing it from any of the current/near future launch companies.
I'll believe it when they find pieces of the drone embedded in the nosecone or find LiPo residue. There is a disturbing fervor regarding the "dangers" of drones at the moment that can result in some hilarious/disturbing claims about their capabilities/risks. I have literally had family members believe that the palm sized quad-copter I have is going to chop off their fingers, and police have made some outlandish claims that were later proven to be demonstrably false.
They can't keep firearms themselves out of the hands of formerly convicted criminals and those only number in the hundreds of millions. Around 10 BILLION rounds of ammunition are sold each year in the US. Ah here we go, The Lancet is a MEDICAL JOURNAL. This is a little like an automotive journal publishing a study on farm productivity. They know next to nothing about the subject, and have no real world experience with its application.
That's funny, coming from the head of our government in a time where it is painfully obvious they want to keep all of the records of their "questionable" activities in a black box. A month doesn't seem to go by where some branch is claiming that the public doesn't need to know about their tracking of phone calls, internet communications, random planting of GPS devices, lying in court about the source of evidence (parallel construction), destruction of documents, keeping of records that are required by law to periodically destroyed, the list goes on.
I imagine on the books they can make it look like they've gone coal free, but I wonder if they can actually DO it in the real world. I'd wager that what they'll actually be doing is something like what many residential solar customers do, pump significant amounts of energy into the grid on sunny days and pull in coal/wind/nuclear/solar/hydroelectric power in at night/on cloudy days. They claim that they're running on clean power but in reality if they disconnected themselves from "undesired" power sources their homes/businesses would be without power half the time. Don't get me wrong, switching off of fossil fuels to renewables (and well designed nuclear IMHO) as much is possible is a worthy goal. However until we invent one heck of a storage medium we will be unable to get anywhere near 100%, 70% is pushing it and even that would require significant fossil fuel backups.
This DA sounds like he is on a paranoid drug trip, similar to some crazy conspiracy theorist who forgot to take his asenapine saying that the government has implanted listening devices in his fillings. Rizwan was a food inspector and Malik was (educated as) a pharmacist. There is little if any indication that they had any background in advanced programming. And even the FBI seems unable, try as they might to stretch the definition, to tie the two of them to any significant terrorist organization so its unlikely that they received anything that way. As with most of these cases government officials seem happy to play to the idiots who watch too much 24 or similar programs that portray some massive conspiracy at play when in fact most of these cases are a few nutjobs randomly lashing out.
Satellites take years to develop, and sometimes sit on a shelf for years more before they get a launch slot. Waiting a few days/weeks for "perfect" weather is nothing compared to that. I imagine launch customers look at the criteria in the following order, First that their satellite makes it to orbit, secondly that it is done so as cheaply as possible, and a distant third that it is launched on time. The only exception might be some interplanetary launches, but in with a properly designed propulsion system there is no reason why the satellite/probe couldn't be launched a few weeks/months early to loiter in an elliptical orbit until the window came up.
Its development is still on a slow simmer, the company is still working on it, but it looks like they're trying to develop the SABRE engine for "commercial" (US Air Force and BAE Systems) purposes to raise capital for a push at developing SKYLON.
If its so dangerous just drain the darn thing. I don't care how neglected it is there has to be some way to open up the valves and drain the reservoir even if it involves shape charges or blow torches. If push came to shove simply disconnect the generators and open up their channels all the way, it would take a long time but the reservoir would eventually drain.
Want to stop "erroneous" take-downs of non-infringing content? Amend the law so that if 0.1% of your take-down claims is improper the content in question is transferred to the public domain. Companies would tread really carefully if they risked losing ownership of the content in question. If content holders expect such severe penalties for infringers its only fair that there be severe penalties for claiming infringement where none exists.
Why go with a generic statement when there is a direct quote from Ortiz, "It doesn't matter what color your uniform is. If you bleed blue, we have to back each other up." That doesn't sound nefarious, not at all. As you noted he has an extensive and public history of racism, abuse, lying and intimidation. He even goes after other cops who don't keep to the blue wall or show "enough patriotism".
The letter in question doesn't appear to have anything directly to do with hoverboard safety from a use perspective (falling off, balance, etc) but more from a mechanical/electrical perspective (component failure, faulty wiring, faulty design, etc). That said I wonder if UL's certification tries to backdoor some of these aspects. Lets face it, the CPSC doesn't have a great track record when it comes to letting people exercise personal responsibility. They're the kind of agency that tries to idiot proof the world no matter what the cost.
