First, a general note: Many companies are remarkably unaware of the going rates until departing key employees enlighten them. Hence counteroffers occur because you showed them the hard way that they miscalculated your market value before. If everyone is adults, that is probably all there is to it. If your boss isn't emotionally adult, don't miss an opportunity to leave...
* You have now made your employer aware that you are unhappy. From this day on, your loyalty will always be in question.
Loyalty??? How 1950's... It depends on the company culture. If they bothered with the counter-offer, either it isn't too big a problem, or else they really, really need you to stick around while they hunt for a replacement. Better understand your own company well enough to tell the difference.
I am assuming here that you repeatedly told your boss the salary was inadequate _before_ you started looking outside. If your outside jobhunting was a complete surprise, whether because you never asked for a raise or because the boss is an idiot whose forgotten all the times you showed him salary surveys, etc., then you'd better get out, because you have pissed off a powerful idiot...
* When promotion time comes around, your employer will remember who is loyal and who is not.
You expected a promotion on top of that big pay raise?
* When times get tough, your employer will begin the cutbacks with you.
Or maybe if they needed you bad enough to make the counteroffer, you'll be the last one they lay off. But usually in a real crunch the question is not you, it's whether the work you are doing is still vital considering the product lines they are dumping.
* Accepting a counteroffer is an insult to your intelligence and a blow to your personal pride; you were bought.
If there's any chance your boss is as childish as this, by all means get out. If you are as childish as this, I hope it wasn't my company that made that offer...
* Where is the money for the counteroffer coming from? All companies have wage and salary guidelines which must be followed. Is it your next raise early?
Whether you can expect continuing raises beyond the counteroffer is a question you must ask. However, in most companies wage and salary guidelines matter only as long as employees believe they are a reasonable excuse for not keeping salaries competitive. They'll tell you they can't give you a raise because of the guidelines, but it's just an excuse. If they really can't break the guidelines to hire and keep the people they really need, you should have been looking for a new job a long time ago, because this company is doomed to death by bureacracy.
* Your company will immediately start looking for a new person at a cheaper price.
Maybe. If you work on a project by project basis, they might be just stringing you along to the end of the current project, but otherwise, if they thought they could replace you they'd have said goodbye already.
* The same circumstances that now cause you to consider a change will repeat themselves in the future, even if you accept a counteroffer.
If you were looking for other work because of working conditions, don't even think about counteroffers. (Unless it's to promote you to CEO so you _can_ fix the problems.) But if it was just about pay raises, just make sure the counteroffer is big enough that you won't need another raise before the next merger/split/reorganization/corporate bankruptcy makes it irrelevant anyway.
* Statistics show that if you accept a counteroffer, the probability of voluntarily leaving in six months or being let go in one year is extremely high.
Source? I can make up statistics too.
* Once the word gets out, the relationship that you now enjoy with your co-workers will never be the same. You will lose the personal satisfaction of peer group acceptance.
Refer back to what I said about loyalty. Your office isnt like a Little League team, I hope
* What type of company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they will give you what you are worth?
A typical one. That's partly because so many companies don't know what their employees are worth until they have to think about replacing them, but also it's in the fundamental nature of commercial negotiations. You are selling yourself. In any negotiated sale, a person who lets it be seen that he isn't willing to walk away is going to get screwed.
To go back to "loyalty": in this context, it's a trick to put you in the ready-to-be-screwed frame of mind.
Or maybe: This job is effing impossible unless they let me change out the users, and I fear I'll get canned when they screw up and lose critical data again...
lawyamike: If you really do have legal expertise, could you please explain what our recourses are when (1) the EULA cannot be read without opening the package, and (2) the store won't give refunds if the package was opened. (In the past, the EULA was generally printed on a sealed envelope containing the disks, but now quite often it is not printed at all, you first see it when you start installation.) It would seem to me that this voids the EULA, but just how do you handle it legally?
I'm thinking you could send out a registered letter to the vendor, saying something like: "I do not accept the EULA on XXXX, purchased xx/xx/xxxx at (store name and address). I attempted to return the product to (store), but they refused to refund the purchase price. Therefore, I consider the EULA void, and until and unless you arrange for a full refund, I am free to use the product in accordance with copyright law and the fair use doctrine."
I work for Target Corp., and we do NOT accept returns on software (also CDs and DVDs) that have been opened. Period.
Then you should have your ass hauled before a judge every goddamned time someone cones in with an opened piece of software which says, "If you do not accept these terms, return the product for a full refund to the place you bought it."
