The military has long had a policy of removing from combat roles persons who require medication to function. i.e. insulin dependent diabetes. Removing the transgender is consistent with this policy as hormone treatments would be a logistical nightmare to supply in a war zone. LGBT rights vs medical discharge for the good of the service. I'll wager the convenience of the service will carry the day.
The need for special individually tailored routine medication to function is enough of a down side to render a transgendered person enough of a liability to remove from the military that requires above average physical condition in the first place. This isn't a special thing for transgendered but a continuation of a policy that has long been in place. Heck, if you got force fed Ritalin for ADHD at any time in your life; you aren't fit for service by the current medical standards.
Hobby drones do not have to be registered. Hobby drones have limits on weight, payload capacity, cannot be flown over another person's property without permission, and are not allowed to be flown in public areas where people congregate or out of sight of the operator. Hobby drones may not be used for commercial purposes. See https://www.faa.gov/uas/ for actual regulations and training requirements.
Any drone that you want to operate out of sight of the operator, carry a decent payload, actually be useful; must be registered and licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S. This is required for the public safety.
Do you really want a bozo flown drone buzzing the airport and taking out a passenger aircraft? To be a licensed drone operator, among other things, you have to pass the equivalent of the Civil Aviation ground school where you learn where it is legal to fly and who needs to be notified of flight paths and height restrictions on the operation of a drone. There are already several precedents in case law confirming that if someone flies a drone over your property without permission you are within your rights to take down the drone. Nope, your teenage daughter can't be drone perved while sunbathing in the back yard without legal recourse.
Well, they are either fake news or yellow press the lot of them. The ethics of journalism is "don't get caught when you make shit up". And I'm convinced that passing middle school science class disqualifies a person from majoring in journalism. I've seen way too many dumbed down to the point of falsehood scientific reports over the years.
The first generation of combat power lasers, back in the 70s, were ruled ineffective due to the huge power requirements. You needed a tractor trailer size generator to power a rifle sized laser. Obviously things are more efficient now and the high power density of a naval vessel is made for a laser implementation.
That being said, the demo was of taking out an engine. Umm, how well does it do on a target that isn't full of volatile fuel to be touched off? Punching a hole through the hull above the waterline would not be very effective I would think. The CO in the film I think was incorrect, it's another niche weapon. I also wonder how effective it would be through a smoke screen from a low tech smudge pot. Smoke would be a much better countermeasure than any reflective coating that would ablate off.
I ran across this over about five years ago when a relative forwarded a link to an academic paper. A year later; the lab results on animals were in and you could consistently give a lab rat diabetes by giving them artificial sweeteners. And, it didn't matter which artificial sweetener you used. The hypothesis is that using artificial sweeteners triggers the taste buds to release hormones to tell the pancreas to produce insulin. But, with no calories to burn, you get lowered blood sugar and feel very hungry. Over time, you train the pancreas to produce less insulin, a condition known as diabetes.
I've been diagnosed as diabetic after a case of pancreatitis back in 2008. I had hell with the side effects of metformin for control of serum glucose. I decided to try an experiment.
I cut out all artificial sweeteners, I rationed my processed sugar intake but didn't eliminate it. (I like sugar in my coffee. Deal!) I added niacin to my morning meds. (Niacin was used for diabetes treatment before there was insulin. Went old school and niacin also lowers cholesterol levels in the blood.)
After six months; I quit taking metformin. That was almost 5 years ago.
Someone check the numbers. The last time I actually ran down the numbers, 2009, it would take 15 years to generate the amount of power it takes to manufacture a solar panel but the mean lifetime in service of a panel was 5 years.
Also, as a take on electric cars... Since the power factor for generators and for motors tends to max at 28%; the losses in conversion mean that more fossil fuel is burned to run an electric car than an internal combustion vehicle. The fuel is just not burned on the highway.
Any autonomous vehicle that is dependent on a network connection should be relegated to the off road hobby market. If dependent on a network connection; a RF jammer would be a quick ticket to causing major traffic accidents.
Net neutrality is about letting those that payed the R&D budget to develop the backbone keep equal access to the backbone. The more lucrative model is to allow the ISP, which is the local service provider, to give preferential treatment in access to sites that they own or have paid agreements with.
