William Gibson called, and Johnny Mnemonic wants his pictures back!
But, speaking of pictures, how does the system deal with pictures of pictures? Keep picture of SO in wallet, use picture of picture as your key. Seems like this might have some potential tbh, especially if you're careful in how you frame the background (as a "3rd factor").
Admittedly I can't see myself using it, way too much faff, and relies on my having my phone with me when I want to access w/e it is I'm trying to access. Can't think of much worse than 'having' to do that. Next I'd be expected to answer it.
I've long maintained that the US could have done much better buying an off-the-shelf aircraft (like the Rafale) and making it autonomous, a "drone" if you will.
Retro-fitting a piloted aircraft to make it into a UAV or a true drone is flat out retarded on every single aspect you can think of except, perhaps, short term cost.
I recently saw an 'advert' that suggested some agency was trying that with the Tornado over here and I practically choked on my cup of tea.
Without a pilot manoeuvres become limited by the resilience of the air frame, rather than fragile humanity. Existing air frames assume human fragility, with the smallest amount of extra tolerance the engineers and designers thought they could get away with. Hence a retro-fit doesn't magically gain you anything except a plane with virtually the same capabilities (and flaws).
My prediction is that the most effective drones will be those 'designed for purpose', not those 'designed for convenience' or those 'designed by politics'. In addition, for the most part, stealth will increasingly become an expensive and limiting irrelevance.
When talking about equal opportunity, using the analogy of a 100 yard dash it helps to recognise that not everyone is actually starting at the same point on the track. The race, as being run today, is not fair.
By all means argue for equal opportunity, rather than equality of outcome. That's a principle that most people will get behind. After all, when pressed (and being honest) no-one appreciates a free loader, no-one appreciates paying to give stuff to people who aren't prepared to work for it.
The problem of freeloading however doesn't apply only to welfare recipients, nor to all welfare recipients. It very much does apply to a number of rich people too.
By the way, equality of outcome is not socialism, socialism is not equality of outcome: "A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." doesn't mean that the community can't distribute the products of the economy unevenly, based, for example, on the value of the inputs of the members of that community.
Societies that blend capitalist (free flow of capital to where is can be 'used' most productively) and socialist (societal regulation of business) principles tend to be the most productive, successful, happy, and have the most opportunity for individual improvement. Capitalism and Socialism are not opposite ends of the same spectrum, and, in my opinion, it's losing sight of this that is compounding America's problems.
Having seen Trump on TV, on the news the other night in relation to a couple of Republicans publicly 'censuring' him, I did find myself pondering this very question...
Who will run for the Democrats in the next election?
The question spawned a host of others, about the DNC, terms of office, chances of re-election, and so on, though most are somewhat imponderable at this stage.
What gave me pause though was the thought that, as someone not hugely interested in US politics beyond the broad, global, geopolitical picture, what does it say that I'd even think the question when it's been less than a year since the last presidential race?
I'd still be curious as to answer to the first question though...
As in, some people have the audacity to pretend knowledge when in reality they are almost completely ignorant, albeit passionate, about the subject.
In reality, unless you grow them yourself, your chances of finding an apple that has not been treated with some kind of 'toxic' chemical is practically zero, and, even if you do grow them yourself, the environment is full of noxious things that can pollute your pristine apple.
In addition, it is rather difficult, and not at all desirable, to create a monoculture of trees. Look in any orchard and you'll tend to see rather a lot of plants that aren't trees... I realise that's not what you mean when you say monoculture, but then what you mean is not what you're saying.
Finally, not all insects are pollinators of apples, and a good number of them are actively harmful to apple crops. If they weren't farmers wouldn't waste the money on pesticides in the first place. I mean, really: reduce pesticide use --> increase yields? It's hard not to be extremely scornful at this simplistic 'answer' to the problem, and that's even with us ignoring the issue of anti-fungal treatments.
I get the impression it would be very hard to apply to anything but very specific types of jobs where it's possible to come up with clear and relevant metrics (e.g. "number of chairs assembled per day", "number of chairs failing QA").
And the funny thing is, the GP was raging against its use in a company that does actually make cars / solar panels, and had a massive recall on cars due to quality control issues.
Since when did firing people for doing consistently substandard work become a bad thing?
A few seconds research would have saved you the embarrassment.
From wikipedia: "Midgley discovered that the addition of Tetraethyllead to gasoline prevented "knocking" in internal combustion engines.[4] The company named the substance "Ethyl", avoiding all mention of lead in reports and advertising. Oil companies and automobile manufacturers, especially General Motors which owned the patent jointly filed by Kettering and Midgley, promoted the TEL additive as a superior alternative to ethanol or ethanol-blended fuels, on which they could make very little profit."
He'd actually come up with over 140 fuel additives that combated 'knock'. TEL was just the one that, being patentable, made him and the companies that bought it the most money.
As horrific as corporate actions have been throughout history, none have even come close to the heinous shit that governments have been able to do when given too much power
Tetra Ethyl Lead.
The long terms effects of this on (developed) world populations was almost incalculable. A poster below mentions 100 million dead in wars. While this is clearly horrific I'd suggest that was a drop in the ocean, compared to the physiological and psychological effects, subsequent and consequential violence, and early deaths caused by this pollutant.
