As a gearbox is something you'd really like to get rid of, and since Vestas is the largest manufacturer in the world, you'd think they'd know what they were doing.
Add in the baseless claims against Assange and Sweden looks pretty fucking rotten.
That one is actually less clear, and I'd very much like to see that one in the courts (though granted, I'm not Assange, so I don't have quite as much riding on the result).
We have our share of feminist activist everything in Sweden, including prosecutors, so that could very well be the whole truth. While it is clear to me that there was American meddling in the Pirate Bay case, it's not nearly as clear here. (And if there was, the CIA must have had a bad day, as a covert OP this could have been handled a lot better). So again, not nearly as clear cut IMHO.
Sure in America that's called jail. However, not everywhere is in America and not everywhere else uses that terminology. Sweden happens to be part of the everywhere that isn't America and doesn't use that terminology.
And even though we have "jails" in Sweden, Peter Sunde still wasn't in our version anyway, as he was incarcerated having been sentenced. The Pirate Bay trial and all that...
He was arrested in May to serve his prison sentence. Police claims he's been hiding himself abroad, he claims he's been quite open about his whereabouts and weren't even told there was an international warrant out for his arrest.
Given how the trial was handled, and given that Peter Sunde is the one of the Pirate Bay founders that have always kept his nose clean otherwise, I'm more inclined to believe his account than the official one.
Now, regarding food, that's not the only instance where the Swedish prison authority haven't followed their own rules. And as Peter Sunde didn't just roll over and take it, but lodged several formal complaints, he's been treated rather badly. Not only put in a high security prison when he was sentenced to 8 months imprisonment, has no history of violence, is a first time offender, and was most definitely not sentenced for a violent crime. It even got to the point where the prison authority threatened that he would have to carry his father's coffin wearing handcuffs! This for a prisoner that has no formal complaints lodged against him and that were given leave at least twice to visit his father in hospital under much less strict security.
No, it pains me to say it, but there's something rotten in the state of Sweden. This whole thing from beginning to end, smells badly.
I hear ya! However, our field is also one in flux. While the guys that studied mechanical engineering in my school in the eighties would still recognise the teaching today, many of the techniques for programming in the large, management etc. weren't even (I hesitate to say, because it's not really true, but bear with me) invented then.
So I think things will probably move in that direction, slowly but surely. However, even those engineers needed to know about Euler's four cases of buckling, or what strain is, etc. Likewise a programmer worth his/her salt need to know about and understand algorithmic complexity etc. (Something I know these "learn X in three months" schools don't necessarily teach to a sufficient degree), so it's not a simple question of throwing all the "old" stuff out, either.
However, we do surely need to leave/make room for (unfortunately very time consuming) projects large and small during college. Damned if you do...
I was never able to take a single class on scalability, security, development methodology trends and how to evaluate them, management of large codebases, refactoring, etc.
And at Chalmers in Sweden (one of the top two engineering schools, "polytechnics") I had all those courses available in the late eighties, early nineties.
However, one problem is that in order to grasp those subjects you first have to grasp the basics. And those takes time to aquire. As I tell my students today; "Remember, it takes ten years, or ten thousand hours to become an expert. This is the first half of that" (our engineering degrees are five year programmes).
Now of course, you'll come across management issues as you mature (it's inevitable it seems), BUT if you didn't have the basics, you wouldn't get the junior position that would eventually lead to your current problems. So it's really a chicken-and-egg problem. We can't teach you everything at school, there comes a time when we just have to chuck you out and let you sink or swim, and learn on your own.
You mean they don't have to have types at all? That's even worse...
Or is it just one of those tedious semantic confusions that are so common when discussing programming languages and types. Do you mean something else by "dynamic language", if so what exactly?
Definitely a lubber, I appreciate the info. There's never been any evidence to suggest that the radar was off, and at midnight in a totally unpopulated area prone to foul weather, it sounds extremely unlikely.
You're welcome. The elephant in the room when it comes to maritime safety is really twofold, alcoholism and sleep deprivation. The 6-by-6 watch keeping that is common means watch personell build up a sleep deficit that isn't helped by the rampant alcoholism (fueled by boredom and tradition). So more often than not, the reason ships run aground, esp. at night, is that the one guy on the bridge falls asleep at the wheel. Of course, no amount of radar or other currently available electronic navigation aids will help in that situation.
Only as long as you have an accurate chronometer that was correctly set. The sextant gives you North/South, but you need the chronometer for East/West
Well, that's close, in that you need time, but not necessarily a chronometer. That was what Harrison had against him, the committee favoured a celestial approach to measuring time as well. And that did work, but the calculations were so onerous that they took literally hours to complete, for less accuracy than could be had by Harrison's chronometers.
If Harrison's chronometers were the only way to determine longitude, then the committee would probably have come around a lot sooner. That Newton himself, as the chair of the board, wasn't all that keen, certainly didn't help. In fact while he didn't object to chronometers per se he did object that if it became unreliable, only celestial timekeeping methods could even hope to put it right again. Something that was true until the advent of radio.
So the chronometer is an item of (practical) convenience, rather than theoretical necessity.
