Well as usual it depends upon what you choose as your baseline. By choosing the baseline year you can get either a very slight increase or more or less flat suicide rate for 15-24 year old up through 2013, the last year for which we have complete data. But it's nothing like the rate of smartphone or social media adoption.
This doesn't preclude a clinician from experiencing a dramatic trend in her practice that would alarm any reasonable person. That's why we have to look at both the statistical aggregate and clinical experience. When experience tells you there has been a dramatic change, and the statistically aggregated data say there's been no change, you put those together and what you're seeing is a change in the circumstances of suicide. That's not as alarming as a dramatic and systematic increase in rates, but it's still important.
If your enemy is in an unassailable position you have two choices; infiltrate and kill them in their sleep or attack something outside their fortress which they must come out to defend. Though I would think that the most obvious targets for the infiltration would be the drone 'pilots' families, people they do business with, people who make them burgers, people they owe money to, people who owe them money.
True. But the "obvious" targets illustrate my point about the depraved mind not being able to comprehend unintended consequences. These targets only work if the enemy reacts to attacking them exactly the way you hope he will. If he instead acts the opposite way, if he becomes more aggressive and indiscriminate in his drone attacks, that will only make you to double-down on your impotent strategy.
You can see this in Japan's strategy in WW2. In retrospect most of Japan's strategic aims in WW2 seem irrational. Their attempts to secure oil militarily only resulted in oil which would otherwise have been sold to them as a neutral or friendly power being cut off. And it was entirely predictable. In fact Japan itself predicted this, so they attacked Pearl Harbor in part on the assumption that a devastating attack would destroy the American public's support for a war to deny Indonesian oil to the empire -- a notion that could only be entertained by someone who was seriously self-deluded. It was a classic case of deranged men mistaking ruthlessness for realism.
Once someone loses his capacity to feel remorse for the consequences of his actions, horrors that would deter an ordinary person from doing something only feed his sense of self-importance and self-righteousness. This is true across the board no matter what your religion or ideology; the only thing that stops any of us from becoming monsters is our awareness of impending remorse.
Take the US drone strike programs in the Middle East. For the most part I feel these are a less destructive than the other military options open to us, and I think the technologies and practices used have become more accurate and precise over the years. But still there are mistakes in intelligence, human and technical errors, and plain bad luck which means despite our best efforts innocent people are being killed. And I feel remorse, even shame over that. Nobody likes feeling those things, but it's important for us to preserve our ability to feel them. Without them we would no longer weigh the negative consequences of our actions, and any rational restraint on our actions would be gone.
If you want a portrait of what that looks like, look at ISIS. They are fighting a brutal but futile campaign; even without the west Muslims themselves would refuse to be united under them. But the irrational futility of their actions only feeds their fanaticism.
Put yourself in the place of someone who wants to murder an identified US serviceman. Could the victim do anything to stop you if you were determined and patient enough, and willing to die?
Our system protects people by instilling fear of consequences. That works very well for most crimes and criminals, but not if the criminal believes he has the skills to avoid being caught (the beltway sniper) or is intent on committing blue suicide (Adam Lanza).
While it's true that a diesel without emissions control emits more highly dangerous particulates, this is not 1970. In an advanced economy any properly maintained, recent model diesel vehicle is going to be as clean as its gasoline counterpart.
It's worth considering banning the most polluting vehicles rather than arbitrarily banning half of all vehicles, but you can't do it this way. One way to do it would be to ban older vehicles, or vehicles of a certain weight carrying fewer than two or three passengers. But the even/odd license plate thing will work to reduce pollution and is simple to implement in a short term emergency -- although a massive inconvenience to people who can't carpool for some reason.
The source of the E. coli is more likely to be migrant farm workers who are not allowed bathroom breaks during harvest. State regs since the 90s require bathroom facilities, but they're often dirty, far away, and using them is frowned on by foremen on a tight schedule.
Having worked with a number of H1Bs from India, I'd say their level of technical competency was pretty comparable to what you'd expect from Americans. Some were horrible, a few were outstanding, most were OK.
There were two big differences. The first was the large number of masters degrees. This is obviously helpful in the visa process, but I don't think a CS or IT master's degree obtained right after college without any intervening work experience means much in practical terms. This is the kernel of truth in the "dodgy diploma" complaint, except there's nothing wrong with the diploma. It's often from a perfectly good program at a US university, it's just gilding the inexperienced lily.