Not quite correct - Target isn't responsible for that EULA. It's up to the software companies to see that there is a reasonable way to return the software. IANAL, but I'd think that, if you attempt to return the software and cannot get a refund, then the EULA is void. Write a letter to the head of the software company telling them so, registered mail...
This doesn't mean that you can violate copyright.
Finally, the Mythic case is different from the typical shrink-wrap EULA case in that the EULA concerns an ongoing service (data on their server). This makes some restrictions sound far more reasonable than they would be in a simple sale. Also, Mythic presented the EULA everytime the user logged in.
The Post Office is a monopoly? Definitely. What about UPS and FedEx? And Airborn Express? They are not permitted by law to compete with the regular mail. If you send a lot of letters or lightweight packages, the PO may audit you to see if these were actually "urgent" or could have gone by snail mail...
But states do NOT naturally form politically significant blocks anymore. Several of the big states split almost 49-49 this time. Even though the electoral college gives a numerical advantage to the small states, did you see anyone campaigning there? They were busy in the big states, trying to get the last possible.1%, in hopes of "winning" by 49.0 to 48.9% and getting ALL the electoral votes. In my state, among others, the electoral votes were for someone 51% of us voted against and probably despised. (I suspect a lot of the other 49% despised the guy they voted for too, just less than the other one.) And the random effects of this...left it up to a chief vote-counter appointed by GWB's brother and five (in)Justices appointed by his father.
If Florida's electoral votes had been divided proportionally to the popular vote, Gore and Bush would have definitely got 12 each. I'm not sure whether Nader, Bush, or Gore would have got the 25th one, but it's unlikely that it would have mattered. I'm pretty sure that if other states did the same thing, _some_ third party would have got the last electoral college vote in Michigan, and maybe other states. If the vote was close enough for Florida's 25th vote to matter, likely no one would have a majority anyhow and Congress would have picked the winner, rather than extra-constitutional court decisions...
You mean they might have to choose between working on this bill or actually reading one of the others to find out which of our rights they are violating this time?
I can boycott a business that I dislike, but it's pretty hard to boycott the government. (It sure didn't work out for Randy Weaver or those people in Waco.)
OTOH, have the government legislate a monopoly for a business over an essential service, and you get monopolistic behavior with no accountability. Like the US Post Office. Or maybe ICANN...
I hadn't realized from the first article that they already had their MEMS chip sort of running rather than just talking about it. But they've still got a long ways to go. I don't see how they'll get the speed they need without giving each head its own drive circuit so all the heads can go at once, rather than X-Y addressing. They've got to put the drive electronics on the chip, then figure out how to produce it at a reasonable cost. 3mm square is almost as big as a Pentium CPU.
Five years might be possible, if production experience with the few other MEMS devices now being produced is relevant to sorting out the issues with this one, and if IBM doesn't let bureacracy get in the way. (I'm afraid that last requirement is about as likely as a Vulcan ship stopping by and helping us solve all our problems...)
A practical storage device will also have to move the chip over the media, or vice versa, with accuracy of a few nanometers, and probably will have to work in two dimensions. (Disk head coils only work in one.) This is easy if you don't mind spending a lot of money, but they'll have to get the transport mechanism cost down to maybe $20 before it becomes a consumer product.
You are right that my numbers (10 years development, 99% chance of failure) are wild guesses - based on 35 years of watching promising new technologies move, or usually not, from the labs. Lots of unexpected problems turn up in trying to commercialize new technology, so most new developments die without ever being produced. If it gets past that hurdle, it will still die in the market unless it is much better than existing technologies, which haven't been standing still while all the problems are worked out. For example, bubble memory once sounded this good relative to competing technology (almost as fast as semiconductor RAM, nonvolatile, and might have been cheaper than disk drives), but by the time it was actually in mass production, semiconductor RAM was much faster and cheaper, while hard drives had shrunk from the size of washing machines to small enough for PC's, became cheaper and more capacious than bubble and not too much slower. There weren't enough applications where bubble was definitely better to support efficient mass production, so it was soon priced right out of the market.
Judging from this report, they haven't taken the first steps to commercializing the hole memory. They are writing and reading with a scanning electron microscope - a lab instrument that probably costs six figures. And they are writing 1,000 times slower than a modern hard drive. It would be nice to have a full backup of the server farm fit on a credit card, but not if it takes days to complete the backup... They need to move it to a purpose-built machine, solve the speed problem, get the cost way down, standardize formats, and get the drives and cartridges on the market. Sounds like ten years - if it is possible to solve the cost and the speed problems in the same machine. Using 1,000 heads instead of one would solve the speed problem _today_, but it sure doesn't help the cost issue. And by the time they are ready to market it, what will they be competing against?
