Perhaps you didn't follow my argument. The $600k is to pay for a staff of six full-time employees at a hypothetical journal. I don't think you can run a high-quality journal with a total budget of $10-1000 per year for more than a very brief while.
Do you seriously think that the overwhelming majority of journals have a six person full time staff? They typical journal has part of a person paid by the publisher. All the other work is performed by unpaid volunteers.
If we look at organising a large conference, the actual cost of the "publishing" side is a pittance compared to the work performed, basically only "deliver the proofs to the printer and receive the proceedings back". The printer doesn't do basically anything more than the actual printing. The major cost of printing is getting the rights to put the logo of the sponsoring organisation on the front cover. (Whether IEEE or ACM).
Sure, Nature, Science and the like might actually do proof reading, copy editing and type setting, but the rest; not so much. The overwhelming majority of the work is done by unpaid volunteers. Always have been, and always will be. Why we don't just cut out the last middleman, is beyond me. Since we don't have to, and status quo is cosy and comfortable, that's probably the reason...
Sweden destroys their constitution every 10 years, and re-writes it from the ground up.
Uhh? What? We do nothing of the sort. Not even close. As a matter of fact the constitutional process in Sweden and the US is similar from the point of view that they are changed by the legislating body like regular laws are but with extra checks and balances to make it more difficult to change.
In Sweden the four parts of our constitutional law (we don't have one collected constitution per se), can be changed only by two consecutive parliaments with a national election in-between (to give the people the chance of changing a parliament that tries to do something not to our liking). Since the term today is four years, that gives a maximum of eight years for a change in constitutional law, but shorter is of course often the norm. So I have no idea where you got the "ten years" from. We most certainly don't require the whole constitution to be ratified within any set time period.
Well recoil, and therefore handling is the same whether you shoot hollow points or FMJs.
In either case, the difference in diameter between 9mm and.45 is so small as to be completely swamped by other factors when it comes to wounding. You're not going to hit a major organ or blood vessel with.45s that you were missing with 9mm. Shoot placement and ammo capacity is bound to completely swamp that effect. The studies I've seen looking at combat effects couldn't discern any difference between 9mm and.45. (But I can't find them now).
All I've read suggest that handgun calibres suck at putting people out of commision anyway, the energy isn't there, so it's like poking someone with a stick. Whether the hole is 9mm or.45 doesn't make a difference. The differences in energy doesn't matter as the energy is too small to begin with.
Lower recoil does mean better training, confidence and subsequent shot placement though. I remember that when Sweden started training snipers again in the nineties they settled on 7.62x51 NATO as experience showed that that was the largest calibre that all soldiers could be expected to learn to shoot well. Bigger may be better for sniping, but then you'd end up with people who couldn't be successfully trained due to that one aspect. So while not ideal for the purpose, it had the one quality that mattered in the end. Usability.
So whether you can accelerate or tow or go fast depends on the torque curve, i.e. torque as a function of engine speed. Now, when you make an ICE you can make certain trade-offs that makes the torque curve look different, and that makes the engine work worse or better for certain task. Or rather, the engine as part of the drive train work worse or better. With an ICE you almost always have to have a gear box with changable gearing as the available rev range and torque curve won't fit the entire speed/work range you're interested in.
So the story is a lot more complicated than what that rule of thumb would lead you to believe. A very high power engine, i.e. an engine that can rev really high and still maintain some torque, still won't make you go fast if the gearbox doesn't allow it. And that's just one example.
(Torque creates acceleration. HP is what maintains speed.)
Not really. Power (weather measured in HP or Watts) for a rotating machine is simply the torque multiplied by the angular velocity. So while you need torque to accelerate e.g. a car, you can't say that "horse power" maintains speed. In fact, it's torque that maintains speed as well. You need enough output torque that when its converted to a force at the wheel/road surface, that force is sufficient to overcome the force due to other losses (wind resistance, or work due to going up hill). Of course, going up a hill your engine/motor's power output better be greater than the work you're doing, otherwise you've made a perpetum mobile
Now, the main problem with the lawn mower example is that the torque curves, i.e. torque as a function of angular velocity ("revs") is very different between an electric motor and an internal combustion engine. (Indeed, that's why many internal combustion engines has an electric motor to start it). So you'd have to compare the torque curves at the precise operating (speed/load) where the stone was hit.
Without doing the math, my feeling is that if you did so, you'd come up with the answer that it didn't matter anyway. The collision between a small, relatively speaking light and hard, stone and the fairly heavy, also hard, steel rotor of a lawn mower with substantial inertia, is as near to the idealistic elastic collision as dammit. I'd be very surprised if the rotor had time to lose enough angular momentum that the difference in torque curves between the electric motor and an ICE one would make enough of a difference in the outcome of the experiment to dominate other sources of error in the setup. Note that of course, it's the difference in torque characteristics, i.e. the speed with which the motor/engine can change its output given a change in load that's the determining factor. At the steady state, a rotor spinning at the same speed will have the same absolute torque driving it, just balancing out losses from friction. If it were otherwise the blade wouldn't rotate with a steady RPM, it would instead rev up or down. So it's not the torque of the power source per se that's the difference, but rather "on demand" torque often called, acceleration torque, given changing conditions.