A pollutant used, not because it was the only thing that would do the job but, because it was patentable.
If anyone holds the belief that governments are all good or all bad, or that corporations are the cause of or the solution to all the world's problems, I'd suggest their ideology could do with a little more nuance. Neither is better or worse than the other. Both are 'moral amplifiers', which is why we should be very wary of granting any individual, or small group of 'interested parties', unfettered power within either type of organisation.
They avoid the initial 'head rush' common with the first spliff of the day, they're less harmful for you, and there's practically no environmental 'after-smell'. A very pleasant way to get stoned indeed.
They do tend to be pretty heavy when it comes to battery use though. Make sure you use high current (for batteries) rechargeables, and get spares!
What, smell and taste are subjective? Who'd have thought it!
While, for the record, I think this is somewhat of an overreach I can't say I really care that much one way or the other. I've never vaped, and almost certainly never will, and I don't live in New York state (- something to ponder, for all those who are up in arms over this, especially if you're one of those people who have suggested to others in the past that they can always move if they're not happy in their current state).
There is no doubt in my mind that the smoking ban has been net positive, both in 'local environment' terms and in encouraging people to stop smoking, which has consequential effects on health, costs of health care, and so on. Many of the arguments used, by both sides, at the time the ban was being debated have been duplicated here, though any adverse health effects of vaping, especially at remove (second hand), are nowhere near as certain. In fact, despite the rather poor study that was linked to on/. the other day, it is almost certain, based on my observations, that vaping has helped reduce the numbers of smokers, and I would worry, albeit only a tiny bit, that this law might go some way towards reversing that trend.
I will say, to finish, that part of the problem in a debate about something like this is that it's hard to be purely 'rational' when dealing with an issue that heavily involves our sense of smell. We're straight into visceral feelings before we even get a chance to think why we might agree or disagree with this law, and, partly because of this, the debate can turn personal, and the debaters increasingly intolerant. And that's a shame. Our countries became great precisely because we were, on the whole, tolerant of other people's opinions; we could see the good when they said it, and recognised when we were being an ass.
Drugs, ransomware payments, money laundering, gambling, etc are driving up bitcoin's value. This works because those things have very little cost but a high value because they're illegal. This is true for all the big crypto currencies.>/p>
This may be true to an extent, but what is really driving the 'value' of bitcoin is the promise of future 'value'. It has less to do with what you can buy with it (unless you're buying currency) now, and far more to do with what you might be able to buy with it at some point.
Basically, the price of bitcoin will drop when the thing underpinning it drops... Either way bitcoin's days are numbered.
The first sentence is a truism, the second an opinion. It remains to be seen whether your opinion or the opinion of those who are more 'bullish' regarding bitcoin's future is correct.
Given the time and energy that has already been 'invested' in mining BTC, and the current number of miners I'd say the market is reasonably confident in its future value proposition. Repeated forking might change this, or might just continue to contribute to its volatility, it's hard to say. It's also not clear how the profusion of other crypto-currencies are going to affect the market (other than wasting a lot of energy, and making a few people rich and many people poorer) in general.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the final blocks of BTC are reached, I can say that for certain, as people are 'funny' when it comes to 'milestones'.
I wouldn't usually reply to myself, but I rather felt the need to make a correction...
Does a 3 foot length of evacuated tube share the same characteristics when repressurising as a 300 foot length of tube? A 3000 foot length? Not exactly. Once you get beyond about 33 feet (essentially the pressure difference between a vacuum and 1 atmosphere) things change
I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking (other than "finish typing, it's nearly beer o'clock") but I clearly had a massive brain fart here. This '33 feet' figure is complete bollocks, in relation to what I was talking about, primarily 'cos we're talking about horizontal tubes, not vertical, and also 'cos air ain't water.
No excuse really. Mea culpa!
The actual figure is more likely to be in the region of tens of kilometres, but I currently lack the tools to be more precise. The guys who did this, and coincidentally already work for Musk, can probably figure it out though. I only wish I was half as smart as them...:-/
For starter people like Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) knew about flight structures well before the first powered flight. From then on aircraft developed quickly...
I'm not sure I see the point you're trying to make here. As many people are keen to point out the notions of vacuum tubes, magnetic levitation, air bearings and indeed pretty much every engineering concept used in the hyperloop proposal are not new either.
When discussing a vacuum container at sea level the pressure on the container will be one atmosphere which is 101kPa or 15psi and not equivalent to 10 meters of water.
Are you sure about that? I'll repeat my original assertion in case you misread it: "The pressure differential between the atmosphere and an evacuated tube is roughly equivalent to a tube at atmospheric pressure submerged in 10 metres of water"
...what has been proposed is a vacuum tube that is well over 100km long...
The original proposal was for a route that ran from LA to SF, so roughly 560 km one way, or a 1120 km circuit. You don't find it funny, as an engineer, that you clearly haven't read the proposals, or follow on documentation, but you're happily telling us what you think they said?
...supposed to be traveling at around 1100kph (700mph) and all it takes is a minor fault or rupture and you have human salsa.
