The F-35 replaced the A-10 Thunderbolt II's role as a tank buster, CAS bomber...
With the money we have spent on the F-35s to date, we could have repaired, retrofitted, and maintained our supply of A-10s for several decades. Hell, the A-10 is practically a flying tank. It has some of the best armament and is the most rugged fixed-wing aircraft which America has. It was a ridiculously short-sighted move to replace it with another overexpensive "multi role, joint" fighter.
Yeah, F-35s replacing the A-10 good luck with that. The idea of the F-35 flying into the operational environment of the A-10, i.e. 0-3000ft which in a real shooting war is likely to be saturated by scrap fire and dominated by Manpads, full blown SAMs and mobile Flak such as Shilkas and Tunguskas and having the same survial rates as the A-10 always struck me as funny. Stealth is pretty much useless down there most of the kills are done with heat seeking missiles and the good old Mk.1 eyeball. Experience has shown several times now that no matter how many smart weapons they cook up there is no replacement for getting in good and close and blasting the shit out of the target with a 30mm gun.
I'm a C++ programmer by trade but there's no way I'd wish that language on a student
Agreed. Its not a learning language.
But it is a real world coding language. When I was taking my CS degree we had a mandatory algorithms course (and not the "how does a for loop work" kind of course, they were teaching the kind of algorithms where a slight performance improvement can shave hours or even days off your execution time). On the first day there was much discontent when everybody discovered that they had to learn C/C++ because it was required to code assignment solutions in those languages. Finally somebody asked the teacher if they could hand in assignments written in Python. There was a short silence from the professor, an odd look flashed across his face and then he just said "NO" and went back to explaining how pointers work in C/C++.
The Chinese government HATES it when people measure and publish "unofficial" pollution level readings...you can bet that pollution controls upwind of the US embassy are especially strict.
Which is pretty amusing since it's pretty easy to design an algorith that will predict pollution levels for most major Chinese cities with pretty much 100% accuracy every day of the year:
#include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h>
int main() {
while(1)
{
printf("Predicted polution level for today: Very High\n");
printf("Health hazard: Extreme\n");
sleep(86400);
}
Who is to say some of the Neanderthal genes that have been found in humans are not "helpful"? How are they measuring "helpful adaptation"? Perhaps they mean the high-altitude features are clearly helpful, while the benefits of others are not known yet. (Maybe some of the top football players are the top because of Neanderthal genes.)
A significant number of those Neanderthal and Denisovan genes are thought to be very helpful. For example Neanderthal genes are thought to play an important part in the way skin works in modern Europeans/Asians/Native Americans/Australians (cold climate tolerance, resistance to some diseases, synthesis of vitamins). However, having strong suspicions that this is the case because a whole bunch of skin related DNA in these populations seems to have come from Neanderthals and Denisovians and suspecting that this DNA is important because Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA seems to have been 'selected out' of some other parts of the genome but is still there in the skin related regions of the genome is one thing. Proving it scientifically is a whole other matter. These guys simply managed to become the first to prove in a scientifically rigorous way the helpfulness of one of the numerous bits of Neanderthal/Denisovan DNA suspected to be beneficial. Now let's hope this stands up to peer review.
Seriously, we have never found any corpses from this beast and with the amount that man has spread out, I am 100% certain we would have found the beast by now.
At the risk of sounding like a tinfoil hat wearing lunatic, just a few years ago I remember seeing several scientists stating on camera that they believed that every large mammal on earth was already documented and known to science. Not long after that I read a news piece reporting the discovery of several previously unknown species of mammals including a species of deer that reportedly weighs in at 150lb. Another example is a species of whale native to the Southern Arctic that is only known from a few DNA samples obtained from whalers. The point being that even though it is fun to ridicule crypto zoologists, there are numerous examples even in this day and age of unknown species hiding right under our noses.
Please please please tell me this device alerts swimmers by playing the "Jaws" theme over the water...
No it just emits an alarm sound that causes hundreds of people to scramble ashore trashing and splashing as they go and generally making lots of the kind of struggling animal sounds that sharks home in on like... well... hungry sharks.
They have retransmission rights, apparently its the re-retransmission rights that are the problem.
You mean they are allowed to transmit Fox content live but not record it and then stream it to the user? Doesn't fair use also come into it? Users have the right to record TV content for personal use.
They dont have re-transmission rights. It costs extra obviously.
The article says they have the right to 'broadcast' Fox content, however, it also says they are doing what Aereo was doing in violation of 'an express contractual prohibition'. Do they have the right to retransmit but not to stream or 'sideload' recorded stuff to mobile devices? I don't get it, those two statements appear to be contradictory at frist glance.
I don't usually use earbuds except to work out, but I have a $20 pair of Sony earbuds that sound better than Apple's. It's absurd that the article doesn't mention a single thing about sound quality, and goes into how easily the cords tangle and body sensors like those are the things people care about. You need to get sound quality right before you can even think about all the other ancillary shit to try and sell more of them.