Without net neutrality, it is the corporate ISP that will decide what you can access and how fast you can access it. I had to deal with an ISP that did exactly that in Texas. If it detected torrent file sharing, it disconnected blocked you for 12 hours and reported you to the ISP web security department who automatically send you an email to let you know you were involved in "unlawful activities". Not just y torrent application triggered disconnect and block not someone running a file sharing application. This translated to being blocked if you had a Blizzard game installed. And if Microsoft update fired up; you were disconnected and blocked. for 12 hours. Comcast and AT&T would love to have such control and charge high premiums for service by the megabyte.
Traditional ISP pricing is based on leasing a certain size pipe with the total amount of content moved being irrelevant. This is how backbone access is billed; how big a pipe are you leasing? FAP policies and data caps are just to charge more or are hiding a fact that the ISP is selling more bandwidth than they have leased from the backbone providers. Like overbooking an air flight; someone is going to be dragged out kicking and screaming for resisting being forbidden what they have paid for.
I, for one, don't want to go back to the days of Compuserve and AOL that would give lightning fast access to content they own but only a slow and error ridden access to content outside of their little sandbox. Keep and prioritize net neutrality.
Any organization, once it get big enough, takes on the characteristics of a life form. Rather like a slime mold; the large organization wants to get into everything and only exists to grow larger.
A bit of a paraphrase of R.A.H. Large organizations need to be pruned before you need impact hammers and high temperature cutting torches to dislodge.
Hmmm, so the ACS organization that reviews academic papers claims to own them and charges through the nose to access a copy. Sci-Hub allows for free download of academic papers. ACS gets its panties in a bunch because their cash cow of charging hundreds of dollars for a copy of a report is going away. The days of expensive limited print runs are over with electronic versions of documents. Culture shock anyone?
This is a lot like the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). A private company that publishes industrial standards is cited in federal law requiring compliance with ANSI standards. If you actually want to look at the standards for (as an example) a hard hat as required by OSHA regulations; it costs $450 to read a copy of the standards for hard hats. This was a big WTF moment for me that a legal requirement under federal law is a secret squirrel requirement hidden behind a corporate paywall. (BTW, a hard hat has to protect a person from a 1/4-20 1.5 inch long bolt dropped from 20 feet.)
Back before people expected the Gub'mint to do everything; planting trees along the boulevard was an Arbor Day project for school age kids and Boy Scout troops. And, yes, trees along a roadway muffle noise and mitigate the heat radiating from the roadways.
Aggregate is mixed up different stuff and can come in different sizes. Most pavement aggregate in the US is 5/8 minus... 5/8" and smaller. Asphalt is aggregate bound up with bitumen (commonly called "coal tar"). You can add stuff to the surface layer such as clay which will vary the color and use of locally procured aggregate will give variations in shade. But, basic asphalt is always black. Tarmac, Tar Macadam Surfacing, is a method of long lasting surfacing that goes back to the 18th century and a Scottish engineer named MacAdam. Tarmac is a spec on bed preparation and not just using a high quality asphalt surface.
Not every road surface is asphalt. One county in my state has pink roads. The use local iron bearing sand for a concrete sheathing on the top of the road that comes out pink in the sunlight.
Useful life of house.. the unwritten caveat is "without upgrading. Look at a house that was built in the early 1960s. The standard in the early 60s was 50 amp electric service with two prong outlets. Today the standard is 200 amp service with grounded outlets throughout the house. Today a vapor barrier is required under the house if you have a conventional foundation. Back in the 60s; mentioning a vapor barrier would get a "What's that?" Today gas appliances don't have a pilot light but electric start and are much safer for it even if it means your hot water will go away during a power outage.
Went through this drill when applying for an equity loan a few years ago. Upgrading the electric to modern standards even lowered my home insurance by a few hundred a year.
Fresh fruit and veggies may be shrink wrapped for sanitary purposes. Dust from the air and people handling the produce could contaminate the outside and spread disease.
That being said; anyone that doesn't wash their produce before consuming is bucking for gastric distress. Yeah, shrink wrapping the produce is a special brand of tin foil hat. Hmmm, why do we say "tin foil" as that is a product phased out when my grandfather was first considering getting married?
