Youtube sometimes is on a "go slow", at times one video on YouTube can't be watched in HD, but another can, they are probably on different servers and one server's upstream is maxed out and the other's is not. It may not always be your end that is the problem.
It has nothing to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality says you'll not discriminate on delivering the packets, regardless of where they are going to or coming from.
A monthly cap just says "you can use this much data, but we don't care to or from the data is going". Nothing at all with net neutrality.
The problem is the ISP's upstream isn't $105/month for 105Mbit/sec continuously, it's many orders of magnitude higher so they'd be going out of business if everyone could just keep it maxed out 24/7 (Price up an OC-3 line some time and you'll see how eyewateringly expensive it is compared with your domestic ISP). Therefore having limits are honest and reasonable. What is dishonest is saying "unlimited broadband" but actually having a limint.
What seems incredible to me is you're paying more tax for healthcare than me, yet in my country I get healthcare that is free at the point of use and don't need health insurance at all.
I think I rather like my (pejoratively termed by right wingers in the US) "socialist health care system". It's certainly way cheaper on my tax take and neither I nor my employer don't have to pay for insurance on top of that.
I therefore have to agree 100%: your health care system sounds as if it needs reform.
Additionally, in the USA there is an awful lot of bad teeth, dentistry in the United States is an order of magnitude more expensive than (private) dentistry in Britain, and it shows especially in rural areas where salaries aren't great and many don't have insurance and people just can't get any form of dental care. (There was even an article a few years back in AOPA Pilot, a flying magazine for AOPA-USA, about dentists who fly around the Appalacians in an ancient DC-3 basically pulling rotten teeth out of the locals).
I've lived in both countries, and I've seen plenty of very bad teeth in the United States in relatively young people.
On a point of pedantry, you are actually more buoyant in any kind of sinking mud/quicksand than in water (because liquefacted mud and quicksand is much denser than water) and it is extremely hard to sink underneath. So even if you were completely stuck and no one rescued you, you wouldn't really get preserved because quite a lot of you would still be sticking out into the open air.
Also if you know how to free yourself from sinking mud, it's usually not all that hard.
It's a lot easier to control the pollution at one large power plant than tens of millions of tiny ones.
Additionally, electricity acts as an abstraction layer. If there were a breakthrough in fusion generation, the EV fleet wouldn't have to change, in fact nothing would have to change, merely by putting the new fusion station on the grid, the entire fleet becomes a lot less polluting.
No effects will last for "billions of years", anything with a half-life that long is considered a stable isotope! The longer the half life, the less radioactive something is.
Chernobyl is a red herring because it was an inherently unsafe fail-dangerous reactor design which no one anywhere else in the world was insane enough to produce.
No it does not remain dangerous for billions of years. We had a word for things with half lives measured in billions of years: "stable". Something with such a long half-life will have very little radioactivity.
More to the point the nuclear deterrent is implemented wrong, and the risk of an accidental nuclear war is greater than the deterrent value. The problem is this:
* Nuclear launch systems are generally "fail dangerous" so a surprise attack can't destroy your ability to retaliate * ICBMs once they are flying cannot be destroyed or recalled. This is intentional. The fear that EMP would cause a destruction mechanism to fail means that ICBMs don't have one. * We know what the safety standards are like in Russia in particular - just look at the insanely dangerous design of some of their nuclear reactors. Are their ICBM systems as unsafe?
We need as a priority to get rid of the ICBMs/SLBMs. Bombers can be recalled if necessary, and the time taken for a bomber to reach its target gives time to turn it off in the case of error.
The other problem with mass nuclear weapons is that using them is suicide even if the other side doesn't retaliate. "Nuclear winter" does not really adequately describe the aftermath of a large nuclear attack. A couple of thousand megatons on "counter value" targets (the euphemistic name for bombing civilian populations) in the northern hemisphere would result in mid-day daylight levels in the northern hemisphere about that of a moonlit night for about two months after the attack due to the vast quantities of soot lofted into the atmosphere, and it would be decades before the climate returned to normal. Even a small exchange, say, between India and Pakistan using 50 Hiroshima-sized bombs each would result in a "nuclear autumn" that would cut the growing season in the continental United States by 60 days; this would result in severe food shortages. (Recent studies with better modelling think that the "nuclear winter" scenario that was independently reached by both Soviet and US research was too optimistic and in fact the effects would be worse than what was expected in the 1980s).
Pencils ARE made from biomass, they are made from wood and carbon. Terrible example!
In any case, the amount of oil we use for plastics is dwarfed (probably by orders of magnitude) compared to what we burn. Plastic is also very reusable, unlike fuel that is burned.