Yup, and when a car crashes at 120 km/h, when a train derails at 200+ km/h, when a plane depressurises or crashes people tend to die too. It's not possible to be so risk averse as to avoid all possibility of harm, because if you were to try you'd starve to death from fear of choking. I'd say much of the fear surround this idea is fear of the unknown - a natural human reaction, even if a tad 'over-sensitive'.
You can even look at the Concord and I will leave it up to you to find out why we don't have supersonic passenger jets anymore
Mostly it was because it couldn't fly supersonic for a great deal of its routes, due to the sonic boom. It was also a bit of a gas guzzler. So, it didn't save as much time as was originally envisaged, and it was very expensive. In other words it stopped flying due to economics, rather than any technical reasons. Again, what point are you trying to make?
As an Engineer, I am all for science and advancement but I also like to see the evidence (you know the Scientific Method) before I agree or disagree
You'll excuse me for saying so, but your posts don't seem to suggest this. It rather seems, by posting the links you have, that you have very much decided already.
As for annoyingly smug, I don't find Thunderfoot that way since he always provides evidence and that is what I care about.
The most visceral demonstration I think I saw him give was him putting a ball bearing in an evacuated glass tube, then having snapped the end off, and watched the ball bearing shoot down the tube and smash through the end he suggested that this showed that any hole in the hyperloop tunnel would 'wreck' the transit pod and or tunnel and kill all the passengers...
So let's examine this demonstration and the claims:
Did snapping the end off the evacuated glass tube, causing air to rush in, destroy the rest of the glass tube? No, it did not
Was the cross sectional area of the glass tube roughly twice that of the ball bearing? No, it was not
Is a small ball bearing in any way equivalent to a 15+ tonne vehicle when considering the effects of a certain mass of air hitting it? No, not really
Does a 3 foot length of evacuated tube share the same characteristics when repressurising as a 300 foot length of tube? A 3000 foot length? Not exactly. Once you get beyond about 33 feet (essentially the pressure difference between a vacuum and 1 atmosphere) things change
So tell me, what 'evidence' is he providing exactly?
After the Channel Tunnel was built the train line was extended, in stages, all the way into central London. Large parts of this track run variously on viaducts over rivers, roads and other rail lines and in tunnels under roads, buildings, and other rail lines. The trains that run on these tracks weigh 700 tonnes and travel up to 300 km/h (albeit they do slow down in some sections).
These trains have been running for closing 15 years now, and, as far as I know, no building has yet collapsed because of them, no cars have skidded on the road, no person has fallen over / suffered stress fractures / died / etc. due to the vibrations.
If a 700 tonne train doesn't cause problems I'd be pretty surprised if a 26 tonne hyperloop (vehicle) capsule did. More so because the tubes are intended to have shock absorbers between them and whatever they're resting on.
What makes you think it will be a 2.54cm (1") thick steel pipe. Have you any idea the tech and subsequent cost that would go into making that type of pipe?
Unlike you, apparently, some people have read at least the original concept document. To quote:
"A tube wall thickness between 0.8 and 0.9 in. (20 to 23 mm) is necessary to provide sufficient strength for the load cases considered such as pressure differential, bending and buckling between pillars, loading due to the capsule weight and acceleration, as well as seismic considerations"
Strangely enough I'm also pretty sure that the guy whose company builds large tubes that they then launch into space has a pretty good idea as to the cost of those tubes. FWIW the original document gives an estimate of about $4 billion for tubes, pumps, pylons, and stations, though I do think it's a shame the costs were not separated out more.
you also have to take into account the thermal expansion coefficient of steel.
Yeah, this is my biggest problem with the proposal, for above ground construction anyway. There are materials and methods that might get around the problem but by my 'uninformed' reckoning they massively increase the cost and complexity of the tubes. Building the tubes in an underground tunnel, however, virtually eliminates the expansion problem, as temperatures below ground are remarkably uniform (as in unaffected by day / night and seasonal cycles). As other posters have mentioned this does hugely increase the construction cost and build time, though much of the tunnel construction could be done using the 'cut and cover' method which would gives substantial gains over boring the tunnel.
Remember that what has been proposed is a very long vacuum tube so there would be normal air pressure outside so even with a slight deformation you are going to have a rupture which would send out a shockwave traveling at the speed of sound and anything in the tube would be pulverized.
Yeah, you probably shouldn't believe everything you see on YouTube, especially stuff which is as disingenuous as some of the videos posted by Thunderfoot. The pressure differential between the atmosphere and an evacuated tube is roughly equivalent to a tube at atmospheric pressure submerged in 10 metres of water. Woah, scary stuff, no? Oh wait, no it's not. Modern engineering solutions turn the miraculous into the mundane on an almost daily basis. You'll also note that, despite numerous micrometeorite hits, the ISS is still in one piece, and that actually is operating in a vacuum, unlike the proposed hyperloop tubes, which are just very low pressure.
Rather than me waffle on here is a Hyperloop debunked video. There are others on the Hyperloop as well as other popular but impractical pseudo science Snake Oil.
Well, he's still as annoyingly smug as when he first started laughing at the idea. I find it slightly amusing that he's seemingly unaware of the irony of pooh-poohing the idea of hyperloop while mocking the Kitty Hawk comparison. He is exactly the sort of person I envisage saying, with patronising smugness, "What a ridiculous idea, wood is heavier than air so it's obvious to anyone who has eyes that it simply will not get off the ground". True, he has raised one or two valid criticisms, but that doesn't mean the problems are insoluble. His mockery, and his apparent assumption that he's smarter than everyone else who's thought about the subject makes it hard to watch anything he posts though.