Chip and Signature should help reduce card cloning attacks because unless the cryptographic key on the chip can be read the application request cryptograms will never be correct so the transactions will be flagged. What happens in the case of an ARQC validation failure is up to your bank, but they can hardly refuse a refund if they approve a transaction where the ARQC validation failed. (Well, they can, but they're likely to get shafted for it eventually)
And that's a real issue. That's why we in Europe right now have geofencing on our cards. When our card information is "stolen" it ends up being used on cloned cards in shops in other parts of the world. BUT, that's not just places like India (which is a perennial favourite), rather one of the major markets is the US as your POS security standards are so lax.
So even if shoring up US standards would not help USians, it will help us in the rest of the world, by making one very popular attack less likely to succeed, by making geoblocking working better.(Blocking the US is more inconvenient than blocking many other countries.)
If availability trumps all else and it is availability that makes medical devices more easy to hack, they why couldn't the hacker simply hack the device and take it offline at the time it's most needed? If every second matters, couldn't the hacker delay you for a few seconds?
Sure they could. But that's not how threat modelling work. The question here is will more hackers do that, and will the added security to thwart them actually lead to more deaths from doctors not being able to navigate that security in time to save the patient.
Risk isn't just the potential outcome of a certain situation, it's also the probability that that outcome will come to be.
It seems like what you are really saying is you need ready access to medical devices, but instead of building robust yet transparent security, your strategy is to "hope" a hacker never targets a patient of yours?
It's not a question of "building", we don't know how to build a secure system like that (and I say that as a security researcher). Security research focuses almost exclusively on "perfect" security, i.e. security above all else. There's no great body of research into exactly what trade-offs are when it comes to implantable device security in general, and implanted life and time critical systems in particular. These are hard problems. It's not for nothing that hospital data access systems still work mainly on the "allow all access, log and deal with the problems later"-model of security. Even one dead patient due to security snafus tends to make people really upset. "Hacking" related health related deaths though are few and far between. (I can't think of a single one off the top of my head).
Not worrying about, and taking steps to prevent, having your pacemaker attacked by a "hacker" is like not worrying about getting randomly shot walking down the street. It's the rational thing to do for all but a very small minority. Other risks, at this point in time completely thwart these risks.
My favourite when I was in the business was the doozy in the 3G 3GPP 23.060 standard: "IPv6 support is mandatory, IPv4 support is optional. The preceding sentence is not to be interpreted such that an implementation providing only IPv4 support is deemed non-compliant". (Or words to that effect.)
Yes, I know the politics that went on behind closed doors to end up with such a wording but seriously, W.T.F?!
No, pinging a cellphone doesn't mean setting up a portable cellphone tower. "Pinging" is the what the cellphone companies call the process a cellphone goes through trying to register with any available cellphone tower (almost always fixed). It's an analogy for the "ping" command in unix.
And the technical term for how that is handled is "mobility management", if anybody wants to look up the procedures in painful detail. (But beware, telecoms standards are actually physically painful to read... You have been warned.)
Ah. OK. Yes, being European "everybody" knows that you have to leave the door ajar, or even fully open, between uses.
Even in Sweden, home of the most overbearing child safety standards you could imagine, I have never heard of a child or pet being injured by crawling into the washing machine. I can honestly say that it has never even appeared on my radar as a risk. (Same with my own kids, not even remotely a problem. Many other things were, but that wasn't one of them. Whether we lived in an apartment with the washer in the bathroom, or a house with a laundry room proper.).
Now, yes, in the bottom of the gasket you can often find a bit of discolouration, (and the other places you mention), but as nothing can really "grow" in a machine that's regularly flushed with 60C water, it's not a problem in practice. If it gets too bad you'll just have to clean it, it's not worse than cleaning out the filter/grating from time to time.
Indeed, that's why we wash underwear in 60âC. It kills all the stuff you don't want growing in them...
No, I'm sorry. When it comes to washing machines, I can't see any benefits to the American models.
Well, yes, of course you can't leave the laundry in the machine when its done. You have to dry it? Otherwise it will indeed become moldy.
But that feels like I'm missing your point... So what did I miss?
P.S. Just bought a used refurbished Siemens front loader. Yes, they "wear out" fast, but usually it's only a single "weak" component that's been made that way, and it can often be fixed fairly cheaply and easily. Not so with newer Husqvarna machines though. The refurbisher showed me two as new three year old machines that were already broken and couldn't be fixed. Parts weren't available, and it was large, expensive and critical parts that had broken (same in both machines). So if you want to know what to buy, check with the local refurbisher...
