Where was all this outrage and demand to bomb when the rebels used nerve gas back in May?
Both sides in the Syrian conflict are baddies. It's a bit hypocritical to bomb the Syrian government for using chemical weapons when we ignored the rebels doing the same.
Current laws already recognise it's not all or nothing - that you can ride a bicycle does not mean that driving a car is exactly the same, so bicycles are treated differently than cars (here bicycles have a right to operate on the highway, cars do not - they and their driver must be licensed and insured).
As for responsiblility, you're going to need rules for that too I'm afraid. When your untrained unlicensed driver runs over some pedestrian, and does not have enough money to pay for the pedestrian's health care, someone has to enforce that they have financial responsibility.
That's fine to the safety nazis. They would say "Well just don't overtake and be more patient".
We already see this with motorways with lorries. You get one lorry with its limiter set to 55.9999998 mph and another lorry with its limiter set to 56.0000001 catches it up and starts to overtake. 15 miles later it's finally past after causing all of lanes 1 and 2 to be going at 56 mph for the last 15 miles, and lane 3 bunched up nose to tail traffic doing about 60.
No, *for profit* space exploration won't happen (at least any time soon). You can still have private not-for-profit things. Private does not necessarily imply profit motive. If Musk can get enough of his ultra-rich buddies excited enough to fund (for example) a Mars exploration mission, then it could be done privately. Of course this is a big "if" and the probability of it happening is somewhere close to zero.
He's right, you won't have businesses trying to establish a colony on Mars.
However, that doesn't necessarily mean there is a probability of zero that Elon Musk can't talk a bunch of his very rich buddies to helping bankroll a mission to Mars, in other words, private but not commercial. (The probability is probably close to zero, but it is non-zero). In reality you'd probably find that NASA also provides something (and probably quite a lot of something) towards a Mars mission that had its origins outside of government.
You can have private travel to somewhere without it being commercial.
The vast majority of helicopter crashes happen at 30 mph or less. Takeoff and landing accidents (from hover), loss of tailrotor effectiveness, settling with power, botched autorotations...these all tend to happen with the helicopter travelling at 30 mph or less.
Pity you don't seem to know jack shit about helicopters before unloading on a useful test.
Nuclear winter -> global warming? A bit of a non-sequitur, don't you think?
I think everyone, even conservatives, can agree that nuclear war and its consequences would be really bad. You don't need to be a bleeding heart liberal to dislike the idea of nuclear war.
From what I understand, the "island of stability" in terms of super-heavy elements is a relative term - it just means the decay of elements in the island of stability is measured in maybe hundreds of milliseconds instead of a few microseconds.
In the past, a PC gamer would replace their main rig every year to 18 months, and this would drive quite a bit of sales. In fact, ordinary PC users would change their computer every 2 to 3 years because the new ones were much better, and new software was more capable (and a lot more bloated) and wouldn't run well on a 2 year old machine. This started changing in the early 2000s for non-gaming PCs (my non-gaming development box I built in 2002 lasted 7 years - basically until components started to fail). For gamers this started changing towards 2010 - now there's little advantage in changing your gaming rig more than once every 3 or 4 years.
The result - while PC usage is probably still growing a little, PC *buying* is declining rapidly because a machine from 2010 is still good enough even for gamers, and a machine from 2005 is good enough for typical email/browse the web stuff. My main gaming rig now is a decent spec *laptop* with nvidia graphics and an i7, and not a hideously overweight one either like gaming laptops of 5 or 6 years ago. Since hardly anyone buys Windows retail, falling PC sales means falling Windows sales. A Windows license for a normal PC is lasting 6 years or more now as people only replace when components actually fail beyond economic repair, and most every day users are no more likely to buy a Windows upgrade any more than they will switch to Linux. A Windows license on a gaming PC is lasting at least 3 years now, possibly more - when in the past, Microsoft could rely on gamers buying a new Windows license every year to 18 months and non-gamers every 2 to 3 years.
When I lived in the US (up till 2002, in Texas) most windows were still single pane even in new builds which surprised me given in Houston heat everyone needs A/C and it's expensive to load up the AC by having windows that just allow the heat in.
The safest generally would be to have zero gap between two following cars. The problem with rear ends is if you're following at a significantly non-zero spacing, but not such a great spacing that you can't stop in time, a high relative speed builds between you and the car in front and >krumpfh! However, if you're following the car in front with reliably no more than a couple of cm between the two vehicles, the relative speed is minuscule even if they do touch. If the two cars are autonomous and communicating, they can coordinate their deceleration, even if it was unexpected and at most can only gently touch because there just isn't enough space between them to generate a large relative velocity between them.