My next door neighbours are both doctors. Coming from a medical family myself, and being naturally curious, I frequently chat with them about the stuff that's going on in medicine...
One of them was recently involved in a study that dealt specifically with post operative recovery rates of smokers, comparing those rates between smokers who had and had not had a cigarette in the immediate period prior to their operation.
The results were not what you'd have expected. In fact those smokers who were still smoking, even though they'd been told not to, had faster recovery rates and less complications than those smokers who had not had a cigarette from an extended period prior to their operation.
Of course we discussed possible reasons for this extremely counter-intuitive result but only two of the reasons we could come up with made any real sense: the effect was significant and real, and based on 'unknown' psychological (must get better, faster, so I can get up and have a fag...need a fag...) or physiological (for example the pre-op stress of giving up smoking weakened the 'non smokers' in some way or otherwise predisposed them to complications) factors; or the study results were a statistical fluke, exacerbated by the small sample size (the somewhat technical breath test has not been widely used on pre-op patients).
The slightly troubling aspect, I found, was that he was asked not to present the findings in any way that could be construed as suggesting that there was any positive benefit in smoking (which is a bit hard to do when that's what the results showed) at a recent conference, as there's still very much a 'war on cigarettes' going on. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating smoking. Any benefit demonstrated in this study is vastly outweighed by the harm that smoking does. The results are however intriguing and, in my opinion, worthy of further study; covering up inconvenient results is neither good science nor a basis for good policy.
Disclaimer: Sorry, I have no links to the study I'm talking about. I'm not even sure it has been published yet (or ever will be). You have every right to treat everything I've just said as an anecdote of dubious provenance, and be appropriately skeptical.
I'd say the solution would be for them to push for the introduction of UBI, and at the same time (since everyone now has enough money to feed, house and clothe themselves) push for elimination of minimum wage.
Pros: Every citizen now has his or her basic needs met; Any job 'worth' doing becomes economically viable; Any citizen is free to start their own business without fear of not being able to eat, etc.; Unskilled immigration becomes considerably less attractive.
Cons:...um... you're all going to have to fill this bit in depending on your politics*
*Republicans (Conservatives) are very very unlikely to even consider UBI. Democrats (Labour / Liberals) will not consider abolishing the minimum wage. Neither part can work in isolation.
Conclusion: Unless political opponents can back off from their extremes, can the insults and mudslinging, and actually start to engage in civil debate we're basically fucked.
So highly intelligent people focus more on the shit going on around them and melt down over it.
I'd say this might be somewhat of a misrepresentation of the situation. It's not about focusing on shit, any more than spotting a tiger lurking in the shadows, triggering your fight or flight response, is about focus. Your actual focus is elsewhere when the particular brain module triggers. Since, as with many of our brain's hair trigger modules, there's a significant false positive rate (faces in clouds / crackers) your endocrine system, in working overtime, leads to side effects such as neural fatigue, inflammation, and so on.
A reasonable working hypothesis might be that some of these brain modules are also useful for things for which they didn't evolve, such as the pattern matching module helping with the visual aspect of the IQ tests, or the social inference module helping with the language aspects of the IQ tests. The more 'competent' your module is the higher your IQ but the more times it gives a false positive. And it turns out that seeing a tiger hiding in every shadow or feeling crippling embarrassment every time you're in company is not good for your mental health.
The more oblivious percentiles brush it off (if they even noticed it at all) and move on with their lives. That seems about right.
As it happens I am somewhat familiar with the notion of IQ, and the various statistical distributions - many of which are single hump bell shaped but definitely not 'normal'. I'm not totally convinced that IQ, however you define it, is actually 'normally' distributed, however that's a topic for another time and also not relevant to the nit-picky point I was trying to make.
Granted the example I gave was trivial, and, in retrospect, perhaps not the best I could have thought of, nor was it explicit. It is true that roughly as many people will have an IQ less than 100 as will have an IQ of greater than 100. In fact, pedantically, that's going to be less than half, as not only is the median value defined as 100 it's also the most common (modal) value - probably a good couple of % of the population right 'on the nail' so to speak..
Having said all that, I was scanning in a rush before going to have lunch when I replied. In other words I was basically just being a right grumpy bugger. Always nice to have someone civilly point out I've been an ass. Cheers!
When our teacher called my friend and I distinctly average I thought he was saying I was a comedian...
Only half the population can have an IQ under 100. It's the average.
And what's the average (as in mean) of the following set of numbers: [108, 100, 99, 99, 99, 99, 99, 99, 99, 99]? And what proportion of them are below 100?
Slashdot Mirror
William Gibson called, and Johnny Mnemonic wants his pictures back!
But, speaking of pictures, how does the system deal with pictures of pictures? Keep picture of SO in wallet, use picture of picture as your key. Seems like this might have some potential tbh, especially if you're careful in how you frame the background (as a "3rd factor").
Admittedly I can't see myself using it, way too much faff, and relies on my having my phone with me when I want to access w/e it is I'm trying to access. Can't think of much worse than 'having' to do that. Next I'd be expected to answer it.
