but it will still work. Lawyers cost money and defending against a criminal complaint costs time as well. By the time the case is dismissed, the defendant is going to be bankrupt either way and it'll be a very long time before anyone thinks of criticising the police in that part of the State.
Thanks for the advice but I've been making a living with S parameters since before Commander Taco was born.
It's not the "always on" aspect that causes the problem, it's the fact that the load V/I curve is hyperbolic with a negative slope rather than linear with a positive slope. Since we're primarily concerned with frequencies much less than line, things like power factor aren't really important and since the function is dominated by the real components at those frequencies, it could be called "negative resistance" but too often "resistance" is used to refer to a zero-intercept linear function so the more general "impedance" is less confusing to most. Pedants, of course, can always find something to complain about.
It doesn't take a computer to really screw up the grid, though.
As pointed out in the Risks Forum twenty years ago, we're moving more and more to constant-power loads on the electrical supply. When most power was resistive lighting, dumb motors, and heat, we had a nice positive slope to the load/voltage curve and the system was quite linear. Now we have a rapidly increasing proportion of "smart" loads -- ones which use switching techniques to effectively get constant power. Your computer is one, but so are newer air conditioners, refrigerators, vehicle chargers, etc.
So?
A constant power load has an effective negative impedance: as the voltage goes down, the current goes up. And that's unstable. When the cumulative load line shifts to zero impedance, it all becomes unstable. A brownout will actually result in an increase in current, bringing the system down with no warning.
The USA has 435 members in the House of Representatives and about 300M population. Due to a few States with too little population to even make the average, most Representatives stand for a bit more than the average. Call it about 690K per.
An order of magnitude can make a big difference. As far as I can tell, your MPs have about as much staff as one of our Representatives, so about all ours have time for is to look at the topic of the correspondence and return the form letter for that topic.
The Congressional filtering system is extremely efficient. No matter what you say, somehow you're always supporting the position that the Congresscritter has already taken.
I've been writing to "my" Congressional "representatives" for almost forty years, and even when I've bluntly said that Senator Bozo has a severe case of craniorectal insertion, I get a letter back thanking me for supporting him.
My father was one. And The Grapes of Wrath is family history.
That doesn't change the fact that when they were sorting enlistees and draftees in WWII, they sent precious few Okies to officer training -- more than Darkies, mind, but that's a damned low bar.
... college, any college, was an entry into the officer ranks in the armed forces. With even one year of college you got routed to officer training, otherwise you were cannon fodder.
Why, you might ask? Simple: because it screened out the lower classes such as Okies.
Back in the early 70s, the hiring officer for my first job after graduation had a sign on his wall: "A four year degree means a man is trainable." (Yes, "man." Times were different and nobody even pretended to be gender-neutral.) He explained it: "If you can put up with four years of bullshit to get a piece of paper, you can stick out the six months it'll take us to train you to be useful."
Pure screening system. The whole idea isn't that you learn anything particularly useful in college, it's that it makes it easy to reject enough candidates to keep the applicant list manageable.
Well, now more people have BS degrees and they need to screen more people out. It's just that simple.
The most expensive line item is salaries and benefits. The stimulus went to prop up the HR costs of state governments. You may have noticed that most public sector jobs were not lost during 2008 and 2009. That's where the money went.
It's a different picture now.
Public sector employment is down 500K jobs from January 2009 to today.
Now that the ARRA support for state and local jobs is expiring, there will be a lot more pink slips (the June jobs report is a start.)
We all appreciate your offer to raise your share of food for your neighborhood, but right now we have a more pressing need for minerals. Please let us know when your quota of copper ore is ready for shipment to the smelter.
I work at a law firm, and I can review cases that are not my own, too - as long as I don't go off and blabber about it in the next bar or to the next journalist, that's fine.
You can access the sealed filings from cases all across the country?
Part of the system's design requirement is that caregivers should be able to access the records of an unresponsive patient. You know, the "found unconscious at an out-of-town auto wreck" scenario. And that's a worthy objective.
Trouble is, it also means that ANY medical personnel, anywhere, have to have access to everyone's medical records. Obvious potential for abuse, so all of the protections have to be post hoc.
Obviously the parties currently in power would not be interested in that change.
It's worse than that. The disproportionate power of the smaller States in the Senate is not only built into our Constitution, it's the only part that can't be amended.
That little feature isn't changing unless we toss the one we have and replace it with a whole new one -- a plan that I think you'll agree is not without major risk.
Bear in mind that the standard technique for hysterectomies has been transvaginal for the last several decades.
However, it's not really even necessary to do that much. A woman who has recently given full-term birth has quite a bit of uterine capacity and a well-stretched cervix, plus all of the other indications of advanced pregnancy. Room in there for a LOT of HE.
So now the TSA can get really suspicious of every woman with a bulging tummy.
Firefox doesn't really need to do that as it's open source and upgrading to a newer version is free.
As long as you're not doing any incoming qualification, that's dandy. Of course, in an enterprise setting you just might want to make sure that the new version supports all of your mission-critical applications. If you're running a distribution, you might want to do some QA on it.
As it is, Gentoo (to name one) still has 4.0 in unstable, and Mozilla's rapid releases are practically guaranteed to keep any of the new releases from ever reaching stable. That's not a joke; running tarballs is a quick way to hose dependencies in most distributions, and pure death in the hardware platforms outside of PC clones.
Then there are all of those plugins that will never catch up to the supported browser version...
Slashdot Mirror
but it will still work. Lawyers cost money and defending against a criminal complaint costs time as well. By the time the case is dismissed, the defendant is going to be bankrupt either way and it'll be a very long time before anyone thinks of criticising the police in that part of the State.