You are hard to please:-) I'd settle for getting a pair of earbuds with my iDevice that don't fall out of my ears whenever I move my head although, to be fair to Apple, this is not a problem limited to their products. The first thing I do when I get a new phone or music player is replace the included earbuds with the in-ear type from a third party manufacturer (usually Sennheiser). I have a small box full of Apple earbuds that I have never used.
It is my professional opinion that all of the audiophile bullshit is bullshit. On a low-end sound system using the cheapest components you can buy, the worst component is your ears. That's where all of your problems start, and you're trying to pay lots of money to compensate throughout the rest of the system.
If you want a pair of headphones that sound great to you, forget about brand names and fancy features. Sit down with a pair of cheap headphones, and listen to the tones in music/tv/whatever that you find most pleasing..... Next, think about features.....
I agree with that for the most part except there is a degree of difference between crapware phones and brands like Sennheiser, even in the $30 range. I know that because I went to a store and tried everything they had and stuff from Sennheiser, Bose etc. sounded noticeably better than the utter crapware. That being said the difference is not massive but there is still some difference in sound quality. I ended up sacrificing sound quality for features and got Bluetooth headphones with a built in remote. I also agree that audiophiles can be properly full of BS. A good way to get a laugh is to go to amazon.com, look up a popular set of cheap ass headphones and read some of the lengthy comments written by the audiophile crowd. You'll be tempted to think that they expected live concert quality sound from the thing.
And I was originally talking about energy independence (oil in this case) when he started going on about the USA being a "net oil product exporter". WTF does that have to do with energy independence? Energy independence is when all of the oil consumed in your country comes from sources within your own country but perhaps definition of energy independence is different in the US from what it is over here in Europe (Nota Bene: I doubt it). A country can be a net metal products exporter and still be dependent on foreign suppliers of steel, i.e. not "metal independent".
Hydrogen doesn't just require "modifications to the gas mains", it requires a complete reconstruction, and it'd probably be a really dumb idea. Hydrogen embrittles metals. You put it in any sort of regular pipe, and your system will start springing leaks everywhere from distribution to end-user consumption. It also leaks through almost everything, but especially things not specifically designed for it. But it gets worse, because after it leaks it tends to pool in explosive mixtures under overhangs. Also, if you have multiple pipes running parallel, and there's hydrogen in the lower one but not in the upper one, part of the hydrogen leaking out of the lower pipe ends up in the upper pipe, where it can follow it to its destination and pools there. Beyond that, H2 has combustible fuel air mixtures way, way wider than of methane, 4-75% in air. And unlike methane, it can readily undergo deflagration-to-detonation transitions under STP conditions. NASA safety guidelines require any facility handling more than a dozen or so kilograms of hydrogen to have a roof designed to be blown away in an explosion. And hydrogen ignites with a tenth the ignition energy of methane. We're used to fuels that require a visible, audible spark to ignite, but hydrogen ignites with the sort of tiny static or electrics discharges that you don't even see in everyday life; ordinary electronics are not designed to be safe in an environment where a combustible hydrogen mix might leak into.
Beyond that, producing hydrogen then burning it is a ridiculously wasteful approach. Even using it in a SOFC after producing it is still ridiculously wasteful. And it's also a very expensive process. Producing methane from atmospheric CO2, however, is so bad it makes even hydrogen look efficient by comparison.
Obviously, the efficient way to store electricity is batteries. Given DC and not too fast of a charge rate, li-ions, for example, can be over 99% efficient. But obviously the price for storage would be way too high. There's various cheaper techs on the market, including some forms of flow storage, with radically cheaper ones in development, and there's talk of using used EV batteries for grid storage; we'll have to wait and see how that plays out. Also far cheaper and more efficient (~75% net) than hydrogen production is pumped hydro, with or without a river present. Compressed air storage is relatively cheap, but inefficient (~10-30%); however there's some lab-scale attempts at isothermal storage which might get that signficantly higher.
Sometimes you see claims on hydrogen or compressed air production that are higher efficiency, but that's just PR flak; they get those numbers by assuming you make use of the waste heat for some other industry that would otherwise have to burning something to produce said head. But you can say that about every system on earth, because everything has waste heat. The number that matters is how efficiently you can store your electricity.
Who's talking about replacing natural gas wit hydrogen? That is what you mean isn't it? I will admit that I'm no chemist nor an expert in the effects of hydrogen on pipe material. All I know is what I have read in the energy industry journal I subscribe to. The idea as far as I understand it is to supplement compressed natural gas (CNG) with hydrogen. That's safe with minor modifications up to a mixture of about 20%. I remember reading somewhere that this has been field tested in Holland where they found that mixtures of up to 20% hydrogen and 80% CNG (by volume) could be treated almost identically to pure CNG. Excess energy from wind and solar plants goes to waste 100%. It does not matter that the process of using that energy to create hydrogen using from that SNG is wasteful, at least the excess energy is not going completely to waste the only issue is whether or not it can be done economically. Making P2G economical is a big issue and It won't be easy but then if it was easy everybody would be doing it. And I'm not quite sure where you are going with that Battery idea, the thought here is to store thousands of gigawatt hours of energy (the current German Gas storage capacity is 200,000 GWh) and that would require one massive battery.