4000 degrees. You somehow got an extra zero in there.
For reading, the tips are 570F (about 300C). Write and erase are higher temperatures. For comparison, ordinary solder begins to melt at about 180C. In other words, the polymer media could be heat damaged, but the chips would be falling off your electronics first.
More to the point: nearly half of all murderers (in the USA) either turn themselves in, kill themselves on the scene, or don't even try to conceal obvious clues leading straight to them. I think that back in the 1950's this was more than 2/3, and it still is in many rural areas. (Of course, the Nicole Simpson murder appears to be one of those obvious cases, and the LAPD managed to blow it. The cops in my rural county have never cracked a non-obvious case, and I'm sure they would do much, much worse against Johnny Cochrane.) So, yes, lots of murders are committed by people with no real hope of getting away with it. Some (especially the gang type murders) might be deterred, but now and then you'd have the gang controlling the police...
throwaway phones...
on
Cradle to Cradle
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· Score: 3, Insightful
What is really needed isn't decomposing upholstery, it's a lot fewer ideas like this.
If we really wanted to do things the *natural* way we would produce as much waste as we feel like in any form that suits us. At the same time we would look around us and try to use any waste we see lying around.
This is the part of biology the average "environmentalist" doesn't understand. Quite contrary to their romanticized view of nature, "natural" (unthinking) organisms pay no heed whatever to their ecological impact. If bacteria find a good enough food source, they'll reproduce like mad for a few hours, until they've poisoned themselves in their own wastes. Larger animals can't destroy the ecology that supports them that fast, but remove whatever factors normally keep them in check (predators, e.g.), and it will happen in the long run.
Humans have the possibility of being smarter than bacteria - but better not start out with romantic misconceptions of what you are trying to protect.
no mention was made at all about how comfortable those eco-chairs were. How long could you use it before the upholstery wore out? How much it costs to make? How much pepsi, or sweat, does it absorb before it decomposes right in your living room? Does it actually decompose in a landfill, or does it last forever like most other "biodegradeable" materials? (Do they really think people will just toss their trash furniture in the backyard and wait for it to melt into the soil? Um, I've got neighbors like that, but the town council is giving them a hard time...)
I expect this trend to continue until the only people still watching free TV are the morons who don't have any money to spend on the advertised products anyhow. OTOH, at Family Video I can rent two movies (1 new release, one oldie) for $1. Even if the movies weren't better than 99% of TV (and they are), 3-hours ad-free is well worth a buck.
I turned off the cable when they raised the rates again last summer, and never bothered to hook the antenna back up. What I miss: Buffy (but our cable company doesn't carry UBN anyhow). And it sounds like there's some good stuff on the Sci-Fi channel, which you also don't get here no matter how much you pay those !@#$%^&* freebooters at the cable company.
I'm just hoping enough people will get disgusted with 50 channels of crap and join me, so it becomes more profitable to release good shows to DVD than to the dying networks.
What bothers me the most is] the IFF (identify friend or foe) transmitter. I really, really hope that IFF does not depend on security by obscurity, but rather on keeping the codes secret and changing them often. Planes fly all over the world with the same IFF gear, some of them will fall into unfriendly hands. Of course, it makes a bit of a difference whether those hands are a Taliban peasant who doesn't understand anything more complex than an AK-47, or (say) a Saudi terrorist millionaire who can buy a research lab to analyze it... But at any rate, once a system like this has been widely deployed for a couple of years, you have to assume the guys with the most technological capability have obtained copies - so your security had better be in the codes.
3. Carriers might be the fastest ship (at least in heavy weather), but they really hate to outrun the escorting destroyers/cruisers/frigates, because then some little boat could sneak up on the carrier and blow large holes in it. And the escorts are not nuclear.
Do nuke carriers still carry some fuel oil so they can refuel their escorts in an emergency? As far as I know, fleet oilers can keep up in a normal cruise, but get left far behind when the warships crank up the shaft RPM's.
in a typical carrier formation, the oiler and the carrier were both critical, high-value assets... loosing either one would seriously degrade the effectiveness of the entire task force. Of course, it was also doctrine that such formations kept a few miles seperation between the oiler and other ships, if at all possible... Oilers are replaceable. Carriers aren't. Of course, considering the appetite of the destroyers for fuel oil as well as the air wing's consumption of JP-5, losing an oiler too soon might mean aborting the plan until a new oiler arrives.