It's not the "always on" aspect that causes the problem, it's the fact that the load V/I curve is hyperbolic with a negative slope rather than linear with a positive slope. Since we're primarily concerned with frequencies much less than line, things like power factor aren't really important and since the function is dominated by the real components at those frequencies, it could be called "negative resistance" but too often "resistance" is used to refer to a zero-intercept linear function so the more general "impedance" is less confusing to most. Pedants, of course, can always find something to complain about.
As pointed out in the Risks Forum twenty years ago, we're moving more and more to constant-power loads on the electrical supply. When most power was resistive lighting, dumb motors, and heat, we had a nice positive slope to the load/voltage curve and the system was quite linear. Now we have a rapidly increasing proportion of "smart" loads -- ones which use switching techniques to effectively get constant power. Your computer is one, but so are newer air conditioners, refrigerators, vehicle chargers, etc.
So?
A constant power load has an effective negative impedance: as the voltage goes down, the current goes up. And that's unstable. When the cumulative load line shifts to zero impedance, it all becomes unstable. A brownout will actually result in an increase in current, bringing the system down with no warning.
Sleep tight, chilluns.
An order of magnitude can make a big difference. As far as I can tell, your MPs have about as much staff as one of our Representatives, so about all ours have time for is to look at the topic of the correspondence and return the form letter for that topic.
The Congressional filtering system is extremely efficient. No matter what you say, somehow you're always supporting the position that the Congresscritter has already taken.
I've been writing to "my" Congressional "representatives" for almost forty years, and even when I've bluntly said that Senator Bozo has a severe case of craniorectal insertion, I get a letter back thanking me for supporting him.
That doesn't change the fact that when they were sorting enlistees and draftees in WWII, they sent precious few Okies to officer training -- more than Darkies, mind, but that's a damned low bar.
Why, you might ask? Simple: because it screened out the lower classes such as Okies.
Back in the early 70s, the hiring officer for my first job after graduation had a sign on his wall: "A four year degree means a man is trainable." (Yes, "man." Times were different and nobody even pretended to be gender-neutral.) He explained it: "If you can put up with four years of bullshit to get a piece of paper, you can stick out the six months it'll take us to train you to be useful."
Pure screening system. The whole idea isn't that you learn anything particularly useful in college, it's that it makes it easy to reject enough candidates to keep the applicant list manageable.
Well, now more people have BS degrees and they need to screen more people out. It's just that simple.
Probably the most important social psychology experiment ever. It's totally transformed the way the United States is governed.
The most expensive line item is salaries and benefits. The stimulus went to prop up the HR costs of state governments. You may have noticed that most public sector jobs were not lost during 2008 and 2009. That's where the money went.
It's a different picture now.
Public sector employment is down 500K jobs from January 2009 to today.
Now that the ARRA support for state and local jobs is expiring, there will be a lot more pink slips (the June jobs report is a start.)
I wonder where the stimulus money was actually spent.
Not exactly hard to find out (per Wikipedia):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009#Provisions_of_the_Act
Almost half ($288B) went to tax cuts, about half of that went to direct aid to the States ($144B), the rest in dribs and drabs to other things.
We all appreciate your offer to raise your share of food for your neighborhood, but right now we have a more pressing need for minerals. Please let us know when your quota of copper ore is ready for shipment to the smelter.
They were killed by all of the cavemen for food.
Mine taught us that they were ridden to death.
I work at a law firm, and I can review cases that are not my own, too - as long as I don't go off and blabber about it in the next bar or to the next journalist, that's fine.
You can access the sealed filings from cases all across the country?
No? Maybe that makes a difference.
Trouble is, it also means that ANY medical personnel, anywhere, have to have access to everyone's medical records. Obvious potential for abuse, so all of the protections have to be post hoc.
Obviously the parties currently in power would not be interested in that change.
It's worse than that. The disproportionate power of the smaller States in the Senate is not only built into our Constitution, it's the only part that can't be amended.
That little feature isn't changing unless we toss the one we have and replace it with a whole new one -- a plan that I think you'll agree is not without major risk.
... as soon as scientists spend as much on think tanks, lobbying, and campaign subsidies as agribusiness does.
However, it's not really even necessary to do that much. A woman who has recently given full-term birth has quite a bit of uterine capacity and a well-stretched cervix, plus all of the other indications of advanced pregnancy. Room in there for a LOT of HE.
So now the TSA can get really suspicious of every woman with a bulging tummy.
Next on the list: apple pies.
... that you can't introduce foreign objects into the human body without leaving obvious surgical wounds.
But what do the sharks think
Objection, Your Honor! Question assumes cognitive processes not in evidence!
The scary part isn't I remember reading that Pogo when it first appeared in newspapers. It's that it's just as true as it ever was.
I mean, couldn't they be a flash in the pan?
Whatever else happens, killing people is always good business.
How many corporations are behind this? That's the only question that counts.
Maybe they even fixed some of the bugs. I can hope, anyway.
Firefox doesn't really need to do that as it's open source and upgrading to a newer version is free.
As long as you're not doing any incoming qualification, that's dandy. Of course, in an enterprise setting you just might want to make sure that the new version supports all of your mission-critical applications. If you're running a distribution, you might want to do some QA on it.
As it is, Gentoo (to name one) still has 4.0 in unstable, and Mozilla's rapid releases are practically guaranteed to keep any of the new releases from ever reaching stable. That's not a joke; running tarballs is a quick way to hose dependencies in most distributions, and pure death in the hardware platforms outside of PC clones.
Then there are all of those plugins that will never catch up to the supported browser version ...