The second big difference is culture. I don't think either culture has an overall advantage, but Indian engineers tend to be can-do and highly conscientious but are often conflict-averse and reluctant to convey bad news. Americans tend to be more assertive in the face of authority and somewhat less likely to tell the boss what they think he wants to hear rather than what he needs to hear. But it's important to realize that engineers are individuals, not cultural automatons. Some Americans are door mats and some Indian engineers are firebrands. And overall engineers from either country are more like each other than they are like ordinary people.
While I think the economic arguments for H1B are bogus, I am grateful to the program for having introduced me to so many interesting people.
My take on the issue of cheating in India is that the stakes are so much higher for some Indians it'd be surprising not to have scandals like this. We Americans see being middle class as a birthright. There isn't a bottomless bit of poverty waiting to swallow us up if we're a few points short of par on our SATs, the way there is for many Indians trying to climb onto the lower rungs of the middle class ladder. But even so *we* cheat plenty. Remember the Air Force officers who shared answers for tests that were supposed to measure their ongoing competency to handle nuclear weapons? That was sheer laziness.
Well, I give him his due in that he took part in some of Greenpeace's earliest activities. And I agree with him on Golden Rice and GMO foods. And he *does* have scientific credentials as an ecologist, although that doesn't mean he's not a crackpot -- especially when he weighs in on areas outside his expertise.
I'm not saying this is bad science; it sounds like great science. I'm just saying the geometry and scale are very different so people shouldn't jump to the conclusion that this will immediately lead to usable therapies for humans.
When I was a student I took a course where we got to handle a variety of vertebrate brains, including human ones. When you hold a human brain in your hand the first impression (other than awe) is that it's not terribly big. But it's huge compared to the brain of a small animal, and some of the structures we may be interested in are deep inside.
And apparently he's a "founder" of Greenpeace in the same sense that Willie Soon is a Harvare-Smithsonian astrophysicist -- which is to say he's worked with them.
So the headline should read, "Oil industry funded think tank announces that a guy who used to belong to Greenpeace is a climate denialist."
Just as a rough comparison, a mouse brain weighs 0.4 g, a human brain 1320 g. So right off the bat I'd be skeptical of whether this could be scaled up to treat humans. But still, it's a very interesting result.
Well, I don't know about *foolproof*, but most of the time when software does bad things because of specially crafted input, it's because someone didn't bother to do an input validation that they obviously ought to have done. This has been a leading cause of bugs since the 1974 edition of "The Elements of Programming Style", which devotes 2 out of 56 lessons to it:
#19 Test input for plausibility and validity.
#20Make sure input doesn't violate the limits of the program.
If K&P were writing that today they'd probably have a rule "never hand a piece of non-literal data to an interpreter without escaping anything the interpreter might consider lexically significant."
But this is evidently a somewhat *different* kind of bug -- perfectly valid data that some part of the program (likely a library) craps out on. Invalid/malicious input handling is a non-functional requirement, but this appears to be a *functional* requirement the programmers failed to implement or test.
Perhaps there should be a rule "if you don't do what you're supposed to with certain input yet, reject that input in a sensible way."
This is the marriage of two mature technologies -- electric motors and automobile chassis -- plus modern batteries. So all you need to create an electric car is the will and enough money to hire the engineers.
The trick will be to create a car that is practical and successful in the marketplace.
It's easy for an engineer to create an amazing car on paper. What's hard is for a company to actually produce an amazing car (electric or otherwise) that people actually want to buy and to make money at it. That requires so many things to go right at so many levels, and that's what's impressive about the success of Tesla.
I look forward to seeing what Virgin comes up with. I wish them success. But I don't particularly expect it.
Because even after Russell gave her credit for showing this first, people still credited him with the discovery.
So this story doesn't contradict that narrative that people in the early 20th C were sexist and unfair to the achievements of women. But it also shows that not all men fit this mold. So it's good news for human nature; it means most of us have caught with the best of us from a hundred years ago.
Which of course is one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at is that if German cooperation is worth so much to us that we pony up all that dough, it's stupid to risk what we get out of that deal by issuing ultimatums over Snowden.