Nope. You have to look at what the actual history was in the countries you're talking about. As a matter of fact women did the washing locally. And they spent a lot of time on it. (But people also owned less clothes, linnen etc. and used them much longer before washing them, than is the case now.
Having your laundry sent out to men (the horror!) doing the actual work didn't happen. At all. (With a small exception being the Army, esp. in times of war. As a matter of fact, modern laundry techniques revolutionised warfare.)
No, what you need are proper washing machines. I.e. machines with a drum instead of an agitator and that heats the water instead of just getting what's on tap.
Whenever I use a washing machine in the US I'm taken aback by how bad they are.
With regular 60âC (140F), cycles for underwear or even a 90âC (195F) cycle for linnen (though not many use it, it's still on the machine), there won't be any mold in you machine. No, way, no how.
Now 61cm isn't too fun to work in as a metric carpenter or you'll end up with silly units like 305mm.
Which is exactly my point. 60 is a very good number to use in that context. Now, of course if you were to try and go "metric" you could opt for 50cm, i.e. "half a meter" which was indeed an earlier standard for some appliances etc. but it never really caught on.
Claiming that imperial units are more "natural" is just silly. And divisibility is more a question of the number, not the unit. 13 inches isn't any easier to divide into three than 33 centimetres. Quite the opposite. (And if you don't like the conversion, the error is just over 6 ten-thousands, that's as near as damn it).
That still leaves a related question - why does US discussion of renewable energy focus on solar-electric 99% of the time, despite the fact that solar-electric is approximately the least efficient possible solution in most cases? Fifteen gallons of hot water is plenty enough for a shower.
That's a good point. With an accumulation tank and a reasonably southern aspect you can get all your hot water needs covered by just a few square meters of solar collectors on your roof for six months of the year. In Sweden. So for those that need heating and hot water, solar collection and accumulation tanks makes a lot of sense.
Of course, cooling your house that way, which is the more pressing problem in many places in the US, is difficult with that setup. And if you need to run a heat pump for cooling, having the requisite accumulation capacity just for hot water, starts to make less sense. (Tanks aren't that cheap, and you need room for them). But it's definitely a technique you should keep in the back of your mind for when it makes sense. (My father in law runs such a setup, since he had the tanks already, as he heats his house with wood).
Most people always think a hydro plant would need a valey and a dam... that is not he case.
There are also buoy, which you can simply let swim in a river that produce power.
Yes it really is the case. If you want to produce any sizeable amount of power you need a good drop and sufficient flow rate. It's like the difference between an overshot and an undershot water wheel. Undershot wheels might be easier to build, but they don't really produce power worth a damn. (Pun intended.)
That you have a lot of small old puny power plants in Germany isn't because they'd make sense today. They were built in a different era, when they made more sense. Also your power prices are already through the roof compared to e.g. Sweden where we do have sufficient hydro power potential (and nuclear) boot. You're prices are three times as high as ours.
Now, we have rivers in Sweden to, and not a single power plant attached to the locks as they just wouldn't make financial sense. We are in fact, busy tearing out all the small power plants (with dams), that were built a hundred years ago as the value of the power they produce (in the single digit percentage compared to the large plants) destroy much more fish reproduction potential then they're worth. Its much better from an ecological standpoint to screw one large(ish) river with large hydro power potential over completely and leave the rest for fish. That way you get lots of power and lots of fish, rather than little power and no fish.
All these sites that make the most sense have already been built out in Sweden, well, we didn't build out the last five of the northern rivers for ecological reasons. This all with downstream power plants where that makes sense. (Not too many as you want to get as big a drop as possible in one go). So there's nothing really left. Like I said above, we're currently busy decommissioning thousands of small plants of the type you're advocating, for ecological reasons, and it won't affect our power production capacity at all. Small low flow plants don't make sense if you have any other option.
Sorry Germany. Hydro isn't for you...:-) And we've put in all that's reasonable to do.
Excluding CANDU, which are the only reactors I know of in operation that can operate and be refueled, however the more popular BWR and PWR can't produce power when they are being re-fueled or maintained. So how is that different from wind as a source? How is asking wind to produce power when the wind is not blowing, not like asking another power source to produce power during it's characteristic outage like being refueled or maintained?
Well, planned maintenance is just that. Planned. That means that you can (and do) make sure that there are other sources of power available to take the load when you perform refuelling or other maintenance on your reactor. Besides refuelling only happens once ever several years (depending on a lot of factors, you can and do run on other schedules), so it's not something you can't plan for.