"reduces the volume" is a pretty vast understatement. First off it "reduces the volume" of the waste by over 90%. Secondly the reduced waste loses 99.9% of its radioactivity after about 40 years. These two factors make disposal much more manageable.
Yet another reason why there should be built in hardware based safeguards, In the case of cameras/mics they should have a noticeable LED that is illuminated (for 2 seconds minimum) when they are active and of course should not be active unless being directly used. In the case of voice commands it shouldn't be too difficult to design a separate controller that would recognize a simple command ("Hey TV") before it began relaying the audio to the main board/internet at which point the LED would illuminate.
You assume the campaign contributions, trips and "consulting/speaking" fees are the only things of value changing hands. You see at least part of what is going on show itself pretty heavily in the regulatory agencies, members of those agencies suddenly gets a cushy job in the private sector after they are replaced/retire. I think the Securities and Exchange Commission is one of the more egregious examples, hundreds of their employees end up representing the very people they were supposed to be regulating, sometimes days after quitting. And reams of documents at the SEC, which are legally required to be kept for 25 years, are inexplicably fed to the shredders.
The last paragraph pretty much sums it up. "It's mostly a proof of concept or rather a disproof of the assumption that wind vibrations can't be usefully harvested. Don't expect tiny metal forests to power cities, but it's still a cool idea." So this appears not to have any practical applications.
"In Fiat Chrysler vehicles equipped with this shifter design, opening the driver's door when the car is not in Park triggers a chime and an instrument cluster alert, and the engine cannot be turned off with the car in gear"
I'm guessing "chime and alert" is a roundabout way of saying the car screams at you "hey moron, you left the car in gear!" the dash lights up like a Christmas tree.
I wonder what their definition of 'terrorists' is, somehow I bet it isn't quite what people are thinking. When the US was bombing the heck out of Iraq/Afghanistan they simply labeled everyone that they killed as "terrorists". When it started to come to light that women and pre teen children were included in those numbers they did finally limit their tally, to including anyone they killed who was armed, including reporters with large scary cameras.
"You'll find that almost 85 percent of the cars going by are violators"
Then your speed limit is set too low, unless there is some compelling reason for it to be that low speed limits should be set by the average traffic speed (within reason). I think my state even has a law to that effect.
Wow, what a "coincidence". The chances of that happening are only about 1.5%, me thinks that there is something shady going on. Not that it swayed the caucus all on its own but it could indicate that other areas of the caucus are conducting themselves in less than impartial ways as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be a bit more concerned with the level of care rather than the method of delivering any bad medical news. One of the reasons (in theory) for telepresence is so that you can consult specialists nationally/internationally without them spending hours/days traveling for each patient when they could be lending their expertise to numerous patients in that same time period. I'm not sure if this specific situation fits that scenario, the specialist could live next door to the hospital for all i know, and even if he lived on the other side of the planet there are definitely ways to handle it a little better (having a generalist onsite to handle consults), but without knowing a bit more I'd cut the hospital a little slack.
While it makes sense in a few niche cases, rail/subway public transport is a technology who's time has come and gone. It requires too large of a footprint, is too complicated to administer, and to expensive to maintain. The future is going to be more fluid and decentralized transport, something like driverless bus and large vans tied to some kind of automated route management system. Think of something like Lyft/Uber, only with driverless vehicles of various sizes and MUCH more prevalent. A transportation system that costs tens of millions per mile with stations that run into the tens/hundreds of millions of dollars each has no chance on even footing with a system that costs tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle and has no stations necessary.
I wonder if this has to do with their big changes to the "Starship" from a carbon fiber/PICA-X design to an actively cooled stainless steel design. Shedding one focused workforce (carbon fiber) so they can eventually rehire another (metal work). It is also (for better or worse) a pretty standard procedure in competitive industries to "cull the heard" as it were once in a while to keep the company from getting too complacent. It stinks for those being cut no doubt, but it's better than ending up like the behemoths they're competing against who are still using 1970-80s tech and burning up insane amounts of money on their way to obscurity.
"Shotguns lack the range or accuracy."
