He's absolutely right. The road rules and way roads are laid out mean that it takes poor judgement on multiple parts to cause most crashes, despite most humans being bad drivers (even the best driver is a bad driver some of the time)
We make hundreds of errors on the road every day but the tolerances built into the rules mean that almost all of the time we can get away with it. Problems come when you get lazy or cocky and think you always will.
"When you come to a halt, you take the engine out of gear and engage the parking brake."
In some countries (and certain us states), engaging the parking brake when stopped in traffic is a driving test fail.
Transmission creep is evil anyway. I don't like it, never have (which is one reason to not drive slushboxes) and don't see why modern CVTs and EVs have to simulate something which is primarily a design flaw from the 1950s.
There are "terrorist attacks" all the way through the film which are actually decrepit infrastructure breaking down (and are then used as justification for draconian law changes)
It seemed improbable at the time, but it seems we're being primed along that direction.
"And even if enough of us stop watching and listening to hurt their pocketbook, they will just blame it on piracy anyway"
Revenue for music (in particular) has been falling for decades. Albums overtook single sales in the early-mid 1970s and by the time CDs came along, revenues were declining at about 5% per year(*). CDs kicked that for a while as people restocked their collections but by the early 90s things were falling again (and faster than before).
(*) This is one of the reasons labels tried charging TV for airing music videos but the comprehensive kicking they took in New Zealand over this made it clear that video exposure was driving sales and you interfered with that at your peril.
Online piracy was actually associated with an INCREASE in sales, but the majors didn't like it because the sales field was more diverse, requiring them to invest more money in A&R + stock, instead of retiring product after a couple of years and relying on cash-cow megagroups for the majority of sales.
Even 50 years ago it was known that if you take the ingredients of primeval earth (as in the gas makeup of the early orange planet) and subject them to electrical discharges (lightning), you'll end up with a hodge-podge of organic compounds. This was done in gas jars over a short period.
When you expand that over an entire planet and thousands/millions of years it shouldn't be surprising that some of those organics will assemble into more complex forms - it's clear that current complex cells contain components from earlier standalone life with mitochondria and chloroplasts being the standout examples (mitochondria has its own (degraded) DNA and mitochonrdrians still reproduce as independent items within a cell)
If Panspermia is accurate then the kinds of life we see on various planets will be of similar chemistry to here and probably of the same chirality. If the independent origin theory is accurate then they should vary wildly, or at least be of randomly varying chirality for carbon-based forms.
Incidentally there are 6 possible components for DNA, but life on earth only uses 4(*). It's entirely possible that DNA-based life on other planet may use them all or a slightly different set of 4.
(*) Artificial life has been assembled in labs using all 6.
I've always wondered what would happen if fake (identically numbered) plates were attached to a number of different cars without the owners being aware of it. Most wouldn't notice for a while, if at all.
(This is known to happen in England, especially London - in order to avoid congestion charges. The fake plates used are those of a known-good vehicle, in order to fool ANPR systems)
In many/most countries you are not required to identify yourself to the police if not under arrest unless you are the driver of a car which has been stopped, or in a wharf area (ports in general, which has been extended to airports and border crossings)
Being arrested for failing to identify outside the above requirements has resulted in successful claims against police in a number of jurisdictions.
It may seem odd to americans but personal privacy and liberty is more highly valued in Germany than the USA at individual and govt levels. This has a lot to do with having lived through the end game that started with all citizens having to carry identity papers - and they've stuck to those values despite enduring terrorist excesses far more outrageous than anything the USA has seen.
"the courts have held that it is reasonable to search people before flights due to the danger that weapons pose on flights."
1: In every single attempted hijacking since 9/11, passengers have overcome the would-be hijackers long before they got close to succeeding.
1a: Even before that time it was happening in some areas. I can recall a 1986 case where an enraged chinese businessman battered a would-be hijacker to death using his mobile phone as a club.
2: All the security theatre in the world is of no use whatsoever if your ground staff can slip a bomb into the cargo hold during loadout. Even bombproof cargo containers are no use if it's dropped between them and the pressure hull (which is apparently what happened in Egypt a while back)
2a: Ditto if you can subvert the in-flight catering companies. This is one aspect of aircraft loadout which is almost never inspected or the staff heavily security vetted.