Also, there is now a strategic security/economical/political dimension to the energy transition for Germany much like there is for the USA concerning Oil independence that has only been reinforced by the Ukraine crisis.
Two things:
1) The USA is a net exporter of petroleum products (we import some oil, but export more refined petroleum products than the oil we import makes) these days.
That's news to me.... a net oil exporter is somebody whose domestic production exceeds domestic consumption leaving a surplus to export. According to EIA statistics about 40% of the crude oil consumed in the USA in 2012 came from foreign sources: http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_b... According to this article the USA is on it's way to become a net gas exporter, it is already a net coal exporter but unlikely to be come a net crude oil exporter. http://business.financialpost....
2) Increasing dependence on natural gas rather than coal by Germany makes them more vulnerable to things like the Ukraine situation.
They are planning to synthesize a natural gas substitute from hydrogen and CO2 scrubbed from the atmosphere or collected off of decomposing biomass. How is that increasing dependence on Russian gas? If this pans out, and P2G is currently getting massive amounts of research money, the Germans will even be able to recycle their existing natural gas infrastructure for storage of excess energy. They'd at the very least be able significantly reduce eliminate Russia's importance as a gas supplier. The best case scenario would of course be to eliminate reliance on Russian gas since it is a significant a strategic liability.
It depends. Because of the increased usage of solar and wind, the grid needs more upgrades, and part of the consumer bill goes to such investments. Also, government taxes could go up.
And there's no problem with buying low and selling high, as long as they are not using unfair business practices to block competitors from doing the same thing.
There are and always will be people who notice the most minute increase in electricity or gasoline prices but think nothing of spending a fortune on, say, cigarettes, holidays, restoring a classic car, buying a caravan or keeping a bunch of pets but the original poster nevertheless has a point. A disproportionate amount of the costs of the energy transition has been offloaded on German consumers. The argument has been that this is being done to save jobs, keep industry competitive, blah, blah, blah..... While the proportion of energy costs in the average household budget may be fairly low it is still unfair to make the consumer pay more than his/her share.
In what year is it predicted that Germany will generate fewer kWh of power from coal than it did in, say, 2005? Will we have to wait until 2050 or something for this long-promised decrease?
I don't think anybody can give you am exact date on when coal power will be phased out but the energy transition effort enjoys fairly broad support among the German public even if it is expensive so I expect it will continue. Also, there is now a strategic security/economical/political dimension to the energy transition for Germany much like there is for the USA concerning Oil independence that has only been reinforced by the Ukraine crisis. The Germans also tend to think in terms of decades rather than fiscal quarters like many Americans seem to do. Germany has gone from renewables being 6.3 percent of the national total in 2000 to about 25 percent in the first half of 2012. That's an increase of about 20% in 12 years so if we are insanely optimistic and assume a linear progression they should be at 50% renewables in c.a. 2028-30. The future of the energy transition project depends on several factors (apart from politics and economic issues of course), chief among them are things like the speed and extent of the transition to electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, how the transition to wind and solar goes and perhaps most importantly the level of progress on projects to store excess energy. The last time I checked the Germans were planning to store energy initially by producing hydrogen which will be used to supplement natural gas (which in turn requires modifications to the gas mains) and how much success they have with projects to store energy by producing methane from carbon dioxide (which a Nature article I read claimed they plan to eventually scrub from the atmosphere) and the hydrogen generated with excess solar/wind energy (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...). I seem to remember there are already a couple or so industrial scale P2G methane plants on line but they are still somewhat experimental.
It's ironic for you to cite Martin Niemöller in this context. Niemöller was initially a supporter of the Nazi regime, anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic. His statement is truthful: he only started opposing the Nazis when they started making his life difficult, and he really only broke with Nazi ideology after having been imprisoned for years. But his apology and subsequent pacifism themselves were opportunism, and he just moved on from supporting one form of totalitarianism to another one.
In fact, it's libertarians (classical liberals) that are warning you of the dangers of what's happening in Massachusetts and the rise of paramilitary-style police, and obviously getting quite a bit of abuse for it from the political establishment.
That was kind of my point, like the OP I was referring to the subset of present-day libertarians that advocate laissez-faire capitalism and who advocate this kind of crap. I cited Niemöller quite deliberately precisely because he cheered along with the Nazis until they got around to targeting him. His lesson was not to make his mistake, get off the band wagon, pour the Kool Aid down the gutter and slash the tyres on the band wagon and choke developments like this at birth. Laissez-faire capitalists will cheer along as these privatised forces morph into corporate armies until they them selves are being targeted.
What's wrong with that? Libertarians should love this - government slashed to bare minimum (or below) and everything in private hands. And as we know, *everything* is better when privately operated. Next step should be deregulating LEC market to enable true competition.
Like Martin Niemöller pointed out, nobody cares about things like this until they are being targeted themselves. I don't expect Libertarians to be any different.