There is also the difference in where the costs go especially when considering government. Let's imagine that every cent spent on licensing now needs to be spent on support.
* Licensing costs mostly (if not all) disappear to a foreign country. * Those support costs are most likely spent with people living in Valencia
The money spent on licensing has zero benefit to the local economy. However, if you had to still spend all that money on support, the vast majority would get spent in the local economy with local benefit. Private enterprise probably doesn't care about this, but governments will do since a better local economy means they get some of that money back directly in taxes, and indirectly in a better performing local economy making the whole place a more attractive place to be.
On the other hand I'm not convinced that any more support will be needed over Microsoft Office. I do not know anyone who has ever received formal training in Microsoft Word. And those who are familiar with Word don't seem to have any difficulty transitioning from the traditional interface to the ribbon interface which is a pretty large change - at least as large as moving to LibreOffice.
The UK national grid does not do this (lower the voltage) and I don't think ever has. As load increases, frequency begins to drop and there are various things that happen if the frequency can't be maintained within tolerances. Large industrial users with things that can go without power for a while without a problem have contracts with the National Grid to have frequency cut-offs. Think of a furnace that takes a week to get to temperature - being without power for a half hour doesn't really matter, so the furnace has equipment that turns it off if the frequency falls below a certain threshold. Organizations with emergency generators (think places like hospitals etc) will have contracts with the Grid that they will automatically start generating and feeding into the grid if the frequency falls below a threshold. If it gets really desperate, blackouts are used - not brown outs. This is exceedingly rare.
I bought an 80W panel to try out the technology (big enough to be useful for some projects, but not so big it was stupidly expensive). It's a modern panel made of monocrystaline cells which are the most efficient of the commonly available cells.
Basically what I found:
* The panel makes rated panel on a clear, hazeless day when the sun strikes the panel exactly at right angles. * On a day with thin cirrus clouds, such that clear shadows are still being cast, it will make 50% of rated power. * On a day with thin clouds but a faint shadow still being cast, it will produce at best 35% to 40% * On an overcast but bright day, 25% * Heavy overcast, only around 5%
Also the power very rapidly drops off if the sun isn't absolutely perpendicular to the panel. To get the best out of the panel sun tracking is absolutely essential which unfortunately means it's now no longer an installation simpler than a small wind generator.
"The peak oil crowd" (whoever they are) never said that at all. A particular geologist made a prediction on when US oil production would peak. It did peak not too far off his prediction and has been declining ever since. It is highly unlikely that US production rate will ever hit that peak again. World conventional oil has also peaked, and the gap is only being filled by unconventional (i.e. expensive, dirty, with poor EROEI) oil sources.
The world as a whole will also one day peak including the increasingly expensive unconventional sources.
The problem is we have an economy based on continual growth. Since all economic growth so far and into the forseeable future also requires a growth in use of energy, while oil is winding down there will be a LOT of economic pain and constant recession. The danger is this constant recession will mean that there just isn't enough money left over to research alternatives if we sit on our hands and just wait until the decline is well under way. Just with the recession caused by banking, many countries have ceased all research in alternatives because the money isn't there. It would be prudent to prepare alternatives so that when the inevitable decline in global oil production does start we are already well placed to fill the difference with something else and not suffer this long recession which might make the development of alternatives longer and slower (and therefore much more painful) than they would be if we get a head start on it now.
The Macbook keyboard is actually very good and comfortable to type on. Of course I would prefer an IBM Model M keyboard, but you've got to compromise for a laptop and the Macbook keyboard is probably the best you can get that fits within the constraints of a laptop.
Phone market != desktop market. They aren't even comparable. There are rather more Linux phone users (orders of magnitude more) than there are MS Phone users.
The Democrats and Obama haven't been suggesting we begin an armed conflict with Charleston, Savannah or Jacksonville. However, certain quarters of Romney's lot do want to attack Iran. It does help to know where a country you intend to invade actually is.
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I just run:
sleep(28800);
at round about midnight.
Where was all this outrage and demand to bomb when the rebels used nerve gas back in May?
Both sides in the Syrian conflict are baddies. It's a bit hypocritical to bomb the Syrian government for using chemical weapons when we ignored the rebels doing the same.