Sure he who pays to piper calls the tune, but if he calls tunes unpopular enough he's paying the piper to play in an empty hall.
They've always been about design, as you'd know if you ever cracked open one of their tower computer cases it goes more than skin deep.
Design is about making choices, and one of the most important choices you have to make is which stuff to leave out. Take watches. If you have a watch with no features other than an hour, minute and second hand, that represents the pinnacle of usability for telling time with an analog watch. With every feature you add to an analog watch the task of telling time becomes ever-so-slightly more trouble.
Some analog watches feature a sun/moon complication which tells you whether it is AM or PM. This added feature doesn't remove the time-telling feature, it just adds design constraints: no digits on the dial, some ours don't have luminous markers etc. Consequently I don't care for this feature, but some people like it and possibly a very small number of them find it useful. This is also true of more popular features like day of the week or stopwatch subdials. They are occasionally useful but they add constraints and clutter. That explains why at a certain price point the number of geegaws on a watch starts going down. That's the point at which the manufacturer begins focusing on design. Consequently the most elegant watches are either very cheap or very expensive.
Google "Al Qaeda Watch" and you'll find the Casio F-91W, a black, square of plastic that is to super-cheap watches what the Rolex Submariner is to super-luxury watches: a design classic. But it's missing a feature I use quite a bit, a countdown timer. To get that I have to spend a few more dollars, and I end up with a bunch of *other* features like multiple time zones, multiple alarms, databanks etc. that significantly complicate the operation of the watch. The market simply doesn't offer a watch that has *exactly* what I want in such a perfectly streamlined package. And this shows something important about design, which is that people have different needs and tastes, so there's no such thing as a blend of function and form that's ideal for everyone.
Selling design is smart. It makes a successful product more profitable because it adds no marginal cost to each unit. And because no design is perfect, it means that after you've saturated the market with one design you can sell it another one. You'd think more companies would follow Apple's lead, but design is harder than it looks, and most tech people can't get past their "more is better" mentality.
Depends on what you mean by "Essentially all of the fuel is at the base of the reactor vessel".
If you mean that no fuel escaped the reactor pressure vessel, I'd take that bet in a heartbeat. If you mean that most of fuel is inside the primary containment vessel, I expect you're right but I wouldn't take that bet one way or the other.
This particular disaster has a track record of confounding optimistic expectations. In fact I think that's the lesson to draw from it. When events move well outside the parameters you expected you can't rely on optimistic expectations, you need data. We have to assume that fuel outside the PCV is at least a possibility until we have evidence which rules that out.
The movie came out in 1979 but the term was coined some twelve years earlier. I remember reading about it in the early 70s so I was quite interested to see the movie when it came out.
The movie had the incredible good luck of having the nuclear industry launching an ill-advised PR campaign against it (there's no such thing as bad publicity), which further backfired when the Three Mile Island accident occurred less than two weeks later.
The movie was actually pretty good. It was of course unfair to the nuclear industry in that it depicts it as using Mafia style tactics, but the scenario it paints was technically feasible. It would perhaps have been a better movie if the industry's motivations had been a bit more complex, e.g. they really believed the plant was safe but their judgment was clouded by confirmation bias. That's pretty much what happened at Fukushima; TEPCO did it's best to build a safe plant, but then discounted information that suggested it had been working from overly optimistic assumptions.
Your private car insurance does not cover you if you are operating as a ride sharing driver. Uber and Lyft as I understand it offer commercial insurance that covers their drivers while they are transporting passengers; but you are not covered by either Uber or your personal insurance when you are driving to or from picking up a fare. So as a driver you are essentially uninsured a lot of the time.
But as a passenger or bystander, you're actually better off with Lyft or Uber insurance-wise. That's because in many jurisdictions taxis aren't required to carry much if any insurance. For example my regulation-happy state allows taxi companies to self insure if they can pay out $20,000, which of course doesn't even cover property damage adequately, much less medical expenses. So what big taxi operators do is divide their fleets among many small corporations. If you call Boston Cab, you'll get a cab which says "Boston Cab" on the door but is owned by a separate corporation and operated by an "independent contractor". This doesn't stop someone with plenty ready cash to spend on lawyers from getting at Boston Cab's assets, but it effectively shields those assets from people who are already financially crippled by medical bills.