3: Making a "binary bomb" is difficult under controlled laboratory conditions. Making one inflight using improvised equipment is virtually impossible. You'd have better luck trying to use thermite - and good luck getting that past a metal detector.
3a: See above for bombs in your shoes (although a few drops of putrescene on the socks might have a debilitating effect on everyone when you take the shoes off) 3b: Ditto for items in your panties.
"I'm kind of surprised that the hard drive industry has not created bigger (i.e. size, not just capacity) drives."
They did. They were fragile, slow, had insanely poor seek times and were - frankly - highly unreliable in normal consumer environments, so Bigfoots died out in the late 1990s.
Spinning a platter that size at any appreciable speed comes with its own sets of problems both in materials stress and bearing suitability (foil and other bearings are not suited to high twisting moments, which means that larger platters are far more sensitive to vibration and bumps than their smaller kin, even if the head technology is the same) the higher swept arc means worse seek times (and higher power consumption to achieve them) and it's a lot harder to reliably stack platters (bigfoots were always single-platter devices) so they're not going to be dense enough in a server environment anyway.
Bigfoot's ONLY redeeming feature was "It's cheap", which was more than wiped out when joe-schmoe's case took a knock and the drive died. They were also highly sensitive to bumps during installation. At the time all drives used on-platter head parking and were touchy about things like electric screwdrivers camming out of their heads and slamming into the next position but doing that to a Bigfoot could render it DOA and putting 2 in the same bay often meant that the headseek vibration from one would send the error count skyrocketing in the other, etc.
"HDDs still kick butt in scenarios where high areal density is more important than ripping transfer speeds"
I recently installed a bunch of 4TB SSDs in a server - yes, for ripping transfer speeds but more importantly because you couldn't get 4TB rotating media in enterprise 2.5" format until very recently (and those drives are 12mm thick, vs SSDs being 9mm, which is important for airflow when the 12mm drives draw 3 times as much power)
By the time you can get 4TB 9mm spinning drives, those 4TB SSDs will be 8 or 16TB and based on the current cost curves, the 4TB SSD will be 1/4 the price it currently is (I paid about $1500 for a quantity purchase - yes we get preferential rates but we supposedly get the same rates from SG/WD too).
Current mechanical HDD prices are still higher than they were before the Thai floods, consumer warranties are laughable and reliability has gone out the window (I paid $65 for 2TB drives which have just hit EOL at 48k hours. Their exact replacements are $90 and warranty is 12 months vs the previous generation's 5 years (consumer drives)
On that basis the extra cost of buying enterprise SSD over enterprise spinning media (about 2.2:1 factor currently at 4TB 2.5") is justified by simply looking at labour costs associated with replacing drives which have failed within the warranty period (_EVERY_ Seagate Constellation in our fleet has been replaced twice in that period, all sizes and WD's drives haven't been much better. Now that HGST is officially folding into WD and Toshiba into Seagate, there's even less reason to feel confident about mechanical drive reliability.)
tl;dr: SSDs surpassed HDD _volumetric_ density(*) a while back. the only advantage they still enjoy is upfront price but the higher backend costs and unreliability wipe that out over the typical server drive lifespan.
WD and SG are on their last legs. They're frantically trying to reposition themselves as vertically integrated vendors but enterprise (and consumer) buyer memories are long enough to remember being screwed over and most will happily give money to silicon-based manufacturers for long enough that there will be one last merger before WestSeaDigitalGate crashes and burns. (there will be much rejoicing, but expect one of the SSD makers to buy and keep the brands)
(*) The amount of storage per platter or areal density is immaterial. What counts is the amount of storage in the 2.5" or 3.5" form factor(**). One of the reasons HAMR got delayed is that the larger vertical size of the heads (and the extra heat generated inside the casing during writing) means you can't get as many platters in the case, which more than wipes out any density advantage over shingling, for a lot of extra cost/complexity (someone remind me again how reliable Tahiti drives used to be?)
