Why would the car continue to operate for 37.5 minutes of the trip if the driver didn't have his hands on the steering wheel? If that's a requirement, why didn't the car just pull over and shut off? It seems like Tesla failed to implement some common sense safety protocols here.
The real problem is that Tesla's "Autopilot" is the worst possible solution to the problem. One of the realities of the human brain is that shifting your attention is hard... To put it in computational terms, the context switch is expensive. Even when the car is doing the driving, it theoretically requires the driver to be auditing it, and be paying attention to their surroundings in case things go sideways. Concentrating on something that you're not actively participating in can be quite difficult, as we already know. If the driver is actually, well, driving, they are already hopefully paying attention to the road and their surroundings.
Until we get self-driving cars that can run without even having a steering wheel, it is a bad idea to have the computer half in control. The better solution is to work the other way. The driver does most of the driving, and the computer only takes over in emergency/collision type situations (avoiding that box on the highway, the idiot merging into your blind spot, etc...)
This actually isn't all that uncommon around the world, at least to varying degrees.
Hot air, at high(er) altitudes is less dense, which will affect the performance of an aircraft to various degrees. The usual effect is that reduces the aircraft's MTOW (Maximum Take Off Weight). If it drops below a certain point, it's either uneconomical to fly the plane, or it can't carry enough fuel to do its job.
Many years ago, Air Canada used to fly to India using Airbus A340s. At certain times of year, it was hot enough in Delhi that they could not take off with sufficient fuel to do DEL->YYZ direct, and instead they would have to make a technical stop in Turkey to refuel the aircraft. This is also one of the reasons why most long-haul international flights fly in and out of Delhi at night. The air is cooler, giving the airliners better performance.
There was a proposed civilian variant known as the MD-17/BC-17, but it was never sold. What I don't know is how far into the approvals process Boeing/McDonnel Douglass went.
I've flown on the C-17 a bunch of times, and as long as you're in the jumpseats on the side (and not in palletized airline seating in the middle) they're quite pleasant to fly on for a cargo plane. *MUCH* nicer than C-130s, though those have their own charm.
Yet telcos seem to think that because "complex stuff" [which isn't remotely complex, by the way], that this somehow exempts them from the obligation to advertise and charge fairly for their services.
I have zero affiliation with the ISP world, or anything else, but here's the thing: Your internet connection is more like the other utilities that are delivered to your house.
The electrical service to your house is likely rated at 200A or so. You can pull down 200A from your power utility, but if you did that all the time the utility would likely investigate to see what's going on. You would probably have to upgrade your service to something higher to continue getting power. If everyone pulled the maximum permitted by their service, it would bring the grid to its knees and cause widespread blackouts. You can see some of this in California with the problems they have with daytime peaking as all the A/C kicks in.
Same thing goes for your water service. The pipe that comes into your house is capable of delivering a lot of water, and if everyone tried to use it to the max, the city's reservoirs would be quickly drained. You see this in big cities during major sporting events and so forth. There is very often a large drop in the reservoirs during intermission, and a corresponding bump in sewage flows, as everyone goes to the restroom and relieves themselves.
The difference between these and your Internet of course is that in most jurisdictions, these are metered services rather than (mostly) unmetered like your internet connection. However, my main point is that it's not practical for providers to guarantee that you can pull down your rated speed 24/7, as building out the network to support that for all of their customers would be prohibitively expensive. At some point there has to be an over-subscription ratio. The issue is what that ratio should be.
Not if you add the cert to your PC's certificate store as a root certificate. This works fine if you have control over all PCs that will be using the site.
You or I know how to do this. The average person on the street? not so much.
maybe I'm too lazy to watch any new stuff, some of it I just don't get (maybe I'm too old). It seems to me when Roddenberry came up with his ST idea, it was new stuff. Space travel was new, having a command staff where not everyone is a white guy whose native language is english was new.
Other than its progressive surface and the fact that it was in space, TOS really wasn't much more than a spaghetti western, in space. It was pretty much just an action series, with the bad guy of the week, and pretty much completely episodic. People forget that, and imho, the Abrams moves are a return to what Trek originally was.