Wow, you're a land lubber then, despite living in Valdez...:-)
OK, where to begin. Disregarding the drunk captain (who I'm told taught navigation in NY to mariners after the incident...), historically first and foremost you don't use celestial navigation if you have land marks to navigate by. That is to say, when in coastal waters, the sextant stays in it's coffer. When you're in coastal waters you use "piloting" skills, hence the name of the specialist you take aboard your ship for extra sensitive tasks. (I.e. the pilot). Piloting uses bearings to visible land marks (rocks, houses, light houses etc), depth readings etc. to establish your position, and compass and log to update it by dead reconing. In the age of technology many of those bearings could be taken by radio direction finding (of radio beacons), manually and via radar. The radar can of course also be used to get bearings and range to other (radar) visible landmarks. That's how ships could pilot in poor visibility, by using so called "radar navigation".
Now, you don't use a depth gauge (whether a knotted line, or a sonar one) to avoid a shoal. By the time you've detected it you're already either on it, or much too close for comfort. Instead navigation by depth reading is done to keep you i.e. in the middle of a sound, or comfortably far away from a coast etc. (Very useful when you have gently sloping costs, that are common in sandy regions. If you sail outside a beach, you can often rely on depth for navigation. Rocky coasts, not so much.)
Now, what to do when you can't navigate by landmarks. That's where celestial navigation comes in. If you have the proper knowledge (tables) a way to measure the apparent height of a celestial object (sun, moon, star) and an accurate clock (which ships have had since the late 1700-hundreds), then you can determine your position on the globe. Now, for reasons of simplicity most ships that still bother with celestial anything resort to a single noonday sun reading, as that's a simple thing to do, and doesn't require you to be as precise with your timing (and working out the position is simplified). Since you're in the middle of the ocean anyway, you don't need to a fix more often than that. You can safely use dead reckoning until next noon. However, should you want to (and have the correct tables) there's nothing stopping you from using the sun as long as it is visible at any given time of day (back in the day, sightings were often taken at least once a watch, i.e. every six or four hours), or the stars at any time they are visible. The moon is also usable, but since it moves so quickly over the sky in relation to the stars, taking a moon height requires skill and dedication, and hence navigational stars are preferred.
All this is historical of course. The merchant navy doesn't even carry the equipment to navigate celestially anymore, and they're not skilled in its use. Today it's GPS and everything else a distant second. Radar navigation skills are still practice however, as it can come in very handy.
So, when it comes to the Exxon Valdes, having your radar turned off if radar navigation thorough that sound was warranted, would indeed be a court martial offence. "Sonar" would have probably been of very little use, as a depth reading will only tell you that you're seriously off course (soundings on charts are only so accurate) and with a ship that size, you should already be well aware of that fact if you're to have any chance of saving the day. Even thinking about using celestial navigation in narrow coastal waters should have you forcibly removed from the bridge, as that couldn't tell you anything you needed to know in time to do anything worthwhile with a ship that size, moving that fast. Celestial navigation is for the open water, period.
P.S. We got the double hulls now and they're not all they're cranked up to be. You see, they don't actually use more steel in the construction of a double hull tanker. So it's the same amount of steel now d
That still doesn't explain why it isn't used elsewhere. Not everything is sold to the US.
Well, history is funny that way. I'm not well read on Hearst and hemp, but it is a plausible scenario given that economic factors are not fixed but varies.
Say that you have two competing technologies that could potentially come to dominate the market. Even if they're not that different, say one is 10% "better" than the other, that doesn't mean that the better one will dominate the market, or that they will take market share according to their relative "goodness", or even that the "better" one will win. There are many other externalities as play, such as did one get a head start? Does it have a lot of backing? Etc. Look at the many format wars for entertainment over the years (VHS/Betamax, "HD-DVD/Blueray, etc. etc.) the first to market, with some small advantage will typically, due to network effects, come to completely dominate the market over time. So if I were Hearst, and I had just bet a pretty penny on wood pulp based paper I would certainly try to put as many obstacles in the way of the competition as I could. If I could just pull ahead a bit, I'd have time on my side to eventually guarantee complete market domination.
So why don't we make industrial hemp based paper even where we have industrial hemp? Because there isn't enough of it in places where access to wood pulp based paper is difficult enough. The wood pulp train continues on its own momentum, and derailing/dethroning that, at this time, with something that's only maybe 10% (or 20% or 50%) better isn't going to happen. There's simply not enough money in it to make the switch and write off the sunk cost (not just plants and distribution facilities, but all the knowledge, training/teaching etc. etc. that we have of the wood pulp based process). If you want to beat out an entrenched competitor you have to be 10 times as good, not 10% better.
Of course, there are a lot of "ifs" and "buts" when it comes to any specific market, but the overall economic theme is difficult to get away from. As soon as society starts to do something one way, it takes a lot of effort to change that. The rewards have to be substantial for it even to be considered. Which relegates hemp to the status of "also ran" when it comes to paper.
They discuss prior studies that looked at development effort, but hand-waved away the fact that dynamic languages take less development effort.
Only with the old style "straight jacket" static typing. With a modern Hindley-Miller type type system, effort is a wash at worst, and in most cases static typing is a clear win as you're not nearly as dependent on testing to find the simple, common brain farts or typos. (And if you're using tools to find those, then guess what? Then you're using static typing, only poorly implemented static typing.) Also, those types, when you've taken the complete step towards typeful programming, serve as wonderful documentation etc.
So, how does that work, exactly? Obviously you don't allow normal market pressures to impact that. Could it be that there is some committee or even a normal government bureaucrat that decides how to deal with 1000 people who all want their heart surgery performed by the same couple of people in the same one hospital?
In that case there's no solution anyway, so the only question becomes whether you do it like in Sweden, i.e. where the patient in most need gets the best surgeon at the best hospital, or you do it likt in the US, where the "richest" patient gets the best surgeon in the best hospital.
