Actually, you can't just run ethonol in a regular car engine, even with the correct fuel lines. The stoichiometric ratio of Ethanol is so wildly different than that of gasoline (9 vs 14 or so, IIRC,) that if you attempt to run it in an engine lacking the appropriate fuel maps, you are almost certainly going to end up with a dangerously lean condition. Extreme over-heating, detonation, and component failure are the likley result.
Flex Fuel vehciles must also have the appropriate sensors and fuel maps to handle ethonol.
Although I'm not at all a fan of the republicans, I think that if the democrats start loosing a lot of elections because of Nader and other 3rd party candidates, it's going to force them to change their position to attract the kind of people who vote for Nader.
A friend of mine in college made a very good point.
She was watching the tablet owners walk into class.... Set up their tables in their docing stations and folding holders, lay out their bluetooth keyboards, plop down their mice, and prepare to work. Comparably, the laptop owners could set their device down, open it up, and begin talking notes.
The advantage of a tablet is lost when you have to carry around all the acessories you'd expect to see on a full size computer. The laptop will continue to improve. There's a nich for a tablet - some things it's more convenient for than a full size laptop... But also some real disadvantages. i don't see the laptop going away anytime soon.
When you put executive salary as a percentage of an industry, it doesn't sound like so much, but the Medical industry is truly staggering in it's size - according to Wikipedia, we spent $2.26 trillion dollars on health care, which, by your figure would suggest that executive salary for that industry consumes 113 billion dollars.
According to this article (the first one I found on the subject via Google) a typical figure for corporate America is for executive pay to be 2.4 percent of the net income. So, it seems like we can do better there.
To address some other points:
1. Agreed that administrative costs can go down. The figure I've heard is that the insurance industry carries a 20% overhead above what's paid out to policy holders. It's worth noting that if medical care was socialized and nothing else changed, that's 200 billion dollars we could put into paying down national debt.
2. Lawsuits are as much an issue of public perception as anything. I think most people believe frivilous suits are wrong, but most would jump at an opportunity to be compensated when someone is injured or killed. IMO, the people complaining about the situation and wrongly citing McDonalds cases are as much to blame as anyone. The law as written is actually pretty good in this area, and changing public perception (building the perception that there isn't a lot of free money to be made here) would do a lot to cut down on frivolous suits.
3. Socialized medicine, drug law reform, and welfare would do a *lot* to cut down on that kind of fraud. When a homless guy can get a meal and a warm bed in a shelter, he's a lot less likely to abuse a hospital. When a druggie can get their fix through legal means, they are a lot less likely to waste $1000 in diagnostics to get some pills. When medicine is free, treating a poor guy who has no means to pay is no longer fraud. I think the ends justify the means here.
A friend of mine had a good suggestion for fixing privatized medicine: make it illegal to cherry pick. A healthy young guy gets the same rates as an old cancer survivor. Relative rates go up for us when we're young and able to earn, and down when we're older and need the coverage. And it becomes within the means of an individual to buy a policy (whereas now it's very expensive unless you're part of a group policy.)
CVTs have not only been implemented on a number of popular cars, they are almost ubiquitous in some applications.
- Many of the Hybrids on the market either come standard with a CVT, or have it available as an option. - Virtually every modern Scooter on the market is equipped with a CVT. - Several motorcycles are available with a CVT (Aprilia Mana comes to mind,) although it hasn't caught on for marketing reasons. - Several full sized cars are available with a CVT, or come equipped with one standard (Nissan Murano being the best known.)
Renault actually built and tested a CVT Formula 1 car, the FW15C, however it was banned before it ever saw competition.
As a subset of working examples in the US, I'd say someone who doesn't think you can manage your own healthcare, choose your own light bulbs, choose to work for less than minimum wage rather than be totally unemployed, choose what toilet or shower-head you have, choose whether or not to smoke, or choose to responsibly carry a firearm.
We did chose. We decided that we didn't want to have people smoking in our face, didn't want to bear the burden of increased medical costs, nor bear the burden of brown-outs or spikes in energy prices.
You'll find that a number of the occupy protesters dream of a librarianship paradise where all power structures are torn down, and the individual is truly free to make their own way... You know, rather than the fantasy Libritarian paradise where governmental power is handed to corporations in the hope that it will make us more free (hint: if you can't make your way in our current system, you certainly won't be able to with less regulation.)
There are good reasons for having a minimum wage, and mandating more energy efficient light-bulbs and shower heads, but ignoring that... If you don't like those things, why don't you get involved with the party and try to improve it rather than placing a vote for the party that's actively selling out your rights and killing the american dream?
Market solutions are brutal, and there is good reason to make policy at the governmental level rather than to be forced to inact the same changes on an individual basis when we face tripple the utility prices.