In WWII, sometimes oilers were mistaken for carriers. At the battle of the Coral Sea, not only did a scout plane report an oiler as a carrier, but about 100 Japanese airplanes bombed and torpedoed it, apparently without noticing the mistake, because their commander claimed one "carrier". (It was going home with empty tanks, and it actually didn't sink until the Navy took the crew off and scuttled it.) I doubt that anyone would make that mistake at close range with a modern carrier, but if you were shooting cruise missiles from 200 miles, one great big long ship gives the same radar reflection as another...
Not necessarily true. Identify where the missiles are coming from and bomb it, or send fighters down a parallel path to the missiles to hook in and kill the launching airplanes or stop part of the missiles _early_. The problem is, likely the theater commanders have to call Washington for permission to bomb, and it takes too long. There was a time when you also had to worry about whether our planes could penetrate to where they needed to be to cut off the flow (short of asking for an ICBM launch), but I doubt that's an issue anywhere now - if the commander has permission to risk a few aircrews before his entire fleet is at risk!
Also, anytime you've got a heavy battery, remember that when there's a short, the battery is a source of almost infinite DC current. At high DC currents, circuit breakers may weld shut when they ought to open, and if that's your only protection, your battery will pour energy into the wires and short until something burns away. It's a real fire hazard.
For proper protection where large batteries are involved, use fuses - best are those cylinders bigger than your thumb, like they used for the mains in houses 50 years ago, but the 1-1/4 by 1/4 inch glass fuses are apparently good enough for a car battery.
This might not actually be dangerous (unless you jump too far when you feel that tingle and crack your head). Solid state electronics always leaks a little bit. In most power supplies, the first thing the cord goes into is a bridge diode, which converts 120VAC to about 340VDC. If these were perfect diodes they would completely block the DC from the power prongs, but since they are real devices they have a few micro amps of reverse current. This might charge the prongs up enough to feel a shock, and it might be measurable with a voltmeter, but there's no way you could get enough current to be hurt. (Except if a diode was shorted, but in most cases the device would then be quite inoperative. Of course, if you work on "broken" electronics, it's hard not to sometimes find something like this the hard way.)
Another place I've seen this is with solid state relays. Is it really switched off? Hook it up to the line, touch the output terminals with a voltmeter, and it reads nearly line voltage (440VAC the time one of our machine repairmen came running to me). Put a 100K load across it, and there's about 5 volts. The relay is indeed switched off, but because it's a block of silicon, some electrons will sneak through it anyhow.
All this gives me a real liking for those big old electromechanical relays that physically separated the input and output when they were opened. Especially the ones with springs so heavy that welded contacts would either tear apart and open, or break open somewhere else... There's no question that when those are off (which often can be visually checked), they are really off. But they are expensive and heavy, and the big ones need solid metal mounts or everything shakes when they operate.
I heard this long ago in Air Force tech school, only the victim was an Airman. I think it's a myth; as far as electricity goes, blood is dilute salt water, and most everything else is dilute salt water with various membranes in the way, and I don't think 9V could put that much current through it. But it is definitely worth remembering that most of the body's resistance is in the skin - and so the jolt you get depends very much on the quality of the skin contact.
Lightly touch a small exposed 110V wire with dry skin, and you just get a little tingle. Grab a big chunk of metal in each hand, and 50V might be more than enough to freeze your muscles with your hands clamped, so you stay there and fry. That's pretty well understood, but another thing that isn't so understood is what rings, etc., can do to you. If a live wire touches the ring, the electricity reaches a much larger area of skin, and the current is multiplied accordingly (if the other side of the circuit is also a large enough or wet enough area). And you might be sweating under the ring, too.
I worked as a repair tech for six years, and because you have to power the stuff up to troubleshoot, and because it's _broken_ so the power doesn't always stay where it belongs, I've gotten zapped many times. It never hurt me - aside from minor bruises from jumping away from the electricity. The rules: no rings, no watch or a cheap plastic one, plastic instead of wire-frame glasses, watch what you're doing always, keep one hand where it can't touch metal, and brush any metal you might have to touch with the back of your hand first (so reflex will break the contact if it's hot). And learn NOT to jump when you're up a ladder...