(**) Those 4TB SSDs in 2.5" cases only occupy 60-70% of the internal space. The only reason Sammy aren't selling larger is that they don't feel there's enough of a market and my purchasing 20 or so wouldn't skew that projection. They've already demonstrated 16TB in 3.5" format and that was the generation prior to what's now on the market. Can't happen soon enough for me.
The problem with that is that traditional media has always been 100% paid for (and then some) by advertisers.
Even newspapers were completely paid for long before they left the press. That number on the front is simply to ensure that the reader feels he's getting value for money (it's usually set at about the value of the paper) - people traditionally felt a free source is less "valuable" in terms of the information disseminated.
William Randolph Hearst drove 2 countries to war (USA vs Spain) in order to sell more newspapers - because that way he could sell more advertising. The exploitation amorality has existed a long time.
The death-blow to printed media might well be the Internet, but it's been declining for decades before that anyway. I proved that to my own satisfaction 30 years ago by running advertising campaigns in different media and comparing cost-benefit. Newspapers had the highest "smugness" factor from the salespeople but the absolute lowest rate of return (virtually zero response), with small radio stations offering the best bang-per-buck and TV giving the highest numbers but at substantially higher costs.
Incidentally: The newspaper sales droids were also the most in self-denial about the value of their product. When told they'd generated no sales leads at all, their response was to try and upsell to more advertising at even more expense.
They choked when I told them that a single classified ad in a larger national paper for 1/200 the cost had generated more sales (20) than their 6-week ad campaign and then tried to claim that radio didn't matter when informed that 1/4 the spend had produced several hundred sales. When they wouldn't take no for an answer I told 'em that they needed to match the prices of "competitors" and rates of returns or offer a money-back guarantee. That was what finally got them off the line and to stop pestering every few days about buying more spots.
People accept radio and TV advertising because they're not paying for it - but even then they'll change the channel if it's annoying, no matter how much a particular ad campaign might stick in the mind. Advertisers used to claim that this kind of "mind worm" was a good thing, but the reality tends to be that people remembered and avoided the product in question (Colgate-Palmolive found that out the hard way in Australasia in the 1980s. Dumping the irritating toothpaste ads produced an uptick in sales)
It's still used that way. Those "driver ed courses" that are offered instead of speeding tickets funnel revenue directly into the pockets of the organisations operating the cameras.
> "Less annoying enough?" you might ask and that's a whole other debate.
Not really.
The reason adblock and its ilk exist is NOT advertising. That's been around almost since the beginning of the WWW.
What kickstarted ablocking was annoying, intrusive advertising: Millions of popups which wouldn't close and advertiser-created malware which would insert adverts into normal web page streams and most annoying of all, NOISY ADVERTS.
Given that large swathes of the Internet have always been charged per-MB, the principle of cost-shifting is writ large: You do not steal money from a man and then use it to force him to wade through advertising he does not wish to see. Eventually there _will_ be a reckoning and AdBlockers are only the tip of the iceberg (Think: TCPA)
The advertising industry has repeatedly proven that it is willing to directly steal from consumers unless compelled not to. In the end, legal compulsions will be slammed into place to prevent the worst excesses.
The effect of the advertising industry whining about blockers is primarily to attract attention that it's possible to block adverts at all. once Joe Public realises that, the game is up.
Making it illegal for them to block network traffic they don't wish to pay for would be a step too far even in the corporatist United States and the advertising lobby should be very careful that by tweaking a tiger's tail, they're very prepared to be the object of the undivided attention of a very annoyed tiger.
Washing a bottle out with argon is a lot different to an underground gas reservoir - which is fed at high pressure and may be a few cubic km in size.
(I'm guessing the winery used argon because it's heavier than air and acts as a mobile "cap" on the liquid as it's filled, whilst a nitrogen purge wouldn't guarantee oxygen staying out during the filling process.)
"Anything from a first-generation galaxy isn't going to have much in the way of heavy elements"
Given that a number of stars in our own galaxy have been shown to be over 10 billion years old, what's to say a first generation galaxy hasn't matured into something like ours over time?
Fossil records show that life showed up on earth more-or-less as soon as the surface was cool enough and solid enough to hold it - it showed up almost immediately after the Theia event (which would have reset everything on the planet) and was certainly present in the oldest known surviving rocks - which predate the late heavy bombardment.