What? this thread is crazy. A heat pump will often have a COP for heating as high as 3 and in theory can be as high as 5. That is for 1kW of power i can pump in 3kW of heat (power) into my house. This is without invoking Maxwell demons or any magic. That is Carnot efficiency. I cannot do this with a heat. The COP of a heater is simply 1.
Uh... Pardon me if this is a stupid question, but given the right conditions, couldn't you just turn the heat pump the other direction and get a COP above 1?
Maybe Engineers aren't such good listeners, then. The problem has CLEARLY been defined, and by many people.
I don't think it's a problem of engineers being bad listeners... I think it's a problem of *sticks his fingers in his ears* Blehblehblehblehblehblehblehblehblehblehbleh I'm not listening! blehblehblehblehbleh... I can't hear you.
Society has always rewarded intelligence because working smarter has always equated to producing more whether it's using a wheel vs a sled or a farmer rotating his crops and irrigating his fields.
Sorry, that's bullcrap. Intelligence is a limited resource, and as knowledge and intelligence increases, the bar raises, limiting the pool of available talent. There is no shortage of people who are willing to work on a farm or clean hallways. The availability of talent will always push down the perceived value of the employee, keeping wages low - after all, what's the point of paying someone who can clean twice as fast twice as much money, when you can just hire two people for the same cost?
It's not about how hard someone works, or how valuable their job is to us as a society. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. Don't think you're better than someone just because you have something that's in demand - the person who cleans the toilets around my office works a lot harder than I do, and they provide a very valuable service despite their low wages, and the availability of replacements.
I was a teacher for a few years, and my experience with those students was what made me reconsider my decision to never have children. Being a positive influence in my student's life, and watching them grow was hugely rewarding.
With that said, if you're comparing that to the satisfaction you take home from your job, then there is something seriously missing in your life. I don't debug network problems because it's what makes me happy, I do it because it's what facilitates my life passions. The experience of bring home race trophies or climbing to the top of Mt. Zas was hugely rewarding, in a way that all the time wasters we have in our day to day lives (video games, work) just aren't. If raising children is the only thing you've done in your life that brings you that kind of satisfaction, then I would hope you find time to open yourself up to more life experiences.
Also, pages that don't need to be dynamic, shouldn't be. Our gateway (to product categories) pages are generated as we update the site, and stored static. This allows them to be cached. It sounds old fashioned, but the fact is that it greatly increases perceived latency. I am amazed at how many websites are generated via PHP and SQL on the fly, yet aren't updated more than a couple times a day or less. That is a lot of wasted CPU cycles on the server, and a lot of wasted potential for caching, both locally and down the line. And yes, it makes your website load slower, making it seem like your pages are larger than they are.
With a good caching engine, dynamically generated webpages should be nearly as fast as a static page - the page it's self is parsed and cached, then only re-parsed if the input changes.
Because the process of learning to be careful with some things takes time... Eventually your kids learn not to eat stuff like magnets, but it doesn't happen right away.While I'm all for kids learning through cuts, and bruises, and burns, I'd rather not have to take a kid to the hospital for something that they really can't be expected to understand.
Also, there's supervising a kid, and then there's locking a kid up in a padded room. Even if you keep an eye on a kid, you can't always protect them from every kind of trouble - and preventing a young child from swallowing small stuff falls into the 'near impossible' end of parenting skills - best you can do is make sure that there isn't anything seriously harmful around the kid, and not every parent in the world understands the danger of magnets. Stories like this help get the word out.
It's funny that there's a bit of a sadness on slashdot about the fact that kids aren't allowed to have fun with cool chemicals, wood burning kits, big jungle jims, and rusty fences... And then we turn around and see posts from people who probably aren't parents complaining that we aren't doing enough to keep our kids safe.
"engage" "sancrosanct" "leverage" "lagniappe" "go the extra mile" "initiative" "adapt to changing needs in the field."
Not sure if serious.
Not to disrespect your work, but having experience in the automotive industry, if the factory quotes 3 hours for a job, it means that doing it right will probably take 4. If the mechanics accomplish the job in 1, the first question out of my mouth will be "What corners did you cut?"
The iPhone is a 'good enough' product that does a pretty incredible job of meeting the desires of the market. It's arguably the Motorola Razr of the late '00s. The fact that it was envisioned by a man with a deranged and twisted-ego doesn't mean that it's necessarily a perfect product, and I doubt that Steve would have let the desire to build something 'perfect' get in the way of his ideals for the product, or approach to delivering it.
The iPhone is a good product, wrapped up in a great UI, and one of the best marketing campaigns I've ever seen. The suggestion that it's a perfect product probably comes from it mattching up against your desires and expectations of a device, rather than it's ultimate qualities. I'd argue that it's a great example of something that's 'good enough' in all the right ways, with an excellent focus on it's target demographic.
