One of the main reasons nuclear power plants in the United States cost so much money to build is that each one of them is independently designed and built.
That's largely because the vast majority of the plants built in the US were built in an era when the technology was rapidly evolving. It's hard to design "standard, modular, and updateable" systems when the technology is immature.
Want to see a shining example of cost control (and an ironic one at that)? Look to the US Navy where plants are designed once and used multiple times.
Some were used a significant number of times, some are only used once or (most of them) a small number of times, some are unique. The two most widely used (S5W and S6G) became that way largely on accident, not by intent. And tellingly, the S6G was brought into service because the 'standard' S5W, designed and built near the dawn of the era, pretty much sucked by the standards of the early 1970's.
how many secrets do you think are being funneled through our multinational corporations like , i dont know, chrysler? hummer? you know hummer is owned by the Chinese now right? the same hummers that our troops are driving around in Iraq and Afghanistan while they get blown up?
Well, partly right - but also gloriously wrong. The company that manufactures the *Hummer* is indeed owned by the Chinese - but our troops don't drive *Hummers*. They drive *Humvees*/*HMMWV*- which are manufactured by a different, US owned, company.
Well, that, and the whole point of TFA centers on the fact that this storm never posed a serious threat. Not just in hindsight, but not a single verifiable data point even says "hurricane", much less "storm of the century".
But the point that TFA, and you, miss, is that the meteorologists were forecasting - predicting the future. And that's always difficult. Storms just like Irene have in fact grown in strength as they approached the coast, despite being fairly benign further out. Those making the predictions and those who must act on them don't have the luxury of ignoring that possibility.
The person who you quoted even pointed that out - but being inconvenient to your simplified worldview you simply ignored it.
My complaint has more to do with the future, than the past - I don't claim myself as immune from the "boy who cried wolf" effect; I'd really prefer feeling comfortable believing the next warning, rather than brushing it off and regretting that later.
Sadly, the real world is much more complex than you would like it to be. Predictions of the behaviors of complex systems *always* have error bars - and when it's dynamic system, the bars are larger yet.
Just out of curiosity, what prevents spammers from +1ing a coherent set of sites plus the one(s) they're trying to push?
Nothing other than the need to create multiple user accounts.
But even so, there are defenses against that - weighting by age, history, and activity on the account for example. You can weight by coherency as well - the +1 (you mention) can be weighted less because it's an outlier. Etc... etc...
While possibly a good idea, be prepared for the protesters. Specifically the group that complains every time a rocket blasts off carrying fissile material.
The number of such protesters has been steadily decreasing over time and is now essentially zero. Heck, Curiosity is within a few weeks of launching and nobody (of those who protest, file lawsuits, etc...) seems to have even noticed.
That's mostly because the difference between the current Chinese pace and the Chinese doing nothing at all is pretty much infinitesimal. There's no room for them to scale back.
uh, what? im pretty sure astronauts not getting killed is a primary engineering objective of manned spaceflight. a better safety record sounds like a pretty good engineering based argument to me.
It sounds good to you because you lack reading comprehension, basic critical thinking skills, and seemingly completely lack any background knowledge relative to the matter.. The OP didn't base his argument on the number of fatal accidents (which is the engineering measurement that determines the safety record), but on the emotional one that the Russians have killed fewer than the Americans.
You seem really, really impressed by all the smoke and mirrors the Russians have created - and utterly unaware that accidents and incidents continue to happen apace. They have yet to ground the Soyuz capsule despite those continuing incidents.
Russia has had fewer astronaut fatailities than the United States
So what? That's an emotional argument, not an engineering one.
all of the fatalities Russia has had have been less recent than any of the US's fatalities (those occurring in space, not on the ground).
Yet, Russia has had an ongoing series of accidents and incidents with it's flights - and that with both the booster *and* the spacecraft. If a US craft behaved in the same way, there would be screams from all quarters to ground it, fire the managers, and consider canceling it. Here, you don't even seem aware that they have even occurred.
please remember that the reason we now rely on Russian spacecraft is because people died on American spacecraft, and NASA responded by retiring all of the spacecraft involved in the human space program (without developing replacements).
Um, no. NASA did what it was told by Congress and the Administration. They had no choice in the matter. Blaming NASA is like blaming a car for crashing, rather than the drunk at the wheel.
So we wait for the next global disaster to wipe us all out in one swipe. Be it a germ, comet, meteor, pole shift, solar flare, gamma burst, supervolcano or the unwise use of technology itself.
You're deluding yourself if you think a few months or a few years delay in manned spaceflight would make one whit of difference. We're at least a century, if not more, from being able to create a 'colony' off planet that could survive (let alone prosper) prosper absent massive and ongoing support from Earth.