It wasn't until TNG and the later movies that things started to become pseudo-philosophical and the like, with the long drawn out conversations around conference tables and what not.
The flip side is that we (as humans) have been genetically modifying our crops since the advent of agriculture.
As far as your argument regarding Roundup and Wheat, I'm pretty sure you're incorrect with that. Monsanto lists Corn, Soybean, Sorghum, Canola, Alfalfa, Cotton, and Sugar Beets as being currently available with the "Roundup Ready" modification. Wheat is still in development.
I actually don't know how good of a candidate that wheat, and the other grains, really are for the mod anyways. Modern cultivation techniques plant the seeds so densely that the wheat will pretty much choke out/shade any weeds that might be present.
How the hell do you waste water? It just flows back into the sea and joins the sea -> cloud -> rain cycle all over again.
A lot of the water used to grow crops in the deserts of California and the like comes from wells, rather than surface water. Depending on the aquifer, and how deep it is, it can take millennia to replenish those stocks, if they ever will replenish. Once that water is gone, the farms will be gone as well. Yes, a lot of the water used in irrigation comes from surface water sources, but aquifer depletion is a real problem as well.
There were scenes in the show in Metropolis at some large body of water
Given that Smallville was filmed in Vancouver, BC (as is Arrow/Supergirl/The Flash), it would be hard to do an establishing shot without large amounts of water present.
The difference is this ice is multi-year ice that has drifted south, then been blown into shore by wind/current. It's drifted down from a lot further away than the ice you're referring to.
There was never any suggestion in the article that the problem was that there was more ice than before. But that doesn't stop the deniers trying to pretend that this is some problem with the concept of global warming. But then not looking at the facts and jumping to conclusions is what causes them to be deniers in the first place.
The bigger worry on this trip is that while the CCGS Amundsen was doing her search and rescue work, the scientists on board took the opportunity to examine the ice they were navigating through was multi-year ice, rather than first year ice. The thing is that multi-year sea ice can not form below a certain latitude. There is always some multi-year ice that gets pushed south every year, but never in this quantity or size/shape, but what they found implies that the arctic ocean has warmed up significantly.
I've been licensed since 1978, and have watched the ebb and flow of the hobby during my time - it's still a great pastime, at least for those of us who just like to BS with our fellow geeks/nerds/techies...
For some of us, we're in a new golden era of the hobby (and I use that word deliberately). The advent of modern computing hardware and sound cards has led to a lot of really fascinating work done on the margins of what is practical over the air. Things like WSPR that can send data (really slowly, and only with synchronized clocks, which is kinda cheating I guess) at levels that are 27dB below the noise floor is truly impressive. Other things like Olivia and the various other digital modes, is the new realm of amateur experimentation.
Yes, in the modern era, for the most part amateurs aren't building their own radios any more, but there's a new growth in all sorts of unique modes and techniques, and people are experimenting once again. Same thing with some of the SDR work being done... Now that it's possible to directly synthesize and/or digitize things at amateur frequencies, there's a whole new world of experimentation to be done.
Umm, where did you get the sense that I'm an imbecile when it comes to firearms, other than your emotional gut reaction?
Yes, I myself am not a hunter, it's not something that appeals to me. I've gone out on hunting trips with these friends I mentioned, been through the process, and watched the respect and care they took in their craft.
It also doesn't mean I don't know anything about firearms. I know how to handle them safely and efficiently. My first job out of University was as an assistant/gruntworker for a research project in the high arctic. Part of my role was to be polar bear patrol for the researchers, which meant I carried for the duration of my stay there, and slept with a rifle next to me in my tent. You don't need an AR-15 to take down a polar bear, a 12ga with slugs will do just fine.
Sure, but you're not going to go hunting with a Mac-10 or similar firearm. Spraying a deer with a dozen rounds doesn't exactly lead to a good dinner. I'm not a hunter myself, but I have friends who do, but they're generally out there with a fairly high powered bolt action rifle, or a shotgun, depending on the season and what their prey is. It's all about simplicity and reliability, if you need to throw a lot of rounds down range to take out a ptarmigan or a buck, you're doing it wrong(tm).