Slashdot Mirror
The good news is that ResierFS has been slowly killing off the other, lesser known filesystems.
Actually, you can't just run ethonol in a regular car engine, even with the correct fuel lines. The stoichiometric ratio of Ethanol is so wildly different than that of gasoline (9 vs 14 or so, IIRC,) that if you attempt to run it in an engine lacking the appropriate fuel maps, you are almost certainly going to end up with a dangerously lean condition. Extreme over-heating, detonation, and component failure are the likley result.
Flex Fuel vehciles must also have the appropriate sensors and fuel maps to handle ethonol.
Apparently, they are also the only ones with Mod points today. :)
The top 5% own 45.1% of the wealth in the United States. The rich accomulate disproportionate wealth, not income.
Although I'm not at all a fan of the republicans, I think that if the democrats start loosing a lot of elections because of Nader and other 3rd party candidates, it's going to force them to change their position to attract the kind of people who vote for Nader.
A friend of mine in college made a very good point.
She was watching the tablet owners walk into class.... Set up their tables in their docing stations and folding holders, lay out their bluetooth keyboards, plop down their mice, and prepare to work. Comparably, the laptop owners could set their device down, open it up, and begin talking notes.
The advantage of a tablet is lost when you have to carry around all the acessories you'd expect to see on a full size computer. The laptop will continue to improve. There's a nich for a tablet - some things it's more convenient for than a full size laptop... But also some real disadvantages. i don't see the laptop going away anytime soon.
When you put executive salary as a percentage of an industry, it doesn't sound like so much, but the Medical industry is truly staggering in it's size - according to Wikipedia, we spent $2.26 trillion dollars on health care, which, by your figure would suggest that executive salary for that industry consumes 113 billion dollars.
According to this article (the first one I found on the subject via Google) a typical figure for corporate America is for executive pay to be 2.4 percent of the net income. So, it seems like we can do better there.
To address some other points:
1. Agreed that administrative costs can go down. The figure I've heard is that the insurance industry carries a 20% overhead above what's paid out to policy holders. It's worth noting that if medical care was socialized and nothing else changed, that's 200 billion dollars we could put into paying down national debt.
2. Lawsuits are as much an issue of public perception as anything. I think most people believe frivilous suits are wrong, but most would jump at an opportunity to be compensated when someone is injured or killed. IMO, the people complaining about the situation and wrongly citing McDonalds cases are as much to blame as anyone. The law as written is actually pretty good in this area, and changing public perception (building the perception that there isn't a lot of free money to be made here) would do a lot to cut down on frivolous suits.
3. Socialized medicine, drug law reform, and welfare would do a *lot* to cut down on that kind of fraud. When a homless guy can get a meal and a warm bed in a shelter, he's a lot less likely to abuse a hospital. When a druggie can get their fix through legal means, they are a lot less likely to waste $1000 in diagnostics to get some pills. When medicine is free, treating a poor guy who has no means to pay is no longer fraud. I think the ends justify the means here.
A friend of mine had a good suggestion for fixing privatized medicine: make it illegal to cherry pick. A healthy young guy gets the same rates as an old cancer survivor. Relative rates go up for us when we're young and able to earn, and down when we're older and need the coverage. And it becomes within the means of an individual to buy a policy (whereas now it's very expensive unless you're part of a group policy.)
Actually, there was a strong call to nuke Russia before they could develop nukes as well.
I always just assume that the republicans are corrupt, so I'm really only interested in knowing what Democrats have been bought and paid for.
CVTs have not only been implemented on a number of popular cars, they are almost ubiquitous in some applications.
- Many of the Hybrids on the market either come standard with a CVT, or have it available as an option.
- Virtually every modern Scooter on the market is equipped with a CVT.
- Several motorcycles are available with a CVT (Aprilia Mana comes to mind,) although it hasn't caught on for marketing reasons.
- Several full sized cars are available with a CVT, or come equipped with one standard (Nissan Murano being the best known.)
Renault actually built and tested a CVT Formula 1 car, the FW15C, however it was banned before it ever saw competition.
http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2007/05/03/banned-continuously-variable-transmission-cvt/
http://www.f1technical.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3966
I'm a motorcyclist. Fear of certain death if I'm involved in a serious accident doesn't slow me down any.
I never liked this line of reasoning. If you have no working class, who are you going to sell your shitty cell phone service to?
We did chose. We decided that we didn't want to have people smoking in our face, didn't want to bear the burden of increased medical costs, nor bear the burden of brown-outs or spikes in energy prices.