Someone is confusing bar codes with RFID chips. Gad, I remember going to a hearing in Sacramento about a law to require subcutaneous RFID insertion on every school age child. Talk about a pedophile's wet dream for stalking tech.
Hmm, I see a market for peel and stick RF shields to keep appliances from using up domestic WiFi bandwidth. Especially since ISPs want to charge by the gigabyte instead of by the size of the pipeline.
BTW, I've been buying dog food from Amazon for about three years. I can be assured they have the brand I want and not just an empty spot on a shelf.
Hmm, I have to show photo ID any time I pick up a prescription on the controlled list. i.e. Lortab prescribed by the Dentist before a tooth extraction.
And every election seems to have a couple of prosecutions for voter fraud. The interesting one was a nurse at a nursing home that sent in absentee ballots for everyone in the home voting for the nurse's preferred candidates. Then, when a local church provided a bus for the denizens of the nursing home to the polls; it was a shit show with a bus load of cranky octogenarians being turned away from the polls as "they had already voted".
And, yes, where I live you have to show ID to vote after that fiasco hit the news.
Actually, you have people that gave up on Apple even before Microsoft was more that a vague idea in a Harvard drop out's dreams.
The Apple II required a proprietary ROM on the floppy drive to function. They actually put part of the disk operating system on the disk drive. This made Apple floppy drives $600 when with any other OS; you patched in the driver and installed a floppy for $99.00 from discounters or $249.00 from Radio Shack.
And, if you ever repaired anything on an Apple II yourself; if you did need to send it in they would refuse to work on it.
The packet switching protocols started in the HAM radio community in the 70s. What AT&T was working on in the 40s was shared spectrum radio telephones. You need both techs to develop the current digital systems.
There were radio telephones going back to the 1930s but the service area was basically urban only and expensive as hell.
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The military has long had a policy of removing from combat roles persons who require medication to function. i.e. insulin dependent diabetes. Removing the transgender is consistent with this policy as hormone treatments would be a logistical nightmare to supply in a war zone.
LGBT rights vs medical discharge for the good of the service. I'll wager the convenience of the service will carry the day.
The need for special individually tailored routine medication to function is enough of a down side to render a transgendered person enough of a liability to remove from the military that requires above average physical condition in the first place. This isn't a special thing for transgendered but a continuation of a policy that has long been in place. Heck, if you got force fed Ritalin for ADHD at any time in your life; you aren't fit for service by the current medical standards.
Hobby drones do not have to be registered. Hobby drones have limits on weight, payload capacity, cannot be flown over another person's property without permission, and are not allowed to be flown in public areas where people congregate or out of sight of the operator. Hobby drones may not be used for commercial purposes. See https://www.faa.gov/uas/ for actual regulations and training requirements.
Any drone that you want to operate out of sight of the operator, carry a decent payload, actually be useful; must be registered and licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S. This is required for the public safety.
Do you really want a bozo flown drone buzzing the airport and taking out a passenger aircraft? To be a licensed drone operator, among other things, you have to pass the equivalent of the Civil Aviation ground school where you learn where it is legal to fly and who needs to be notified of flight paths and height restrictions on the operation of a drone. There are already several precedents in case law confirming that if someone flies a drone over your property without permission you are within your rights to take down the drone. Nope, your teenage daughter can't be drone perved while sunbathing in the back yard without legal recourse.
Well, they are either fake news or yellow press the lot of them.
The ethics of journalism is "don't get caught when you make shit up".
And I'm convinced that passing middle school science class disqualifies a person from majoring in journalism. I've seen way too many dumbed down to the point of falsehood scientific reports over the years.
The first generation of combat power lasers, back in the 70s, were ruled ineffective due to the huge power requirements. You needed a tractor trailer size generator to power a rifle sized laser. Obviously things are more efficient now and the high power density of a naval vessel is made for a laser implementation.
That being said, the demo was of taking out an engine. Umm, how well does it do on a target that isn't full of volatile fuel to be touched off? Punching a hole through the hull above the waterline would not be very effective I would think. The CO in the film I think was incorrect, it's another niche weapon. I also wonder how effective it would be through a smoke screen from a low tech smudge pot. Smoke would be a much better countermeasure than any reflective coating that would ablate off.