And that's, incidentally, why we have much, much better outcomes for the same money.
But in general the answer to your question is "yes". In Sweden you can go to any hospital/doctor to seek treatment. If the same treatment is available by your own county, you can be made to wait a couple of weeks, but even that's not a hard rule, if you push, you can go directly. It's not uncommon for your local doctor to discuss with you where you'd want to go, when you're going for a speciality that is of the "one of a kind in the country" that you seem so afraid you'll miss.
Oh, wait, I get it. You're one of the people in your country that doesn't pay any of the taxes that fund your healthcare system. I guess it does feel like a pretty good system, having other people buy for you the professional services you want.... No? Why not? If you have the right to the use of a podiatrist because you're too lazy to trim your own toenails, why don't you have a right to an electrician's services to come and change a lightbulb in your house?
No, I pay out the nose. No question about that.:-) However, I pay a lot less than you do, since that how insurance works (or rather, I pay about the same, but get much, much better care for my money). If you have a large pool with no individual management then insurance gets dirt cheap. Ask any insurance company, it's individually that costs money. (That's why so called group plans for i.e. home insurance you can get from e.g. your union in Sweden are so popular. They're usually about a quarter of the cost for the same service, and that's not because insurance companies are cutting their profits.)
Now, of course your "podiatrist" spiel is just silly. With health care based on need, you'll just be sent home if it turns out that you don't actually have a need. And that's the way it should work. Now of course, if you'd actually go to the doctor because you're to lazy to cut your own toe nails, I'd prefer our system. If you think that's why you're at the doctor there's a good chance there's something wrong with you, but at the other end of your body, and I'd much better that you'd actually go to the doctor then, then not being able to, due to cost. I'd much prefer to have those people in the hands of psychiatrists than running around complaining they can's see a doctor.
No, it's usually yearly for kids, and that's quite frankly often enough.
Also, dentistry (same as in the US) is usually not part of the universal healthcare, but a separate system, so there's a lot more variability in dental care than healthcare proper in the EU. In Sweden for example, only kids (until 18 yo) get free dentistry, as an adult you have to pay your own. Unless of cours it becomes a systemic health care problem.
You're more likely to get good journalism out of Al Jazeera than you are out of any of the cable news outlets in the US today.
It's less of a surprise if you consider its pedigree. Al Jazeera took over many if not most of the staff of the Arabic BBC world service channel that was shut down by the BBC as a response to Saudi censorship demands.
So, with that kind of heritage, it's not that surprising that they should be good at what they do.
Since you can not seem to grasp a sliver of honesty, no point in further discussion. The point of this post was simply to announce the lies to others so that they can be wary of your words.
Nope. As a computer scientist educated in both logic and engineering, it's pretty clear who's words needs to be taken with a grain of salt and who's doesn't.
Hint: it's not his... Misreading "statics" for "statistics" is a huge enough warning flag.
Sure, but that also made it unpopular for its "excessive" wounding effects. That's one reason it was changed. (Even though you aren't signatories to the relevant conventions, you still profess to follow them).
But this is getting off topic.:-) We were talking about the vaunted firepower of the SMLE. While the Lee Enfield might have scared the Germans at Mons, it was past its prime by WWII. Now, 20 (or indeed 30) rounds out of a (semi) automatic that's a whole 'nuther ballgame, the capabilities of the round itself notwithstanding.
This is also a myth, invented in retrospect to explain the poor performance.
Sure, if you want to discuss the particulars I have no beef with what you say. I was just pointing out that 5.56mm is much more marginal than previous rounds had been, just because the lower ends of the spectrum was being investigated, something that hadn't been done before (well, regarding humans at least, even the bigger cartridges were often marginal against horses in FMJ...)
When it comes actual wounding mechanisms, it's interesting to note that even 7.62 NATO in certain loading had a tendency to yaw and break (at the cannelure), so 5.56 was not unique in that respect.
No, that's wrong on many accounts. The german reports of withering Lee-Enfield fire are from the first world war. And since the German army had extensive experience from the Lee-Enfield from the first world war, its capabilities weren't a surprise the second time around. Not by a long shot.
But that didn't matter since rifles were passe. The German infantry squad was armed with the Mauser (shortened version of the full length rifle of WWI) throughout WWII. But that didn't matter as the rifle squad had the newly invented general purpose machine gun to form around. It was even considered the sole reason for the squad's existence. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...). Note that only NCOs etc. were supplied with any kind of automatic weapons, in most cases the "Schmeisser" submachine gun. The rest of the squad was basically there to carry ammunition for the machine gun and to provide flank cover for the crew. And the German rifle squad could definately put more rounds on target than a British rifle squad of the time, the "mad minute" not withstanding.
The sturmgewehr 44 didn't come out until (you guessed it), 1944, and was never a standard rifle squad rifle. It's cartridge was emphatically not developed with any "only need to wound" factor taken into account. Instead it was recognised that most targets were human, and only 150m away or so (max 300). So much could be saved by developing a cartridge for that situation instead of a cartridge that could topple a horse at shorter ranges and a man at 1000m (the original design specifications actually hinged on the effectiveness against horses, as stopping a cavalry charge was still very much the order of the day). So instead the "kurz" round was developed to give rifle like performance out to a couple of hundred meters, but allowing the carrying of more ammunition both on the person and in the gun, and much lower recoil, which becomes important in a fully automatic weapon.