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First, a general note: Many companies are remarkably unaware of the going rates until departing key employees enlighten them. Hence counteroffers occur because you showed them the hard way that they miscalculated your market value before. If everyone is adults, that is probably all there is to it. If your boss isn't emotionally adult, don't miss an opportunity to leave...
* You have now made your employer aware that you are unhappy. From this day on, your loyalty will always be in question.
Loyalty??? How 1950's... It depends on the company culture. If they bothered with the counter-offer, either it isn't too big a problem, or else they really, really need you to stick around while they hunt for a replacement. Better understand your own company well enough to tell the difference.
I am assuming here that you repeatedly told your boss the salary was inadequate _before_ you started looking outside. If your outside jobhunting was a complete surprise, whether because you never asked for a raise or because the boss is an idiot whose forgotten all the times you showed him salary surveys, etc., then you'd better get out, because you have pissed off a powerful idiot...
* When promotion time comes around, your employer will remember who is loyal and who is not.
You expected a promotion on top of that big pay raise?
* When times get tough, your employer will begin the cutbacks with you.
Or maybe if they needed you bad enough to make the counteroffer, you'll be the last one they lay off. But usually in a real crunch the question is not you, it's whether the work you are doing is still vital considering the product lines they are dumping.
* Accepting a counteroffer is an insult to your intelligence and a blow to your personal pride; you were bought.
If there's any chance your boss is as childish as this, by all means get out. If you are as childish as this, I hope it wasn't my company that made that offer...
* Where is the money for the counteroffer coming from? All companies have wage and salary guidelines which must be followed. Is it your next raise early?
Whether you can expect continuing raises beyond the counteroffer is a question you must ask. However, in most companies wage and salary guidelines matter only as long as employees believe they are a reasonable excuse for not keeping salaries competitive. They'll tell you they can't give you a raise because of the guidelines, but it's just an excuse. If they really can't break the guidelines to hire and keep the people they really need, you should have been looking for a new job a long time ago, because this company is doomed to death by bureacracy.
* Your company will immediately start looking for a new person at a cheaper price.
Maybe. If you work on a project by project basis, they might be just stringing you along to the end of the current project, but otherwise, if they thought they could replace you they'd have said goodbye already.
* The same circumstances that now cause you to consider a change will repeat themselves in the future, even if you accept a counteroffer.
If you were looking for other work because of working conditions, don't even think about counteroffers. (Unless it's to promote you to CEO so you _can_ fix the problems.) But if it was just about pay raises, just make sure the counteroffer is big enough that you won't need another raise before the next merger/split/reorganization/corporate bankruptcy makes it irrelevant anyway.
* Statistics show that if you accept a counteroffer, the probability of voluntarily leaving in six months or being let go in one year is extremely high.
Source? I can make up statistics too.
* Once the word gets out, the relationship that you now enjoy with your co-workers will never be the same. You will lose the personal satisfaction of peer group acceptance.
Refer back to what I said about loyalty. Your office isnt like a Little League team, I hope
* What type of company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they will give you what you are worth?
A typical one. That's partly because so many companies don't know what their employees are worth until they have to think about replacing them, but also it's in the fundamental nature of commercial negotiations. You are selling yourself. In any negotiated sale, a person who lets it be seen that he isn't willing to walk away is going to get screwed.
To go back to "loyalty": in this context, it's a trick to put you in the ready-to-be-screwed frame of mind.
Or maybe: This job is effing impossible unless they let me change out the users, and I fear I'll get canned when they screw up and lose critical data again...
lawyamike: If you really do have legal expertise, could you please explain what our recourses are when (1) the EULA cannot be read without opening the package, and (2) the store won't give refunds if the package was opened. (In the past, the EULA was generally printed on a sealed envelope containing the disks, but now quite often it is not printed at all, you first see it when you start installation.) It would seem to me that this voids the EULA, but just how do you handle it legally?
I'm thinking you could send out a registered letter to the vendor, saying something like: "I do not accept the EULA on XXXX, purchased xx/xx/xxxx at (store name and address). I attempted to return the product to (store), but they refused to refund the purchase price. Therefore, I consider the EULA void, and until and unless you arrange for a full refund, I am free to use the product in accordance with copyright law and the fair use doctrine."
I work for Target Corp., and we do NOT accept returns on software (also CDs and DVDs) that have been opened. Period.
Then you should have your ass hauled before a judge every goddamned time someone cones in with an opened piece of software which says, "If you do not accept these terms, return the product for a full refund to the place you bought it."