Whether ridesharing services increase personal or financial risks to users and bystanders is almost certainly a function of jurisdiction. Imagine a jurisdiction which requires taxis to carry adequate insurance and commercial vehicles to be safety inspected annually, but which doesn't require these things for the private cars used in ridesharing. That's the end of the spectrum where ridesharing externalizes risks and costs the most. Conversely in a place like Boston where there's annual inspections all-around and which make it easy for taxi companies to avoid liabilities for their operations, ridesharing companies are probably net positive for the public. The insurance situation coming to and from ridesharing jobs needs some work, but it's not substantially worse than the insurance situation for taxi companies all the time.
Some Native American languages have two versions of "is" depending on whether you know what "is" by first hand knowledge, or whether you heard it from someone else
Which doesn't mean English speakers can't express the difference between first and second-hand knowledge or (usually) tell from context. What it does mean is it's easier to elide that distinction in English.
I think that the idea that language somehow limits cognition is far too strong an assertion. Even if the urban myth about Eskimos having fifty separate words for snow were true, that doesn't mean someone who speaks a language from Papua New Guinea can't tell the difference between downy, fluffy snow and wet, cement-like snow. But I'm totally onboard that language can limit what can be communicated concisely; that it is possible in English to come away from hearing someone say "I shoveled ten inches of snow from my walk," with very little idea of whether that was a lot of work or not much work at all.
It's even possible to borrow idioms from other languages. Many years ago my wife and I did a crash course in Spanish before a month long visit to her sister who was working in Chile. It totally didn't take in her case; I had to explain to her that the bird perching on the sign at the beach notwithstanding, "zona peligrosa" does not mean "pelican zone." But to this day if she misplaces her keys she'll say, that they have "lost themselves on me." That accurately expresses the feeling that it's the damned keys' fault.
Well, there's nothing that stops people from doing this, other than that unlike you, they find javascript useless.
And it is *perfectly* reasonable to blame MS for IE. If not MS, than who? First of all, Javascript isn't the only source of Internet security problems. But by being deliberately non-compatible IE javascript created or exacerbated security problems for the web as a whole. If other computers on your LAN have to run an old version of IE because of its quirks, that puts your machine at risk too even if it doesn't run IE.
Sure too many people want to be writers. Which is not to say some of them shouldn't be.
Two of my writing friends have gone onto economically successful writing careers, one as a prolific, traditionally published author and another as a (rare) bestselling self-published author. The self-publisher stands out in part because she's got an extensive background in business; she invested in professional editing and artwork and can do the promotion work for her books as well as anyone at a New York Publishing house could.
But while they were among the most hard working and technically accomplished unpublished writers I've read, they're not really that interesting (which is why I'm not name-dropping). The stuff they write seems to me to be very similar to other stuff that is published in their market -- maybe a bit better from a prose standpoint than most, but eminently forgettable.
But there's one unpublished writer I've worked with who the world is really missing out on. He writes Jewish-themed epic and urban fantasy. His stuff has a kind of moral and imaginative resonance -- C.S. Lewis would have called it "numinous". But it's also deeply flawed. His prose is dense, over-complex and unnecessarily redundant. What he needs is really good editor. It'd be a lot of effort for an editor but what you'd end up with is something really special. But does that make business sense, when for the same amount of work he could put out three or four solid but conventional manuscripts by technically accomplished writers?
As for the unpublished writers who go the self-publishing route, most of them are not technically polished enough to have much chance with traditional publishers, nor do they tend to put the kind of editorial and production effort into their ebooks as my NYT best-selling friend. They tend to treat it as if it were a last-ditch attempt to recoup some of their sunk costs. Which is wishful thinking, but not a crime. Selling substandard prose is not like selling contaminated meat; you're not going to harm anyone, and if anything a dreadful cover should warn consumers what they're getting into.
And one thing I've learned by sharing my own prose and critiques is that there's a point where it almost doesn't matter if what you've written is more dreadful than it ought to have been. If you write something you care about, there's some weirdo out in the world somewhere it'll connect with.
Why not? Filter what you don't want, or translate it to what you think it should look like.
Of course nothing stops you from doing this. The practical barrier is getting everyone else to go along. Attempting to shape the course of language is like trying to nail jello to the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
Well as usual it depends upon what you choose as your baseline. By choosing the baseline year you can get either a very slight increase or more or less flat suicide rate for 15-24 year old up through 2013, the last year for which we have complete data. But it's nothing like the rate of smartphone or social media adoption.