Which is a good thing for this application. Assuming the craft in this instance (and assuming there was an actual incident to begin with) were relatively standard consumer grade drones they would be unable to resist even basic bird-shot. Bird-shot is so widely used for hunting birds BECAUSE its pattern spreads out increasing the chances of hitting the target and upon coming back down to the ground it is relatively harmless due to its fairly low terminal velocity. If you do need a little extra range a "choke" on a shotgun will allow for hitting targets up to around 50 yards. Even if you're stupid enough to shoot directly at a vehicle at close range the pellets often have difficulty piercing even the thin metal of a car body let alone the more robust hull of an aircraft. Most responsible gun owners know to check what's behind the target BEFORE pulling the trigger, which is why even in a country where the number of guns outnumber people the accidental shootings pear year are 0.02% of he mortality statistics.
We have information suggesting that it may be a binary contact pair, could it be tidally locked to the sun and thus have no light curve? Another possibility is that being out so far with so little gravitational interference maybe it is encased in a relatively uniform "snowdrift" of ice and dirt. Either way we should know in a week or so, hopefully it will be a heck of a show no matter what.
I'm not really sure I see the point in Virgins/Blue Origins suborbital hoppers. They can't really go very far, they don't give you much time in weightlessness (less than 6 minutes), they're not terribly reusable and they're wickedly expensive. For better or worse I think the BFR/Starship/Superheavy is really the only launcher with a chance of opening up access to space at this point, even their BFR/S/SH craft in its point to point transport roll would be a better ride than SS2/NS. Blue Origins New Glenn seems to be the next in line, but they're still years away from achieving what SpaceX did three years ago. It almost sounds like SpaceX will be conducting suborbital hops with its Starship before/around when the New Glenn flies for the first time. I hope that SpaceX gets competition to keep them honest/motivated, but I'm just not seeing it from any of the current/near future launch companies.
I'll believe it when they find pieces of the drone embedded in the nosecone or find LiPo residue. There is a disturbing fervor regarding the "dangers" of drones at the moment that can result in some hilarious/disturbing claims about their capabilities/risks. I have literally had family members believe that the palm sized quad-copter I have is going to chop off their fingers, and police have made some outlandish claims that were later proven to be demonstrably false.
NYPD flew helicopter at drone
Park helicopter tries to knock drone out of air
They can't keep firearms themselves out of the hands of formerly convicted criminals and those only number in the hundreds of millions. Around 10 BILLION rounds of ammunition are sold each year in the US. Ah here we go, The Lancet is a MEDICAL JOURNAL. This is a little like an automotive journal publishing a study on farm productivity. They know next to nothing about the subject, and have no real world experience with its application.
That's funny, coming from the head of our government in a time where it is painfully obvious they want to keep all of the records of their "questionable" activities in a black box. A month doesn't seem to go by where some branch is claiming that the public doesn't need to know about their tracking of phone calls, internet communications, random planting of GPS devices, lying in court about the source of evidence (parallel construction), destruction of documents, keeping of records that are required by law to periodically destroyed, the list goes on.
I imagine on the books they can make it look like they've gone coal free, but I wonder if they can actually DO it in the real world. I'd wager that what they'll actually be doing is something like what many residential solar customers do, pump significant amounts of energy into the grid on sunny days and pull in coal/wind/nuclear/solar/hydroelectric power in at night/on cloudy days. They claim that they're running on clean power but in reality if they disconnected themselves from "undesired" power sources their homes/businesses would be without power half the time. Don't get me wrong, switching off of fossil fuels to renewables (and well designed nuclear IMHO) as much is possible is a worthy goal. However until we invent one heck of a storage medium we will be unable to get anywhere near 100%, 70% is pushing it and even that would require significant fossil fuel backups.
This DA sounds like he is on a paranoid drug trip, similar to some crazy conspiracy theorist who forgot to take his asenapine saying that the government has implanted listening devices in his fillings. Rizwan was a food inspector and Malik was (educated as) a pharmacist. There is little if any indication that they had any background in advanced programming. And even the FBI seems unable, try as they might to stretch the definition, to tie the two of them to any significant terrorist organization so its unlikely that they received anything that way. As with most of these cases government officials seem happy to play to the idiots who watch too much 24 or similar programs that portray some massive conspiracy at play when in fact most of these cases are a few nutjobs randomly lashing out.