The announcement comes after reports this week that Verizon and British company Colt provide Internet services to the German parliament and other official entities.
Had we not obtained that piece of intelligence, the history of the world could've been quite different...
Yeah and if MI6 had grown a spine and called bullshit on the CIA case for WMD's in Iraq maybe that country would not now be on the cusp of becoming an Islamist Caliphate and 179 British soldiers would not have died what is increasingly looking like pointless deaths. At least the Germans had the good sense to see that the CIA 'evidence' for Iraqi WMDs was a steaming pile of horse manure and the strategic foresight to realize that intervention in Iraq would highly probably become the kind of FUBAR it currently is. Could it be that Germany (and France for that matter) learned some lessons from WWI, WWII and the cold war proxy conflicts that Britain might be well advised to take to heart?
1: Parking spaces are in demand. 2: People are willing to pay cash for one. 3: Other people want money.
All that needs to happen is that the server gets moved offshore, and the app be made as a Web app so it survives being pulled from Apple's store.
I remember this exact same thing happening at a place I worked at when in college. They were such sticklers about being on time for shift that a second late on the phones meant a six month denial of promotions, and being late for any reason three times is an automatic termination. So, people from the neighborhood would fill this place's parking lot up about an hour before shift changed and demand cash... and the employees of this firm would pony up to a C-note in order to get a place, drive a car about a half mile from the office and park in a seedy neighborhood, or be late and stuck on the phones for another half-year with a freeze on raises.
I applaud SF banning this app, but in reality, it won't help, and this is just the start of it. I won't be surprised to see a black market for parking spaces, with people sitting for hours to "sell" theirs, happening soon. Especially home games in university towns or other places where people go for an event.
Why not just use the data already collected in all those parking palces, parking garages and multi story car parks? They usually have signs at every entrance stating how many free parking spaces there are (at least in Germany they do) and all you'd have to do is network these facilities pipe, the data into an app that shows the nearest free parking spots based on your location. The app could be provided by the city council as a public service or better yet the data could be integrated made available via web-service and integrated directly into networked satnav devices. Alternatively you could make this data availabe as a subscription service by a private company if you think public services stink too much of communism for your taste. Individual drivers would still have to find their own spot so there would be no hogging since nobody profits from "selling information" about the location of individual spaces. Hell, there could even be a "Report parking tard" button that dispatches a GPS location and a photo to the nearest tow-truck/cop-car/meter-maid.
No, he'll still be free to do as he wants, he'll just want to do different things. What on earth does age have to do with doing what you want?
Becasue as you age and experience things like for exampe: witnessing a serious traffic accident or loosing a family member in a traffic accident, you realize that there is a reason people passed laws against morons doing whatever they want, using public roads as their private race track or driving a car while being drunk out of their scull. Like he said, it's called growing up. You should try it...
why on earth would I allow a third party to make money off public parking if it's not re-invested into the road system
You mean why on earth would you allow the tow truck driver that removes a car thats been parked in a spot too long to make money off public parking?
Why would you allow the police man who busts people for driving too fast, driving drunk, driving an usafecar... etc. to profit off of public roads? After all cops get paid don't they?... and wages are profit. I'd say it's because both the cop and the truck driver are enforcing the rules that allow for the safety, fairness and efficient running of the system whereas some bozo sitting on a parking spot twice as long as he/she has to in order to profit from releasing it to the highest bidder is not contributing to the efficient use of the system. Plus I can only imagine the fight that would break out when some irritated driver who's been waiting for Mr. Bozo's to vacate a parking space is told to make way for the newly arrived driverwho 'bought the rights' to the supposedly public parking space, especially in the US where half the population seems to be packing a gun. Now if this company sold subscriptions to a service that provided information based on your location about where the most parking spaces are likely to be available that's a whole other matter.
What are you doing to your equipment? How did these "flappy bits" develop? How is it that every laptop you've claimed to own apparently crumbled at your touch?
It's called: "wear" and "poor engineering"
You know what? I don't actually believe you. I think you're lying. Are you just trying really hard to justify your overpriced laptop? I have no idea why. Just take the knock to the pocket-book and move on. Everyone makes mistakes.
Perhaps you just like Apple products and are worried about their lack of marketshare? If that's the case, you may want to find a different approach. I've never had a laptop inexplicably disintegrate.
You know what? I think you are one of those irrational individuals who hates computer equipment from certain manufacturers for no apparent reason and because you can then get yourself worked up by quoting other peoples internet posts out of context and accusing them of being liars. Some computers are simply badly designed, and the ones from Apple happen to be better designed than many other brands. That does not mean that Apple PCs are the only properly designed computers (my employer has for example had a quite good experience with a large fleet of Lenovo machines) but it does mean that they fall apart less often than for example the cheaper Dell and (as the GP pointed out) Sony laptops (which a former employer had poor experiences with).
Slashdot Mirror
The F-35 replaced the A-10 Thunderbolt II's role as a tank buster, CAS bomber...