I've long maintained that the US could have done much better buying an off-the-shelf aircraft (like the Rafale) and making it autonomous, a "drone" if you will.
Retro-fitting a piloted aircraft to make it into a UAV or a true drone is flat out retarded on every single aspect you can think of except, perhaps, short term cost.
I recently saw an 'advert' that suggested some agency was trying that with the Tornado over here and I practically choked on my cup of tea.
Without a pilot manoeuvres become limited by the resilience of the air frame, rather than fragile humanity. Existing air frames assume human fragility, with the smallest amount of extra tolerance the engineers and designers thought they could get away with. Hence a retro-fit doesn't magically gain you anything except a plane with virtually the same capabilities (and flaws).
My prediction is that the most effective drones will be those 'designed for purpose', not those 'designed for convenience' or those 'designed by politics'. In addition, for the most part, stealth will increasingly become an expensive and limiting irrelevance.
When talking about equal opportunity, using the analogy of a 100 yard dash it helps to recognise that not everyone is actually starting at the same point on the track. The race, as being run today, is not fair.
By all means argue for equal opportunity, rather than equality of outcome. That's a principle that most people will get behind. After all, when pressed (and being honest) no-one appreciates a free loader, no-one appreciates paying to give stuff to people who aren't prepared to work for it.
The problem of freeloading however doesn't apply only to welfare recipients, nor to all welfare recipients. It very much does apply to a number of rich people too.
By the way, equality of outcome is not socialism, socialism is not equality of outcome: "A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." doesn't mean that the community can't distribute the products of the economy unevenly, based, for example, on the value of the inputs of the members of that community.
Societies that blend capitalist (free flow of capital to where is can be 'used' most productively) and socialist (societal regulation of business) principles tend to be the most productive, successful, happy, and have the most opportunity for individual improvement. Capitalism and Socialism are not opposite ends of the same spectrum, and, in my opinion, it's losing sight of this that is compounding America's problems.
Having seen Trump on TV, on the news the other night in relation to a couple of Republicans publicly 'censuring' him, I did find myself pondering this very question...
Who will run for the Democrats in the next election?
The question spawned a host of others, about the DNC, terms of office, chances of re-election, and so on, though most are somewhat imponderable at this stage.
What gave me pause though was the thought that, as someone not hugely interested in US politics beyond the broad, global, geopolitical picture, what does it say that I'd even think the question when it's been less than a year since the last presidential race?
I'd still be curious as to answer to the first question though...
odassity
The word you're looking for is "audacity".
As in, some people have the audacity to pretend knowledge when in reality they are almost completely ignorant, albeit passionate, about the subject.
In reality, unless you grow them yourself, your chances of finding an apple that has not been treated with some kind of 'toxic' chemical is practically zero, and, even if you do grow them yourself, the environment is full of noxious things that can pollute your pristine apple.
In addition, it is rather difficult, and not at all desirable, to create a monoculture of trees. Look in any orchard and you'll tend to see rather a lot of plants that aren't trees... I realise that's not what you mean when you say monoculture, but then what you mean is not what you're saying.
Finally, not all insects are pollinators of apples, and a good number of them are actively harmful to apple crops. If they weren't farmers wouldn't waste the money on pesticides in the first place. I mean, really: reduce pesticide use --> increase yields? It's hard not to be extremely scornful at this simplistic 'answer' to the problem, and that's even with us ignoring the issue of anti-fungal treatments.
I get the impression it would be very hard to apply to anything but very specific types of jobs where it's possible to come up with clear and relevant metrics (e.g. "number of chairs assembled per day", "number of chairs failing QA").
And the funny thing is, the GP was raging against its use in a company that does actually make cars / solar panels, and had a massive recall on cars due to quality control issues.
Since when did firing people for doing consistently substandard work become a bad thing?
A few seconds research would have saved you the embarrassment.
From wikipedia: "Midgley discovered that the addition of Tetraethyllead to gasoline prevented "knocking" in internal combustion engines.[4] The company named the substance "Ethyl", avoiding all mention of lead in reports and advertising. Oil companies and automobile manufacturers, especially General Motors which owned the patent jointly filed by Kettering and Midgley, promoted the TEL additive as a superior alternative to ethanol or ethanol-blended fuels, on which they could make very little profit."
He'd actually come up with over 140 fuel additives that combated 'knock'. TEL was just the one that, being patentable, made him and the companies that bought it the most money.
As horrific as corporate actions have been throughout history, none have even come close to the heinous shit that governments have been able to do when given too much power
Tetra Ethyl Lead.
The long terms effects of this on (developed) world populations was almost incalculable. A poster below mentions 100 million dead in wars. While this is clearly horrific I'd suggest that was a drop in the ocean, compared to the physiological and psychological effects, subsequent and consequential violence, and early deaths caused by this pollutant.
A pollutant used, not because it was the only thing that would do the job but, because it was patentable.
If anyone holds the belief that governments are all good or all bad, or that corporations are the cause of or the solution to all the world's problems, I'd suggest their ideology could do with a little more nuance. Neither is better or worse than the other. Both are 'moral amplifiers', which is why we should be very wary of granting any individual, or small group of 'interested parties', unfettered power within either type of organisation.