In Sweden we get ca 50% of our power from nuclear (with the rest from hydroelectric) and I can't remember a single instance where a planned, or unplanned for that matter, nuclear power disruption to operations took down the grid. Wind OTOH we could only manage about 10-15% right now befoer the grid would be in trouble.
(Now, refuelling under during operation is actually something you don't want in a reactor, as it increases the proliferation risks. In order to produce weapons grade plutonium you need to constantly remove the Pu239 before it catches another neutron and becomes Pu240, which you don't want in your bomb as it'll fizzle.)
Now, wind on the other hand is much less stable, varying unpredictably on a shorter than hourly scale. You need serious backing by short run up standby power that can deliver a lot of power and cheaply (i.e. hydroelectric with large dams) to be able to tolerate a lot of wind (or solar) for that matter.
Why is distributing the wind as a source of energy too difficult problem for us to manage? It's an emotive claim? What is the problem that you see?
A main problem of course is cost. Long distance transmission can easily lose 10%-20% (even 50% in poor conditions) of the available power to transmission losses. In order for wind to average out, you need to be able to flexibly move lots of power over long distances (i.e. north one day, south the next), which is not cheap. We need a whole new grid in most places, i.e. massive investments are needed. I seem to remember that an area the size of Sweden, (which is roughly 10% larger than California and similar in shape) could just about be enough for wind availability to even out. But we don't have near the transmission capacity to move that much power that flexibly, and that's given that we already have some seriously beefy transmission lines from the Northern hydro electric power plants and the South, where we all live.
The reason that it "works" for Germany, that is seldom mentioned is that they're very well connected electrically to the rest of the continent, that hasn't had an "Energiewende" and probably won't. France's nuclear power plants get to take up the slack in a big way, and there are many times when German wind has to be dumped onto the market at negative prices, i.e. you get paid just to get rid of it. So while "Germany" works electrically (even though it's expensive), it couldn't do so on its own. Not by a long shot. It only works as long as it's neighbours don't do the same thing, which isn't really sustainable.
Another problem with this is that it increases fossil fuel usage compared to countries like Sweden. The reason is simple. Electricity is three times as expensive to the consumer in Germany as it is here. Hence we heat our houses with electricity (mainly using heat pumps) as that makes economic sense. In Germany you can't do that (anymore) and hence people use some form of fossil fuel, both for heating and cooking (natural gas from Russia mainly).
Now, of course, the so called "smart grid" that is often put as a solution to all this, i.e. a grid whereby you coul
The funny thing about that is the Europeans and China benefit more from that than the US does as only a small percentage of its oil imports come from the Middle East.
Not really. Oil is one of the most fungible goods on the market. Of course we in Europe are going to try and minimize transportation cost, but if we couldn't, we'd just buy "your" oil (or oil products) put them on a tanker and be done with it. This would raise prices for all involved. That's how "supply and demand" works. It's not like we'd all of a sudden stop using oil if light middle eastern crude suddenly disapeared from the market. (Even though we use mostly Brent here in the Nordic countries).
So it makes sense for the US to protect "your" oil based economy by keeping world wide supply high and steady, even if you may or may not actually refine and burn oil from that particular region. Paradoxically since i.e. gasoline is taxed much higher here in Europe we could come out of such a scenario much better than you, since governments have a taxation tool to help mitigate a sharp crude increase, while crude prices affect your market, and hence economy, more directly.
There's also the whole petro dollar situation, whereby if you want to buy oil from the Saudis you have to pay in US dollars, a portion of which the Saudis use to buy US government financial instruments. If you piss them off enough, they could do the Saddam thing, and start selling oil in Euros. That would directly hurt the US economy, no question about it.
And multiple winners is nothing unusual or bad. There often are more that one deserving recipients in a year so why not award two or three if their discoveries merit recognition? Occasionally the prize is awarded to groups rather than individuals but this serves little purpose since only individuals can really benefit.
That's actually built into the prize. The rule is that only a maximum of three persons and two works per prize may be considered. The exception is the peace prize, which may be awarded to institutions. It also doesn't have to be awarded, the money can instead be split between the other prizes.
What if giant alien slugs attack? We should probably spend the $450 million developing space-capable salt-guns, just in case.
Well, since a couple of tons of rock salt travelling at a couple of km/s in the opposite direction would do a number on an asteroid/comet as well, I'm all for that.
Dual use technology is just smart economics. So while we wait for the slugs (any day now) they could shore up our asteroid/comet defences.
Slashdot Mirror
How was an Apache pilot supposed to discern the motives and the allegiances of the newly-arrived group of people?
He wasn't. He was supposed to follow the rules of engagement instead of being a trigger happy arse hole.
Perhaps you didn't follow my argument. The $600k is to pay for a staff of six full-time employees at a hypothetical journal. I don't think you can run a high-quality journal with a total budget of $10-1000 per year for more than a very brief while.