With the money we have spent on the F-35s to date, we could have repaired, retrofitted, and maintained our supply of A-10s for several decades. Hell, the A-10 is practically a flying tank. It has some of the best armament and is the most rugged fixed-wing aircraft which America has. It was a ridiculously short-sighted move to replace it with another overexpensive "multi role, joint" fighter.
Yeah, F-35s replacing the A-10 good luck with that. The idea of the F-35 flying into the operational environment of the A-10, i.e. 0-3000ft which in a real shooting war is likely to be saturated by scrap fire and dominated by Manpads, full blown SAMs and mobile Flak such as Shilkas and Tunguskas and having the same survial rates as the A-10 always struck me as funny. Stealth is pretty much useless down there most of the kills are done with heat seeking missiles and the good old Mk.1 eyeball. Experience has shown several times now that no matter how many smart weapons they cook up there is no replacement for getting in good and close and blasting the shit out of the target with a 30mm gun.
I'm a C++ programmer by trade but there's no way I'd wish that language on a student
Agreed. Its not a learning language.
But it is a real world coding language. When I was taking my CS degree we had a mandatory algorithms course (and not the "how does a for loop work" kind of course, they were teaching the kind of algorithms where a slight performance improvement can shave hours or even days off your execution time). On the first day there was much discontent when everybody discovered that they had to learn C/C++ because it was required to code assignment solutions in those languages. Finally somebody asked the teacher if they could hand in assignments written in Python. There was a short silence from the professor, an odd look flashed across his face and then he just said "NO" and went back to explaining how pointers work in C/C++.
The Chinese government HATES it when people measure and publish "unofficial" pollution level readings...you can bet that pollution controls upwind of the US embassy are especially strict.
Which is pretty amusing since it's pretty easy to design an algorith that will predict pollution levels for most major Chinese cities with pretty much 100% accuracy every day of the year:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main()
{
while(1)
{
printf("Predicted polution level for today: Very High\n");
printf("Health hazard: Extreme\n");
sleep(86400);
}
return 1;
}
Who is to say some of the Neanderthal genes that have been found in humans are not "helpful"? How are they measuring "helpful adaptation"? Perhaps they mean the high-altitude features are clearly helpful, while the benefits of others are not known yet. (Maybe some of the top football players are the top because of Neanderthal genes.)
A significant number of those Neanderthal and Denisovan genes are thought to be very helpful. For example Neanderthal genes are thought to play an important part in the way skin works in modern Europeans/Asians/Native Americans/Australians (cold climate tolerance, resistance to some diseases, synthesis of vitamins). However, having strong suspicions that this is the case because a whole bunch of skin related DNA in these populations seems to have come from Neanderthals and Denisovians and suspecting that this DNA is important because Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA seems to have been 'selected out' of some other parts of the genome but is still there in the skin related regions of the genome is one thing. Proving it scientifically is a whole other matter. These guys simply managed to become the first to prove in a scientifically rigorous way the helpfulness of one of the numerous bits of Neanderthal/Denisovan DNA suspected to be beneficial. Now let's hope this stands up to peer review.
Seriously, we have never found any corpses from this beast and with the amount that man has spread out, I am 100% certain we would have found the beast by now.
At the risk of sounding like a tinfoil hat wearing lunatic, just a few years ago I remember seeing several scientists stating on camera that they believed that every large mammal on earth was already documented and known to science. Not long after that I read a news piece reporting the discovery of several previously unknown species of mammals including a species of deer that reportedly weighs in at 150lb. Another example is a species of whale native to the Southern Arctic that is only known from a few DNA samples obtained from whalers. The point being that even though it is fun to ridicule crypto zoologists, there are numerous examples even in this day and age of unknown species hiding right under our noses.
Please please please tell me this device alerts swimmers by playing the "Jaws" theme over the water...
No it just emits an alarm sound that causes hundreds of people to scramble ashore trashing and splashing as they go and generally making lots of the kind of struggling animal sounds that sharks home in on like... well... hungry sharks.
They have retransmission rights, apparently its the re-retransmission rights that are the problem.
You mean they are allowed to transmit Fox content live but not record it and then stream it to the user? Doesn't fair use also come into it? Users have the right to record TV content for personal use.
They dont have re-transmission rights. It costs extra obviously.
The article says they have the right to 'broadcast' Fox content, however, it also says they are doing what Aereo was doing in violation of 'an express contractual prohibition'. Do they have the right to retransmit but not to stream or 'sideload' recorded stuff to mobile devices? I don't get it, those two statements appear to be contradictory at frist glance.
Heard at the Apple Headquarters monitoring their users: .... little Johnny (User 2317687491XXL)....
Little Johnny? XXL? Is he American?
I don't usually use earbuds except to work out, but I have a $20 pair of Sony earbuds that sound better than Apple's. It's absurd that the article doesn't mention a single thing about sound quality, and goes into how easily the cords tangle and body sensors like those are the things people care about. You need to get sound quality right before you can even think about all the other ancillary shit to try and sell more of them.
