I really wish folks would stop bringing up the Streisand effect - because it's mostly bullshit both in nature and in the way it gets misused. (As you did OP, you might want to read that article yourself.) Sometimes it happens that way, most of the time it doesn't.
The "problem" is one of critical mass: there's no reason to use a social networking site unless your friends use the same social networking site.
It's not just a lack of critical mass, it's a lack of.. well, pretty much everything needed to create a critical mass. No business pages or fan pages or group pages...
Powerful politicians stake their political lives on something scientific that they may or may not understand on any level, and suddenly opposing scientific views are damaging to their careers. Even if their side of the argument is correct, they muddy the water with dishonest tactics designed to discredit the opposition. Al Gore and climate change are of course the best examples of this.
While your karma whoring rant is to be expected... It's not insightful, and it's pretty much irrelevant because scientific views play no part in this story.
Why not nominate the Nobel Peace Prize to the Science Editorial Board. They are correct in that "political maps that seek to advance disputed territorial claims have no place in scientific papers".
Then why was the Science Editorial Board insisting that the map be changed to one that seeks to advance a disputed territorial claim? There's two sides to every dispute, and their preferred map is the one preferred by their 'side' - which in effect is every bit as political as the map preferred by the Chinese.
Why couldn't we move things like geographic surveys to the Department of the Interior? Why do we have to have a seperate agency for that? It just adds another level of bueacracy, and thus cost.
If you're referring to the USGS - it already is part of the Department of the Interior. So, no added bureaucracy, no added cost.
It has a separate name for the same reason Purchasing has a different name from Accounts Receivable - they can't all be "those guys over in the corner".
Once the oil begins to run out, heavier-than-air airraft are going to become scarce.
On some planet where hydrocarbons can't be synthesized from common (and non petroleum based) feedstocks and energy from a nuclear or other (no fossil) based power plant. But we don't live on such a planet.
(I hate to break it to you, but WWII was over sixty years ago - chemistry has advanced just a little bit since then.)
've been refitting an ocean cruising sailboat and learning more about metallurgy and materials science than I ever imagined
the corrosion and other effects mean that few commercial vessels last over 20 years - it's cheaper to buy a new one than to fix the old one.
You may have learned more about metallurgy and materials science than you ever imagined, but you know much less than than you think you do. Commercial ships routinely last more then 20 years, as do warships. The usual killer for commercial ships isn't corrosion, it's being outmoded. The usual killer for warships is the systems being worn out, hull corrosion is rarely a factor.
Look at the Fleet Guide for the Washington State Ferries - the bulk of the fleet is over thirty years old. (Though you'd never know it to ride aboard them.)
Contrast that with SpaceX, which employs a few hundred people to run their Falcon program. Now you see why they can do things so much cheaper.
You're absolutely correct - it's always going to be cheaper to operate a mini van than a full size eighteen wheeler. Your mistake lies in confusing one for the other.
In today's news, the nation which sent a man to the moon, but can no longer put a man into orbit, is buying tickets on stunt-planes to recreate the Mercury suborbital missions.
Not even close - as SS2 hasn't a fraction of Mercury's performance. What SS2 does is replace something NASA has been using for years - sounding rockets and the Vomit Comet.
That assumes your book ever generates a profit... the vast majority don't and the publisher eats the losses. So you have a choice, assume the risk yourself, or trade income to someone else in return for them accepting the losses.
This reminds me of a scifi (short) story I read too many years ago - I forget the title or author - I think pi was also being calculated to the Nth and some some magic number was reached and the universe started to unravel. The stars started blinking off, etc.
This sounds like a jumbled recollection of Clarke's Nine Billion Names of God, in particular because the last line of your description is pretty much the last line of your story. (And a line that's stuck with me too over the forty odd years since I first read it.)
Sir Arthur was a master at writing memorable one liners and then constructing an entire story around them.
My advice to the young men of/. is all chicks look hot when they're 19, so don't pay attention to that when wife shopping; examine how their moms look, because that's what you're gonna be waking up to in 20 years
For those sadly malformed people who place a premium on physical appearance, that's something valuable to know.
But my bride of twenty two years is still hot to me - and I simply don't care what other people think. We've been mistaken for newlyweds are recently as a month ago, so we're doing something right.