I would fscking hope so, all of these things being Microsoft products.
Current laws already recognise it's not all or nothing - that you can ride a bicycle does not mean that driving a car is exactly the same, so bicycles are treated differently than cars (here bicycles have a right to operate on the highway, cars do not - they and their driver must be licensed and insured).
As for responsiblility, you're going to need rules for that too I'm afraid. When your untrained unlicensed driver runs over some pedestrian, and does not have enough money to pay for the pedestrian's health care, someone has to enforce that they have financial responsibility.
Any speed limiter probably won't control the brake, it'll probably only control the gas.
That's fine to the safety nazis. They would say "Well just don't overtake and be more patient".
We already see this with motorways with lorries. You get one lorry with its limiter set to 55.9999998 mph and another lorry with its limiter set to 56.0000001 catches it up and starts to overtake. 15 miles later it's finally past after causing all of lanes 1 and 2 to be going at 56 mph for the last 15 miles, and lane 3 bunched up nose to tail traffic doing about 60.
Commercial satellites are not space exploration any more than a commercial flight from London to Paris is exploration.
No, *for profit* space exploration won't happen (at least any time soon). You can still have private not-for-profit things. Private does not necessarily imply profit motive. If Musk can get enough of his ultra-rich buddies excited enough to fund (for example) a Mars exploration mission, then it could be done privately. Of course this is a big "if" and the probability of it happening is somewhere close to zero.
Elon Musk *does* have a degree in physics.
He's right, you won't have businesses trying to establish a colony on Mars.
However, that doesn't necessarily mean there is a probability of zero that Elon Musk can't talk a bunch of his very rich buddies to helping bankroll a mission to Mars, in other words, private but not commercial. (The probability is probably close to zero, but it is non-zero). In reality you'd probably find that NASA also provides something (and probably quite a lot of something) towards a Mars mission that had its origins outside of government.
You can have private travel to somewhere without it being commercial.
The vast majority of helicopter crashes happen at 30 mph or less. Takeoff and landing accidents (from hover), loss of tailrotor effectiveness, settling with power, botched autorotations...these all tend to happen with the helicopter travelling at 30 mph or less.
Pity you don't seem to know jack shit about helicopters before unloading on a useful test.
Nuclear winter -> global warming? A bit of a non-sequitur, don't you think?
I think everyone, even conservatives, can agree that nuclear war and its consequences would be really bad. You don't need to be a bleeding heart liberal to dislike the idea of nuclear war.
From what I understand, the "island of stability" in terms of super-heavy elements is a relative term - it just means the decay of elements in the island of stability is measured in maybe hundreds of milliseconds instead of a few microseconds.
Well that's the problem!
In the past, a PC gamer would replace their main rig every year to 18 months, and this would drive quite a bit of sales. In fact, ordinary PC users would change their computer every 2 to 3 years because the new ones were much better, and new software was more capable (and a lot more bloated) and wouldn't run well on a 2 year old machine. This started changing in the early 2000s for non-gaming PCs (my non-gaming development box I built in 2002 lasted 7 years - basically until components started to fail). For gamers this started changing towards 2010 - now there's little advantage in changing your gaming rig more than once every 3 or 4 years.
The result - while PC usage is probably still growing a little, PC *buying* is declining rapidly because a machine from 2010 is still good enough even for gamers, and a machine from 2005 is good enough for typical email/browse the web stuff. My main gaming rig now is a decent spec *laptop* with nvidia graphics and an i7, and not a hideously overweight one either like gaming laptops of 5 or 6 years ago. Since hardly anyone buys Windows retail, falling PC sales means falling Windows sales. A Windows license for a normal PC is lasting 6 years or more now as people only replace when components actually fail beyond economic repair, and most every day users are no more likely to buy a Windows upgrade any more than they will switch to Linux. A Windows license on a gaming PC is lasting at least 3 years now, possibly more - when in the past, Microsoft could rely on gamers buying a new Windows license every year to 18 months and non-gamers every 2 to 3 years.
When I lived in the US (up till 2002, in Texas) most windows were still single pane even in new builds which surprised me given in Houston heat everyone needs A/C and it's expensive to load up the AC by having windows that just allow the heat in.