The term off-the-grid (OTG) or off-grid refers to living in a self-sufficient manner without reliance on one or more public utilities.
In other words, the definition and the status are so fuzzy as to mean (Alice-In-Wonderland style) practically anything. That's not very useful at all. And you, like the writers of the article, seem to have missed that first and second paragraphs are at odds with each other. Hell, the second paragraph is at odds with itself.
I personally believe that there is some level of debate available, even within your chosen definition of OTG (which appears to involve complete independence from the fruits of industrialized societies on the planet).
Since I didn't define 'off-the-grid' - that would be something you've pulled from your ass.
Had I claimed that they way of life didn't exist, you'd have a point. But I didn't. Had I redefined the buzzword, you'd have a point. But I didn't.
But I see your true colors now, you're not interested in discussion, you're just a drive-by jackass with an ability to parrot words he doesn't understand and an IQ somewhere south of the glass of iced tea at me elbow.
By your strict definition, practically nobody on Earth has lived off the grid for several thousand years, and that's just silly.
Why is it silly to point out the truth? That 'latter person' depends on industrialized society every bit as much as I (a confirmed suburbanite) do - and it's ludicrous to believe or behave otherwise.
When you rely on a complex infrastructure to provide your hardware, and an equally complex infrastructure to give your hardware purpose - the idea that you are "off the grid" is laughable.
I have a strong case of it, and the storm isn't supposed to hit here (Maryland) until Sunday at dawn. Thus far, I've been been glued to the tube and saturated myself by exposing myself to:
There, fixed that for you. Seriously, don't blame the media for your inability to shut the tube off or change the damn channel.
That's because masturbation isn't a prerequisite for disaster preparedness. If it makes you feel better, go for it, but don't delude yourself that it's useful.
Translation: My mind is made up, no scientific evidence need apply and no further study is necessary.
Seriously, I find it disturbing as hell that climate change zealots and doomsayers point at scientific evidence to 'prove' their point.... (Of course, we all know that science at this level is about correlation and best fit models, not 'proof'.) But let someone investigate something that may disturb their dogma - and their support of science goes right out the window.
United estimates a savings of 326,000 gallons of fuel a year due to the lighter load.
And how many gallons of fuel a year are used making all of those 11,000 iPads and shipping them from China?
The share of the ship's fuel budget represented by a single forty foot container (more than enough to hold those iPads) probably comes for around a thousand gallons or so, probably a bit less. You also have to consider that FedEx won't be shipping hundreds of packages of map updates every month either.
Hubble's mission became largely irrelevant half way through it's lifetime. The purpose was to achieve detail which was impossible for ground based instruments that were trapped below miles of distorting atmosphere.
That's only one of Hubble's missions and it still excels at it. (It's also the mission that those who rely on dick size to evaluate a mission focus on.)
But Hubble can still see fainter objects than ground based scopes can. Hubble can also see IR and UV wavelengths that don't penetrate the atmosphere. And Hubble can both take pictures and make spectrograms of these objects and in these wavelengths.
But there seems to be no reason at all to replace Hubble with an identical instrument.
True. But there's every reason to replace Hubble with an evolved successor operating in the same wavelengths. (In the same way Hubble itself evolved over it's lifetime, exactly as ground based scopes do too.)
Yet another proud power point presentation from the Russians about their Brave Future Plans. Seriously, how do these announcements keep making the news? Russia announces bold plans regularly, and equally regularly they vanish into the recycling bin after a few weeks.
Not to mention, this is like me approving a bridge across the Puget Sound. Not only do I not have the money - the government of King County has no idea that they're party to this plan.
Geeks who hate Apple should at least try to understand what drives its success
Fanboys of Apple should do the same.
I think you'd be surprised how little they spend on marketing -- certainly nowhere near the 70% you claim.
I think that along with the education mentioned above, you should get some reading comprehension - because nowhere did the OP claim the spent 70% on marketing.
tl;dr version: APPLE RULES! MICROSOFT AND GOOGLE DROOL! (And just to prove my point, I'll make stuff up and plead special exceptions, and handwave vigorously.)
I'm glad someone said it. The United States manufactures more today than it has at any time in history. It's just that technology improvements mean we do it with a LOT less people.
That and it has become a lot less visible - and I mean that literally. Many people seem to think that since huge buildings of yesterday that occupied vast tracts of land near the core (and were actually on the edge when built) of an important Eastern city and had smokestacks belching 24/7 are dark and abandoned that manufacturing has vanished. But the reality today is far different. A facility that can turn out thousands of units a day fits into a modest tilt-up building in an unremarkable business park in an otherwise second rate city way the hell out in flyover land. The vast parking lots and streams of workings tilting their caps towards their Lord and Master as they streamed into the factory have been replaced by robots and automated machinery.