You are hard to please :-) I'd settle for getting a pair of earbuds with my iDevice that don't fall out of my ears whenever I move my head although, to be fair to Apple, this is not a problem limited to their products. The first thing I do when I get a new phone or music player is replace the included earbuds with the in-ear type from a third party manufacturer (usually Sennheiser). I have a small box full of Apple earbuds that I have never used.
It is my professional opinion that all of the audiophile bullshit is bullshit. On a low-end sound system using the cheapest components you can buy, the worst component is your ears. That's where all of your problems start, and you're trying to pay lots of money to compensate throughout the rest of the system.
If you want a pair of headphones that sound great to you, forget about brand names and fancy features. Sit down with a pair of cheap headphones, and listen to the tones in music/tv/whatever that you find most pleasing..... Next, think about features.....
I agree with that for the most part except there is a degree of difference between crapware phones and brands like Sennheiser, even in the $30 range. I know that because I went to a store and tried everything they had and stuff from Sennheiser, Bose etc. sounded noticeably better than the utter crapware. That being said the difference is not massive but there is still some difference in sound quality. I ended up sacrificing sound quality for features and got Bluetooth headphones with a built in remote. I also agree that audiophiles can be properly full of BS. A good way to get a laugh is to go to amazon.com, look up a popular set of cheap ass headphones and read some of the lengthy comments written by the audiophile crowd. You'll be tempted to think that they expected live concert quality sound from the thing.
He said "petroleum products".
The US is a net oil-product exporter: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
And I was originally talking about energy independence (oil in this case) when he started going on about the USA being a "net oil product exporter". WTF does that have to do with energy independence? Energy independence is when all of the oil consumed in your country comes from sources within your own country but perhaps definition of energy independence is different in the US from what it is over here in Europe (Nota Bene: I doubt it). A country can be a net metal products exporter and still be dependent on foreign suppliers of steel, i.e. not "metal independent".
Hydrogen doesn't just require "modifications to the gas mains", it requires a complete reconstruction, and it'd probably be a really dumb idea. Hydrogen embrittles metals. You put it in any sort of regular pipe, and your system will start springing leaks everywhere from distribution to end-user consumption. It also leaks through almost everything, but especially things not specifically designed for it. But it gets worse, because after it leaks it tends to pool in explosive mixtures under overhangs. Also, if you have multiple pipes running parallel, and there's hydrogen in the lower one but not in the upper one, part of the hydrogen leaking out of the lower pipe ends up in the upper pipe, where it can follow it to its destination and pools there. Beyond that, H2 has combustible fuel air mixtures way, way wider than of methane, 4-75% in air. And unlike methane, it can readily undergo deflagration-to-detonation transitions under STP conditions. NASA safety guidelines require any facility handling more than a dozen or so kilograms of hydrogen to have a roof designed to be blown away in an explosion. And hydrogen ignites with a tenth the ignition energy of methane. We're used to fuels that require a visible, audible spark to ignite, but hydrogen ignites with the sort of tiny static or electrics discharges that you don't even see in everyday life; ordinary electronics are not designed to be safe in an environment where a combustible hydrogen mix might leak into.
Beyond that, producing hydrogen then burning it is a ridiculously wasteful approach. Even using it in a SOFC after producing it is still ridiculously wasteful. And it's also a very expensive process. Producing methane from atmospheric CO2, however, is so bad it makes even hydrogen look efficient by comparison.
Obviously, the efficient way to store electricity is batteries. Given DC and not too fast of a charge rate, li-ions, for example, can be over 99% efficient. But obviously the price for storage would be way too high. There's various cheaper techs on the market, including some forms of flow storage, with radically cheaper ones in development, and there's talk of using used EV batteries for grid storage; we'll have to wait and see how that plays out. Also far cheaper and more efficient (~75% net) than hydrogen production is pumped hydro, with or without a river present. Compressed air storage is relatively cheap, but inefficient (~10-30%); however there's some lab-scale attempts at isothermal storage which might get that signficantly higher.
Sometimes you see claims on hydrogen or compressed air production that are higher efficiency, but that's just PR flak; they get those numbers by assuming you make use of the waste heat for some other industry that would otherwise have to burning something to produce said head. But you can say that about every system on earth, because everything has waste heat. The number that matters is how efficiently you can store your electricity.
Who's talking about replacing natural gas wit hydrogen? That is what you mean isn't it? I will admit that I'm no chemist nor an expert in the effects of hydrogen on pipe material. All I know is what I have read in the energy industry journal I subscribe to. The idea as far as I understand it is to supplement compressed natural gas (CNG) with hydrogen. That's safe with minor modifications up to a mixture of about 20%. I remember reading somewhere that this has been field tested in Holland where they found that mixtures of up to 20% hydrogen and 80% CNG (by volume) could be treated almost identically to pure CNG. Excess energy from wind and solar plants goes to waste 100%. It does not matter that the process of using that energy to create hydrogen using from that SNG is wasteful, at least the excess energy is not going completely to waste the only issue is whether or not it can be done economically. Making P2G economical is a big issue and It won't be easy but then if it was easy everybody would be doing it. And I'm not quite sure where you are going with that Battery idea, the thought here is to store thousands of gigawatt hours of energy (the current German Gas storage capacity is 200,000 GWh) and that would require one massive battery.