Do you seriously think that the overwhelming majority of journals have a six person full time staff? They typical journal has part of a person paid by the publisher. All the other work is performed by unpaid volunteers.
If we look at organising a large conference, the actual cost of the "publishing" side is a pittance compared to the work performed, basically only "deliver the proofs to the printer and receive the proceedings back". The printer doesn't do basically anything more than the actual printing. The major cost of printing is getting the rights to put the logo of the sponsoring organisation on the front cover. (Whether IEEE or ACM).
Sure, Nature, Science and the like might actually do proof reading, copy editing and type setting, but the rest; not so much. The overwhelming majority of the work is done by unpaid volunteers. Always have been, and always will be. Why we don't just cut out the last middleman, is beyond me. Since we don't have to, and status quo is cosy and comfortable, that's probably the reason...
Sweden destroys their constitution every 10 years, and re-writes it from the ground up.
Uhh? What? We do nothing of the sort. Not even close. As a matter of fact the constitutional process in Sweden and the US is similar from the point of view that they are changed by the legislating body like regular laws are but with extra checks and balances to make it more difficult to change.
In Sweden the four parts of our constitutional law (we don't have one collected constitution per se), can be changed only by two consecutive parliaments with a national election in-between (to give the people the chance of changing a parliament that tries to do something not to our liking). Since the term today is four years, that gives a maximum of eight years for a change in constitutional law, but shorter is of course often the norm. So I have no idea where you got the "ten years" from. We most certainly don't require the whole constitution to be ratified within any set time period.
Well recoil, and therefore handling is the same whether you shoot hollow points or FMJs.
In either case, the difference in diameter between 9mm and .45 is so small as to be completely swamped by other factors when it comes to wounding. You're not going to hit a major organ or blood vessel with .45s that you were missing with 9mm. Shoot placement and ammo capacity is bound to completely swamp that effect. The studies I've seen looking at combat effects couldn't discern any difference between 9mm and .45. (But I can't find them now).
All I've read suggest that handgun calibres suck at putting people out of commision anyway, the energy isn't there, so it's like poking someone with a stick. Whether the hole is 9mm or .45 doesn't make a difference. The differences in energy doesn't matter as the energy is too small to begin with.
Lower recoil does mean better training, confidence and subsequent shot placement though. I remember that when Sweden started training snipers again in the nineties they settled on 7.62x51 NATO as experience showed that that was the largest calibre that all soldiers could be expected to learn to shoot well. Bigger may be better for sniping, but then you'd end up with people who couldn't be successfully trained due to that one aspect. So while not ideal for the purpose, it had the one quality that mattered in the end. Usability.
No. Power is just torque times angular velocity.
So whether you can accelerate or tow or go fast depends on the torque curve, i.e. torque as a function of engine speed. Now, when you make an ICE you can make certain trade-offs that makes the torque curve look different, and that makes the engine work worse or better for certain task. Or rather, the engine as part of the drive train work worse or better. With an ICE you almost always have to have a gear box with changable gearing as the available rev range and torque curve won't fit the entire speed/work range you're interested in.
So the story is a lot more complicated than what that rule of thumb would lead you to believe. A very high power engine, i.e. an engine that can rev really high and still maintain some torque, still won't make you go fast if the gearbox doesn't allow it. And that's just one example.
(Torque creates acceleration. HP is what maintains speed.)
Not really. Power (weather measured in HP or Watts) for a rotating machine is simply the torque multiplied by the angular velocity. So while you need torque to accelerate e.g. a car, you can't say that "horse power" maintains speed. In fact, it's torque that maintains speed as well. You need enough output torque that when its converted to a force at the wheel/road surface, that force is sufficient to overcome the force due to other losses (wind resistance, or work due to going up hill). Of course, going up a hill your engine/motor's power output better be greater than the work you're doing, otherwise you've made a perpetum mobile
Now, the main problem with the lawn mower example is that the torque curves, i.e. torque as a function of angular velocity ("revs") is very different between an electric motor and an internal combustion engine. (Indeed, that's why many internal combustion engines has an electric motor to start it). So you'd have to compare the torque curves at the precise operating (speed/load) where the stone was hit.
Without doing the math, my feeling is that if you did so, you'd come up with the answer that it didn't matter anyway. The collision between a small, relatively speaking light and hard, stone and the fairly heavy, also hard, steel rotor of a lawn mower with substantial inertia, is as near to the idealistic elastic collision as dammit. I'd be very surprised if the rotor had time to lose enough angular momentum that the difference in torque curves between the electric motor and an ICE one would make enough of a difference in the outcome of the experiment to dominate other sources of error in the setup. Note that of course, it's the difference in torque characteristics, i.e. the speed with which the motor/engine can change its output given a change in load that's the determining factor. At the steady state, a rotor spinning at the same speed will have the same absolute torque driving it, just balancing out losses from friction. If it were otherwise the blade wouldn't rotate with a steady RPM, it would instead rev up or down. So it's not the torque of the power source per se that's the difference, but rather "on demand" torque often called, acceleration torque, given changing conditions.