95% of shooters will have a stupidly low hit count/per rounds fired. Army police train for it. Everyone else tries to train themselves to be slow and methodical and keep the heart rate steady
This is true within the Military as well. When the DoD was looking to replace the M14, they did a pretty extensive study on the best way to cause damage to the enemy. The result of the study found that the largest effect was not the calibre of the bullets going down range, but instead related to simply the number of rounds going downrange. As such, they switched from 7.62mm to 5.56, as it allowed the soldiers/marines to carry more rounds for the same weight, and the (potentially) lower recoil reduced fatigue and allowed more rounds to go down range.
Yes, a 7.62mm has a hell of a lot more stopping/penetration power, but that doesn't matter if the round just impacts the dirt or a tree, or whatever.
That's the thing, they don't have to be to be a problem. That was the ingenious thing with Stuxnet... It had two parts, the worm that infected internet connected hosts, and the thumbdrive vector that allowed it to jump the air gap. It's entirely likely that it originated with infected thumb drives that were dropped in parking lots/buses/etc... frequented by the Engineers working on Iran's nuclear programme. People being people, they stuck the thumb drives into their machines, on either side of the air gap, and then the worm spread through the isolated side of the network, infecting the PLCs driving their centrifuges.
That said, I operate the network for an organization that has their own private power system (small hydro-electric system isolated from the main grid). As much as I would like to physically isolate our power control network from our main operational network, it's unfortunately not practical. Instead the main control of the turbines, exciters, generators and such is strongly firewalled, and then the load shedding components in the rest of the campus are on an isolated VLAN. There is additional protection through strategic use of VRFs and the like. Is it perfect? no, but it's the best I can do.
100 years ago it was much cheaper to handle and import Opium and Heroin that was derived from the opium poppy. This drug has a certain strength, known effects, and isn't hugely dense. Yes, there were already synthetic opiods at that point, but they were mostly a laboratory curiosity than anything else. There wasn't a reason for those in the drug trade to introduce them, as opium derived drugs were cheap enough. Due to the "war on drugs" and the current prohibitionist climate, we're now reaping what we sowed. The criminal element has now moved to substitutes which are orders of magnitude more potent than what was present before, and thus cheaper.
The only real solution, imho, is to stop treating drug addiction as a criminal offense, and move to the medical model. The only time addicts will give up their addiction successfully is when they're ready to do so. Until then, we need to support them to keep them from killing themselves, and hopefully keep them as functioning members of our society.
The difference today, though, is the sheer potency of the synthetic opiods that are being mailed across. You can ship enough Fentanyl or worse Carfentanyl (or its analogues) in an envelope designed for a greeting card to supply a reasonably sized town for a few weeks. We're talking drugs where the LD50 is on the order of micrograms. In theory of course, they could be diluted down to a safe dosage (we're talking almost Homeopathic type levels of dilution), but the reality is that most of the dealers and gangs running this stuff certainly aren't compounding pharmacists or even real chemists.
They're also extremely cheap as they're synthesized in labs, rather than requiring all the processing to be derived from opium poppies, paying off the cartels and corrupt government officials, and so forth. This is basically Economics 101 going on in the drug trade. The dealers have found a new source of product that is (much) cheaper and easier to obtain, and done right, meets the inelastic need of the addicts.
Anyhow, the real lesson here is that the "war on drugs" has failed, and failed miserably. It has hugely increased the cost of simple Heroin and other opiods, and pushed people to using these much cheaper (and far more dangerous) analogues. The only reason why they are cheaper, is because policy has made the traditional drugs so expensive and criminally dangerous to get.
Actually nuclear has the same problem. It's a fairly expensive base load, but when demand drops prices still go negative, because you still need the grid to absorb the excess. You can't just ramp up and ramp down on a dime: that's why they call it base load. Your base load should always be less than total demand.
Exactly this. During the California power crisis a decade or so ago, our public utility up in British Columbia made out like bandits. During the day time, power was at a huge premium in California. So, BC Hydro would run their hydro-electric power plants flat out, as hard as possible, unsustainably draining their reservoirs. At night, they'd turn the dams off, let the water build up behind the dams again, and buy dirt cheap nuclear power from California. The reason is that the older designs used in current Nuclear power plants can't reliably ramp up or down to meet real daytime/nighttime peaking.