If (proto)life or traces of it is found on any other planet in our system that will blow the "rare" factor away - and there are enough stars in our own galactic outskirts to pretty much guarantee millions of instances of some form of life at the stated odds, let alone looking to other galaxies.
40 years ago we thought planets were likely to be rare. Now we know that virtually every star out there has some (there are likely to be more planets than stars). As it's one of the more efficent ways of increasing entropy, life is likely to spring into existence regularly and be obliterated just as regularly. The question is how many times has it managed to get as far as allowing sentience(*) and how many times has it gone away again too?
(*) Our descendants (if they exist) are likely to be oxygen starved apes. It doesn't take much to make this planet uninhabitable for our species or anything else massing over 50kg. An anoxic oceanic event would do it and geologically those go hand in hand with spiking CO2 levels. Ironically, anoxic events are very likely to have created most of the oilfields we tap into today.
You're forgetting the primary reason for ignoring Nixon: He was corrupt and provably so.
Whatever else he achieved, his political corruption(*) cost the USA (and the world) 40 years of viable nuclear research when he shut down Oak Ridge's MSR program. We (the developed world) could be more-or-less off carbon and giving a real helping hand kickstarting developing countries' economies (not to mention not needing to prop up nasty dictatorships/kingdoms around the world to ensure continued access to cheap but polluting energy), without needing to have places like Yucca Mountain (whose geology is unsuitable for the proposed task but the reality is you only need to sequester spent conventional fuel for 300 years before it's approachable enough to safely re-refine)
If you want to solve the world's population problem the answer is simple: Make people better off. Poor people have more kids. Even moderately well-off people in poor countries have more kids, explicitly stating "Otherwise there will be noone to look after use in our old age"
(*) There are many forms of corruption. Anything that's done or not done because it will influence voters, vs being for the country's long-term good(**) is political corruption.
(**) Constantly going to war is not in any country's long-term good. It may keep people in jobs and temporarily increase security but world history shows that empires with a history of aggression by conquest eventually face a reckoning and the more aggressive they were, the more likely it is the repercussions will result in them ceasing to exist, not least because their economies were usually geared around expansion which abruptly stopped.
Other commentators are correct in that modern USA dems and reps are far to the right of anything in past history. This was a trend that started in the 1960s and was consummated by Ronald Reagan. The home of "liberty for all" now has pervasive corporatism and statism at its core, with fewer individual liberties than many of the so-called "repressive" countries it disparages.
"Meanwhile, other, less impactive drugs, are either illegal or next to it."
If you check your history, you'll find that the first of those drugs to be made illegal was one that was generally believed to only be used by immigrant farm workers and the unstated primary reason for the ban was to keep newly minted "G-men" in jobs.
In other words. Narco-gangs created the need for the FBI and the FBI needed the narco gangs to continue existing in order to justify staying in operation.
I forgot to add: raw gas also contains copious quantities of CO2 (up to 50%) and CO, neither of which you really want hanging around in a populated area.
The same reason all gas companies use large storage vessels of some sort or another:
Demand is never constant, supply can be highly variable and you need to maintain delivery pressure within a fairly tight window regardless.
There's usually 3-6 months' supply of gas in the EU distribution networks at any one time, which is handy when russia cuts off the flow into western europe during a dispute with Ukraine, etc. On the other side of the continent, LNG ships plugged into the distribution system result in highly irregular input patterns.
Pressurisation of the reservoir is done when demand (and energy prices to run the pumps) are low. Feedout is done in peak periods.
It's just as well this is processed gas in any case. A raw gas leak would be deadly, not just smelly.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK you can avoid the necessity for individual vehicle insurance if you have sufficiently high liability cover registered with the authorities.
That starts around UKP5 million cover and is effectively only available to royalty, etc.
He's absolutely right. The road rules and way roads are laid out mean that it takes poor judgement on multiple parts to cause most crashes, despite most humans being bad drivers (even the best driver is a bad driver some of the time)
We make hundreds of errors on the road every day but the tolerances built into the rules mean that almost all of the time we can get away with it. Problems come when you get lazy or cocky and think you always will.