Why this has happened is something the author of TFA, with his "management, management, management" rant seems completely oblivious to. It's a complex combination of enviromental regulations, labor laws and costs, tax laws, etc... etc... The same things that are driving manufacturing overseas are also driving it away from the traditional domestic centers.
And those changes aren't going away. The wheel has turned, and it's on a ratchet - it's not turning back.
I also see the usual rants (both in TFA and in the Slashdot comments) about Wall Street and the evil 'fat cats'. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wall Street and the fat cats are hardly alone - it's also the Greatest Generation, and the Boomers, and the X'ers, and the Y'ers and everyone else with a 401-k or an IRA or an ESOP or a pension fund. They too demand 6% annual returns. They too demand ever rising profits and ever falling costs.
How long do you think it will be before the US is no longer top dog in making planes? Tell me... which is the biggest passenger plane in the world?
Who is building the largest passenger aircraft is only important if your only concern is dick size. While it makes for impressive video on the Discovery channel, the reality is that large long haul aircraft are only a very small portion of the market.
The real bread-and-butter in the passenger airliner business is and long has been the short-to-medium and transcontinental markets with small and medium sized aircraft.
Airbus came out of nothing and is build with EXPENSIVE european workers and the US can barely compete.
Um, no. Airbus started as a consortium of existing aerospace and airframe manufacturers. (And as such has been around a long time - the consortium was formally consummated in 1970.) As far as barely competing, it could also be said that Airbus can barely compete with Boeing. The two are pretty much neck-and-neck.
Slashdot Mirror
That's largely because the vast majority of the plants built in the US were built in an era when the technology was rapidly evolving. It's hard to design "standard, modular, and updateable" systems when the technology is immature.
Some were used a significant number of times, some are only used once or (most of them) a small number of times, some are unique. The two most widely used (S5W and S6G) became that way largely on accident, not by intent. And tellingly, the S6G was brought into service because the 'standard' S5W, designed and built near the dawn of the era, pretty much sucked by the standards of the early 1970's.
Well, partly right - but also gloriously wrong. The company that manufactures the *Hummer* is indeed owned by the Chinese - but our troops don't drive *Hummers*. They drive *Humvees*/*HMMWV*- which are manufactured by a different, US owned, company.
Time for a new layer of tinfoil.
But the point that TFA, and you, miss, is that the meteorologists were forecasting - predicting the future. And that's always difficult. Storms just like Irene have in fact grown in strength as they approached the coast, despite being fairly benign further out. Those making the predictions and those who must act on them don't have the luxury of ignoring that possibility.
The person who you quoted even pointed that out - but being inconvenient to your simplified worldview you simply ignored it.
Sadly, the real world is much more complex than you would like it to be. Predictions of the behaviors of complex systems *always* have error bars - and when it's dynamic system, the bars are larger yet.
Nothing other than the need to create multiple user accounts.
But even so, there are defenses against that - weighting by age, history, and activity on the account for example. You can weight by coherency as well - the +1 (you mention) can be weighted less because it's an outlier. Etc... etc...
The number of such protesters has been steadily decreasing over time and is now essentially zero. Heck, Curiosity is within a few weeks of launching and nobody (of those who protest, file lawsuits, etc...) seems to have even noticed.
That's mostly because the difference between the current Chinese pace and the Chinese doing nothing at all is pretty much infinitesimal. There's no room for them to scale back.
It sounds good to you because you lack reading comprehension, basic critical thinking skills, and seemingly completely lack any background knowledge relative to the matter.. The OP didn't base his argument on the number of fatal accidents (which is the engineering measurement that determines the safety record), but on the emotional one that the Russians have killed fewer than the Americans.
You seem really, really impressed by all the smoke and mirrors the Russians have created - and utterly unaware that accidents and incidents continue to happen apace. They have yet to ground the Soyuz capsule despite those continuing incidents.
Go get informed yourself.
So what? That's an emotional argument, not an engineering one.
Yet, Russia has had an ongoing series of accidents and incidents with it's flights - and that with both the booster *and* the spacecraft. If a US craft behaved in the same way, there would be screams from all quarters to ground it, fire the managers, and consider canceling it. Here, you don't even seem aware that they have even occurred.
Um, no. NASA did what it was told by Congress and the Administration. They had no choice in the matter. Blaming NASA is like blaming a car for crashing, rather than the drunk at the wheel.
You're deluding yourself if you think a few months or a few years delay in manned spaceflight would make one whit of difference. We're at least a century, if not more, from being able to create a 'colony' off planet that could survive (let alone prosper) prosper absent massive and ongoing support from Earth.
In other words, the definition and the status are so fuzzy as to mean (Alice-In-Wonderland style) practically anything. That's not very useful at all. And you, like the writers of the article, seem to have missed that first and second paragraphs are at odds with each other. Hell, the second paragraph is at odds with itself.