People fly inherently unstable aircraft all the time. They are called "helicopters" :-)
The safest generally would be to have zero gap between two following cars. The problem with rear ends is if you're following at a significantly non-zero spacing, but not such a great spacing that you can't stop in time, a high relative speed builds between you and the car in front and >krumpfh! However, if you're following the car in front with reliably no more than a couple of cm between the two vehicles, the relative speed is minuscule even if they do touch. If the two cars are autonomous and communicating, they can coordinate their deceleration, even if it was unexpected and at most can only gently touch because there just isn't enough space between them to generate a large relative velocity between them.
There is also the difference in where the costs go especially when considering government. Let's imagine that every cent spent on licensing now needs to be spent on support.
* Licensing costs mostly (if not all) disappear to a foreign country.
* Those support costs are most likely spent with people living in Valencia
The money spent on licensing has zero benefit to the local economy. However, if you had to still spend all that money on support, the vast majority would get spent in the local economy with local benefit. Private enterprise probably doesn't care about this, but governments will do since a better local economy means they get some of that money back directly in taxes, and indirectly in a better performing local economy making the whole place a more attractive place to be.
On the other hand I'm not convinced that any more support will be needed over Microsoft Office. I do not know anyone who has ever received formal training in Microsoft Word. And those who are familiar with Word don't seem to have any difficulty transitioning from the traditional interface to the ribbon interface which is a pretty large change - at least as large as moving to LibreOffice.
The UK national grid does not do this (lower the voltage) and I don't think ever has. As load increases, frequency begins to drop and there are various things that happen if the frequency can't be maintained within tolerances. Large industrial users with things that can go without power for a while without a problem have contracts with the National Grid to have frequency cut-offs. Think of a furnace that takes a week to get to temperature - being without power for a half hour doesn't really matter, so the furnace has equipment that turns it off if the frequency falls below a certain threshold. Organizations with emergency generators (think places like hospitals etc) will have contracts with the Grid that they will automatically start generating and feeding into the grid if the frequency falls below a threshold. If it gets really desperate, blackouts are used - not brown outs. This is exceedingly rare.
They do to work effectively though.
I bought an 80W panel to try out the technology (big enough to be useful for some projects, but not so big it was stupidly expensive). It's a modern panel made of monocrystaline cells which are the most efficient of the commonly available cells.
Basically what I found:
* The panel makes rated panel on a clear, hazeless day when the sun strikes the panel exactly at right angles.
* On a day with thin cirrus clouds, such that clear shadows are still being cast, it will make 50% of rated power.
* On a day with thin clouds but a faint shadow still being cast, it will produce at best 35% to 40%
* On an overcast but bright day, 25%
* Heavy overcast, only around 5%
Also the power very rapidly drops off if the sun isn't absolutely perpendicular to the panel. To get the best out of the panel sun tracking is absolutely essential which unfortunately means it's now no longer an installation simpler than a small wind generator.
Probably not because solar doesn't use those things. You're confusing solar with wind (which might use rare earths for generator magnets).
"The peak oil crowd" (whoever they are) never said that at all. A particular geologist made a prediction on when US oil production would peak. It did peak not too far off his prediction and has been declining ever since. It is highly unlikely that US production rate will ever hit that peak again. World conventional oil has also peaked, and the gap is only being filled by unconventional (i.e. expensive, dirty, with poor EROEI) oil sources.
The world as a whole will also one day peak including the increasingly expensive unconventional sources.
The problem is we have an economy based on continual growth. Since all economic growth so far and into the forseeable future also requires a growth in use of energy, while oil is winding down there will be a LOT of economic pain and constant recession. The danger is this constant recession will mean that there just isn't enough money left over to research alternatives if we sit on our hands and just wait until the decline is well under way. Just with the recession caused by banking, many countries have ceased all research in alternatives because the money isn't there. It would be prudent to prepare alternatives so that when the inevitable decline in global oil production does start we are already well placed to fill the difference with something else and not suffer this long recession which might make the development of alternatives longer and slower (and therefore much more painful) than they would be if we get a head start on it now.
The Macbook keyboard is actually very good and comfortable to type on. Of course I would prefer an IBM Model M keyboard, but you've got to compromise for a laptop and the Macbook keyboard is probably the best you can get that fits within the constraints of a laptop.
Phone market != desktop market. They aren't even comparable. There are rather more Linux phone users (orders of magnitude more) than there are MS Phone users.
The Democrats and Obama haven't been suggesting we begin an armed conflict with Charleston, Savannah or Jacksonville. However, certain quarters of Romney's lot do want to attack Iran. It does help to know where a country you intend to invade actually is.