The "wound not kill" design parameters don't come into effect until 5.56mm NATO and the corresponding USSR rounds were introduced in the late sixties/seventies. (As can be observed by their abysmal performance in a full metal jacket to actually stop a man. They still kill without much problem.) Horses were out of the picture when 5.56mm NATO was developed, so that together with "wounding factor" (wound not kill wasn't really a factor when designing rifle ammunitio) is why they got away with such a weak cartridge. Which was actually weaker from the beginning but the Army kept insisting on being able to penetrate a steel helmet at 300m, so the case had to be lengthened and lengthened to fit enough propellant. That gave the unfortunate case dimensions that are with us still to this day.
So, for example, while US spacecraft are beautiful, with aluminum skins with countersunk rivets to reduce drag, etc., the Russian vehicles looked like tractors - thick sheet metal and bolts, getting into space through sheer determination.
And it's interesting that the reason for this was a lack of nuclear weapons sophistication. Making a hydrogen bomb required hydrogen (isotopes) as fuel. But how to store it? The first idea was using liquid hydrogen, but then you need a railway car full of cryogenic equipment to keep it liquid. That's the design parameters the Soviets used for their ICMBs, i.e. we need to be able to shoot a railway cart to the US. Teller and co. then realised that by using lithium in the Teller-Ulam design you could make the bomb much, much smaller and lighter, and the US ICBM were designed with that in mind, i.e. we need to shoot a family car to the Soviet union. (The Soviets then got clever, and didnt' actually fire a cryogenic H-bomb, while the US actually did, and then it turned out in Ivy Mike that lithium was the gift that keep on giving...)
So, when the space race started in earnest, the Soviets had these great big bloody rockets, and hence could loft a heavy Sputnik (~80kg) into space without much trouble, while the anemic US rockets barely managed close to a tenth of that (~13kg). It took quite a number of years before US heavy lift capability had caught up.
Define "it". The Internet service may be better, but that's because it is subsidized by Sweden's considerable taxes.
Which means, the costs are (much?) higher than the bill says â" and TFA cites â" the difference is paid to the tax-authorities instead of going directly to the service-provider.
No, not really. While the article says "government" that's not quite true. In Sweden we have a long tradition of "business as government", and wholly (or partially) government owned businesses. That's what's at play here: The fibre to my house was pulled by the local energy company (district heating and electricity). That company, while wholly owned by the local (municipal) government runs a surplus, and hence isn't subsidised by taxes. But they do enjoy a government monopoly.
What they do, do is provide the basic infrastructure that others can offer their services on, whether that service, be delivering broadband or electricity. Now, in order to do so, they require coverage of their cost, but are not in the market to squeeze it for all it's worth.
Hence I pay $50 a month for 100/100Mbps internet, basic cable and IP telephony. That money goes to my service providers who then (in turn) pay the energy company.
Most often overheard quote indie band quote " I can't eat exposure".
Sure they can. Without exposure no-one will come to their gigs. And the proceeds from those they sure can eat. Well, rather, they can buy stuff to eat, even if money is high in fiber, their nutritional value apart from that is lacking.
Even major acts don't make much money off of selling their recorded music, RIAA has seen to that, but the exposure leads to better other ways to make money. Exposure is basically where the entire game is at.
Nukes also have an easier time leveling buildings than they do utterly decimating populations. The fireball generally is very small, the overpressure that will kill you is a bit bigger, but theres a wide zone of "buildings become unsound" where people suffer much lesser effects.
It's already been said, but it bears repeating. If you want to kill people instead of things you go for radiological warfare, i.e. you rely on fallout, not blast overpressure. (Incidentally, since the military is almost always concerned with other types of targets, they're typically exclusively concerned with blast overpressure, at the exclusion of all other types of effects).
Compare the exercise retold by Stuart Slade where it only took a small portion of the US arsenal to kill as near as all of the Chineese as it wouldn't matter.
Now, that that wouldn't happen, even in a large scale exchange is another matter. Nuclear weapons are far too valuable to use for such a purpose (usually), and there are lots of other strategies that would be tried before a counter population strike.
The part I'm I think will be the big show-stopper is the likelihood of people 'catching goodies from the sky'. Given the technical restrictions of these drones it seems fair to assume they'll be used mostly for 'small but expensive' goods. What's to stop people from building a microwave-gun to fry the electronics and run of with the cargo ? Heck, a decent slingshot could probably bring them down. I realize one could rob any courier service, but with drones it's going to be dead-simple unless they start building in all kinds of security measures but thus limiting the capacity/range/... of the machine.
Yes, I was thinking "shotgun", but your ideas are better. Let's run with it a bit. How about a good old fashioned barrage balloon? Or use it to loft a fishing net, or why not a kite? "Honest officer, here I was just flying my kite, minding my own business and all these drones started to fall all around me, not my fault really..."
Or, for the ultimate thrill. Your own drone/RPV. There have been "dog fighting" competitions between RC-planes for ages, trying to cut someone else's streamer with your propeller. Now you could actually make that game worth your time.
Then there's good old fashioned GPS-spoofing that can be done for cheap. Make the drone land/drop thinking it has reached its destination? It's manna from heaven all over again, only this time courtesy of Amazon...:-)
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Sorry, that is nonsense. Modern wind turbines have no gear boxes.
Which ones are those? The biggest and most modern to date certainly has a gearbox: http://cleantechnica.com/2012/...
As a gearbox is something you'd really like to get rid of, and since Vestas is the largest manufacturer in the world, you'd think they'd know what they were doing.