This doesn't preclude a clinician from experiencing a dramatic trend in her practice that would alarm any reasonable person. That's why we have to look at both the statistical aggregate and clinical experience. When experience tells you there has been a dramatic change, and the statistically aggregated data say there's been no change, you put those together and what you're seeing is a change in the circumstances of suicide. That's not as alarming as a dramatic and systematic increase in rates, but it's still important.
If your enemy is in an unassailable position you have two choices; infiltrate and kill them in their sleep or attack something outside their fortress which they must come out to defend. Though I would think that the most obvious targets for the infiltration would be the drone 'pilots' families, people they do business with, people who make them burgers, people they owe money to, people who owe them money.
True. But the "obvious" targets illustrate my point about the depraved mind not being able to comprehend unintended consequences. These targets only work if the enemy reacts to attacking them exactly the way you hope he will. If he instead acts the opposite way, if he becomes more aggressive and indiscriminate in his drone attacks, that will only make you to double-down on your impotent strategy.
You can see this in Japan's strategy in WW2. In retrospect most of Japan's strategic aims in WW2 seem irrational. Their attempts to secure oil militarily only resulted in oil which would otherwise have been sold to them as a neutral or friendly power being cut off. And it was entirely predictable. In fact Japan itself predicted this, so they attacked Pearl Harbor in part on the assumption that a devastating attack would destroy the American public's support for a war to deny Indonesian oil to the empire -- a notion that could only be entertained by someone who was seriously self-deluded. It was a classic case of deranged men mistaking ruthlessness for realism.
Once someone loses his capacity to feel remorse for the consequences of his actions, horrors that would deter an ordinary person from doing something only feed his sense of self-importance and self-righteousness. This is true across the board no matter what your religion or ideology; the only thing that stops any of us from becoming monsters is our awareness of impending remorse.
Take the US drone strike programs in the Middle East. For the most part I feel these are a less destructive than the other military options open to us, and I think the technologies and practices used have become more accurate and precise over the years. But still there are mistakes in intelligence, human and technical errors, and plain bad luck which means despite our best efforts innocent people are being killed. And I feel remorse, even shame over that. Nobody likes feeling those things, but it's important for us to preserve our ability to feel them. Without them we would no longer weigh the negative consequences of our actions, and any rational restraint on our actions would be gone.
If you want a portrait of what that looks like, look at ISIS. They are fighting a brutal but futile campaign; even without the west Muslims themselves would refuse to be united under them. But the irrational futility of their actions only feeds their fanaticism.
You don't get to shoot back if you're dead.
Put yourself in the place of someone who wants to murder an identified US serviceman. Could the victim do anything to stop you if you were determined and patient enough, and willing to die?
Our system protects people by instilling fear of consequences. That works very well for most crimes and criminals, but not if the criminal believes he has the skills to avoid being caught (the beltway sniper) or is intent on committing blue suicide (Adam Lanza).
While it's true that a diesel without emissions control emits more highly dangerous particulates, this is not 1970. In an advanced economy any properly maintained, recent model diesel vehicle is going to be as clean as its gasoline counterpart.
It's worth considering banning the most polluting vehicles rather than arbitrarily banning half of all vehicles, but you can't do it this way. One way to do it would be to ban older vehicles, or vehicles of a certain weight carrying fewer than two or three passengers. But the even/odd license plate thing will work to reduce pollution and is simple to implement in a short term emergency -- although a massive inconvenience to people who can't carpool for some reason.
The source of the E. coli is more likely to be migrant farm workers who are not allowed bathroom breaks during harvest. State regs since the 90s require bathroom facilities, but they're often dirty, far away, and using them is frowned on by foremen on a tight schedule.
Having worked with a number of H1Bs from India, I'd say their level of technical competency was pretty comparable to what you'd expect from Americans. Some were horrible, a few were outstanding, most were OK.
There were two big differences. The first was the large number of masters degrees. This is obviously helpful in the visa process, but I don't think a CS or IT master's degree obtained right after college without any intervening work experience means much in practical terms. This is the kernel of truth in the "dodgy diploma" complaint, except there's nothing wrong with the diploma. It's often from a perfectly good program at a US university, it's just gilding the inexperienced lily.