You'll find that a number of the occupy protesters dream of a librarianship paradise where all power structures are torn down, and the individual is truly free to make their own way... You know, rather than the fantasy Libritarian paradise where governmental power is handed to corporations in the hope that it will make us more free (hint: if you can't make your way in our current system, you certainly won't be able to with less regulation.)
There are good reasons for having a minimum wage, and mandating more energy efficient light-bulbs and shower heads, but ignoring that... If you don't like those things, why don't you get involved with the party and try to improve it rather than placing a vote for the party that's actively selling out your rights and killing the american dream?
Market solutions are brutal, and there is good reason to make policy at the governmental level rather than to be forced to inact the same changes on an individual basis when we face tripple the utility prices.
Uh... Pardon me if this is a stupid question, but given the right conditions, couldn't you just turn the heat pump the other direction and get a COP above 1?
Can you be 20% more awesome?
Some things just dont have units.
I don't think it's a problem of engineers being bad listeners... I think it's a problem of *sticks his fingers in his ears* Blehblehblehblehblehblehblehblehblehblehbleh I'm not listening! blehblehblehblehbleh... I can't hear you.
Sorry, that's bullcrap. Intelligence is a limited resource, and as knowledge and intelligence increases, the bar raises, limiting the pool of available talent. There is no shortage of people who are willing to work on a farm or clean hallways. The availability of talent will always push down the perceived value of the employee, keeping wages low - after all, what's the point of paying someone who can clean twice as fast twice as much money, when you can just hire two people for the same cost?
It's not about how hard someone works, or how valuable their job is to us as a society. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. Don't think you're better than someone just because you have something that's in demand - the person who cleans the toilets around my office works a lot harder than I do, and they provide a very valuable service despite their low wages, and the availability of replacements.
I was a teacher for a few years, and my experience with those students was what made me reconsider my decision to never have children. Being a positive influence in my student's life, and watching them grow was hugely rewarding.
With that said, if you're comparing that to the satisfaction you take home from your job, then there is something seriously missing in your life. I don't debug network problems because it's what makes me happy, I do it because it's what facilitates my life passions. The experience of bring home race trophies or climbing to the top of Mt. Zas was hugely rewarding, in a way that all the time wasters we have in our day to day lives (video games, work) just aren't. If raising children is the only thing you've done in your life that brings you that kind of satisfaction, then I would hope you find time to open yourself up to more life experiences.
With a good caching engine, dynamically generated webpages should be nearly as fast as a static page - the page it's self is parsed and cached, then only re-parsed if the input changes.
If the price was -$200, I'd buy as many as the store stocked, from every store in the area. ;)
Because the process of learning to be careful with some things takes time... Eventually your kids learn not to eat stuff like magnets, but it doesn't happen right away.While I'm all for kids learning through cuts, and bruises, and burns, I'd rather not have to take a kid to the hospital for something that they really can't be expected to understand.
Also, there's supervising a kid, and then there's locking a kid up in a padded room. Even if you keep an eye on a kid, you can't always protect them from every kind of trouble - and preventing a young child from swallowing small stuff falls into the 'near impossible' end of parenting skills - best you can do is make sure that there isn't anything seriously harmful around the kid, and not every parent in the world understands the danger of magnets. Stories like this help get the word out.
It's funny that there's a bit of a sadness on slashdot about the fact that kids aren't allowed to have fun with cool chemicals, wood burning kits, big jungle jims, and rusty fences... And then we turn around and see posts from people who probably aren't parents complaining that we aren't doing enough to keep our kids safe.
"engage" "sancrosanct" "leverage" "lagniappe" "go the extra mile" "initiative" "adapt to changing needs in the field."
Not sure if serious.
Not to disrespect your work, but having experience in the automotive industry, if the factory quotes 3 hours for a job, it means that doing it right will probably take 4. If the mechanics accomplish the job in 1, the first question out of my mouth will be "What corners did you cut?"
The iPhone is a 'good enough' product that does a pretty incredible job of meeting the desires of the market. It's arguably the Motorola Razr of the late '00s. The fact that it was envisioned by a man with a deranged and twisted-ego doesn't mean that it's necessarily a perfect product, and I doubt that Steve would have let the desire to build something 'perfect' get in the way of his ideals for the product, or approach to delivering it.
The iPhone is a good product, wrapped up in a great UI, and one of the best marketing campaigns I've ever seen. The suggestion that it's a perfect product probably comes from it mattching up against your desires and expectations of a device, rather than it's ultimate qualities. I'd argue that it's a great example of something that's 'good enough' in all the right ways, with an excellent focus on it's target demographic.
If you're arguing that the iPhone is perfect, you've either never used one, or never used anything else.
You may be thinking of the Cracked.com article: "5 ways we ruined the occupy wall street generation." Good article, and definitely worth a read.