In any case, to make plastic, fundamentally you need hydrocarbons. If you have energy you can make hydrocarbons. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are incredibly abundant; have a big enough source of energy and you can make any hydrocarbon you want. It's just it's more convenient and cheaper to get them ready-made from oil.
The problem is not the QUANTITY of oil, it's the RATE at which you can extract it.
The biggest supplier to the USA of oil is Canada, not the Middle East. But consider this: Canada's proven reserves are 1.7 trillion barrels of oil if I recall correctly. By comparison, Mexico's Cantarell field was only 0.1% of the size of Canada's tar sands reserves. However, after two decades of development, Canada's entire tar sands reserves can barely produce at the rate of Cantarell - a field 0.1% of the size - at its peak.
All the easy US oil is gone. While there may be a lot in shale, it is painfully slow to extract. It's not like drinking out of a Coke bottle with a straw (that's what Saudi oil is like), it's basically having to extract it from rock.
Basically, it's slow and hard and expensive to extract. For the US to be able to run only on north American oil sources, it would have to cut consumption to 1/4 of what it is now permanently. With the best will in the world, the US oil reserves will not produce oil quickly nor cheaply. It has nothing to do with environmentalists, and everything to do with sweet crude from elsewhere being a heck of a lot cheaper and easier to extract.
With Unix you effectively have that logical drive name - the mount point. You have the physical name (such as/dev/disk/c0t0d07) and the logical name (/usr/local, for example).
The batteries don't die *that* quickly. My laptop, which I still take with me everywhere, is a 12in PowerBook G4. Remember those? When I bought it no one even had an inkling (well, apart from Jobs) that Intel was on the horizon for a Mac. It'll be 7 years old this year.
It had about 4 hours battery life when brand new, and still manages an hour today at nearly 7 years old. A 7 year old 1st gen iPad will likely therefore get over two hours on battery still if the degradation happens at this rate, which is still a useful amount of time. (At 2 years old the PowerBook was still getting 3 to 3.5 hours out of a charge).
On a tangental note, I enjoy flying radio control helicopters, I have three of them (a "micro sized" heli, T-Rex 250, with a rotor disc of about 25 cm diameter, weighing about 350g), a 500-size and a 600-size (which weighs about 2.5kg, IIRC with a rotor diameter of 1.6 metres), all of them are collective pitch and extremely agile (they are all aerobatic models). All of them are electric too.
What worries me a little is that the wider political world will see the small drones, which don't look an awful lot different to a model RC heli, then start invoking the "terrorism!" bogeyman and trying to ban/restrict the RC flying we do or making us go through a painful registration process to be able to buy parts or helis. It won't take a huge leap of imagination for some politician to think that my T-Rex 600 could be some sort of threat to a public figure if fitted with an FPV (first person view) system, and then we have yet another avenue of pleasure closed off due to the war-on-terror:-(
Where I live, all the goverment employees computers are set to use Bing in the IE search box (and this cannot be changed, it is enforced by group policy) because Microsoft gave the government a discount if they made all government employees use Bing on their work machines.
Of course government employees can type in "google.com" into the address bar and use Google (or whoever else) if they wish, but I would imagine most just enter things into the search bar.
You won't stay conscious for more than a few seconds.
The lungs are not a one-way system; effectively, if there is less oxygen in the lungs than there is in the blood, the lungs work in reverse and remove oxygen from the blood. At airline altitudes, the time of "useful consciousness" is something like 30 seconds. At 50,000 feet, time of useful consciousness is between 6 and 9 seconds because the lungs strip the oxygen out of the blood so efficiently. This is why if there is only one crew member in the flight deck, he or she must wear an oxygen mask until the other crew member returns; after all if some hull breach emergency presents itself while he's alone he might be too busy trying to fly the plane to don the oxygen mask.
A rapid decompression can reduce the time of useful consciousness by 50% due to the forced exhalation.
I guess Steve won't like me any more. My laptop is not a Macbook, it's a 12in. PowerBook G4 that's still going and going... it'll be 7 years old this year.
Daylight in the evening is far more valuable than daylight in the morning even if your work hours are flexible.
If your work hours are flexible, it doesn't actually matter. Just go to work an hour earlier. Problem solved. We are not in central Europe, we are on the western periphery, therefore it's wrong for us to be on central European time.
And in any case we shouldn't be on CET because we are not in central Europe, we are in the periphery of western Europe. CET is entirely inappropriate for us.
Slashdot Mirror
Youtube sometimes is on a "go slow", at times one video on YouTube can't be watched in HD, but another can, they are probably on different servers and one server's upstream is maxed out and the other's is not. It may not always be your end that is the problem.
It has nothing to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality says you'll not discriminate on delivering the packets, regardless of where they are going to or coming from.
A monthly cap just says "you can use this much data, but we don't care to or from the data is going". Nothing at all with net neutrality.