"When you come to a halt, you take the engine out of gear and engage the parking brake."
In some countries (and certain us states), engaging the parking brake when stopped in traffic is a driving test fail.
Transmission creep is evil anyway. I don't like it, never have (which is one reason to not drive slushboxes) and don't see why modern CVTs and EVs have to simulate something which is primarily a design flaw from the 1950s.
No, not the country, the film.
There are "terrorist attacks" all the way through the film which are actually decrepit infrastructure breaking down (and are then used as justification for draconian law changes)
It seemed improbable at the time, but it seems we're being primed along that direction.
Perhaps more people should watch it.
"And even if enough of us stop watching and listening to hurt their pocketbook, they will just blame it on piracy anyway"
Revenue for music (in particular) has been falling for decades. Albums overtook single sales in the early-mid 1970s and by the time CDs came along, revenues were declining at about 5% per year(*). CDs kicked that for a while as people restocked their collections but by the early 90s things were falling again (and faster than before).
(*) This is one of the reasons labels tried charging TV for airing music videos but the comprehensive kicking they took in New Zealand over this made it clear that video exposure was driving sales and you interfered with that at your peril.
Online piracy was actually associated with an INCREASE in sales, but the majors didn't like it because the sales field was more diverse, requiring them to invest more money in A&R + stock, instead of retiring product after a couple of years and relying on cash-cow megagroups for the majority of sales.
This is the basis of panspermia theory.
Even 50 years ago it was known that if you take the ingredients of primeval earth (as in the gas makeup of the early orange planet) and subject them to electrical discharges (lightning), you'll end up with a hodge-podge of organic compounds. This was done in gas jars over a short period.
When you expand that over an entire planet and thousands/millions of years it shouldn't be surprising that some of those organics will assemble into more complex forms - it's clear that current complex cells contain components from earlier standalone life with mitochondria and chloroplasts being the standout examples (mitochondria has its own (degraded) DNA and mitochonrdrians still reproduce as independent items within a cell)
If Panspermia is accurate then the kinds of life we see on various planets will be of similar chemistry to here and probably of the same chirality. If the independent origin theory is accurate then they should vary wildly, or at least be of randomly varying chirality for carbon-based forms.
Incidentally there are 6 possible components for DNA, but life on earth only uses 4(*). It's entirely possible that DNA-based life on other planet may use them all or a slightly different set of 4.
(*) Artificial life has been assembled in labs using all 6.
"Realize that even though the linked article is a bit aged nothing has really changed"
Except that the Snowden revelations underscored it's already happening.
I've always wondered what would happen if fake (identically numbered) plates were attached to a number of different cars without the owners being aware of it. Most wouldn't notice for a while, if at all.
(This is known to happen in England, especially London - in order to avoid congestion charges. The fake plates used are those of a known-good vehicle, in order to fool ANPR systems)
In many/most countries you are not required to identify yourself to the police if not under arrest unless you are the driver of a car which has been stopped, or in a wharf area (ports in general, which has been extended to airports and border crossings)
Being arrested for failing to identify outside the above requirements has resulted in successful claims against police in a number of jurisdictions.
It may seem odd to americans but personal privacy and liberty is more highly valued in Germany than the USA at individual and govt levels. This has a lot to do with having lived through the end game that started with all citizens having to carry identity papers - and they've stuck to those values despite enduring terrorist excesses far more outrageous than anything the USA has seen.
WRT: 2a - if things can be stolen from airside baggage handling, then things can be smuggled in. Don't blame 3rd world security for this.
"the courts have held that it is reasonable to search people before flights due to the danger that weapons pose on flights."
1: In every single attempted hijacking since 9/11, passengers have overcome the would-be hijackers long before they got close to succeeding.
1a: Even before that time it was happening in some areas. I can recall a 1986 case where an enraged chinese businessman battered a would-be hijacker to death using his mobile phone as a club.
2: All the security theatre in the world is of no use whatsoever if your ground staff can slip a bomb into the cargo hold during loadout. Even bombproof cargo containers are no use if it's dropped between them and the pressure hull (which is apparently what happened in Egypt a while back)
2a: Ditto if you can subvert the in-flight catering companies. This is one aspect of aircraft loadout which is almost never inspected or the staff heavily security vetted.