Since I didn't define 'off-the-grid' - that would be something you've pulled from your ass.
Had I claimed that they way of life didn't exist, you'd have a point. But I didn't. Had I redefined the buzzword, you'd have a point. But I didn't.
But I see your true colors now, you're not interested in discussion, you're just a drive-by jackass with an ability to parrot words he doesn't understand and an IQ somewhere south of the glass of iced tea at me elbow.
Why is it silly to point out the truth? That 'latter person' depends on industrialized society every bit as much as I (a confirmed suburbanite) do - and it's ludicrous to believe or behave otherwise.
When you rely on a complex infrastructure to provide your hardware, and an equally complex infrastructure to give your hardware purpose - the idea that you are "off the grid" is laughable.
There, fixed that for you. Seriously, don't blame the media for your inability to shut the tube off or change the damn channel.
That's because masturbation isn't a prerequisite for disaster preparedness. If it makes you feel better, go for it, but don't delude yourself that it's useful.
Translation: My mind is made up, no scientific evidence need apply and no further study is necessary.
Seriously, I find it disturbing as hell that climate change zealots and doomsayers point at scientific evidence to 'prove' their point.... (Of course, we all know that science at this level is about correlation and best fit models, not 'proof'.) But let someone investigate something that may disturb their dogma - and their support of science goes right out the window.
The share of the ship's fuel budget represented by a single forty foot container (more than enough to hold those iPads) probably comes for around a thousand gallons or so, probably a bit less. You also have to consider that FedEx won't be shipping hundreds of packages of map updates every month either.
That's only one of Hubble's missions and it still excels at it. (It's also the mission that those who rely on dick size to evaluate a mission focus on.)
But Hubble can still see fainter objects than ground based scopes can. Hubble can also see IR and UV wavelengths that don't penetrate the atmosphere. And Hubble can both take pictures and make spectrograms of these objects and in these wavelengths.
True. But there's every reason to replace Hubble with an evolved successor operating in the same wavelengths. (In the same way Hubble itself evolved over it's lifetime, exactly as ground based scopes do too.)
Yet another proud power point presentation from the Russians about their Brave Future Plans. Seriously, how do these announcements keep making the news? Russia announces bold plans regularly, and equally regularly they vanish into the recycling bin after a few weeks.
Not to mention, this is like me approving a bridge across the Puget Sound. Not only do I not have the money - the government of King County has no idea that they're party to this plan.
Fanboys of Apple should do the same.
I think that along with the education mentioned above, you should get some reading comprehension - because nowhere did the OP claim the spent 70% on marketing.
tl;dr version: APPLE RULES! MICROSOFT AND GOOGLE DROOL! (And just to prove my point, I'll make stuff up and plead special exceptions, and handwave vigorously.)
Any the details of your legal education are... what exactly?
That and it has become a lot less visible - and I mean that literally. Many people seem to think that since huge buildings of yesterday that occupied vast tracts of land near the core (and were actually on the edge when built) of an important Eastern city and had smokestacks belching 24/7 are dark and abandoned that manufacturing has vanished. But the reality today is far different. A facility that can turn out thousands of units a day fits into a modest tilt-up building in an unremarkable business park in an otherwise second rate city way the hell out in flyover land. The vast parking lots and streams of workings tilting their caps towards their Lord and Master as they streamed into the factory have been replaced by robots and automated machinery.
Why this has happened is something the author of TFA, with his "management, management, management" rant seems completely oblivious to. It's a complex combination of enviromental regulations, labor laws and costs, tax laws, etc... etc... The same things that are driving manufacturing overseas are also driving it away from the traditional domestic centers.
And those changes aren't going away. The wheel has turned, and it's on a ratchet - it's not turning back.
I also see the usual rants (both in TFA and in the Slashdot comments) about Wall Street and the evil 'fat cats'. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wall Street and the fat cats are hardly alone - it's also the Greatest Generation, and the Boomers, and the X'ers, and the Y'ers and everyone else with a 401-k or an IRA or an ESOP or a pension fund. They too demand 6% annual returns. They too demand ever rising profits and ever falling costs.
Who is building the largest passenger aircraft is only important if your only concern is dick size. While it makes for impressive video on the Discovery channel, the reality is that large long haul aircraft are only a very small portion of the market.
The real bread-and-butter in the passenger airliner business is and long has been the short-to-medium and transcontinental markets with small and medium sized aircraft.
Um, no. Airbus started as a consortium of existing aerospace and airframe manufacturers. (And as such has been around a long time - the consortium was formally consummated in 1970.) As far as barely competing, it could also be said that Airbus can barely compete with Boeing. The two are pretty much neck-and-neck.