Not quite true. The problem with Wind turbines is that if you run them unloaded, they tend to runaway and destroy themselves. You need to keep them loaded at all times. They could just dump the load into loadbanks or similar, but then they would have to invest in load banks (giant resistors) to make that practical. Solar, on the other hand, you can safely disconnect and leave open circuit if you don't need the power any more.
Impeach him for what. First you have to have a crime.
Actually, all you need is suspicion of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" as per the constitution. From there, impeachment takes a simple majority of the house. Should the motion pass, it's then sent to the Senate, which conducts a "trial" which then eventually needs a 2/3rds majority to remove the president from office. However, unlike trials in the legal system, the standards of evidence and due process are much more relaxed in one sense. However, the 2/3rds majority makes it an exceedingly difficult bar to hit (which I suppose was part of the point).
I've done a lot of work with a local Ace/True-Value hardware store and it was so much easier to deal with for random/weird things than the big boys. I was involved in a project to renew/rebuild part of a camp/retreat centre, and so we were buying a lot of different items to make things happen. To get our stuff on-site involved sending it up a lake on a boat.
Anyhow, for big ticket electrical items (spools of wire, conduit, 15 new electrical panels and associated breakers, etc... we dealt with the local electrical supply as they gave us the best prices, had what we needed, and one of their local reps lived 2 blocks from the boat dock so could just drop it off.
For the onesies and twosies, and other random stuff, the Ace in town was the best to deal with, especially for those of us who aren't experts. We'd call them and go "Hey, we need 10lbs of 2" sheetrock screws" and their response was "no problem, we'll have them on the boat tomorrow." In a bunch of situations, too, where we didn't quite know what we needed, their expertise really came into play. Plus, if they didn't have it on hand, they could usually get it pretty quickly.
Anyhow, my point is that the big box stores are fine if all you need is a 2x4, or a 20A eaton breaker, or a new light switch. If you need a 40A 3 phase breaker for a cutler-hamer breaker panel, or a replacement fan motor for a 15 year old bathroom fan, they're probably not going to be able to help you. The local guys, on the other hand, are usually willing to work with you can either get you what you need, or a replacement part.
Right, and their networks (Electric and Water supply) can't supply every customer at their rated capacity either.
In the case of the water system, this is observable in cities who's local sports team is partaking in the league championship. During half time/intermission, the water reservoirs drain noticeably due to everyone relieving themselves and flushing. If everyone was using their water supply at full capacity, the infrastructure and the source would not be able to sustain it.
Same thing with the electrical grid. Look at the problems they've had in California over the years with daytime peaking, load management, and so forth. If everyone used all the power available to them all the time, the utility simply would not be able to sustain it. If you were/are using your full 200A service to capacity, all the time, the power company is going to come and figure out what's going on. Near where I grew up, a couple of neighbors on large properties got into a neighborly competition around each Christmas as to who could present the most spectacular light display. In the end, the power company had to rebuild the network in their neiborhood to supply the additional load without impacting their non-participating neighbors. The grid just wasn't built to have two houses, off of one transformer, where both were drawing 200A continuously for hours at a time.
The gas trunk line to your neighborhood is sized for the average usage of the area it serves, plus some margin. If everyone's furnace was running full bore, all stove burners on, hot water tanks, etc... the pressure would drop, demand would slow down, and the system would stabilize, and you would be wondering why you're getting piss poor flame out of your stove.
The difference is that, in the case of Electricity it's metered, so the more you use, the more you pay. Also, it's pretty common to have a step function in there. You pay one rate up to X kWh used, and Y thereafter.
So yeah, your comparison is flawed. The only way it would work is if you were willing to accept a metered account. Are you? I didn't think so. Instead, you get best effort.
When connected to an appropriate DAC or headphone connector, the lightning connector delivers raw uncompressed digital audio. You're not just limited to Bluetooth. Also, IIRC, airplay will generally deliver the audio in its native format over wireless, so there's that as well.