3: Making a "binary bomb" is difficult under controlled laboratory conditions. Making one inflight using improvised equipment is virtually impossible. You'd have better luck trying to use thermite - and good luck getting that past a metal detector.
3a: See above for bombs in your shoes (although a few drops of putrescene on the socks might have a debilitating effect on everyone when you take the shoes off)
3b: Ditto for items in your panties.
"I'm kind of surprised that the hard drive industry has not created bigger (i.e. size, not just capacity) drives."
They did. They were fragile, slow, had insanely poor seek times and were - frankly - highly unreliable in normal consumer environments, so Bigfoots died out in the late 1990s.
Spinning a platter that size at any appreciable speed comes with its own sets of problems both in materials stress and bearing suitability (foil and other bearings are not suited to high twisting moments, which means that larger platters are far more sensitive to vibration and bumps than their smaller kin, even if the head technology is the same) the higher swept arc means worse seek times (and higher power consumption to achieve them) and it's a lot harder to reliably stack platters (bigfoots were always single-platter devices) so they're not going to be dense enough in a server environment anyway.
Bigfoot's ONLY redeeming feature was "It's cheap", which was more than wiped out when joe-schmoe's case took a knock and the drive died. They were also highly sensitive to bumps during installation. At the time all drives used on-platter head parking and were touchy about things like electric screwdrivers camming out of their heads and slamming into the next position but doing that to a Bigfoot could render it DOA and putting 2 in the same bay often meant that the headseek vibration from one would send the error count skyrocketing in the other, etc.
"HDDs still kick butt in scenarios where high areal density is more important than ripping transfer speeds"
I recently installed a bunch of 4TB SSDs in a server - yes, for ripping transfer speeds but more importantly because you couldn't get 4TB rotating media in enterprise 2.5" format until very recently (and those drives are 12mm thick, vs SSDs being 9mm, which is important for airflow when the 12mm drives draw 3 times as much power)
By the time you can get 4TB 9mm spinning drives, those 4TB SSDs will be 8 or 16TB and based on the current cost curves, the 4TB SSD will be 1/4 the price it currently is (I paid about $1500 for a quantity purchase - yes we get preferential rates but we supposedly get the same rates from SG/WD too).
Current mechanical HDD prices are still higher than they were before the Thai floods, consumer warranties are laughable and reliability has gone out the window (I paid $65 for 2TB drives which have just hit EOL at 48k hours. Their exact replacements are $90 and warranty is 12 months vs the previous generation's 5 years (consumer drives)
On that basis the extra cost of buying enterprise SSD over enterprise spinning media (about 2.2:1 factor currently at 4TB 2.5") is justified by simply looking at labour costs associated with replacing drives which have failed within the warranty period (_EVERY_ Seagate Constellation in our fleet has been replaced twice in that period, all sizes and WD's drives haven't been much better. Now that HGST is officially folding into WD and Toshiba into Seagate, there's even less reason to feel confident about mechanical drive reliability.)
tl;dr: SSDs surpassed HDD _volumetric_ density(*) a while back. the only advantage they still enjoy is upfront price but the higher backend costs and unreliability wipe that out over the typical server drive lifespan.
WD and SG are on their last legs. They're frantically trying to reposition themselves as vertically integrated vendors but enterprise (and consumer) buyer memories are long enough to remember being screwed over and most will happily give money to silicon-based manufacturers for long enough that there will be one last merger before WestSeaDigitalGate crashes and burns. (there will be much rejoicing, but expect one of the SSD makers to buy and keep the brands)
(*) The amount of storage per platter or areal density is immaterial. What counts is the amount of storage in the 2.5" or 3.5" form factor(**). One of the reasons HAMR got delayed is that the larger vertical size of the heads (and the extra heat generated inside the casing during writing) means you can't get as many platters in the case, which more than wipes out any density advantage over shingling, for a lot of extra cost/complexity (someone remind me again how reliable Tahiti drives used to be?)