Satellites take years to develop, and sometimes sit on a shelf for years more before they get a launch slot. Waiting a few days/weeks for "perfect" weather is nothing compared to that. I imagine launch customers look at the criteria in the following order, First that their satellite makes it to orbit, secondly that it is done so as cheaply as possible, and a distant third that it is launched on time. The only exception might be some interplanetary launches, but in with a properly designed propulsion system there is no reason why the satellite/probe couldn't be launched a few weeks/months early to loiter in an elliptical orbit until the window came up.
Its development is still on a slow simmer, the company is still working on it, but it looks like they're trying to develop the SABRE engine for "commercial" (US Air Force and BAE Systems) purposes to raise capital for a push at developing SKYLON.
If its so dangerous just drain the darn thing. I don't care how neglected it is there has to be some way to open up the valves and drain the reservoir even if it involves shape charges or blow torches. If push came to shove simply disconnect the generators and open up their channels all the way, it would take a long time but the reservoir would eventually drain.
Want to stop "erroneous" take-downs of non-infringing content? Amend the law so that if 0.1% of your take-down claims is improper the content in question is transferred to the public domain. Companies would tread really carefully if they risked losing ownership of the content in question. If content holders expect such severe penalties for infringers its only fair that there be severe penalties for claiming infringement where none exists.
"cops versus bad guys"
Why go with a generic statement when there is a direct quote from Ortiz, "It doesn't matter what color your uniform is. If you bleed blue, we have to back each other up." That doesn't sound nefarious, not at all. As you noted he has an extensive and public history of racism, abuse, lying and intimidation. He even goes after other cops who don't keep to the blue wall or show "enough patriotism".
The letter in question doesn't appear to have anything directly to do with hoverboard safety from a use perspective (falling off, balance, etc) but more from a mechanical/electrical perspective (component failure, faulty wiring, faulty design, etc). That said I wonder if UL's certification tries to backdoor some of these aspects. Lets face it, the CPSC doesn't have a great track record when it comes to letting people exercise personal responsibility. They're the kind of agency that tries to idiot proof the world no matter what the cost.
"reduces the volume" is a pretty vast understatement. First off it "reduces the volume" of the waste by over 90%. Secondly the reduced waste loses 99.9% of its radioactivity after about 40 years. These two factors make disposal much more manageable.
Yet another reason why there should be built in hardware based safeguards, In the case of cameras/mics they should have a noticeable LED that is illuminated (for 2 seconds minimum) when they are active and of course should not be active unless being directly used. In the case of voice commands it shouldn't be too difficult to design a separate controller that would recognize a simple command ("Hey TV") before it began relaying the audio to the main board/internet at which point the LED would illuminate.
You assume the campaign contributions, trips and "consulting/speaking" fees are the only things of value changing hands. You see at least part of what is going on show itself pretty heavily in the regulatory agencies, members of those agencies suddenly gets a cushy job in the private sector after they are replaced/retire. I think the Securities and Exchange Commission is one of the more egregious examples, hundreds of their employees end up representing the very people they were supposed to be regulating, sometimes days after quitting. And reams of documents at the SEC, which are legally required to be kept for 25 years, are inexplicably fed to the shredders.
The last paragraph pretty much sums it up.
"It's mostly a proof of concept or rather a disproof of the assumption that wind vibrations can't be usefully harvested. Don't expect tiny metal forests to power cities, but it's still a cool idea."
So this appears not to have any practical applications.
"In Fiat Chrysler vehicles equipped with this shifter design, opening the driver's door when the car is not in Park triggers a chime and an instrument cluster alert, and the engine cannot be turned off with the car in gear"
I'm guessing "chime and alert" is a roundabout way of saying the car screams at you "hey moron, you left the car in gear!" the dash lights up like a Christmas tree.
I wonder what their definition of 'terrorists' is, somehow I bet it isn't quite what people are thinking. When the US was bombing the heck out of Iraq/Afghanistan they simply labeled everyone that they killed as "terrorists". When it started to come to light that women and pre teen children were included in those numbers they did finally limit their tally, to including anyone they killed who was armed, including reporters with large scary cameras.
"You'll find that almost 85 percent of the cars going by are violators"
Then your speed limit is set too low, unless there is some compelling reason for it to be that low speed limits should be set by the average traffic speed (within reason). I think my state even has a law to that effect.
Wow, what a "coincidence". The chances of that happening are only about 1.5%, me thinks that there is something shady going on. Not that it swayed the caucus all on its own but it could indicate that other areas of the caucus are conducting themselves in less than impartial ways as well.