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Why would the car continue to operate for 37.5 minutes of the trip if the driver didn't have his hands on the steering wheel? If that's a requirement, why didn't the car just pull over and shut off? It seems like Tesla failed to implement some common sense safety protocols here.
The real problem is that Tesla's "Autopilot" is the worst possible solution to the problem. One of the realities of the human brain is that shifting your attention is hard... To put it in computational terms, the context switch is expensive. Even when the car is doing the driving, it theoretically requires the driver to be auditing it, and be paying attention to their surroundings in case things go sideways. Concentrating on something that you're not actively participating in can be quite difficult, as we already know. If the driver is actually, well, driving, they are already hopefully paying attention to the road and their surroundings.
Until we get self-driving cars that can run without even having a steering wheel, it is a bad idea to have the computer half in control. The better solution is to work the other way. The driver does most of the driving, and the computer only takes over in emergency/collision type situations (avoiding that box on the highway, the idiot merging into your blind spot, etc...)
This actually isn't all that uncommon around the world, at least to varying degrees.
Hot air, at high(er) altitudes is less dense, which will affect the performance of an aircraft to various degrees. The usual effect is that reduces the aircraft's MTOW (Maximum Take Off Weight). If it drops below a certain point, it's either uneconomical to fly the plane, or it can't carry enough fuel to do its job.
Many years ago, Air Canada used to fly to India using Airbus A340s. At certain times of year, it was hot enough in Delhi that they could not take off with sufficient fuel to do DEL->YYZ direct, and instead they would have to make a technical stop in Turkey to refuel the aircraft. This is also one of the reasons why most long-haul international flights fly in and out of Delhi at night. The air is cooler, giving the airliners better performance.
There was a proposed civilian variant known as the MD-17/BC-17, but it was never sold. What I don't know is how far into the approvals process Boeing/McDonnel Douglass went.
I've flown on the C-17 a bunch of times, and as long as you're in the jumpseats on the side (and not in palletized airline seating in the middle) they're quite pleasant to fly on for a cargo plane. *MUCH* nicer than C-130s, though those have their own charm.
Yet telcos seem to think that because "complex stuff" [which isn't remotely complex, by the way], that this somehow exempts them from the obligation to advertise and charge fairly for their services.
I have zero affiliation with the ISP world, or anything else, but here's the thing: Your internet connection is more like the other utilities that are delivered to your house.
The electrical service to your house is likely rated at 200A or so. You can pull down 200A from your power utility, but if you did that all the time the utility would likely investigate to see what's going on. You would probably have to upgrade your service to something higher to continue getting power. If everyone pulled the maximum permitted by their service, it would bring the grid to its knees and cause widespread blackouts. You can see some of this in California with the problems they have with daytime peaking as all the A/C kicks in.
Same thing goes for your water service. The pipe that comes into your house is capable of delivering a lot of water, and if everyone tried to use it to the max, the city's reservoirs would be quickly drained. You see this in big cities during major sporting events and so forth. There is very often a large drop in the reservoirs during intermission, and a corresponding bump in sewage flows, as everyone goes to the restroom and relieves themselves.
The difference between these and your Internet of course is that in most jurisdictions, these are metered services rather than (mostly) unmetered like your internet connection. However, my main point is that it's not practical for providers to guarantee that you can pull down your rated speed 24/7, as building out the network to support that for all of their customers would be prohibitively expensive. At some point there has to be an over-subscription ratio. The issue is what that ratio should be.
Not if you add the cert to your PC's certificate store as a root certificate. This works fine if you have control over all PCs that will be using the site.
You or I know how to do this. The average person on the street? not so much.
maybe I'm too lazy to watch any new stuff, some of it I just don't get (maybe I'm too old). It seems to me when Roddenberry came up with his ST idea, it was new stuff. Space travel was new, having a command staff where not everyone is a white guy whose native language is english was new.
Other than its progressive surface and the fact that it was in space, TOS really wasn't much more than a spaghetti western, in space. It was pretty much just an action series, with the bad guy of the week, and pretty much completely episodic. People forget that, and imho, the Abrams moves are a return to what Trek originally was.