The Tunguska event didn't raise too much atmospheric dust or cause much occlusion
And while one needle prick won't kill you, three thousand of them will quite likely be problematical.
might have released in total ten gigatons or so, which is what, twice the total world nuclear arsenal except without fallout.
Look up "nuclear winter". While the more spectacular and lurid claims of the original proponents have been debunked, it's currently believed that a large scale nuclear war will cause significant climate change.
It's much cheaper than a fleet of employees and trucks.
With probably tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of points being needed to be monitored annually, I seriously doubt that. The admin costs alone are going to mount pretty quickly, as will the costs of advertising the program, etc... etc...
If someone is frustrated about signal problems, they can run the app at any time to automatically report a problem (no points). After a while, when the unsolicited points in an area add up, it should show up on a map to help Verizon prioritize future coverage.
Which would then need a truck to go out and measure and characterize the area precisely enough to engineer the new coverage...
While this is all well and good, I'm surprised they can't get this data from the handsets themselves - Dropped calls / choppy calls / slow-loading pages, low-bandwidth connections
That depends on having handsets available in the area to monitor, and on being able to retrieve stored data from the handsets, and on normalizing the data from a zillion different handsets to allow for analysis. Even if all the handset manufacturers equipped their phones with proper monitoring hardware/[firm|soft]ware and agreed on a standard method of storing and retrieving the data - it would still be a huge task to retrieve and analyze it all, and it still wouldn't be enough. (See below).
I'm surprised their own network monitoring systems can't provide this data without have to drive millions of miles.
This *is* [at least part of] their network monitoring systems. The problem is, with network monitoring, and even with your handset monitoring scheme, all you know is that "this area" is having problems. It's the eyes and antenna on the ground that lets you figure out the why and how to correct for it.
Not that Verizon is the only company with this kind of mobile monitoring anyhow - they're just the only company that makes a big deal out of it.
Gah, you're entirely correct. Precise, not accurate. I've been trying to train myself to remember the difference, but it's not working.
Not to worry, I get 'em ack basswards all too frequently too...
I made the assumption that (like almost anything with an Li-ion battery) the car computer just passes along the value given by the battery's microcontroller. The microcontroller prevents the battery from being discharged to the point of damage.
Regardless of which circuit board is doing the calculations, the issues with calculating SOC are the same. I think your assumption is a safe one however, because it allows the battery pack's design to be altered without having to alter the cars soft- or firm- ware. (And because SOC data needs to be available even when the pack is not installed in a car.)
The microcontroller prevents the battery from being discharged to the point of damage. I don't think this hack will break anything, but I don't like it either. If you need to zoom in to see if you can make it home to charge, you're doing it wrong.
On this, we're in complete agreement. Doubly so since how fast that last 1% is going to be consumed is so dependent on outside variables like traffic lights, detours, terrain, etc... Nobody with any sense would drive any distance with less than a quarter of a tank, so doing so with less than an a twelfth of a tank just seems silly.
The hack produces a more *precise* charge gauge, whether or not it is more *accurate* is unknown without considerable engineering work. (And for the reasons discussed below, with 100% certainty it is not more accurate - because you're still relying on the same hardware and software.)
Don't confuse precise and accurate, they are not synonyms despite being commonly treated so.
The computer can measure the SOC of the battery to within less than 1%, but dumbs it down to a strip of 12 bars.
And, as I said in my original post, there may very well be valid engineering reasons for doing so. A battery charge gauge isn't the equivalent of a fuel gauge as you aren't directly measuring a physical quantity. A battery charge gauge rather is displaying a calculated quantity, a calculation with a significant number of variables. The value of many of those variables cannot themselves be directly measured, and thus can be quite fuzzy. Even if they can be directly measured, that doesn't mean there isn't an element of fuzz there too - measuring devices are only as good as their budget, design, construction, maintenance, and calibration will allow. (And the Leaf isn't built by the people who built the NASA moon rovers. Or even by the people who built the Shuttle.) What this all adds up to, is that while the computer may be able to calculate the SOC with precision, that doesn't mean that the calculated value is accurate because of all the fuzz in the system. (GIGO.)
Given that the consequences for the battery (and it's owner) if the battery is run flat - it's an entirely reasonable engineering decision to encourage the owner to (re)charge the battery well before reaching that state.