Those vaporizers are great!
They avoid the initial 'head rush' common with the first spliff of the day, they're less harmful for you, and there's practically no environmental 'after-smell'. A very pleasant way to get stoned indeed.
They do tend to be pretty heavy when it comes to battery use though. Make sure you use high current (for batteries) rechargeables, and get spares!
Good.
An eCig ... still has nicotine, and I would rather not have to inhale the stuff if I can avoid it.
What about the ones (liquids) that don't, of which there are a large number? What reason do you have for banning those at the same time?
How can anyone enjoy such a disgusting smell?
What, smell and taste are subjective? Who'd have thought it!
While, for the record, I think this is somewhat of an overreach I can't say I really care that much one way or the other. I've never vaped, and almost certainly never will, and I don't live in New York state (- something to ponder, for all those who are up in arms over this, especially if you're one of those people who have suggested to others in the past that they can always move if they're not happy in their current state).
There is no doubt in my mind that the smoking ban has been net positive, both in 'local environment' terms and in encouraging people to stop smoking, which has consequential effects on health, costs of health care, and so on. Many of the arguments used, by both sides, at the time the ban was being debated have been duplicated here, though any adverse health effects of vaping, especially at remove (second hand), are nowhere near as certain. In fact, despite the rather poor study that was linked to on /. the other day, it is almost certain, based on my observations, that vaping has helped reduce the numbers of smokers, and I would worry, albeit only a tiny bit, that this law might go some way towards reversing that trend.
I will say, to finish, that part of the problem in a debate about something like this is that it's hard to be purely 'rational' when dealing with an issue that heavily involves our sense of smell. We're straight into visceral feelings before we even get a chance to think why we might agree or disagree with this law, and, partly because of this, the debate can turn personal, and the debaters increasingly intolerant. And that's a shame. Our countries became great precisely because we were, on the whole, tolerant of other people's opinions; we could see the good when they said it, and recognised when we were being an ass.
I wonder if such a thing might still be possible?
Drugs, ransomware payments, money laundering, gambling, etc are driving up bitcoin's value. This works because those things have very little cost but a high value because they're illegal. This is true for all the big crypto currencies.>/p>
This may be true to an extent, but what is really driving the 'value' of bitcoin is the promise of future 'value'. It has less to do with what you can buy with it (unless you're buying currency) now, and far more to do with what you might be able to buy with it at some point.
Basically, the price of bitcoin will drop when the thing underpinning it drops ... Either way bitcoin's days are numbered.
The first sentence is a truism, the second an opinion. It remains to be seen whether your opinion or the opinion of those who are more 'bullish' regarding bitcoin's future is correct.
Given the time and energy that has already been 'invested' in mining BTC, and the current number of miners I'd say the market is reasonably confident in its future value proposition. Repeated forking might change this, or might just continue to contribute to its volatility, it's hard to say. It's also not clear how the profusion of other crypto-currencies are going to affect the market (other than wasting a lot of energy, and making a few people rich and many people poorer) in general.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the final blocks of BTC are reached, I can say that for certain, as people are 'funny' when it comes to 'milestones'.
I wouldn't usually reply to myself, but I rather felt the need to make a correction...
Does a 3 foot length of evacuated tube share the same characteristics when repressurising as a 300 foot length of tube? A 3000 foot length? Not exactly. Once you get beyond about 33 feet (essentially the pressure difference between a vacuum and 1 atmosphere) things change
I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking (other than "finish typing, it's nearly beer o'clock") but I clearly had a massive brain fart here. This '33 feet' figure is complete bollocks, in relation to what I was talking about, primarily 'cos we're talking about horizontal tubes, not vertical, and also 'cos air ain't water.
No excuse really. Mea culpa!
The actual figure is more likely to be in the region of tens of kilometres, but I currently lack the tools to be more precise. The guys who did this, and coincidentally already work for Musk, can probably figure it out though. I only wish I was half as smart as them... :-/
For starter people like Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) knew about flight structures well before the first powered flight. From then on aircraft developed quickly...
I'm not sure I see the point you're trying to make here. As many people are keen to point out the notions of vacuum tubes, magnetic levitation, air bearings and indeed pretty much every engineering concept used in the hyperloop proposal are not new either.
When discussing a vacuum container at sea level the pressure on the container will be one atmosphere which is 101kPa or 15psi and not equivalent to 10 meters of water.
Are you sure about that? I'll repeat my original assertion in case you misread it: "The pressure differential between the atmosphere and an evacuated tube is roughly equivalent to a tube at atmospheric pressure submerged in 10 metres of water"
...what has been proposed is a vacuum tube that is well over 100km long...
The original proposal was for a route that ran from LA to SF, so roughly 560 km one way, or a 1120 km circuit. You don't find it funny, as an engineer, that you clearly haven't read the proposals, or follow on documentation, but you're happily telling us what you think they said?
...supposed to be traveling at around 1100kph (700mph) and all it takes is a minor fault or rupture and you have human salsa.
Yup, and when a car crashes at 120 km/h, when a train derails at 200+ km/h, when a plane depressurises or crashes people tend to die too. It's not possible to be so risk averse as to avoid all possibility of harm, because if you were to try you'd starve to death from fear of choking. I'd say much of the fear surround this idea is fear of the unknown - a natural human reaction, even if a tad 'over-sensitive'.