The problem is the ISP's upstream isn't $105/month for 105Mbit/sec continuously, it's many orders of magnitude higher so they'd be going out of business if everyone could just keep it maxed out 24/7 (Price up an OC-3 line some time and you'll see how eyewateringly expensive it is compared with your domestic ISP). Therefore having limits are honest and reasonable. What is dishonest is saying "unlimited broadband" but actually having a limint.
I have to agree. For non-authenticated transfers, HTTP and rsync are better, for authenticated transfers, sftp/scp is better.
Fortunately at work virtually all the companies we deal with now use scp/sftp instead of ftp.
What seems incredible to me is you're paying more tax for healthcare than me, yet in my country I get healthcare that is free at the point of use and don't need health insurance at all.
I think I rather like my (pejoratively termed by right wingers in the US) "socialist health care system". It's certainly way cheaper on my tax take and neither I nor my employer don't have to pay for insurance on top of that.
I therefore have to agree 100%: your health care system sounds as if it needs reform.
Additionally, in the USA there is an awful lot of bad teeth, dentistry in the United States is an order of magnitude more expensive than (private) dentistry in Britain, and it shows especially in rural areas where salaries aren't great and many don't have insurance and people just can't get any form of dental care. (There was even an article a few years back in AOPA Pilot, a flying magazine for AOPA-USA, about dentists who fly around the Appalacians in an ancient DC-3 basically pulling rotten teeth out of the locals).
I've lived in both countries, and I've seen plenty of very bad teeth in the United States in relatively young people.
On a point of pedantry, you are actually more buoyant in any kind of sinking mud/quicksand than in water (because liquefacted mud and quicksand is much denser than water) and it is extremely hard to sink underneath. So even if you were completely stuck and no one rescued you, you wouldn't really get preserved because quite a lot of you would still be sticking out into the open air.
Also if you know how to free yourself from sinking mud, it's usually not all that hard.
Analog is *enormously* important. It's just not trendy. The world is analog, and for one digital systems will need an interface to the analog world.
It's a lot easier to control the pollution at one large power plant than tens of millions of tiny ones.
Additionally, electricity acts as an abstraction layer. If there were a breakthrough in fusion generation, the EV fleet wouldn't have to change, in fact nothing would have to change, merely by putting the new fusion station on the grid, the entire fleet becomes a lot less polluting.
No effects will last for "billions of years", anything with a half-life that long is considered a stable isotope! The longer the half life, the less radioactive something is.
Chernobyl is a red herring because it was an inherently unsafe fail-dangerous reactor design which no one anywhere else in the world was insane enough to produce.
No it does not remain dangerous for billions of years. We had a word for things with half lives measured in billions of years: "stable". Something with such a long half-life will have very little radioactivity.
ARM already had it thanks to Apple: when Apple chose the ARM for the Newton, other companies started taking ARM seriously and began to use it too.
This comes directly from Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson, the designers of the ARM (both of whom I've had the pleasure of meeting).
More to the point the nuclear deterrent is implemented wrong, and the risk of an accidental nuclear war is greater than the deterrent value. The problem is this:
* Nuclear launch systems are generally "fail dangerous" so a surprise attack can't destroy your ability to retaliate
* ICBMs once they are flying cannot be destroyed or recalled. This is intentional. The fear that EMP would cause a destruction mechanism to fail means that ICBMs don't have one.
* We know what the safety standards are like in Russia in particular - just look at the insanely dangerous design of some of their nuclear reactors. Are their ICBM systems as unsafe?
We need as a priority to get rid of the ICBMs/SLBMs. Bombers can be recalled if necessary, and the time taken for a bomber to reach its target gives time to turn it off in the case of error.
The other problem with mass nuclear weapons is that using them is suicide even if the other side doesn't retaliate. "Nuclear winter" does not really adequately describe the aftermath of a large nuclear attack. A couple of thousand megatons on "counter value" targets (the euphemistic name for bombing civilian populations) in the northern hemisphere would result in mid-day daylight levels in the northern hemisphere about that of a moonlit night for about two months after the attack due to the vast quantities of soot lofted into the atmosphere, and it would be decades before the climate returned to normal. Even a small exchange, say, between India and Pakistan using 50 Hiroshima-sized bombs each would result in a "nuclear autumn" that would cut the growing season in the continental United States by 60 days; this would result in severe food shortages. (Recent studies with better modelling think that the "nuclear winter" scenario that was independently reached by both Soviet and US research was too optimistic and in fact the effects would be worse than what was expected in the 1980s).
Pencils ARE made from biomass, they are made from wood and carbon. Terrible example!