It wasn't until TNG and the later movies that things started to become pseudo-philosophical and the like, with the long drawn out conversations around conference tables and what not.
The flip side is that we (as humans) have been genetically modifying our crops since the advent of agriculture.
As far as your argument regarding Roundup and Wheat, I'm pretty sure you're incorrect with that. Monsanto lists Corn, Soybean, Sorghum, Canola, Alfalfa, Cotton, and Sugar Beets as being currently available with the "Roundup Ready" modification. Wheat is still in development.
I actually don't know how good of a candidate that wheat, and the other grains, really are for the mod anyways. Modern cultivation techniques plant the seeds so densely that the wheat will pretty much choke out/shade any weeds that might be present.
How the hell do you waste water? It just flows back into the sea and joins the sea -> cloud -> rain cycle all over again.
A lot of the water used to grow crops in the deserts of California and the like comes from wells, rather than surface water. Depending on the aquifer, and how deep it is, it can take millennia to replenish those stocks, if they ever will replenish. Once that water is gone, the farms will be gone as well. Yes, a lot of the water used in irrigation comes from surface water sources, but aquifer depletion is a real problem as well.
There were scenes in the show in Metropolis at some large body of water
Given that Smallville was filmed in Vancouver, BC (as is Arrow/Supergirl/The Flash), it would be hard to do an establishing shot without large amounts of water present.
The difference is this ice is multi-year ice that has drifted south, then been blown into shore by wind/current. It's drifted down from a lot further away than the ice you're referring to.
There was never any suggestion in the article that the problem was that there was more ice than before. But that doesn't stop the deniers trying to pretend that this is some problem with the concept of global warming. But then not looking at the facts and jumping to conclusions is what causes them to be deniers in the first place.
The bigger worry on this trip is that while the CCGS Amundsen was doing her search and rescue work, the scientists on board took the opportunity to examine the ice they were navigating through was multi-year ice, rather than first year ice. The thing is that multi-year sea ice can not form below a certain latitude. There is always some multi-year ice that gets pushed south every year, but never in this quantity or size/shape, but what they found implies that the arctic ocean has warmed up significantly.
I've been licensed since 1978, and have watched the ebb and flow of the hobby during my time - it's still a great pastime, at least for those of us who just like to BS with our fellow geeks/nerds/techies...
For some of us, we're in a new golden era of the hobby (and I use that word deliberately). The advent of modern computing hardware and sound cards has led to a lot of really fascinating work done on the margins of what is practical over the air. Things like WSPR that can send data (really slowly, and only with synchronized clocks, which is kinda cheating I guess) at levels that are 27dB below the noise floor is truly impressive. Other things like Olivia and the various other digital modes, is the new realm of amateur experimentation.
Yes, in the modern era, for the most part amateurs aren't building their own radios any more, but there's a new growth in all sorts of unique modes and techniques, and people are experimenting once again. Same thing with some of the SDR work being done... Now that it's possible to directly synthesize and/or digitize things at amateur frequencies, there's a whole new world of experimentation to be done.
Umm, where did you get the sense that I'm an imbecile when it comes to firearms, other than your emotional gut reaction?
Yes, I myself am not a hunter, it's not something that appeals to me. I've gone out on hunting trips with these friends I mentioned, been through the process, and watched the respect and care they took in their craft.
It also doesn't mean I don't know anything about firearms. I know how to handle them safely and efficiently. My first job out of University was as an assistant/gruntworker for a research project in the high arctic. Part of my role was to be polar bear patrol for the researchers, which meant I carried for the duration of my stay there, and slept with a rifle next to me in my tent. You don't need an AR-15 to take down a polar bear, a 12ga with slugs will do just fine.
Sure, but you're not going to go hunting with a Mac-10 or similar firearm. Spraying a deer with a dozen rounds doesn't exactly lead to a good dinner. I'm not a hunter myself, but I have friends who do, but they're generally out there with a fairly high powered bolt action rifle, or a shotgun, depending on the season and what their prey is. It's all about simplicity and reliability, if you need to throw a lot of rounds down range to take out a ptarmigan or a buck, you're doing it wrong(tm).