Add in the baseless claims against Assange and Sweden looks pretty fucking rotten.
That one is actually less clear, and I'd very much like to see that one in the courts (though granted, I'm not Assange, so I don't have quite as much riding on the result).
We have our share of feminist activist everything in Sweden, including prosecutors, so that could very well be the whole truth. While it is clear to me that there was American meddling in the Pirate Bay case, it's not nearly as clear here. (And if there was, the CIA must have had a bad day, as a covert OP this could have been handled a lot better). So again, not nearly as clear cut IMHO.
Sure in America that's called jail. However, not everywhere is in America and not everywhere else uses that terminology. Sweden happens to be part of the everywhere that isn't America and doesn't use that terminology.
And even though we have "jails" in Sweden, Peter Sunde still wasn't in our version anyway, as he was incarcerated having been sentenced. The Pirate Bay trial and all that...
He was arrested in May to serve his prison sentence. Police claims he's been hiding himself abroad, he claims he's been quite open about his whereabouts and weren't even told there was an international warrant out for his arrest.
Given how the trial was handled, and given that Peter Sunde is the one of the Pirate Bay founders that have always kept his nose clean otherwise, I'm more inclined to believe his account than the official one.
Now, regarding food, that's not the only instance where the Swedish prison authority haven't followed their own rules. And as Peter Sunde didn't just roll over and take it, but lodged several formal complaints, he's been treated rather badly. Not only put in a high security prison when he was sentenced to 8 months imprisonment, has no history of violence, is a first time offender, and was most definitely not sentenced for a violent crime. It even got to the point where the prison authority threatened that he would have to carry his father's coffin wearing handcuffs! This for a prisoner that has no formal complaints lodged against him and that were given leave at least twice to visit his father in hospital under much less strict security.
No, it pains me to say it, but there's something rotten in the state of Sweden. This whole thing from beginning to end, smells badly.
I hear ya! However, our field is also one in flux. While the guys that studied mechanical engineering in my school in the eighties would still recognise the teaching today, many of the techniques for programming in the large, management etc. weren't even (I hesitate to say, because it's not really true, but bear with me) invented then.
So I think things will probably move in that direction, slowly but surely. However, even those engineers needed to know about Euler's four cases of buckling, or what strain is, etc. Likewise a programmer worth his/her salt need to know about and understand algorithmic complexity etc. (Something I know these "learn X in three months" schools don't necessarily teach to a sufficient degree), so it's not a simple question of throwing all the "old" stuff out, either.
However, we do surely need to leave/make room for (unfortunately very time consuming) projects large and small during college. Damned if you do...
I was never able to take a single class on scalability, security, development methodology trends and how to evaluate them, management of large codebases, refactoring, etc.
And at Chalmers in Sweden (one of the top two engineering schools, "polytechnics") I had all those courses available in the late eighties, early nineties.
However, one problem is that in order to grasp those subjects you first have to grasp the basics. And those takes time to aquire. As I tell my students today; "Remember, it takes ten years, or ten thousand hours to become an expert. This is the first half of that" (our engineering degrees are five year programmes).
Now of course, you'll come across management issues as you mature (it's inevitable it seems), BUT if you didn't have the basics, you wouldn't get the junior position that would eventually lead to your current problems. So it's really a chicken-and-egg problem. We can't teach you everything at school, there comes a time when we just have to chuck you out and let you sink or swim, and learn on your own.
The guys who cooperated, and gave up their nuke programs (Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi), are dead.
Or not doing too well, esp. the Ukraine.
They even got US and Russian promises that "nothing bad will happen, we promise. Cross our hearts and hope to die" and all that...
You mean they don't have to have types at all? That's even worse...
Or is it just one of those tedious semantic confusions that are so common when discussing programming languages and types. Do you mean something else by "dynamic language", if so what exactly?
Definitely a lubber, I appreciate the info. There's never been any evidence to suggest that the radar was off, and at midnight in a totally unpopulated area prone to foul weather, it sounds extremely unlikely.
You're welcome. The elephant in the room when it comes to maritime safety is really twofold, alcoholism and sleep deprivation. The 6-by-6 watch keeping that is common means watch personell build up a sleep deficit that isn't helped by the rampant alcoholism (fueled by boredom and tradition). So more often than not, the reason ships run aground, esp. at night, is that the one guy on the bridge falls asleep at the wheel. Of course, no amount of radar or other currently available electronic navigation aids will help in that situation.
Only as long as you have an accurate chronometer that was correctly set. The sextant gives you North/South, but you need the chronometer for East/West
Well, that's close, in that you need time, but not necessarily a chronometer. That was what Harrison had against him, the committee favoured a celestial approach to measuring time as well. And that did work, but the calculations were so onerous that they took literally hours to complete, for less accuracy than could be had by Harrison's chronometers.
If Harrison's chronometers were the only way to determine longitude, then the committee would probably have come around a lot sooner. That Newton himself, as the chair of the board, wasn't all that keen, certainly didn't help. In fact while he didn't object to chronometers per se he did object that if it became unreliable, only celestial timekeeping methods could even hope to put it right again. Something that was true until the advent of radio.
So the chronometer is an item of (practical) convenience, rather than theoretical necessity.