Chip and Signature should help reduce card cloning attacks because unless the cryptographic key on the chip can be read the application request cryptograms will never be correct so the transactions will be flagged. What happens in the case of an ARQC validation failure is up to your bank, but they can hardly refuse a refund if they approve a transaction where the ARQC validation failed. (Well, they can, but they're likely to get shafted for it eventually)
And that's a real issue. That's why we in Europe right now have geofencing on our cards. When our card information is "stolen" it ends up being used on cloned cards in shops in other parts of the world. BUT, that's not just places like India (which is a perennial favourite), rather one of the major markets is the US as your POS security standards are so lax.
So even if shoring up US standards would not help USians, it will help us in the rest of the world, by making one very popular attack less likely to succeed, by making geoblocking working better.(Blocking the US is more inconvenient than blocking many other countries.)
If availability trumps all else and it is availability that makes medical devices more easy to hack, they why couldn't the hacker simply hack the device and take it offline at the time it's most needed? If every second matters, couldn't the hacker delay you for a few seconds?
Sure they could. But that's not how threat modelling work. The question here is will more hackers do that, and will the added security to thwart them actually lead to more deaths from doctors not being able to navigate that security in time to save the patient.
Risk isn't just the potential outcome of a certain situation, it's also the probability that that outcome will come to be.
It seems like what you are really saying is you need ready access to medical devices, but instead of building robust yet transparent security, your strategy is to "hope" a hacker never targets a patient of yours?
It's not a question of "building", we don't know how to build a secure system like that (and I say that as a security researcher). Security research focuses almost exclusively on "perfect" security, i.e. security above all else. There's no great body of research into exactly what trade-offs are when it comes to implantable device security in general, and implanted life and time critical systems in particular. These are hard problems. It's not for nothing that hospital data access systems still work mainly on the "allow all access, log and deal with the problems later"-model of security. Even one dead patient due to security snafus tends to make people really upset. "Hacking" related health related deaths though are few and far between. (I can't think of a single one off the top of my head).
Not worrying about, and taking steps to prevent, having your pacemaker attacked by a "hacker" is like not worrying about getting randomly shot walking down the street. It's the rational thing to do for all but a very small minority. Other risks, at this point in time completely thwart these risks.
Testify, brother! Testify!
My favourite when I was in the business was the doozy in the 3G 3GPP 23.060 standard: "IPv6 support is mandatory, IPv4 support is optional. The preceding sentence is not to be interpreted such that an implementation providing only IPv4 support is deemed non-compliant". (Or words to that effect.)
Yes, I know the politics that went on behind closed doors to end up with such a wording but seriously, W.T.F?!
No, pinging a cellphone doesn't mean setting up a portable cellphone tower. "Pinging" is the what the cellphone companies call the process a cellphone goes through trying to register with any available cellphone tower (almost always fixed). It's an analogy for the "ping" command in unix.
And the technical term for how that is handled is "mobility management", if anybody wants to look up the procedures in painful detail. (But beware, telecoms standards are actually physically painful to read... You have been warned.)
Ah. OK. Yes, being European "everybody" knows that you have to leave the door ajar, or even fully open, between uses.
Even in Sweden, home of the most overbearing child safety standards you could imagine, I have never heard of a child or pet being injured by crawling into the washing machine. I can honestly say that it has never even appeared on my radar as a risk. (Same with my own kids, not even remotely a problem. Many other things were, but that wasn't one of them. Whether we lived in an apartment with the washer in the bathroom, or a house with a laundry room proper.).
Now, yes, in the bottom of the gasket you can often find a bit of discolouration, (and the other places you mention), but as nothing can really "grow" in a machine that's regularly flushed with 60C water, it's not a problem in practice. If it gets too bad you'll just have to clean it, it's not worse than cleaning out the filter/grating from time to time.
Indeed, that's why we wash underwear in 60âC. It kills all the stuff you don't want growing in them...
No, I'm sorry. When it comes to washing machines, I can't see any benefits to the American models.
Well, yes, of course you can't leave the laundry in the machine when its done. You have to dry it? Otherwise it will indeed become moldy.
But that feels like I'm missing your point... So what did I miss?
P.S. Just bought a used refurbished Siemens front loader. Yes, they "wear out" fast, but usually it's only a single "weak" component that's been made that way, and it can often be fixed fairly cheaply and easily. Not so with newer Husqvarna machines though. The refurbisher showed me two as new three year old machines that were already broken and couldn't be fixed. Parts weren't available, and it was large, expensive and critical parts that had broken (same in both machines). So if you want to know what to buy, check with the local refurbisher...