The second big difference is culture. I don't think either culture has an overall advantage, but Indian engineers tend to be can-do and highly conscientious but are often conflict-averse and reluctant to convey bad news. Americans tend to be more assertive in the face of authority and somewhat less likely to tell the boss what they think he wants to hear rather than what he needs to hear. But it's important to realize that engineers are individuals, not cultural automatons. Some Americans are door mats and some Indian engineers are firebrands. And overall engineers from either country are more like each other than they are like ordinary people.
While I think the economic arguments for H1B are bogus, I am grateful to the program for having introduced me to so many interesting people.
My take on the issue of cheating in India is that the stakes are so much higher for some Indians it'd be surprising not to have scandals like this. We Americans see being middle class as a birthright. There isn't a bottomless bit of poverty waiting to swallow us up if we're a few points short of par on our SATs, the way there is for many Indians trying to climb onto the lower rungs of the middle class ladder. But even so *we* cheat plenty. Remember the Air Force officers who shared answers for tests that were supposed to measure their ongoing competency to handle nuclear weapons? That was sheer laziness.
Well, I give him his due in that he took part in some of Greenpeace's earliest activities. And I agree with him on Golden Rice and GMO foods. And he *does* have scientific credentials as an ecologist, although that doesn't mean he's not a crackpot -- especially when he weighs in on areas outside his expertise.
I'm not saying this is bad science; it sounds like great science. I'm just saying the geometry and scale are very different so people shouldn't jump to the conclusion that this will immediately lead to usable therapies for humans.
When I was a student I took a course where we got to handle a variety of vertebrate brains, including human ones. When you hold a human brain in your hand the first impression (other than awe) is that it's not terribly big. But it's huge compared to the brain of a small animal, and some of the structures we may be interested in are deep inside.
Just a few semesters of brain science at MIT before I chose a different major.
And apparently he's a "founder" of Greenpeace in the same sense that Willie Soon is a Harvare-Smithsonian astrophysicist -- which is to say he's worked with them.
So the headline should read, "Oil industry funded think tank announces that a guy who used to belong to Greenpeace is a climate denialist."
Not exactly prime clickbait.
Just as a rough comparison, a mouse brain weighs 0.4 g, a human brain 1320 g. So right off the bat I'd be skeptical of whether this could be scaled up to treat humans. But still, it's a very interesting result.
Well, I don't know about *foolproof*, but most of the time when software does bad things because of specially crafted input, it's because someone didn't bother to do an input validation that they obviously ought to have done. This has been a leading cause of bugs since the 1974 edition of "The Elements of Programming Style", which devotes 2 out of 56 lessons to it:
#19 Test input for plausibility and validity.
#20Make sure input doesn't violate the limits of the program.
If K&P were writing that today they'd probably have a rule "never hand a piece of non-literal data to an interpreter without escaping anything the interpreter might consider lexically significant."
But this is evidently a somewhat *different* kind of bug -- perfectly valid data that some part of the program (likely a library) craps out on. Invalid/malicious input handling is a non-functional requirement, but this appears to be a *functional* requirement the programmers failed to implement or test.
Perhaps there should be a rule "if you don't do what you're supposed to with certain input yet, reject that input in a sensible way."
This is the marriage of two mature technologies -- electric motors and automobile chassis -- plus modern batteries. So all you need to create an electric car is the will and enough money to hire the engineers.
The trick will be to create a car that is practical and successful in the marketplace.
It's easy for an engineer to create an amazing car on paper. What's hard is for a company to actually produce an amazing car (electric or otherwise) that people actually want to buy and to make money at it. That requires so many things to go right at so many levels, and that's what's impressive about the success of Tesla.
I look forward to seeing what Virgin comes up with. I wish them success. But I don't particularly expect it.
Because even after Russell gave her credit for showing this first, people still credited him with the discovery.
So this story doesn't contradict that narrative that people in the early 20th C were sexist and unfair to the achievements of women. But it also shows that not all men fit this mold. So it's good news for human nature; it means most of us have caught with the best of us from a hundred years ago.
Which of course is one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at is that if German cooperation is worth so much to us that we pony up all that dough, it's stupid to risk what we get out of that deal by issuing ultimatums over Snowden.