Not quite correct - Target isn't responsible for that EULA. It's up to the software companies to see that there is a reasonable way to return the software. IANAL, but I'd think that, if you attempt to return the software and cannot get a refund, then the EULA is void. Write a letter to the head of the software company telling them so, registered mail...
This doesn't mean that you can violate copyright.
Finally, the Mythic case is different from the typical shrink-wrap EULA case in that the EULA concerns an ongoing service (data on their server). This makes some restrictions sound far more reasonable than they would be in a simple sale. Also, Mythic presented the EULA everytime the user logged in.
The Post Office is a monopoly?
Definitely.
What about UPS and FedEx? And Airborn Express?
They are not permitted by law to compete with the regular mail. If you send a lot of letters or lightweight packages, the PO may audit you to see if these were actually "urgent" or could have gone by snail mail...
But states do NOT naturally form politically significant blocks anymore. Several of the big states split almost 49-49 this time. Even though the electoral college gives a numerical advantage to the small states, did you see anyone campaigning there? They were busy in the big states, trying to get the last possible .1%, in hopes of "winning" by 49.0 to 48.9% and getting ALL the electoral votes. In my state, among others, the electoral votes were for someone 51% of us voted against and probably despised. (I suspect a lot of the other 49% despised the guy they voted for too, just less than the other one.) And the random effects of this...left it up to a chief vote-counter appointed by GWB's brother and five (in)Justices appointed by his father.
If Florida's electoral votes had been divided proportionally to the popular vote, Gore and Bush would have definitely got 12 each. I'm not sure whether Nader, Bush, or Gore would have got the 25th one, but it's unlikely that it would have mattered. I'm pretty sure that if other states did the same thing, _some_ third party would have got the last electoral college vote in Michigan, and maybe other states. If the vote was close enough for Florida's 25th vote to matter, likely no one would have a majority anyhow and Congress would have picked the winner, rather than extra-constitutional court decisions...
You mean they might have to choose between working on this bill or actually reading one of the others to find out which of our rights they are violating this time?
I can boycott a business that I dislike, but it's pretty hard to boycott the government. (It sure didn't work out for Randy Weaver or those people in Waco.)
OTOH, have the government legislate a monopoly for a business over an essential service, and you get monopolistic behavior with no accountability. Like the US Post Office. Or maybe ICANN...
I hadn't realized from the first article that they already had their MEMS chip sort of running rather than just talking about it. But they've still got a long ways to go. I don't see how they'll get the speed they need without giving each head its own drive circuit so all the heads can go at once, rather than X-Y addressing. They've got to put the drive electronics on the chip, then figure out how to produce it at a reasonable cost. 3mm square is almost as big as a Pentium CPU.
Five years might be possible, if production experience with the few other MEMS devices now being produced is relevant to sorting out the issues with this one, and if IBM doesn't let bureacracy get in the way. (I'm afraid that last requirement is about as likely as a Vulcan ship stopping by and helping us solve all our problems...)
A practical storage device will also have to move the chip over the media, or vice versa, with accuracy of a few nanometers, and probably will have to work in two dimensions. (Disk head coils only work in one.) This is easy if you don't mind spending a lot of money, but they'll have to get the transport mechanism cost down to maybe $20 before it becomes a consumer product.
Maybe they have no idea how to get the cost under $50K...
You are right that my numbers (10 years development, 99% chance of failure) are wild guesses - based on 35 years of watching promising new technologies move, or usually not, from the labs. Lots of unexpected problems turn up in trying to commercialize new technology, so most new developments die without ever being produced. If it gets past that hurdle, it will still die in the market unless it is much better than existing technologies, which haven't been standing still while all the problems are worked out. For example, bubble memory once sounded this good relative to competing technology (almost as fast as semiconductor RAM, nonvolatile, and might have been cheaper than disk drives), but by the time it was actually in mass production, semiconductor RAM was much faster and cheaper, while hard drives had shrunk from the size of washing machines to small enough for PC's, became cheaper and more capacious than bubble and not too much slower. There weren't enough applications where bubble was definitely better to support efficient mass production, so it was soon priced right out of the market.
Judging from this report, they haven't taken the first steps to commercializing the hole memory. They are writing and reading with a scanning electron microscope - a lab instrument that probably costs six figures. And they are writing 1,000 times slower than a modern hard drive. It would be nice to have a full backup of the server farm fit on a credit card, but not if it takes days to complete the backup... They need to move it to a purpose-built machine, solve the speed problem, get the cost way down, standardize formats, and get the drives and cartridges on the market. Sounds like ten years - if it is possible to solve the cost and the speed problems in the same machine. Using 1,000 heads instead of one would solve the speed problem _today_, but it sure doesn't help the cost issue. And by the time they are ready to market it, what will they be competing against?