Absolute BS.
Nope. You have to look at what the actual history was in the countries you're talking about. As a matter of fact women did the washing locally. And they spent a lot of time on it. (But people also owned less clothes, linnen etc. and used them much longer before washing them, than is the case now.
Having your laundry sent out to men (the horror!) doing the actual work didn't happen. At all. (With a small exception being the Army, esp. in times of war. As a matter of fact, modern laundry techniques revolutionised warfare.)
No, what you need are proper washing machines. I.e. machines with a drum instead of an agitator and that heats the water instead of just getting what's on tap.
Whenever I use a washing machine in the US I'm taken aback by how bad they are.
With regular 60âC (140F), cycles for underwear or even a 90âC (195F) cycle for linnen (though not many use it, it's still on the machine), there won't be any mold in you machine. No, way, no how.
No, it means that something is left unspoken. Hence I'm not speaking it. If I didn't it wouldn't be unspoken, now would it?
[...]
Now 61cm isn't too fun to work in as a metric carpenter or you'll end up with silly units like 305mm.
Which is exactly my point. 60 is a very good number to use in that context. Now, of course if you were to try and go "metric" you could opt for 50cm, i.e. "half a meter" which was indeed an earlier standard for some appliances etc. but it never really caught on.
Claiming that imperial units are more "natural" is just silly. And divisibility is more a question of the number, not the unit. 13 inches isn't any easier to divide into three than 33 centimetres. Quite the opposite. (And if you don't like the conversion, the error is just over 6 ten-thousands, that's as near as damn it).
Personally a fan of Metric, but Imperial does have one major thing going for it - Easy divisibility by low prime numbers.
And you've just realised why the standard kitchen module in the metric, i.e. European world, is 60cm wide... Much better than twelve...
Oh come on, even I know that nuclear subs can stay underwater without replenishing the air supply for months. You just need the CO2 scrubbers.
No, they also need a source of oxygen. Nuclear submarines get that from the ocean.
That still leaves a related question - why does US discussion of renewable energy focus on solar-electric 99% of the time, despite the fact that solar-electric is approximately the least efficient possible solution in most cases? Fifteen gallons of hot water is plenty enough for a shower.
That's a good point. With an accumulation tank and a reasonably southern aspect you can get all your hot water needs covered by just a few square meters of solar collectors on your roof for six months of the year. In Sweden. So for those that need heating and hot water, solar collection and accumulation tanks makes a lot of sense.
Of course, cooling your house that way, which is the more pressing problem in many places in the US, is difficult with that setup. And if you need to run a heat pump for cooling, having the requisite accumulation capacity just for hot water, starts to make less sense. (Tanks aren't that cheap, and you need room for them). But it's definitely a technique you should keep in the back of your mind for when it makes sense. (My father in law runs such a setup, since he had the tanks already, as he heats his house with wood).
Most people always think a hydro plant would need a valey and a dam ... that is not he case.
There are also buoy, which you can simply let swim in a river that produce power.
Yes it really is the case. If you want to produce any sizeable amount of power you need a good drop and sufficient flow rate. It's like the difference between an overshot and an undershot water wheel. Undershot wheels might be easier to build, but they don't really produce power worth a damn. (Pun intended.)
That you have a lot of small old puny power plants in Germany isn't because they'd make sense today. They were built in a different era, when they made more sense. Also your power prices are already through the roof compared to e.g. Sweden where we do have sufficient hydro power potential (and nuclear) boot. You're prices are three times as high as ours.
Now, we have rivers in Sweden to, and not a single power plant attached to the locks as they just wouldn't make financial sense. We are in fact, busy tearing out all the small power plants (with dams), that were built a hundred years ago as the value of the power they produce (in the single digit percentage compared to the large plants) destroy much more fish reproduction potential then they're worth. Its much better from an ecological standpoint to screw one large(ish) river with large hydro power potential over completely and leave the rest for fish. That way you get lots of power and lots of fish, rather than little power and no fish.
All these sites that make the most sense have already been built out in Sweden, well, we didn't build out the last five of the northern rivers for ecological reasons. This all with downstream power plants where that makes sense. (Not too many as you want to get as big a drop as possible in one go). So there's nothing really left. Like I said above, we're currently busy decommissioning thousands of small plants of the type you're advocating, for ecological reasons, and it won't affect our power production capacity at all. Small low flow plants don't make sense if you have any other option.
Sorry Germany. Hydro isn't for you... :-) And we've put in all that's reasonable to do.
Excluding CANDU, which are the only reactors I know of in operation that can operate and be refueled, however the more popular BWR and PWR can't produce power when they are being re-fueled or maintained. So how is that different from wind as a source? How is asking wind to produce power when the wind is not blowing, not like asking another power source to produce power during it's characteristic outage like being refueled or maintained?