Sure he who pays to piper calls the tune, but if he calls tunes unpopular enough he's paying the piper to play in an empty hall.
Sure, and sci fi has had anti-gravity for many decades, but I'm pretty sure that information suggesting it was actually possible would still be news.
They've always been about design, as you'd know if you ever cracked open one of their tower computer cases it goes more than skin deep.
Design is about making choices, and one of the most important choices you have to make is which stuff to leave out. Take watches. If you have a watch with no features other than an hour, minute and second hand, that represents the pinnacle of usability for telling time with an analog watch. With every feature you add to an analog watch the task of telling time becomes ever-so-slightly more trouble.
Some analog watches feature a sun/moon complication which tells you whether it is AM or PM. This added feature doesn't remove the time-telling feature, it just adds design constraints: no digits on the dial, some ours don't have luminous markers etc. Consequently I don't care for this feature, but some people like it and possibly a very small number of them find it useful. This is also true of more popular features like day of the week or stopwatch subdials. They are occasionally useful but they add constraints and clutter. That explains why at a certain price point the number of geegaws on a watch starts going down. That's the point at which the manufacturer begins focusing on design. Consequently the most elegant watches are either very cheap or very expensive.
Google "Al Qaeda Watch" and you'll find the Casio F-91W, a black, square of plastic that is to super-cheap watches what the Rolex Submariner is to super-luxury watches: a design classic. But it's missing a feature I use quite a bit, a countdown timer. To get that I have to spend a few more dollars, and I end up with a bunch of *other* features like multiple time zones, multiple alarms, databanks etc. that significantly complicate the operation of the watch. The market simply doesn't offer a watch that has *exactly* what I want in such a perfectly streamlined package. And this shows something important about design, which is that people have different needs and tastes, so there's no such thing as a blend of function and form that's ideal for everyone.
Selling design is smart. It makes a successful product more profitable because it adds no marginal cost to each unit. And because no design is perfect, it means that after you've saturated the market with one design you can sell it another one. You'd think more companies would follow Apple's lead, but design is harder than it looks, and most tech people can't get past their "more is better" mentality.
Depends on what you mean by "Essentially all of the fuel is at the base of the reactor vessel".
If you mean that no fuel escaped the reactor pressure vessel, I'd take that bet in a heartbeat. If you mean that most of fuel is inside the primary containment vessel, I expect you're right but I wouldn't take that bet one way or the other.
This particular disaster has a track record of confounding optimistic expectations. In fact I think that's the lesson to draw from it. When events move well outside the parameters you expected you can't rely on optimistic expectations, you need data. We have to assume that fuel outside the PCV is at least a possibility until we have evidence which rules that out.
The movie came out in 1979 but the term was coined some twelve years earlier. I remember reading about it in the early 70s so I was quite interested to see the movie when it came out.
The movie had the incredible good luck of having the nuclear industry launching an ill-advised PR campaign against it (there's no such thing as bad publicity), which further backfired when the Three Mile Island accident occurred less than two weeks later.
The movie was actually pretty good. It was of course unfair to the nuclear industry in that it depicts it as using Mafia style tactics, but the scenario it paints was technically feasible. It would perhaps have been a better movie if the industry's motivations had been a bit more complex, e.g. they really believed the plant was safe but their judgment was clouded by confirmation bias. That's pretty much what happened at Fukushima; TEPCO did it's best to build a safe plant, but then discounted information that suggested it had been working from overly optimistic assumptions.
Your private car insurance does not cover you if you are operating as a ride sharing driver. Uber and Lyft as I understand it offer commercial insurance that covers their drivers while they are transporting passengers; but you are not covered by either Uber or your personal insurance when you are driving to or from picking up a fare. So as a driver you are essentially uninsured a lot of the time.
But as a passenger or bystander, you're actually better off with Lyft or Uber insurance-wise. That's because in many jurisdictions taxis aren't required to carry much if any insurance. For example my regulation-happy state allows taxi companies to self insure if they can pay out $20,000, which of course doesn't even cover property damage adequately, much less medical expenses. So what big taxi operators do is divide their fleets among many small corporations. If you call Boston Cab, you'll get a cab which says "Boston Cab" on the door but is owned by a separate corporation and operated by an "independent contractor". This doesn't stop someone with plenty ready cash to spend on lawyers from getting at Boston Cab's assets, but it effectively shields those assets from people who are already financially crippled by medical bills.