In any case, the amount of oil we use for plastics is dwarfed (probably by orders of magnitude) compared to what we burn. Plastic is also very reusable, unlike fuel that is burned.
In any case, to make plastic, fundamentally you need hydrocarbons. If you have energy you can make hydrocarbons. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are incredibly abundant; have a big enough source of energy and you can make any hydrocarbon you want. It's just it's more convenient and cheaper to get them ready-made from oil.
The problem is not the QUANTITY of oil, it's the RATE at which you can extract it.
The biggest supplier to the USA of oil is Canada, not the Middle East. But consider this: Canada's proven reserves are 1.7 trillion barrels of oil if I recall correctly. By comparison, Mexico's Cantarell field was only 0.1% of the size of Canada's tar sands reserves. However, after two decades of development, Canada's entire tar sands reserves can barely produce at the rate of Cantarell - a field 0.1% of the size - at its peak.
All the easy US oil is gone. While there may be a lot in shale, it is painfully slow to extract. It's not like drinking out of a Coke bottle with a straw (that's what Saudi oil is like), it's basically having to extract it from rock.
Basically, it's slow and hard and expensive to extract. For the US to be able to run only on north American oil sources, it would have to cut consumption to 1/4 of what it is now permanently. With the best will in the world, the US oil reserves will not produce oil quickly nor cheaply. It has nothing to do with environmentalists, and everything to do with sweet crude from elsewhere being a heck of a lot cheaper and easier to extract.
With Unix you effectively have that logical drive name - the mount point. You have the physical name (such as /dev/disk/c0t0d07) and the logical name (/usr/local, for example).
On a point of pedantry, it "raises the question", not "begs the question".
http://begthequestion.info/
The batteries don't die *that* quickly. My laptop, which I still take with me everywhere, is a 12in PowerBook G4. Remember those? When I bought it no one even had an inkling (well, apart from Jobs) that Intel was on the horizon for a Mac. It'll be 7 years old this year.
It had about 4 hours battery life when brand new, and still manages an hour today at nearly 7 years old. A 7 year old 1st gen iPad will likely therefore get over two hours on battery still if the degradation happens at this rate, which is still a useful amount of time. (At 2 years old the PowerBook was still getting 3 to 3.5 hours out of a charge).
On a tangental note, I enjoy flying radio control helicopters, I have three of them (a "micro sized" heli, T-Rex 250, with a rotor disc of about 25 cm diameter, weighing about 350g), a 500-size and a 600-size (which weighs about 2.5kg, IIRC with a rotor diameter of 1.6 metres), all of them are collective pitch and extremely agile (they are all aerobatic models). All of them are electric too.
What worries me a little is that the wider political world will see the small drones, which don't look an awful lot different to a model RC heli, then start invoking the "terrorism!" bogeyman and trying to ban/restrict the RC flying we do or making us go through a painful registration process to be able to buy parts or helis. It won't take a huge leap of imagination for some politician to think that my T-Rex 600 could be some sort of threat to a public figure if fitted with an FPV (first person view) system, and then we have yet another avenue of pleasure closed off due to the war-on-terror :-(
Where I live, all the goverment employees computers are set to use Bing in the IE search box (and this cannot be changed, it is enforced by group policy) because Microsoft gave the government a discount if they made all government employees use Bing on their work machines.
Of course government employees can type in "google.com" into the address bar and use Google (or whoever else) if they wish, but I would imagine most just enter things into the search bar.
You won't stay conscious for more than a few seconds.
The lungs are not a one-way system; effectively, if there is less oxygen in the lungs than there is in the blood, the lungs work in reverse and remove oxygen from the blood. At airline altitudes, the time of "useful consciousness" is something like 30 seconds. At 50,000 feet, time of useful consciousness is between 6 and 9 seconds because the lungs strip the oxygen out of the blood so efficiently. This is why if there is only one crew member in the flight deck, he or she must wear an oxygen mask until the other crew member returns; after all if some hull breach emergency presents itself while he's alone he might be too busy trying to fly the plane to don the oxygen mask.
A rapid decompression can reduce the time of useful consciousness by 50% due to the forced exhalation.
I guess Steve won't like me any more. My laptop is not a Macbook, it's a 12in. PowerBook G4 that's still going and going... it'll be 7 years old this year.
We are not subjects of the crown, and haven't been for a very long time. There are now very few people who are considered "British subjects"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nationality_law
If your work hours are flexible, it doesn't actually matter. Just go to work an hour earlier. Problem solved. We are not in central Europe, we are on the western periphery, therefore it's wrong for us to be on central European time.
And in any case we shouldn't be on CET because we are not in central Europe, we are in the periphery of western Europe. CET is entirely inappropriate for us.
When Intel is saying "open" in this context, it doesn't mean open to the user, it means open to the manufacturer.