95% of shooters will have a stupidly low hit count/per rounds fired. Army police train for it. Everyone else tries to train themselves to be slow and methodical and keep the heart rate steady
This is true within the Military as well. When the DoD was looking to replace the M14, they did a pretty extensive study on the best way to cause damage to the enemy. The result of the study found that the largest effect was not the calibre of the bullets going down range, but instead related to simply the number of rounds going downrange. As such, they switched from 7.62mm to 5.56, as it allowed the soldiers/marines to carry more rounds for the same weight, and the (potentially) lower recoil reduced fatigue and allowed more rounds to go down range.
Yes, a 7.62mm has a hell of a lot more stopping/penetration power, but that doesn't matter if the round just impacts the dirt or a tree, or whatever.
That's the thing, they don't have to be to be a problem. That was the ingenious thing with Stuxnet... It had two parts, the worm that infected internet connected hosts, and the thumbdrive vector that allowed it to jump the air gap. It's entirely likely that it originated with infected thumb drives that were dropped in parking lots/buses/etc... frequented by the Engineers working on Iran's nuclear programme. People being people, they stuck the thumb drives into their machines, on either side of the air gap, and then the worm spread through the isolated side of the network, infecting the PLCs driving their centrifuges.
That said, I operate the network for an organization that has their own private power system (small hydro-electric system isolated from the main grid). As much as I would like to physically isolate our power control network from our main operational network, it's unfortunately not practical. Instead the main control of the turbines, exciters, generators and such is strongly firewalled, and then the load shedding components in the rest of the campus are on an isolated VLAN. There is additional protection through strategic use of VRFs and the like. Is it perfect? no, but it's the best I can do.
100 years ago it was much cheaper to handle and import Opium and Heroin that was derived from the opium poppy. This drug has a certain strength, known effects, and isn't hugely dense. Yes, there were already synthetic opiods at that point, but they were mostly a laboratory curiosity than anything else. There wasn't a reason for those in the drug trade to introduce them, as opium derived drugs were cheap enough. Due to the "war on drugs" and the current prohibitionist climate, we're now reaping what we sowed. The criminal element has now moved to substitutes which are orders of magnitude more potent than what was present before, and thus cheaper.
The only real solution, imho, is to stop treating drug addiction as a criminal offense, and move to the medical model. The only time addicts will give up their addiction successfully is when they're ready to do so. Until then, we need to support them to keep them from killing themselves, and hopefully keep them as functioning members of our society.
The difference today, though, is the sheer potency of the synthetic opiods that are being mailed across. You can ship enough Fentanyl or worse Carfentanyl (or its analogues) in an envelope designed for a greeting card to supply a reasonably sized town for a few weeks. We're talking drugs where the LD50 is on the order of micrograms. In theory of course, they could be diluted down to a safe dosage (we're talking almost Homeopathic type levels of dilution), but the reality is that most of the dealers and gangs running this stuff certainly aren't compounding pharmacists or even real chemists.
They're also extremely cheap as they're synthesized in labs, rather than requiring all the processing to be derived from opium poppies, paying off the cartels and corrupt government officials, and so forth. This is basically Economics 101 going on in the drug trade. The dealers have found a new source of product that is (much) cheaper and easier to obtain, and done right, meets the inelastic need of the addicts.
Anyhow, the real lesson here is that the "war on drugs" has failed, and failed miserably. It has hugely increased the cost of simple Heroin and other opiods, and pushed people to using these much cheaper (and far more dangerous) analogues. The only reason why they are cheaper, is because policy has made the traditional drugs so expensive and criminally dangerous to get.
Actually nuclear has the same problem. It's a fairly expensive base load, but when demand drops prices still go negative, because you still need the grid to absorb the excess. You can't just ramp up and ramp down on a dime: that's why they call it base load. Your base load should always be less than total demand.
Exactly this. During the California power crisis a decade or so ago, our public utility up in British Columbia made out like bandits. During the day time, power was at a huge premium in California. So, BC Hydro would run their hydro-electric power plants flat out, as hard as possible, unsustainably draining their reservoirs. At night, they'd turn the dams off, let the water build up behind the dams again, and buy dirt cheap nuclear power from California. The reason is that the older designs used in current Nuclear power plants can't reliably ramp up or down to meet real daytime/nighttime peaking.