Whether ridesharing services increase personal or financial risks to users and bystanders is almost certainly a function of jurisdiction. Imagine a jurisdiction which requires taxis to carry adequate insurance and commercial vehicles to be safety inspected annually, but which doesn't require these things for the private cars used in ridesharing. That's the end of the spectrum where ridesharing externalizes risks and costs the most. Conversely in a place like Boston where there's annual inspections all-around and which make it easy for taxi companies to avoid liabilities for their operations, ridesharing companies are probably net positive for the public. The insurance situation coming to and from ridesharing jobs needs some work, but it's not substantially worse than the insurance situation for taxi companies all the time.
Which doesn't mean English speakers can't express the difference between first and second-hand knowledge or (usually) tell from context. What it does mean is it's easier to elide that distinction in English.
I think that the idea that language somehow limits cognition is far too strong an assertion. Even if the urban myth about Eskimos having fifty separate words for snow were true, that doesn't mean someone who speaks a language from Papua New Guinea can't tell the difference between downy, fluffy snow and wet, cement-like snow. But I'm totally onboard that language can limit what can be communicated concisely; that it is possible in English to come away from hearing someone say "I shoveled ten inches of snow from my walk," with very little idea of whether that was a lot of work or not much work at all.
It's even possible to borrow idioms from other languages. Many years ago my wife and I did a crash course in Spanish before a month long visit to her sister who was working in Chile. It totally didn't take in her case; I had to explain to her that the bird perching on the sign at the beach notwithstanding, "zona peligrosa" does not mean "pelican zone." But to this day if she misplaces her keys she'll say, that they have "lost themselves on me." That accurately expresses the feeling that it's the damned keys' fault.
Well, there's nothing that stops people from doing this, other than that unlike you, they find javascript useless.
And it is *perfectly* reasonable to blame MS for IE. If not MS, than who? First of all, Javascript isn't the only source of Internet security problems. But by being deliberately non-compatible IE javascript created or exacerbated security problems for the web as a whole. If other computers on your LAN have to run an old version of IE because of its quirks, that puts your machine at risk too even if it doesn't run IE.
Sure too many people want to be writers. Which is not to say some of them shouldn't be.
Two of my writing friends have gone onto economically successful writing careers, one as a prolific, traditionally published author and another as a (rare) bestselling self-published author. The self-publisher stands out in part because she's got an extensive background in business; she invested in professional editing and artwork and can do the promotion work for her books as well as anyone at a New York Publishing house could.
But while they were among the most hard working and technically accomplished unpublished writers I've read, they're not really that interesting (which is why I'm not name-dropping). The stuff they write seems to me to be very similar to other stuff that is published in their market -- maybe a bit better from a prose standpoint than most, but eminently forgettable.
But there's one unpublished writer I've worked with who the world is really missing out on. He writes Jewish-themed epic and urban fantasy. His stuff has a kind of moral and imaginative resonance -- C.S. Lewis would have called it "numinous". But it's also deeply flawed. His prose is dense, over-complex and unnecessarily redundant. What he needs is really good editor. It'd be a lot of effort for an editor but what you'd end up with is something really special. But does that make business sense, when for the same amount of work he could put out three or four solid but conventional manuscripts by technically accomplished writers?
As for the unpublished writers who go the self-publishing route, most of them are not technically polished enough to have much chance with traditional publishers, nor do they tend to put the kind of editorial and production effort into their ebooks as my NYT best-selling friend. They tend to treat it as if it were a last-ditch attempt to recoup some of their sunk costs. Which is wishful thinking, but not a crime. Selling substandard prose is not like selling contaminated meat; you're not going to harm anyone, and if anything a dreadful cover should warn consumers what they're getting into.
And one thing I've learned by sharing my own prose and critiques is that there's a point where it almost doesn't matter if what you've written is more dreadful than it ought to have been. If you write something you care about, there's some weirdo out in the world somewhere it'll connect with.
Why not? Filter what you don't want, or translate it to what you think it should look like.
Of course nothing stops you from doing this. The practical barrier is getting everyone else to go along. Attempting to shape the course of language is like trying to nail jello to the wall.