Wow, you're a land lubber then, despite living in Valdez... :-)
OK, where to begin. Disregarding the drunk captain (who I'm told taught navigation in NY to mariners after the incident...), historically first and foremost you don't use celestial navigation if you have land marks to navigate by. That is to say, when in coastal waters, the sextant stays in it's coffer. When you're in coastal waters you use "piloting" skills, hence the name of the specialist you take aboard your ship for extra sensitive tasks. (I.e. the pilot). Piloting uses bearings to visible land marks (rocks, houses, light houses etc), depth readings etc. to establish your position, and compass and log to update it by dead reconing. In the age of technology many of those bearings could be taken by radio direction finding (of radio beacons), manually and via radar. The radar can of course also be used to get bearings and range to other (radar) visible landmarks. That's how ships could pilot in poor visibility, by using so called "radar navigation".
Now, you don't use a depth gauge (whether a knotted line, or a sonar one) to avoid a shoal. By the time you've detected it you're already either on it, or much too close for comfort. Instead navigation by depth reading is done to keep you i.e. in the middle of a sound, or comfortably far away from a coast etc. (Very useful when you have gently sloping costs, that are common in sandy regions. If you sail outside a beach, you can often rely on depth for navigation. Rocky coasts, not so much.)
Now, what to do when you can't navigate by landmarks. That's where celestial navigation comes in. If you have the proper knowledge (tables) a way to measure the apparent height of a celestial object (sun, moon, star) and an accurate clock (which ships have had since the late 1700-hundreds), then you can determine your position on the globe. Now, for reasons of simplicity most ships that still bother with celestial anything resort to a single noonday sun reading, as that's a simple thing to do, and doesn't require you to be as precise with your timing (and working out the position is simplified). Since you're in the middle of the ocean anyway, you don't need to a fix more often than that. You can safely use dead reckoning until next noon. However, should you want to (and have the correct tables) there's nothing stopping you from using the sun as long as it is visible at any given time of day (back in the day, sightings were often taken at least once a watch, i.e. every six or four hours), or the stars at any time they are visible. The moon is also usable, but since it moves so quickly over the sky in relation to the stars, taking a moon height requires skill and dedication, and hence navigational stars are preferred.
All this is historical of course. The merchant navy doesn't even carry the equipment to navigate celestially anymore, and they're not skilled in its use. Today it's GPS and everything else a distant second. Radar navigation skills are still practice however, as it can come in very handy.
So, when it comes to the Exxon Valdes, having your radar turned off if radar navigation thorough that sound was warranted, would indeed be a court martial offence. "Sonar" would have probably been of very little use, as a depth reading will only tell you that you're seriously off course (soundings on charts are only so accurate) and with a ship that size, you should already be well aware of that fact if you're to have any chance of saving the day. Even thinking about using celestial navigation in narrow coastal waters should have you forcibly removed from the bridge, as that couldn't tell you anything you needed to know in time to do anything worthwhile with a ship that size, moving that fast. Celestial navigation is for the open water, period.
P.S. We got the double hulls now and they're not all they're cranked up to be. You see, they don't actually use more steel in the construction of a double hull tanker. So it's the same amount of steel now d
That still doesn't explain why it isn't used elsewhere. Not everything is sold to the US.
Well, history is funny that way. I'm not well read on Hearst and hemp, but it is a plausible scenario given that economic factors are not fixed but varies.
Say that you have two competing technologies that could potentially come to dominate the market. Even if they're not that different, say one is 10% "better" than the other, that doesn't mean that the better one will dominate the market, or that they will take market share according to their relative "goodness", or even that the "better" one will win. There are many other externalities as play, such as did one get a head start? Does it have a lot of backing? Etc. Look at the many format wars for entertainment over the years (VHS/Betamax, "HD-DVD/Blueray, etc. etc.) the first to market, with some small advantage will typically, due to network effects, come to completely dominate the market over time. So if I were Hearst, and I had just bet a pretty penny on wood pulp based paper I would certainly try to put as many obstacles in the way of the competition as I could. If I could just pull ahead a bit, I'd have time on my side to eventually guarantee complete market domination.
So why don't we make industrial hemp based paper even where we have industrial hemp? Because there isn't enough of it in places where access to wood pulp based paper is difficult enough. The wood pulp train continues on its own momentum, and derailing/dethroning that, at this time, with something that's only maybe 10% (or 20% or 50%) better isn't going to happen. There's simply not enough money in it to make the switch and write off the sunk cost (not just plants and distribution facilities, but all the knowledge, training/teaching etc. etc. that we have of the wood pulp based process). If you want to beat out an entrenched competitor you have to be 10 times as good, not 10% better.
Of course, there are a lot of "ifs" and "buts" when it comes to any specific market, but the overall economic theme is difficult to get away from. As soon as society starts to do something one way, it takes a lot of effort to change that. The rewards have to be substantial for it even to be considered. Which relegates hemp to the status of "also ran" when it comes to paper.
I don't care what they say, software written with Emacs is way better than software writen with Vi!
Well duh! Emacs is written with Emacs, so that's trivially true.
They discuss prior studies that looked at development effort, but hand-waved away the fact that dynamic languages take less development effort.
Only with the old style "straight jacket" static typing. With a modern Hindley-Miller type type system, effort is a wash at worst, and in most cases static typing is a clear win as you're not nearly as dependent on testing to find the simple, common brain farts or typos. (And if you're using tools to find those, then guess what? Then you're using static typing, only poorly implemented static typing.) Also, those types, when you've taken the complete step towards typeful programming, serve as wonderful documentation etc.