You can even look at the Concord and I will leave it up to you to find out why we don't have supersonic passenger jets anymore
Mostly it was because it couldn't fly supersonic for a great deal of its routes, due to the sonic boom. It was also a bit of a gas guzzler. So, it didn't save as much time as was originally envisaged, and it was very expensive. In other words it stopped flying due to economics, rather than any technical reasons. Again, what point are you trying to make?
As an Engineer, I am all for science and advancement but I also like to see the evidence (you know the Scientific Method) before I agree or disagree
You'll excuse me for saying so, but your posts don't seem to suggest this. It rather seems, by posting the links you have, that you have very much decided already.
As for annoyingly smug, I don't find Thunderfoot that way since he always provides evidence and that is what I care about.
The most visceral demonstration I think I saw him give was him putting a ball bearing in an evacuated glass tube, then having snapped the end off, and watched the ball bearing shoot down the tube and smash through the end he suggested that this showed that any hole in the hyperloop tunnel would 'wreck' the transit pod and or tunnel and kill all the passengers...
So let's examine this demonstration and the claims:
Did snapping the end off the evacuated glass tube, causing air to rush in, destroy the rest of the glass tube? No, it did not
Was the cross sectional area of the glass tube roughly twice that of the ball bearing? No, it was not
Is a small ball bearing in any way equivalent to a 15+ tonne vehicle when considering the effects of a certain mass of air hitting it? No, not really
Does a 3 foot length of evacuated tube share the same characteristics when repressurising as a 300 foot length of tube? A 3000 foot length? Not exactly. Once you get beyond about 33 feet (essentially the pressure difference between a vacuum and 1 atmosphere) things change
So tell me, what 'evidence' is he providing exactly?
What about energy?
I'd actually go as far as to say that energy is the only true currency in the universe...
After the Channel Tunnel was built the train line was extended, in stages, all the way into central London. Large parts of this track run variously on viaducts over rivers, roads and other rail lines and in tunnels under roads, buildings, and other rail lines. The trains that run on these tracks weigh 700 tonnes and travel up to 300 km/h (albeit they do slow down in some sections).
These trains have been running for closing 15 years now, and, as far as I know, no building has yet collapsed because of them, no cars have skidded on the road, no person has fallen over / suffered stress fractures / died / etc. due to the vibrations.
If a 700 tonne train doesn't cause problems I'd be pretty surprised if a 26 tonne hyperloop (vehicle) capsule did. More so because the tubes are intended to have shock absorbers between them and whatever they're resting on.
What makes you think it will be a 2.54cm (1") thick steel pipe. Have you any idea the tech and subsequent cost that would go into making that type of pipe?
Unlike you, apparently, some people have read at least the original concept document. To quote:
"A tube wall thickness between 0.8 and 0.9 in. (20 to 23 mm) is necessary to provide sufficient strength for the load cases considered such as pressure differential, bending and buckling between pillars, loading due to the capsule weight and acceleration, as well as seismic considerations"
Strangely enough I'm also pretty sure that the guy whose company builds large tubes that they then launch into space has a pretty good idea as to the cost of those tubes. FWIW the original document gives an estimate of about $4 billion for tubes, pumps, pylons, and stations, though I do think it's a shame the costs were not separated out more.
you also have to take into account the thermal expansion coefficient of steel.
Yeah, this is my biggest problem with the proposal, for above ground construction anyway. There are materials and methods that might get around the problem but by my 'uninformed' reckoning they massively increase the cost and complexity of the tubes. Building the tubes in an underground tunnel, however, virtually eliminates the expansion problem, as temperatures below ground are remarkably uniform (as in unaffected by day / night and seasonal cycles). As other posters have mentioned this does hugely increase the construction cost and build time, though much of the tunnel construction could be done using the 'cut and cover' method which would gives substantial gains over boring the tunnel.
Remember that what has been proposed is a very long vacuum tube so there would be normal air pressure outside so even with a slight deformation you are going to have a rupture which would send out a shockwave traveling at the speed of sound and anything in the tube would be pulverized.
Yeah, you probably shouldn't believe everything you see on YouTube, especially stuff which is as disingenuous as some of the videos posted by Thunderfoot. The pressure differential between the atmosphere and an evacuated tube is roughly equivalent to a tube at atmospheric pressure submerged in 10 metres of water. Woah, scary stuff, no? Oh wait, no it's not. Modern engineering solutions turn the miraculous into the mundane on an almost daily basis. You'll also note that, despite numerous micrometeorite hits, the ISS is still in one piece, and that actually is operating in a vacuum, unlike the proposed hyperloop tubes, which are just very low pressure.
Rather than me waffle on here is a Hyperloop debunked video. There are others on the Hyperloop as well as other popular but impractical pseudo science Snake Oil.
Well, he's still as annoyingly smug as when he first started laughing at the idea. I find it slightly amusing that he's seemingly unaware of the irony of pooh-poohing the idea of hyperloop while mocking the Kitty Hawk comparison. He is exactly the sort of person I envisage saying, with patronising smugness, "What a ridiculous idea, wood is heavier than air so it's obvious to anyone who has eyes that it simply will not get off the ground". True, he has raised one or two valid criticisms, but that doesn't mean the problems are insoluble. His mockery, and his apparent assumption that he's smarter than everyone else who's thought about the subject makes it hard to watch anything he posts though.