Give me a baseball bat and 5 minutes with any cocksucker that steals my shit, and he'll wish he didn't. Sure you might have my laptop, but I just knocked out all of your teeth and broke your legs. Fair trade.
And when he charges you with assault and battery - you'll wish you hadn't. Is ten-to-twenty and a felony on your record a fair trade?
Perhaps Nissan knows something about their batteries and BMS that he doesn't, and the false zero reading is there to ensure the batteries last as long as they're intended to?
There's other possibilities too... Maybe there's an oddity in the discharge curve right near the bottom, or in the capacity reading right near the bottom, or the metering system isn't quite 100% reliable near the bottom...
I don't care what kind of engineer you are, if you don't have the fulls specs and know all of the considerations taken and tradeoffs made by the original designers - you're just guessing.
Hacking a $1000 computer or a $100 RC airplane is one thing. Hacking (and possibly voiding the warranty and your insurance) on a $25,000 automobile... not something I'd want to guess on.
I think it was Freakonomics that pointed out that the price of sex has dropped since the 30's. Prostitutes used to cost more than the median monthly wage, now they cost the price of a meal
I'm gonna call bullshit on this one - because there has never been a single price for prostitutes any more than there is a single price for pretty much anything else.
As to the rest of your arguments and replies... I'm gonna quote Buzz Lightyear, "you are one sad little man". One with some decidedly odd ideas about the human race.
Slashdot Mirror
I really wish folks would stop bringing up the Streisand effect - because it's mostly bullshit both in nature and in the way it gets misused. (As you did OP, you might want to read that article yourself.) Sometimes it happens that way, most of the time it doesn't.
It's not just a lack of critical mass, it's a lack of.. well, pretty much everything needed to create a critical mass. No business pages or fan pages or group pages...
While your karma whoring rant is to be expected... It's not insightful, and it's pretty much irrelevant because scientific views play no part in this story.
Then why was the Science Editorial Board insisting that the map be changed to one that seeks to advance a disputed territorial claim? There's two sides to every dispute, and their preferred map is the one preferred by their 'side' - which in effect is every bit as political as the map preferred by the Chinese.
If you're referring to the USGS - it already is part of the Department of the Interior. So, no added bureaucracy, no added cost.
It has a separate name for the same reason Purchasing has a different name from Accounts Receivable - they can't all be "those guys over in the corner".
On some planet where hydrocarbons can't be synthesized from common (and non petroleum based) feedstocks and energy from a nuclear or other (no fossil) based power plant. But we don't live on such a planet.
(I hate to break it to you, but WWII was over sixty years ago - chemistry has advanced just a little bit since then.)
Not only are those not 'up and coming' actresses (as specified in TFA), they're a minority out of actresses of their cohorts.
And then consider Zubrin is himself an optimist as to what is cheap and easy.
You may have learned more about metallurgy and materials science than you ever imagined, but you know much less than than you think you do. Commercial ships routinely last more then 20 years, as do warships. The usual killer for commercial ships isn't corrosion, it's being outmoded. The usual killer for warships is the systems being worn out, hull corrosion is rarely a factor.
Look at the Fleet Guide for the Washington State Ferries - the bulk of the fleet is over thirty years old. (Though you'd never know it to ride aboard them.)
Unless I'm writing a reply dealing with accounting, her specialty and something /. is pretty much innocent of, neither have I.
You utterly failed to understand me - because I said no such thing. You're projecting your sad little obsession on me.
You're absolutely correct - it's always going to be cheaper to operate a mini van than a full size eighteen wheeler. Your mistake lies in confusing one for the other.
Not even close - as SS2 hasn't a fraction of Mercury's performance. What SS2 does is replace something NASA has been using for years - sounding rockets and the Vomit Comet.
That assumes your book ever generates a profit... the vast majority don't and the publisher eats the losses. So you have a choice, assume the risk yourself, or trade income to someone else in return for them accepting the losses.
22 is how many years we've been married idiot.
This sounds like a jumbled recollection of Clarke's Nine Billion Names of God , in particular because the last line of your description is pretty much the last line of your story. (And a line that's stuck with me too over the forty odd years since I first read it.)
Sir Arthur was a master at writing memorable one liners and then constructing an entire story around them.
For those sadly malformed people who place a premium on physical appearance, that's something valuable to know.