So, how does that work, exactly? Obviously you don't allow normal market pressures to impact that. Could it be that there is some committee or even a normal government bureaucrat that decides how to deal with 1000 people who all want their heart surgery performed by the same couple of people in the same one hospital?
In that case there's no solution anyway, so the only question becomes whether you do it like in Sweden, i.e. where the patient in most need gets the best surgeon at the best hospital, or you do it likt in the US, where the "richest" patient gets the best surgeon in the best hospital.
And that's, incidentally, why we have much, much better outcomes for the same money.
But in general the answer to your question is "yes". In Sweden you can go to any hospital/doctor to seek treatment. If the same treatment is available by your own county, you can be made to wait a couple of weeks, but even that's not a hard rule, if you push, you can go directly. It's not uncommon for your local doctor to discuss with you where you'd want to go, when you're going for a speciality that is of the "one of a kind in the country" that you seem so afraid you'll miss.
Oh, wait, I get it. You're one of the people in your country that doesn't pay any of the taxes that fund your healthcare system. I guess it does feel like a pretty good system, having other people buy for you the professional services you want. ... No? Why not? If you have the right to the use of a podiatrist because you're too lazy to trim your own toenails, why don't you have a right to an electrician's services to come and change a lightbulb in your house?
No, I pay out the nose. No question about that. :-) However, I pay a lot less than you do, since that how insurance works (or rather, I pay about the same, but get much, much better care for my money). If you have a large pool with no individual management then insurance gets dirt cheap. Ask any insurance company, it's individually that costs money. (That's why so called group plans for i.e. home insurance you can get from e.g. your union in Sweden are so popular. They're usually about a quarter of the cost for the same service, and that's not because insurance companies are cutting their profits.)
Now, of course your "podiatrist" spiel is just silly. With health care based on need, you'll just be sent home if it turns out that you don't actually have a need. And that's the way it should work. Now of course, if you'd actually go to the doctor because you're to lazy to cut your own toe nails, I'd prefer our system. If you think that's why you're at the doctor there's a good chance there's something wrong with you, but at the other end of your body, and I'd much better that you'd actually go to the doctor then, then not being able to, due to cost. I'd much prefer to have those people in the hands of psychiatrists than running around complaining they can's see a doctor.
No, it's usually yearly for kids, and that's quite frankly often enough.
Also, dentistry (same as in the US) is usually not part of the universal healthcare, but a separate system, so there's a lot more variability in dental care than healthcare proper in the EU. In Sweden for example, only kids (until 18 yo) get free dentistry, as an adult you have to pay your own. Unless of cours it becomes a systemic health care problem.
You're more likely to get good journalism out of Al Jazeera than you are out of any of the cable news outlets in the US today.
It's less of a surprise if you consider its pedigree. Al Jazeera took over many if not most of the staff of the Arabic BBC world service channel that was shut down by the BBC as a response to Saudi censorship demands.
So, with that kind of heritage, it's not that surprising that they should be good at what they do.
Since you can not seem to grasp a sliver of honesty, no point in further discussion. The point of this post was simply to announce the lies to others so that they can be wary of your words.
Nope. As a computer scientist educated in both logic and engineering, it's pretty clear who's words needs to be taken with a grain of salt and who's doesn't.
Hint: it's not his... Misreading "statics" for "statistics" is a huge enough warning flag.
Sure, but that also made it unpopular for its "excessive" wounding effects. That's one reason it was changed. (Even though you aren't signatories to the relevant conventions, you still profess to follow them).
But this is getting off topic. :-) We were talking about the vaunted firepower of the SMLE. While the Lee Enfield might have scared the Germans at Mons, it was past its prime by WWII. Now, 20 (or indeed 30) rounds out of a (semi) automatic that's a whole 'nuther ballgame, the capabilities of the round itself notwithstanding.
This is also a myth, invented in retrospect to explain the poor performance.
Sure, if you want to discuss the particulars I have no beef with what you say. I was just pointing out that 5.56mm is much more marginal than previous rounds had been, just because the lower ends of the spectrum was being investigated, something that hadn't been done before (well, regarding humans at least, even the bigger cartridges were often marginal against horses in FMJ...)
When it comes actual wounding mechanisms, it's interesting to note that even 7.62 NATO in certain loading had a tendency to yaw and break (at the cannelure), so 5.56 was not unique in that respect.
No, that's wrong on many accounts. The german reports of withering Lee-Enfield fire are from the first world war. And since the German army had extensive experience from the Lee-Enfield from the first world war, its capabilities weren't a surprise the second time around. Not by a long shot.
But that didn't matter since rifles were passe. The German infantry squad was armed with the Mauser (shortened version of the full length rifle of WWI) throughout WWII. But that didn't matter as the rifle squad had the newly invented general purpose machine gun to form around. It was even considered the sole reason for the squad's existence. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...). Note that only NCOs etc. were supplied with any kind of automatic weapons, in most cases the "Schmeisser" submachine gun. The rest of the squad was basically there to carry ammunition for the machine gun and to provide flank cover for the crew. And the German rifle squad could definately put more rounds on target than a British rifle squad of the time, the "mad minute" not withstanding.
The sturmgewehr 44 didn't come out until (you guessed it), 1944, and was never a standard rifle squad rifle. It's cartridge was emphatically not developed with any "only need to wound" factor taken into account. Instead it was recognised that most targets were human, and only 150m away or so (max 300). So much could be saved by developing a cartridge for that situation instead of a cartridge that could topple a horse at shorter ranges and a man at 1000m (the original design specifications actually hinged on the effectiveness against horses, as stopping a cavalry charge was still very much the order of the day). So instead the "kurz" round was developed to give rifle like performance out to a couple of hundred meters, but allowing the carrying of more ammunition both on the person and in the gun, and much lower recoil, which becomes important in a fully automatic weapon.