I ran across this over about five years ago when a relative forwarded a link to an academic paper. A year later; the lab results on animals were in and you could consistently give a lab rat diabetes by giving them artificial sweeteners. And, it didn't matter which artificial sweetener you used.
The hypothesis is that using artificial sweeteners triggers the taste buds to release hormones to tell the pancreas to produce insulin. But, with no calories to burn, you get lowered blood sugar and feel very hungry. Over time, you train the pancreas to produce less insulin, a condition known as diabetes.
I've been diagnosed as diabetic after a case of pancreatitis back in 2008. I had hell with the side effects of metformin for control of serum glucose. I decided to try an experiment.
I cut out all artificial sweeteners, I rationed my processed sugar intake but didn't eliminate it. (I like sugar in my coffee. Deal!) I added niacin to my morning meds. (Niacin was used for diabetes treatment before there was insulin. Went old school and niacin also lowers cholesterol levels in the blood.)
After six months; I quit taking metformin. That was almost 5 years ago.
Someone check the numbers. The last time I actually ran down the numbers, 2009, it would take 15 years to generate the amount of power it takes to manufacture a solar panel but the mean lifetime in service of a panel was 5 years.
Also, as a take on electric cars... Since the power factor for generators and for motors tends to max at 28%; the losses in conversion mean that more fossil fuel is burned to run an electric car than an internal combustion vehicle. The fuel is just not burned on the highway.
Any autonomous vehicle that is dependent on a network connection should be relegated to the off road hobby market. If dependent on a network connection; a RF jammer would be a quick ticket to causing major traffic accidents.
Net neutrality is about letting those that payed the R&D budget to develop the backbone keep equal access to the backbone. The more lucrative model is to allow the ISP, which is the local service provider, to give preferential treatment in access to sites that they own or have paid agreements with.
Without net neutrality, it is the corporate ISP that will decide what you can access and how fast you can access it. I had to deal with an ISP that did exactly that in Texas. If it detected torrent file sharing, it disconnected blocked you for 12 hours and reported you to the ISP web security department who automatically send you an email to let you know you were involved in "unlawful activities". Not just y torrent application triggered disconnect and block not someone running a file sharing application. This translated to being blocked if you had a Blizzard game installed. And if Microsoft update fired up; you were disconnected and blocked. for 12 hours. Comcast and AT&T would love to have such control and charge high premiums for service by the megabyte.
Traditional ISP pricing is based on leasing a certain size pipe with the total amount of content moved being irrelevant. This is how backbone access is billed; how big a pipe are you leasing? FAP policies and data caps are just to charge more or are hiding a fact that the ISP is selling more bandwidth than they have leased from the backbone providers. Like overbooking an air flight; someone is going to be dragged out kicking and screaming for resisting being forbidden what they have paid for.
I, for one, don't want to go back to the days of Compuserve and AOL that would give lightning fast access to content they own but only a slow and error ridden access to content outside of their little sandbox. Keep and prioritize net neutrality.
Any organization, once it get big enough, takes on the characteristics of a life form. Rather like a slime mold; the large organization wants to get into everything and only exists to grow larger.
A bit of a paraphrase of R.A.H. Large organizations need to be pruned before you need impact hammers and high temperature cutting torches to dislodge.
Let a physicist debunk...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
Hmmm, so the ACS organization that reviews academic papers claims to own them and charges through the nose to access a copy. Sci-Hub allows for free download of academic papers. ACS gets its panties in a bunch because their cash cow of charging hundreds of dollars for a copy of a report is going away. The days of expensive limited print runs are over with electronic versions of documents. Culture shock anyone?
This is a lot like the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). A private company that publishes industrial standards is cited in federal law requiring compliance with ANSI standards. If you actually want to look at the standards for (as an example) a hard hat as required by OSHA regulations; it costs $450 to read a copy of the standards for hard hats. This was a big WTF moment for me that a legal requirement under federal law is a secret squirrel requirement hidden behind a corporate paywall. (BTW, a hard hat has to protect a person from a 1/4-20 1.5 inch long bolt dropped from 20 feet.)
https://webstore.ansi.org/
Why upgrade from XP? XP runs the VT100 terminal emulator to interface with the VAX that has all the data on it anyway. (snark snark)
Actually, you do plant trees in the middle of the road if it has a median strip.
http://www.nbc-2.com/story/28717937/lee-county-to-remove-palm-trees-on-gateway-blvd
Back before people expected the Gub'mint to do everything; planting trees along the boulevard was an Arbor Day project for school age kids and Boy Scout troops. And, yes, trees along a roadway muffle noise and mitigate the heat radiating from the roadways.