Two things:
1) The USA is a net exporter of petroleum products (we import some oil, but export more refined petroleum products than the oil we import makes) these days.
That's news to me.... a net oil exporter is somebody whose domestic production exceeds domestic consumption leaving a surplus to export. According to EIA statistics about 40% of the crude oil consumed in the USA in 2012 came from foreign sources:
http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_b...
According to this article the USA is on it's way to become a net gas exporter, it is already a net coal exporter but unlikely to be come a net crude oil exporter.
http://business.financialpost....
2) Increasing dependence on natural gas rather than coal by Germany makes them more vulnerable to things like the Ukraine situation.
They are planning to synthesize a natural gas substitute from hydrogen and CO2 scrubbed from the atmosphere or collected off of decomposing biomass. How is that increasing dependence on Russian gas? If this pans out, and P2G is currently getting massive amounts of research money, the Germans will even be able to recycle their existing natural gas infrastructure for storage of excess energy. They'd at the very least be able significantly reduce eliminate Russia's importance as a gas supplier. The best case scenario would of course be to eliminate reliance on Russian gas since it is a significant a strategic liability.
It depends. Because of the increased usage of solar and wind, the grid needs more upgrades, and part of the consumer bill goes to such investments. Also, government taxes could go up.
And there's no problem with buying low and selling high, as long as they are not using unfair business practices to block competitors from doing the same thing.
There are and always will be people who notice the most minute increase in electricity or gasoline prices but think nothing of spending a fortune on, say, cigarettes, holidays, restoring a classic car, buying a caravan or keeping a bunch of pets but the original poster nevertheless has a point. A disproportionate amount of the costs of the energy transition has been offloaded on German consumers. The argument has been that this is being done to save jobs, keep industry competitive, blah, blah, blah..... While the proportion of energy costs in the average household budget may be fairly low it is still unfair to make the consumer pay more than his/her share.
In what year is it predicted that Germany will generate fewer kWh of power from coal than it did in, say, 2005? Will we have to wait until 2050 or something for this long-promised decrease?
I don't think anybody can give you am exact date on when coal power will be phased out but the energy transition effort enjoys fairly broad support among the German public even if it is expensive so I expect it will continue. Also, there is now a strategic security/economical/political dimension to the energy transition for Germany much like there is for the USA concerning Oil independence that has only been reinforced by the Ukraine crisis. The Germans also tend to think in terms of decades rather than fiscal quarters like many Americans seem to do. Germany has gone from renewables being 6.3 percent of the national total in 2000 to about 25 percent in the first half of 2012. That's an increase of about 20% in 12 years so if we are insanely optimistic and assume a linear progression they should be at 50% renewables in c.a. 2028-30. The future of the energy transition project depends on several factors (apart from politics and economic issues of course), chief among them are things like the speed and extent of the transition to electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, how the transition to wind and solar goes and perhaps most importantly the level of progress on projects to store excess energy. The last time I checked the Germans were planning to store energy initially by producing hydrogen which will be used to supplement natural gas (which in turn requires modifications to the gas mains) and how much success they have with projects to store energy by producing methane from carbon dioxide (which a Nature article I read claimed they plan to eventually scrub from the atmosphere) and the hydrogen generated with excess solar/wind energy (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...). I seem to remember there are already a couple or so industrial scale P2G methane plants on line but they are still somewhat experimental.
It's ironic for you to cite Martin Niemöller in this context. Niemöller was initially a supporter of the Nazi regime, anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic. His statement is truthful: he only started opposing the Nazis when they started making his life difficult, and he really only broke with Nazi ideology after having been imprisoned for years. But his apology and subsequent pacifism themselves were opportunism, and he just moved on from supporting one form of totalitarianism to another one.
In fact, it's libertarians (classical liberals) that are warning you of the dangers of what's happening in Massachusetts and the rise of paramilitary-style police, and obviously getting quite a bit of abuse for it from the political establishment.
That was kind of my point, like the OP I was referring to the subset of present-day libertarians that advocate laissez-faire capitalism and who advocate this kind of crap. I cited Niemöller quite deliberately precisely because he cheered along with the Nazis until they got around to targeting him. His lesson was not to make his mistake, get off the band wagon, pour the Kool Aid down the gutter and slash the tyres on the band wagon and choke developments like this at birth. Laissez-faire capitalists will cheer along as these privatised forces morph into corporate armies until they them selves are being targeted.
What's wrong with that? Libertarians should love this - government slashed to bare minimum (or below) and everything in private hands. And as we know, *everything* is better when privately operated. Next step should be deregulating LEC market to enable true competition.
Like Martin Niemöller pointed out, nobody cares about things like this until they are being targeted themselves. I don't expect Libertarians to be any different.
steve balmer chair throwing is still there.
Give them some time, removing all the references to Steve and chair throwing is going to keep a few dozen Indian IT people busy for months.