The "wound not kill" design parameters don't come into effect until 5.56mm NATO and the corresponding USSR rounds were introduced in the late sixties/seventies. (As can be observed by their abysmal performance in a full metal jacket to actually stop a man. They still kill without much problem.) Horses were out of the picture when 5.56mm NATO was developed, so that together with "wounding factor" (wound not kill wasn't really a factor when designing rifle ammunitio) is why they got away with such a weak cartridge. Which was actually weaker from the beginning but the Army kept insisting on being able to penetrate a steel helmet at 300m, so the case had to be lengthened and lengthened to fit enough propellant. That gave the unfortunate case dimensions that are with us still to this day.
So, for example, while US spacecraft are beautiful, with aluminum skins with countersunk rivets to reduce drag, etc., the Russian vehicles looked like tractors - thick sheet metal and bolts, getting into space through sheer determination.
And it's interesting that the reason for this was a lack of nuclear weapons sophistication. Making a hydrogen bomb required hydrogen (isotopes) as fuel. But how to store it? The first idea was using liquid hydrogen, but then you need a railway car full of cryogenic equipment to keep it liquid. That's the design parameters the Soviets used for their ICMBs, i.e. we need to be able to shoot a railway cart to the US. Teller and co. then realised that by using lithium in the Teller-Ulam design you could make the bomb much, much smaller and lighter, and the US ICBM were designed with that in mind, i.e. we need to shoot a family car to the Soviet union. (The Soviets then got clever, and didnt' actually fire a cryogenic H-bomb, while the US actually did, and then it turned out in Ivy Mike that lithium was the gift that keep on giving...)
So, when the space race started in earnest, the Soviets had these great big bloody rockets, and hence could loft a heavy Sputnik (~80kg) into space without much trouble, while the anemic US rockets barely managed close to a tenth of that (~13kg). It took quite a number of years before US heavy lift capability had caught up.
Define "it". The Internet service may be better, but that's because it is subsidized by Sweden's considerable taxes. Which means, the costs are (much?) higher than the bill says â" and TFA cites â" the difference is paid to the tax-authorities instead of going directly to the service-provider.
No, not really. While the article says "government" that's not quite true. In Sweden we have a long tradition of "business as government", and wholly (or partially) government owned businesses. That's what's at play here: The fibre to my house was pulled by the local energy company (district heating and electricity). That company, while wholly owned by the local (municipal) government runs a surplus, and hence isn't subsidised by taxes. But they do enjoy a government monopoly.
What they do, do is provide the basic infrastructure that others can offer their services on, whether that service, be delivering broadband or electricity. Now, in order to do so, they require coverage of their cost, but are not in the market to squeeze it for all it's worth.
Hence I pay $50 a month for 100/100Mbps internet, basic cable and IP telephony. That money goes to my service providers who then (in turn) pay the energy company.
Most often overheard quote indie band quote " I can't eat exposure" .
Sure they can. Without exposure no-one will come to their gigs. And the proceeds from those they sure can eat. Well, rather, they can buy stuff to eat, even if money is high in fiber, their nutritional value apart from that is lacking.
Even major acts don't make much money off of selling their recorded music, RIAA has seen to that, but the exposure leads to better other ways to make money. Exposure is basically where the entire game is at.
Nukes also have an easier time leveling buildings than they do utterly decimating populations. The fireball generally is very small, the overpressure that will kill you is a bit bigger, but theres a wide zone of "buildings become unsound" where people suffer much lesser effects.
It's already been said, but it bears repeating. If you want to kill people instead of things you go for radiological warfare, i.e. you rely on fallout, not blast overpressure. (Incidentally, since the military is almost always concerned with other types of targets, they're typically exclusively concerned with blast overpressure, at the exclusion of all other types of effects).
Compare the exercise retold by Stuart Slade where it only took a small portion of the US arsenal to kill as near as all of the Chineese as it wouldn't matter.
Now, that that wouldn't happen, even in a large scale exchange is another matter. Nuclear weapons are far too valuable to use for such a purpose (usually), and there are lots of other strategies that would be tried before a counter population strike.
The part I'm I think will be the big show-stopper is the likelihood of people 'catching goodies from the sky'. Given the technical restrictions of these drones it seems fair to assume they'll be used mostly for 'small but expensive' goods. What's to stop people from building a microwave-gun to fry the electronics and run of with the cargo ? Heck, a decent slingshot could probably bring them down. I realize one could rob any courier service, but with drones it's going to be dead-simple unless they start building in all kinds of security measures but thus limiting the capacity/range/... of the machine.
Yes, I was thinking "shotgun", but your ideas are better. Let's run with it a bit. How about a good old fashioned barrage balloon? Or use it to loft a fishing net, or why not a kite? "Honest officer, here I was just flying my kite, minding my own business and all these drones started to fall all around me, not my fault really..."
Or, for the ultimate thrill. Your own drone/RPV. There have been "dog fighting" competitions between RC-planes for ages, trying to cut someone else's streamer with your propeller. Now you could actually make that game worth your time.
Then there's good old fashioned GPS-spoofing that can be done for cheap. Make the drone land/drop thinking it has reached its destination? It's manna from heaven all over again, only this time courtesy of Amazon... :-)