4000 degrees. You somehow got an extra zero in there.
For reading, the tips are 570F (about 300C). Write and erase are higher temperatures. For comparison, ordinary solder begins to melt at about 180C. In other words, the polymer media could be heat damaged, but the chips would be falling off your electronics first.
They just sold their Hard disk unit to hitachi. And a few days later they report a new storage format.
But the new technology is 10 years from market - with maybe a 1% chance of actually getting to market.
More to the point: nearly half of all murderers (in the USA) either turn themselves in, kill themselves on the scene, or don't even try to conceal obvious clues leading straight to them. I think that back in the 1950's this was more than 2/3, and it still is in many rural areas. (Of course, the Nicole Simpson murder appears to be one of those obvious cases, and the LAPD managed to blow it. The cops in my rural county have never cracked a non-obvious case, and I'm sure they would do much, much worse against Johnny Cochrane.) So, yes, lots of murders are committed by people with no real hope of getting away with it. Some (especially the gang type murders) might be deterred, but now and then you'd have the gang controlling the police...
What is really needed isn't decomposing upholstery, it's a lot fewer ideas like this.
If we really wanted to do things the *natural* way we would produce as much waste as we feel like in any form that suits us. At the same time we would look around us and try to use any waste we see lying around.
This is the part of biology the average "environmentalist" doesn't understand. Quite contrary to their romanticized view of nature, "natural" (unthinking) organisms pay no heed whatever to their ecological impact. If bacteria find a good enough food source, they'll reproduce like mad for a few hours, until they've poisoned themselves in their own wastes. Larger animals can't destroy the ecology that supports them that fast, but remove whatever factors normally keep them in check (predators, e.g.), and it will happen in the long run.
Humans have the possibility of being smarter than bacteria - but better not start out with romantic misconceptions of what you are trying to protect.
no mention was made at all about how comfortable those eco-chairs were. How long could you use it before the upholstery wore out?
How much it costs to make? How much pepsi, or sweat, does it absorb before it decomposes right in your living room? Does it actually decompose in a landfill, or does it last forever like most other "biodegradeable" materials? (Do they really think people will just toss their trash furniture in the backyard and wait for it to melt into the soil? Um, I've got neighbors like that, but the town council is giving them a hard time...)
I expect this trend to continue until the only people still watching free TV are the morons who don't have any money to spend on the advertised products anyhow. OTOH, at Family Video I can rent two movies (1 new release, one oldie) for $1. Even if the movies weren't better than 99% of TV (and they are), 3-hours ad-free is well worth a buck.
I turned off the cable when they raised the rates again last summer, and never bothered to hook the antenna back up. What I miss: Buffy (but our cable company doesn't carry UBN anyhow). And it sounds like there's some good stuff on the Sci-Fi channel, which you also don't get here no matter how much you pay those !@#$%^&* freebooters at the cable company.
I'm just hoping enough people will get disgusted with 50 channels of crap and join me, so it becomes more profitable to release good shows to DVD than to the dying networks.
What bothers me the most is] the IFF (identify friend or foe) transmitter. I really, really hope that IFF does not depend on security by obscurity, but rather on keeping the codes secret and changing them often. Planes fly all over the world with the same IFF gear, some of them will fall into unfriendly hands. Of course, it makes a bit of a difference whether those hands are a Taliban peasant who doesn't understand anything more complex than an AK-47, or (say) a Saudi terrorist millionaire who can buy a research lab to analyze it... But at any rate, once a system like this has been widely deployed for a couple of years, you have to assume the guys with the most technological capability have obtained copies - so your security had better be in the codes.
3. Carriers might be the fastest ship (at least in heavy weather), but they really hate to outrun the escorting destroyers/cruisers/frigates, because then some little boat could sneak up on the carrier and blow large holes in it. And the escorts are not nuclear.
Do nuke carriers still carry some fuel oil so they can refuel their escorts in an emergency? As far as I know, fleet oilers can keep up in a normal cruise, but get left far behind when the warships crank up the shaft RPM's.
in a typical carrier formation, the oiler and the carrier were both critical, high-value assets... loosing either one would seriously degrade the effectiveness of the entire task force. Of course, it was also doctrine that such formations kept a few miles seperation between the oiler and other ships, if at all possible...