(**) Those 4TB SSDs in 2.5" cases only occupy 60-70% of the internal space. The only reason Sammy aren't selling larger is that they don't feel there's enough of a market and my purchasing 20 or so wouldn't skew that projection. They've already demonstrated 16TB in 3.5" format and that was the generation prior to what's now on the market. Can't happen soon enough for me.
The problem with that is that traditional media has always been 100% paid for (and then some) by advertisers.
Even newspapers were completely paid for long before they left the press. That number on the front is simply to ensure that the reader feels he's getting value for money (it's usually set at about the value of the paper) - people traditionally felt a free source is less "valuable" in terms of the information disseminated.
William Randolph Hearst drove 2 countries to war (USA vs Spain) in order to sell more newspapers - because that way he could sell more advertising. The exploitation amorality has existed a long time.
The death-blow to printed media might well be the Internet, but it's been declining for decades before that anyway. I proved that to my own satisfaction 30 years ago by running advertising campaigns in different media and comparing cost-benefit. Newspapers had the highest "smugness" factor from the salespeople but the absolute lowest rate of return (virtually zero response), with small radio stations offering the best bang-per-buck and TV giving the highest numbers but at substantially higher costs.
Incidentally: The newspaper sales droids were also the most in self-denial about the value of their product. When told they'd generated no sales leads at all, their response was to try and upsell to more advertising at even more expense.
They choked when I told them that a single classified ad in a larger national paper for 1/200 the cost had generated more sales (20) than their 6-week ad campaign and then tried to claim that radio didn't matter when informed that 1/4 the spend had produced several hundred sales. When they wouldn't take no for an answer I told 'em that they needed to match the prices of "competitors" and rates of returns or offer a money-back guarantee. That was what finally got them off the line and to stop pestering every few days about buying more spots.
People accept radio and TV advertising because they're not paying for it - but even then they'll change the channel if it's annoying, no matter how much a particular ad campaign might stick in the mind. Advertisers used to claim that this kind of "mind worm" was a good thing, but the reality tends to be that people remembered and avoided the product in question (Colgate-Palmolive found that out the hard way in Australasia in the 1980s. Dumping the irritating toothpaste ads produced an uptick in sales)
As far as I can tell, "acceptable adverts" in ABP parlance means "no popups, no animations, no flash, no noises and no obnoxiously large panels"
> We had a similar thing in the UK many years ago
It's still used that way. Those "driver ed courses" that are offered instead of speeding tickets funnel revenue directly into the pockets of the organisations operating the cameras.
I just reinstalled adblock plus on my android.
The option to filter/unfilter "acceptable advertising" is no longer there.
> "Less annoying enough?" you might ask and that's a whole other debate.
Not really.
The reason adblock and its ilk exist is NOT advertising. That's been around almost since the beginning of the WWW.
What kickstarted ablocking was annoying, intrusive advertising: Millions of popups which wouldn't close and advertiser-created malware which would insert adverts into normal web page streams and most annoying of all, NOISY ADVERTS.
Given that large swathes of the Internet have always been charged per-MB, the principle of cost-shifting is writ large: You do not steal money from a man and then use it to force him to wade through advertising he does not wish to see. Eventually there _will_ be a reckoning and AdBlockers are only the tip of the iceberg (Think: TCPA)
The advertising industry has repeatedly proven that it is willing to directly steal from consumers unless compelled not to. In the end, legal compulsions will be slammed into place to prevent the worst excesses.
The effect of the advertising industry whining about blockers is primarily to attract attention that it's possible to block adverts at all. once Joe Public realises that, the game is up.
Making it illegal for them to block network traffic they don't wish to pay for would be a step too far even in the corporatist United States and the advertising lobby should be very careful that by tweaking a tiger's tail, they're very prepared to be the object of the undivided attention of a very annoyed tiger.
Ublock origin doesn't exist as a standalone thingie on android, so adblock is what's there until something better comes along.
Ad Away works relatively well at cost of a massively bloated /etc/hosts but it doesn't catch everything.
Washing a bottle out with argon is a lot different to an underground gas reservoir - which is fed at high pressure and may be a few cubic km in size.
(I'm guessing the winery used argon because it's heavier than air and acts as a mobile "cap" on the liquid as it's filled, whilst a nitrogen purge wouldn't guarantee oxygen staying out during the filling process.)