Not quite true. The problem with Wind turbines is that if you run them unloaded, they tend to runaway and destroy themselves. You need to keep them loaded at all times. They could just dump the load into loadbanks or similar, but then they would have to invest in load banks (giant resistors) to make that practical. Solar, on the other hand, you can safely disconnect and leave open circuit if you don't need the power any more.
Impeach him for what. First you have to have a crime.
Actually, all you need is suspicion of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" as per the constitution. From there, impeachment takes a simple majority of the house. Should the motion pass, it's then sent to the Senate, which conducts a "trial" which then eventually needs a 2/3rds majority to remove the president from office. However, unlike trials in the legal system, the standards of evidence and due process are much more relaxed in one sense. However, the 2/3rds majority makes it an exceedingly difficult bar to hit (which I suppose was part of the point).
I've done a lot of work with a local Ace/True-Value hardware store and it was so much easier to deal with for random/weird things than the big boys. I was involved in a project to renew/rebuild part of a camp/retreat centre, and so we were buying a lot of different items to make things happen. To get our stuff on-site involved sending it up a lake on a boat.
Anyhow, for big ticket electrical items (spools of wire, conduit, 15 new electrical panels and associated breakers, etc... we dealt with the local electrical supply as they gave us the best prices, had what we needed, and one of their local reps lived 2 blocks from the boat dock so could just drop it off.
For the onesies and twosies, and other random stuff, the Ace in town was the best to deal with, especially for those of us who aren't experts. We'd call them and go "Hey, we need 10lbs of 2" sheetrock screws" and their response was "no problem, we'll have them on the boat tomorrow." In a bunch of situations, too, where we didn't quite know what we needed, their expertise really came into play. Plus, if they didn't have it on hand, they could usually get it pretty quickly.
Anyhow, my point is that the big box stores are fine if all you need is a 2x4, or a 20A eaton breaker, or a new light switch. If you need a 40A 3 phase breaker for a cutler-hamer breaker panel, or a replacement fan motor for a 15 year old bathroom fan, they're probably not going to be able to help you. The local guys, on the other hand, are usually willing to work with you can either get you what you need, or a replacement part.
Right, and their networks (Electric and Water supply) can't supply every customer at their rated capacity either.
In the case of the water system, this is observable in cities who's local sports team is partaking in the league championship. During half time/intermission, the water reservoirs drain noticeably due to everyone relieving themselves and flushing. If everyone was using their water supply at full capacity, the infrastructure and the source would not be able to sustain it.
Same thing with the electrical grid. Look at the problems they've had in California over the years with daytime peaking, load management, and so forth. If everyone used all the power available to them all the time, the utility simply would not be able to sustain it. If you were/are using your full 200A service to capacity, all the time, the power company is going to come and figure out what's going on. Near where I grew up, a couple of neighbors on large properties got into a neighborly competition around each Christmas as to who could present the most spectacular light display. In the end, the power company had to rebuild the network in their neiborhood to supply the additional load without impacting their non-participating neighbors. The grid just wasn't built to have two houses, off of one transformer, where both were drawing 200A continuously for hours at a time.
The gas trunk line to your neighborhood is sized for the average usage of the area it serves, plus some margin. If everyone's furnace was running full bore, all stove burners on, hot water tanks, etc... the pressure would drop, demand would slow down, and the system would stabilize, and you would be wondering why you're getting piss poor flame out of your stove.
The difference is that, in the case of Electricity it's metered, so the more you use, the more you pay. Also, it's pretty common to have a step function in there. You pay one rate up to X kWh used, and Y thereafter.
So yeah, your comparison is flawed. The only way it would work is if you were willing to accept a metered account. Are you? I didn't think so. Instead, you get best effort.
When connected to an appropriate DAC or headphone connector, the lightning connector delivers raw uncompressed digital audio. You're not just limited to Bluetooth. Also, IIRC, airplay will generally deliver the audio in its native format over wireless, so there's that as well.
Just don't have any threatening math in your notebook.