Oilers are replaceable. Carriers aren't. Of course, considering the appetite of the destroyers for fuel oil as well as the air wing's consumption of JP-5, losing an oiler too soon might mean aborting the plan until a new oiler arrives.
In WWII, sometimes oilers were mistaken for carriers. At the battle of the Coral Sea, not only did a scout plane report an oiler as a carrier, but about 100 Japanese airplanes bombed and torpedoed it, apparently without noticing the mistake, because their commander claimed one "carrier". (It was going home with empty tanks, and it actually didn't sink until the Navy took the crew off and scuttled it.) I doubt that anyone would make that mistake at close range with a modern carrier, but if you were shooting cruise missiles from 200 miles, one great big long ship gives the same radar reflection as another...
There's no way to stop a rollback.
Not necessarily true. Identify where the missiles are coming from and bomb it, or send fighters down a parallel path to the missiles to hook in and kill the launching airplanes or stop part of the missiles _early_. The problem is, likely the theater commanders have to call Washington for permission to bomb, and it takes too long. There was a time when you also had to worry about whether our planes could penetrate to where they needed to be to cut off the flow (short of asking for an ICBM launch), but I doubt that's an issue anywhere now - if the commander has permission to risk a few aircrews before his entire fleet is at risk!
Also, anytime you've got a heavy battery, remember that when there's a short, the battery is a source of almost infinite DC current. At high DC currents, circuit breakers may weld shut when they ought to open, and if that's your only protection, your battery will pour energy into the wires and short until something burns away. It's a real fire hazard.
For proper protection where large batteries are involved, use fuses - best are those cylinders bigger than your thumb, like they used for the mains in houses 50 years ago, but the 1-1/4 by 1/4 inch glass fuses are apparently good enough for a car battery.
This might not actually be dangerous (unless you jump too far when you feel that tingle and crack your head). Solid state electronics always leaks a little bit. In most power supplies, the first thing the cord goes into is a bridge diode, which converts 120VAC to about 340VDC. If these were perfect diodes they would completely block the DC from the power prongs, but since they are real devices they have a few micro amps of reverse current. This might charge the prongs up enough to feel a shock, and it might be measurable with a voltmeter, but there's no way you could get enough current to be hurt. (Except if a diode was shorted, but in most cases the device would then be quite inoperative. Of course, if you work on "broken" electronics, it's hard not to sometimes find something like this the hard way.)
Another place I've seen this is with solid state relays. Is it really switched off? Hook it up to the line, touch the output terminals with a voltmeter, and it reads nearly line voltage (440VAC the time one of our machine repairmen came running to me). Put a 100K load across it, and there's about 5 volts. The relay is indeed switched off, but because it's a block of silicon, some electrons will sneak through it anyhow.
All this gives me a real liking for those big old electromechanical relays that physically separated the input and output when they were opened. Especially the ones with springs so heavy that welded contacts would either tear apart and open, or break open somewhere else... There's no question that when those are off (which often can be visually checked), they are really off. But they are expensive and heavy, and the big ones need solid metal mounts or everything shakes when they operate.
I heard this long ago in Air Force tech school, only the victim was an Airman. I think it's a myth; as far as electricity goes, blood is dilute salt water, and most everything else is dilute salt water with various membranes in the way, and I don't think 9V could put that much current through it. But it is definitely worth remembering that most of the body's resistance is in the skin - and so the jolt you get depends very much on the quality of the skin contact.
Lightly touch a small exposed 110V wire with dry skin, and you just get a little tingle. Grab a big chunk of metal in each hand, and 50V might be more than enough to freeze your muscles with your hands clamped, so you stay there and fry. That's pretty well understood, but another thing that isn't so understood is what rings, etc., can do to you. If a live wire touches the ring, the electricity reaches a much larger area of skin, and the current is multiplied accordingly (if the other side of the circuit is also a large enough or wet enough area). And you might be sweating under the ring, too.
I worked as a repair tech for six years, and because you have to power the stuff up to troubleshoot, and because it's _broken_ so the power doesn't always stay where it belongs, I've gotten zapped many times. It never hurt me - aside from minor bruises from jumping away from the electricity. The rules: no rings, no watch or a cheap plastic one, plastic instead of wire-frame glasses, watch what you're doing always, keep one hand where it can't touch metal, and brush any metal you might have to touch with the back of your hand first (so reflex will break the contact if it's hot). And learn NOT to jump when you're up a ladder...