Well, planned maintenance is just that. Planned. That means that you can (and do) make sure that there are other sources of power available to take the load when you perform refuelling or other maintenance on your reactor. Besides refuelling only happens once ever several years (depending on a lot of factors, you can and do run on other schedules), so it's not something you can't plan for.
In Sweden we get ca 50% of our power from nuclear (with the rest from hydroelectric) and I can't remember a single instance where a planned, or unplanned for that matter, nuclear power disruption to operations took down the grid. Wind OTOH we could only manage about 10-15% right now befoer the grid would be in trouble.
(Now, refuelling under during operation is actually something you don't want in a reactor, as it increases the proliferation risks. In order to produce weapons grade plutonium you need to constantly remove the Pu239 before it catches another neutron and becomes Pu240, which you don't want in your bomb as it'll fizzle.)
Now, wind on the other hand is much less stable, varying unpredictably on a shorter than hourly scale. You need serious backing by short run up standby power that can deliver a lot of power and cheaply (i.e. hydroelectric with large dams) to be able to tolerate a lot of wind (or solar) for that matter.
Why is distributing the wind as a source of energy too difficult problem for us to manage? It's an emotive claim? What is the problem that you see?
A main problem of course is cost. Long distance transmission can easily lose 10%-20% (even 50% in poor conditions) of the available power to transmission losses. In order for wind to average out, you need to be able to flexibly move lots of power over long distances (i.e. north one day, south the next), which is not cheap. We need a whole new grid in most places, i.e. massive investments are needed. I seem to remember that an area the size of Sweden, (which is roughly 10% larger than California and similar in shape) could just about be enough for wind availability to even out. But we don't have near the transmission capacity to move that much power that flexibly, and that's given that we already have some seriously beefy transmission lines from the Northern hydro electric power plants and the South, where we all live.
The reason that it "works" for Germany, that is seldom mentioned is that they're very well connected electrically to the rest of the continent, that hasn't had an "Energiewende" and probably won't. France's nuclear power plants get to take up the slack in a big way, and there are many times when German wind has to be dumped onto the market at negative prices, i.e. you get paid just to get rid of it. So while "Germany" works electrically (even though it's expensive), it couldn't do so on its own. Not by a long shot. It only works as long as it's neighbours don't do the same thing, which isn't really sustainable.
Another problem with this is that it increases fossil fuel usage compared to countries like Sweden. The reason is simple. Electricity is three times as expensive to the consumer in Germany as it is here. Hence we heat our houses with electricity (mainly using heat pumps) as that makes economic sense. In Germany you can't do that (anymore) and hence people use some form of fossil fuel, both for heating and cooking (natural gas from Russia mainly).
Now, of course, the so called "smart grid" that is often put as a solution to all this, i.e. a grid whereby you coul
The funny thing about that is the Europeans and China benefit more from that than the US does as only a small percentage of its oil imports come from the Middle East.
Not really. Oil is one of the most fungible goods on the market. Of course we in Europe are going to try and minimize transportation cost, but if we couldn't, we'd just buy "your" oil (or oil products) put them on a tanker and be done with it. This would raise prices for all involved. That's how "supply and demand" works. It's not like we'd all of a sudden stop using oil if light middle eastern crude suddenly disapeared from the market. (Even though we use mostly Brent here in the Nordic countries).
So it makes sense for the US to protect "your" oil based economy by keeping world wide supply high and steady, even if you may or may not actually refine and burn oil from that particular region. Paradoxically since i.e. gasoline is taxed much higher here in Europe we could come out of such a scenario much better than you, since governments have a taxation tool to help mitigate a sharp crude increase, while crude prices affect your market, and hence economy, more directly.
There's also the whole petro dollar situation, whereby if you want to buy oil from the Saudis you have to pay in US dollars, a portion of which the Saudis use to buy US government financial instruments. If you piss them off enough, they could do the Saddam thing, and start selling oil in Euros. That would directly hurt the US economy, no question about it.
And multiple winners is nothing unusual or bad. There often are more that one deserving recipients in a year so why not award two or three if their discoveries merit recognition? Occasionally the prize is awarded to groups rather than individuals but this serves little purpose since only individuals can really benefit.
That's actually built into the prize. The rule is that only a maximum of three persons and two works per prize may be considered. The exception is the peace prize, which may be awarded to institutions. It also doesn't have to be awarded, the money can instead be split between the other prizes.
These days I'm mostly a Lua and C guy who implements highly concurrent network services.
Erlang?
What if giant alien slugs attack? We should probably spend the $450 million developing space-capable salt-guns, just in case.
Well, since a couple of tons of rock salt travelling at a couple of km/s in the opposite direction would do a number on an asteroid/comet as well, I'm all for that.
Dual use technology is just smart economics. So while we wait for the slugs (any day now) they could shore up our asteroid/comet defences.