"You have just been erased."
How does that /. Cliche go? In Soviet Europe Google erases YOU!
Germany should've learned their lesson, when a telegram sent to their Ambassador in Mexico was intercepted by the British — and shared with the US-government.
Had we not obtained that piece of intelligence, the history of the world could've been quite different...
Yeah and if MI6 had grown a spine and called bullshit on the CIA case for WMD's in Iraq maybe that country would not now be on the cusp of becoming an Islamist Caliphate and 179 British soldiers would not have died what is increasingly looking like pointless deaths. At least the Germans had the good sense to see that the CIA 'evidence' for Iraqi WMDs was a steaming pile of horse manure and the strategic foresight to realize that intervention in Iraq would highly probably become the kind of FUBAR it currently is. Could it be that Germany (and France for that matter) learned some lessons from WWI, WWII and the cold war proxy conflicts that Britain might be well advised to take to heart?
I can see this type of service continuing on.
1: Parking spaces are in demand.
2: People are willing to pay cash for one.
3: Other people want money.
All that needs to happen is that the server gets moved offshore, and the app be made as a Web app so it survives being pulled from Apple's store.
I remember this exact same thing happening at a place I worked at when in college. They were such sticklers about being on time for shift that a second late on the phones meant a six month denial of promotions, and being late for any reason three times is an automatic termination. So, people from the neighborhood would fill this place's parking lot up about an hour before shift changed and demand cash... and the employees of this firm would pony up to a C-note in order to get a place, drive a car about a half mile from the office and park in a seedy neighborhood, or be late and stuck on the phones for another half-year with a freeze on raises.
I applaud SF banning this app, but in reality, it won't help, and this is just the start of it. I won't be surprised to see a black market for parking spaces, with people sitting for hours to "sell" theirs, happening soon. Especially home games in university towns or other places where people go for an event.
Why not just use the data already collected in all those parking palces, parking garages and multi story car parks? They usually have signs at every entrance stating how many free parking spaces there are (at least in Germany they do) and all you'd have to do is network these facilities pipe, the data into an app that shows the nearest free parking spots based on your location. The app could be provided by the city council as a public service or better yet the data could be integrated made available via web-service and integrated directly into networked satnav devices. Alternatively you could make this data availabe as a subscription service by a private company if you think public services stink too much of communism for your taste. Individual drivers would still have to find their own spot so there would be no hogging since nobody profits from "selling information" about the location of individual spaces. Hell, there could even be a "Report parking tard" button that dispatches a GPS location and a photo to the nearest tow-truck/cop-car/meter-maid.
No, he'll still be free to do as he wants, he'll just want to do different things. What on earth does age have to do with doing what you want?
Becasue as you age and experience things like for exampe: witnessing a serious traffic accident or loosing a family member in a traffic accident, you realize that there is a reason people passed laws against morons doing whatever they want, using public roads as their private race track or driving a car while being drunk out of their scull. Like he said, it's called growing up. You should try it...
why on earth would I allow a third party to make money off public parking if it's not re-invested into the road system
You mean why on earth would you allow the tow truck driver that removes a car thats been parked in a spot too long to make money off public parking?
Why would you allow the police man who busts people for driving too fast, driving drunk, driving an usafecar... etc. to profit off of public roads? After all cops get paid don't they? ... and wages are profit. I'd say it's because both the cop and the truck driver are enforcing the rules that allow for the safety, fairness and efficient running of the system whereas some bozo sitting on a parking spot twice as long as he/she has to in order to profit from releasing it to the highest bidder is not contributing to the efficient use of the system. Plus I can only imagine the fight that would break out when some irritated driver who's been waiting for Mr. Bozo's to vacate a parking space is told to make way for the newly arrived driverwho 'bought the rights' to the supposedly public parking space, especially in the US where half the population seems to be packing a gun. Now if this company sold subscriptions to a service that provided information based on your location about where the most parking spaces are likely to be available that's a whole other matter.
doesn't have any flappy bits to fall off.
What are you doing to your equipment? How did these "flappy bits" develop? How is it that every laptop you've claimed to own apparently crumbled at your touch?
It's called: "wear" and "poor engineering"
You know what? I don't actually believe you. I think you're lying. Are you just trying really hard to justify your overpriced laptop? I have no idea why. Just take the knock to the pocket-book and move on. Everyone makes mistakes.
Perhaps you just like Apple products and are worried about their lack of marketshare? If that's the case, you may want to find a different approach. I've never had a laptop inexplicably disintegrate.
You know what? I think you are one of those irrational individuals who hates computer equipment from certain manufacturers for no apparent reason and because you can then get yourself worked up by quoting other peoples internet posts out of context and accusing them of being liars. Some computers are simply badly designed, and the ones from Apple happen to be better designed than many other brands. That does not mean that Apple PCs are the only properly designed computers (my employer has for example had a quite good experience with a large fleet of Lenovo machines) but it does mean that they fall apart less often than for example the cheaper Dell and (as the GP pointed out) Sony laptops (which a former employer had poor experiences with).