"Anything from a first-generation galaxy isn't going to have much in the way of heavy elements"
Given that a number of stars in our own galaxy have been shown to be over 10 billion years old, what's to say a first generation galaxy hasn't matured into something like ours over time?
Fossil records show that life showed up on earth more-or-less as soon as the surface was cool enough and solid enough to hold it - it showed up almost immediately after the Theia event (which would have reset everything on the planet) and was certainly present in the oldest known surviving rocks - which predate the late heavy bombardment.
If (proto)life or traces of it is found on any other planet in our system that will blow the "rare" factor away - and there are enough stars in our own galactic outskirts to pretty much guarantee millions of instances of some form of life at the stated odds, let alone looking to other galaxies.
40 years ago we thought planets were likely to be rare. Now we know that virtually every star out there has some (there are likely to be more planets than stars). As it's one of the more efficent ways of increasing entropy, life is likely to spring into existence regularly and be obliterated just as regularly. The question is how many times has it managed to get as far as allowing sentience(*) and how many times has it gone away again too?
(*) Our descendants (if they exist) are likely to be oxygen starved apes. It doesn't take much to make this planet uninhabitable for our species or anything else massing over 50kg. An anoxic oceanic event would do it and geologically those go hand in hand with spiking CO2 levels. Ironically, anoxic events are very likely to have created most of the oilfields we tap into today.
You're forgetting the primary reason for ignoring Nixon: He was corrupt and provably so.
Whatever else he achieved, his political corruption(*) cost the USA (and the world) 40 years of viable nuclear research when he shut down Oak Ridge's MSR program. We (the developed world) could be more-or-less off carbon and giving a real helping hand kickstarting developing countries' economies (not to mention not needing to prop up nasty dictatorships/kingdoms around the world to ensure continued access to cheap but polluting energy), without needing to have places like Yucca Mountain (whose geology is unsuitable for the proposed task but the reality is you only need to sequester spent conventional fuel for 300 years before it's approachable enough to safely re-refine)
If you want to solve the world's population problem the answer is simple: Make people better off.
Poor people have more kids. Even moderately well-off people in poor countries have more kids, explicitly stating "Otherwise there will be noone to look after use in our old age"
(*) There are many forms of corruption. Anything that's done or not done because it will influence voters, vs being for the country's long-term good(**) is political corruption.
(**) Constantly going to war is not in any country's long-term good. It may keep people in jobs and temporarily increase security but world history shows that empires with a history of aggression by conquest eventually face a reckoning and the more aggressive they were, the more likely it is the repercussions will result in them ceasing to exist, not least because their economies were usually geared around expansion which abruptly stopped.
Other commentators are correct in that modern USA dems and reps are far to the right of anything in past history. This was a trend that started in the 1960s and was consummated by Ronald Reagan. The home of "liberty for all" now has pervasive corporatism and statism at its core, with fewer individual liberties than many of the so-called "repressive" countries it disparages.
"Meanwhile, other, less impactive drugs, are either illegal or next to it."
If you check your history, you'll find that the first of those drugs to be made illegal was one that was generally believed to only be used by immigrant farm workers and the unstated primary reason for the ban was to keep newly minted "G-men" in jobs.
In other words. Narco-gangs created the need for the FBI and the FBI needed the narco gangs to continue existing in order to justify staying in operation.
I forgot to add: raw gas also contains copious quantities of CO2 (up to 50%) and CO, neither of which you really want hanging around in a populated area.
The same reason all gas companies use large storage vessels of some sort or another:
Demand is never constant, supply can be highly variable and you need to maintain delivery pressure within a fairly tight window regardless.
There's usually 3-6 months' supply of gas in the EU distribution networks at any one time, which is handy when russia cuts off the flow into western europe during a dispute with Ukraine, etc. On the other side of the continent, LNG ships plugged into the distribution system result in highly irregular input patterns.
Pressurisation of the reservoir is done when demand (and energy prices to run the pumps) are low. Feedout is done in peak periods.
It's just as well this is processed gas in any case. A raw gas leak would be deadly, not just smelly.