The Outlaw, Josey Wales.
Good film!
My next door neighbours are both doctors. Coming from a medical family myself, and being naturally curious, I frequently chat with them about the stuff that's going on in medicine...
One of them was recently involved in a study that dealt specifically with post operative recovery rates of smokers, comparing those rates between smokers who had and had not had a cigarette in the immediate period prior to their operation.
The results were not what you'd have expected. In fact those smokers who were still smoking, even though they'd been told not to, had faster recovery rates and less complications than those smokers who had not had a cigarette from an extended period prior to their operation.
Of course we discussed possible reasons for this extremely counter-intuitive result but only two of the reasons we could come up with made any real sense: the effect was significant and real, and based on 'unknown' psychological (must get better, faster, so I can get up and have a fag...need a fag...) or physiological (for example the pre-op stress of giving up smoking weakened the 'non smokers' in some way or otherwise predisposed them to complications) factors; or the study results were a statistical fluke, exacerbated by the small sample size (the somewhat technical breath test has not been widely used on pre-op patients).
The slightly troubling aspect, I found, was that he was asked not to present the findings in any way that could be construed as suggesting that there was any positive benefit in smoking (which is a bit hard to do when that's what the results showed) at a recent conference, as there's still very much a 'war on cigarettes' going on. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating smoking. Any benefit demonstrated in this study is vastly outweighed by the harm that smoking does. The results are however intriguing and, in my opinion, worthy of further study; covering up inconvenient results is neither good science nor a basis for good policy.
Disclaimer: Sorry, I have no links to the study I'm talking about. I'm not even sure it has been published yet (or ever will be). You have every right to treat everything I've just said as an anecdote of dubious provenance, and be appropriately skeptical.
I'd say the solution would be for them to push for the introduction of UBI, and at the same time (since everyone now has enough money to feed, house and clothe themselves) push for elimination of minimum wage.
Pros: Every citizen now has his or her basic needs met; Any job 'worth' doing becomes economically viable; Any citizen is free to start their own business without fear of not being able to eat, etc.; Unskilled immigration becomes considerably less attractive.
Cons: ...um... you're all going to have to fill this bit in depending on your politics*
*Republicans (Conservatives) are very very unlikely to even consider UBI. Democrats (Labour / Liberals) will not consider abolishing the minimum wage. Neither part can work in isolation.
Conclusion: Unless political opponents can back off from their extremes, can the insults and mudslinging, and actually start to engage in civil debate we're basically fucked.
Perspective employers...
Are these the ones that look good from a distance, but the closer you get the worse the job appears?
I know, I know -- I read it. I'm sorry.
So highly intelligent people focus more on the shit going on around them and melt down over it.
I'd say this might be somewhat of a misrepresentation of the situation. It's not about focusing on shit, any more than spotting a tiger lurking in the shadows, triggering your fight or flight response, is about focus. Your actual focus is elsewhere when the particular brain module triggers. Since, as with many of our brain's hair trigger modules, there's a significant false positive rate (faces in clouds / crackers) your endocrine system, in working overtime, leads to side effects such as neural fatigue, inflammation, and so on.
A reasonable working hypothesis might be that some of these brain modules are also useful for things for which they didn't evolve, such as the pattern matching module helping with the visual aspect of the IQ tests, or the social inference module helping with the language aspects of the IQ tests. The more 'competent' your module is the higher your IQ but the more times it gives a false positive. And it turns out that seeing a tiger hiding in every shadow or feeling crippling embarrassment every time you're in company is not good for your mental health.
The more oblivious percentiles brush it off (if they even noticed it at all) and move on with their lives. That seems about right.
Yup. That does sound about right.
Do you know how IQ scores actually work?
Yes, thank you.
As it happens his statement is still wrong, but I hold up my hand to being a bit of an ass in my reply.
Thanks for the reply, and the links.
As it happens I am somewhat familiar with the notion of IQ, and the various statistical distributions - many of which are single hump bell shaped but definitely not 'normal'. I'm not totally convinced that IQ, however you define it, is actually 'normally' distributed, however that's a topic for another time and also not relevant to the nit-picky point I was trying to make.
Granted the example I gave was trivial, and, in retrospect, perhaps not the best I could have thought of, nor was it explicit. It is true that roughly as many people will have an IQ less than 100 as will have an IQ of greater than 100. In fact, pedantically, that's going to be less than half, as not only is the median value defined as 100 it's also the most common (modal) value - probably a good couple of % of the population right 'on the nail' so to speak..
Having said all that, I was scanning in a rush before going to have lunch when I replied. In other words I was basically just being a right grumpy bugger. Always nice to have someone civilly point out I've been an ass. Cheers!
When our teacher called my friend and I distinctly average I thought he was saying I was a comedian...
Only half the population can have an IQ under 100. It's the average.
And what's the average (as in mean) of the following set of numbers: [108, 100, 99, 99, 99, 99, 99, 99, 99, 99]? And what proportion of them are below 100?
Would you like to reconsider your statement?