But my bride of twenty two years is still hot to me - and I simply don't care what other people think. We've been mistaken for newlyweds are recently as a month ago, so we're doing something right.
And while one needle prick won't kill you, three thousand of them will quite likely be problematical.
Look up "nuclear winter". While the more spectacular and lurid claims of the original proponents have been debunked, it's currently believed that a large scale nuclear war will cause significant climate change.
With probably tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of points being needed to be monitored annually, I seriously doubt that. The admin costs alone are going to mount pretty quickly, as will the costs of advertising the program, etc... etc...
Which would then need a truck to go out and measure and characterize the area precisely enough to engineer the new coverage...
That depends on having handsets available in the area to monitor, and on being able to retrieve stored data from the handsets, and on normalizing the data from a zillion different handsets to allow for analysis. Even if all the handset manufacturers equipped their phones with proper monitoring hardware/[firm|soft]ware and agreed on a standard method of storing and retrieving the data - it would still be a huge task to retrieve and analyze it all, and it still wouldn't be enough. (See below).
This *is* [at least part of] their network monitoring systems. The problem is, with network monitoring, and even with your handset monitoring scheme, all you know is that "this area" is having problems. It's the eyes and antenna on the ground that lets you figure out the why and how to correct for it.
Not that Verizon is the only company with this kind of mobile monitoring anyhow - they're just the only company that makes a big deal out of it.
Not to worry, I get 'em ack basswards all too frequently too...
Regardless of which circuit board is doing the calculations, the issues with calculating SOC are the same. I think your assumption is a safe one however, because it allows the battery pack's design to be altered without having to alter the cars soft- or firm- ware. (And because SOC data needs to be available even when the pack is not installed in a car.)
On this, we're in complete agreement. Doubly so since how fast that last 1% is going to be consumed is so dependent on outside variables like traffic lights, detours, terrain, etc... Nobody with any sense would drive any distance with less than a quarter of a tank, so doing so with less than an a twelfth of a tank just seems silly.
The hack produces a more *precise* charge gauge, whether or not it is more *accurate* is unknown without considerable engineering work. (And for the reasons discussed below, with 100% certainty it is not more accurate - because you're still relying on the same hardware and software.)
Don't confuse precise and accurate, they are not synonyms despite being commonly treated so.
And, as I said in my original post, there may very well be valid engineering reasons for doing so. A battery charge gauge isn't the equivalent of a fuel gauge as you aren't directly measuring a physical quantity. A battery charge gauge rather is displaying a calculated quantity, a calculation with a significant number of variables. The value of many of those variables cannot themselves be directly measured, and thus can be quite fuzzy. Even if they can be directly measured, that doesn't mean there isn't an element of fuzz there too - measuring devices are only as good as their budget, design, construction, maintenance, and calibration will allow. (And the Leaf isn't built by the people who built the NASA moon rovers. Or even by the people who built the Shuttle.) What this all adds up to, is that while the computer may be able to calculate the SOC with precision, that doesn't mean that the calculated value is accurate because of all the fuzz in the system. (GIGO.)
Given that the consequences for the battery (and it's owner) if the battery is run flat - it's an entirely reasonable engineering decision to encourage the owner to (re)charge the battery well before reaching that state.
He hit the headlines on Slashdot and CNN, which sounds about right. Which is the OP's point.
That you were unaware of Ritchie's death says more about you than it does about the media coverage.
And when he charges you with assault and battery - you'll wish you hadn't. Is ten-to-twenty and a felony on your record a fair trade?
There's other possibilities too... Maybe there's an oddity in the discharge curve right near the bottom, or in the capacity reading right near the bottom, or the metering system isn't quite 100% reliable near the bottom...
I don't care what kind of engineer you are, if you don't have the fulls specs and know all of the considerations taken and tradeoffs made by the original designers - you're just guessing.
Hacking a $1000 computer or a $100 RC airplane is one thing. Hacking (and possibly voiding the warranty and your insurance) on a $25,000 automobile... not something I'd want to guess on.
I'm gonna call bullshit on this one - because there has never been a single price for prostitutes any more than there is a single price for pretty much anything else.
As to the rest of your arguments and replies... I'm gonna quote Buzz Lightyear, "you are one sad little man". One with some decidedly odd ideas about the human race.