I-10, I-20, and I-65 through Alabama are made of concrete and not asphalt.
It is a misnomer to consider every pavement to be asphalt.
Aggregate is mixed up different stuff and can come in different sizes. Most pavement aggregate in the US is 5/8 minus... 5/8" and smaller.
Asphalt is aggregate bound up with bitumen (commonly called "coal tar"). You can add stuff to the surface layer such as clay which will vary the color and use of locally procured aggregate will give variations in shade. But, basic asphalt is always black.
Tarmac, Tar Macadam Surfacing, is a method of long lasting surfacing that goes back to the 18th century and a Scottish engineer named MacAdam. Tarmac is a spec on bed preparation and not just using a high quality asphalt surface.
Not every road surface is asphalt. One county in my state has pink roads. The use local iron bearing sand for a concrete sheathing on the top of the road that comes out pink in the sunlight.
Useful life of house.. the unwritten caveat is "without upgrading. Look at a house that was built in the early 1960s. The standard in the early 60s was 50 amp electric service with two prong outlets. Today the standard is 200 amp service with grounded outlets throughout the house. Today a vapor barrier is required under the house if you have a conventional foundation. Back in the 60s; mentioning a vapor barrier would get a "What's that?" Today gas appliances don't have a pilot light but electric start and are much safer for it even if it means your hot water will go away during a power outage.
Went through this drill when applying for an equity loan a few years ago. Upgrading the electric to modern standards even lowered my home insurance by a few hundred a year.
The answer is luggage carts you rent for a few coins at the airport.
Fresh fruit and veggies may be shrink wrapped for sanitary purposes. Dust from the air and people handling the produce could contaminate the outside and spread disease.
That being said; anyone that doesn't wash their produce before consuming is bucking for gastric distress. Yeah, shrink wrapping the produce is a special brand of tin foil hat. Hmmm, why do we say "tin foil" as that is a product phased out when my grandfather was first considering getting married?
Someone is confusing bar codes with RFID chips.
Gad, I remember going to a hearing in Sacramento about a law to require subcutaneous RFID insertion on every school age child. Talk about a pedophile's wet dream for stalking tech.
And, if you are outside of Southern California or the Southwest; that amount of water is easily provided. You don't even need to irrigate.
Hmm, I see a market for peel and stick RF shields to keep appliances from using up domestic WiFi bandwidth. Especially since ISPs want to charge by the gigabyte instead of by the size of the pipeline.
BTW, I've been buying dog food from Amazon for about three years. I can be assured they have the brand I want and not just an empty spot on a shelf.
Hmm, I have to show photo ID any time I pick up a prescription on the controlled list. i.e. Lortab prescribed by the Dentist before a tooth extraction.
And every election seems to have a couple of prosecutions for voter fraud. The interesting one was a nurse at a nursing home that sent in absentee ballots for everyone in the home voting for the nurse's preferred candidates. Then, when a local church provided a bus for the denizens of the nursing home to the polls; it was a shit show with a bus load of cranky octogenarians being turned away from the polls as "they had already voted".
And, yes, where I live you have to show ID to vote after that fiasco hit the news.
Actually, you have people that gave up on Apple even before Microsoft was more that a vague idea in a Harvard drop out's dreams.
The Apple II required a proprietary ROM on the floppy drive to function. They actually put part of the disk operating system on the disk drive. This made Apple floppy drives $600 when with any other OS; you patched in the driver and installed a floppy for $99.00 from discounters or $249.00 from Radio Shack.
And, if you ever repaired anything on an Apple II yourself; if you did need to send it in they would refuse to work on it.
Yep, gave up on apple in 1983.
The packet switching protocols started in the HAM radio community in the 70s. What AT&T was working on in the 40s was shared spectrum radio telephones. You need both techs to develop the current digital systems.
There were radio telephones going back to the 1930s but the service area was basically urban only and expensive as hell.