Except, as far as I can see, the function of this system is to collect fault logs from all the places the planes might fly to, and correlate them. I.e. central to its primary function is network communications of some sort. Now, they could run a private network over their entire operation range (most of Europe, I would guess), but that would would be prohibitively expensive for what is basically a third-line support function. So I bet they used the internet. Of course, they could have run a locked VPN over the Internet, which would have been better. But I cannot see top security being applied to what is essentially an office system.
Except that this was not really a mission critical system - it was a fault logging system in the maintenance department. So far as one can tell from a machine-translated popular article, it was meant to log if a single aircraft had a number of different faults logged close together, because faults at different stations might not otherwise get correlated. As such, it is basically an IT system with response requirements in minutes, not a real time system with fault tolerance requirements. One of the systems which failed might have been a warning system which would have warned the pilots of the mistake which cause the crash.
It will, of course, be in the form of a check or or other financial transfer, but these are commonly regarded as cash. Intel is paying $48 for each McAfee share, not offering Intel shares. Therefore Intel really is buying McAfee, not merging.
You also have a number of densely populated areas scattered around an enormous amount of not very much. Nobody is suggesting covering the whole US with high speed trains - just as the UK is not covered with high speed trains. This is a straw man. But you have a number of conurbations where large numbers of people live quite close together.
The problem is not the wide open spaces, it is actually the less packed suburbs. Most US suburbs, full of potential passengers, are much less densely packed than in Europe. Europeans have blocks of flats, terrace type houses, or small plots. Americans have detached houses in the middle of significant sized lots. If you have a high-speed city-centre to city-centre train, in Europe people can use local transport to get to and from the central station; in the US, you have to take your car to the centre, then find and pay for parking, then find another car at the other end.
This large-scale scheme is actually dependent on good small scale local public transport to fan in and out.
Two reasons. Firstly, even when you are taxing to raise money, you have a choice what to tax. You can tax alcohol and medicine the same. This is a choice, but most people have shown a preference for taxing what they see as luxuries higher than necessities.
Secondly, sometimes personal use has public costs. Many things produce pollution, whether it be atmospheric, noise, water etc. which produce a cost on everybody but a benefit for the few. It seems reasonable to require the few to compensate the many for the harm they done. The compensation may be used to rectify the harm done, or to buy something different which will compensate. The demand for compensation then produces a pressure on the few to consider others to some extent. Of course, the compensation must be proportionate. But the production of CO2 is a harm to everybody: it is reasonable to expect those who get the benefit from the CO2 to compensate others for the harm they do.
The wish behind this is excellent, but the law had better be carefully drafted. For example, you could mandate that all videos should have subtitles or closed captions. Which, with respect to major broadcasters, would be reasonable. But are you going to force this onto everybody who posts a home video? Obviously not (I think). But now how do you draw the line between home videos, small semi-professional videos, and full-blown broadcasters? And is this likely to produce a de-facto censorship of overseas broadcasters.
Why do you have to make all devices accessible? Does, for example, a waterproof phone designed for surfers/canoeists have to have features for the blind? While not saying the blind cannot surf, the population of blind surfers is pretty small, and they do not really need access to what seems at first glance a trivial gadget. The blind must not be locked off the Web - but they don't need it while canoeing.
Put it the other way, do you have to make all web devices available to the non-disabled? Am I required to make a braille web-interpreter (a device) accessible to the sighted but braille-impaired?
Will this effectively ban ultra-low-power long battery life devices which, for example, don't have speaker-phones and use e-paper without back lights, which are harder for this with impaired vision to use?
In the West, the $€£ is king; in China, to a large extent the Party is king. Many of these factories will be extremely inefficient and would have bell closed or replaces long long ago in the West, but have been kept going in China because of the effect on local jobs - especially local party jobs. The power that says that 2000 factories must close because of central policy is the same power that kept them open regardless of whether it was in most people's best interest to do so. Central control works both ways: when the centre is right, it can get things done very fast. But when it is wrong it can get things don, or not done, with equal efficicency. For all its defects, when the market is working properly it is remarkably efficient.
A friend's wife had a problem with her car which caused the dashboard to light up with multiple warning lights. My friend, a highly skilled hardware engineer, traced the fault after half an hour's work: a single underinflated tire, presumably reported by the sensors referred to in TFA. The tire sensor had turned on its own warning light - so far so good. But it had also talked to the ABS, which had decided to turn itself off, producing another red warning. And this had talked to the central monitoring system, which had flagged up a safety critical fault and ordered her to a garage. And maybe some other faults.
So a malicious prankster could suddenly turn on a christmas tree of warning lights on many passing cars, with results comic to some but potentially dangerous if the driver is distracted and/or does something unexpected like an emergency stop or a swerve to the shoulder.
A colleague recently got a call from his wife: her car dash had lit up with warning lights. After about half an hour he traced it to a single fault: an under-inflated tire, presumably reported (correctly) by one of the sensors described in TFO. One tire warning light - OK so far.But the tire warning system had talked to the ABS system, which had decided for inscrutable reasons that it wouldn't work with an underinflated tire. And that had talked to the central monitoring system, which had turned on the "Safety Critical Fault" light. And maybe a few other things. The result was, like Three Mile Island, a single underlying fault had turned into a christmas tree of warnings that an unskilled interpreter (the wife) was terrified of and a skilled engineer (my colleague, a very good hardware engineer) took half an hour to troubleshoot.
The point being that there is a possibility for a dangerous prank here. By fooling cars into thinking their tires are dangerously underinflated, you can give the driver a serious fright - with possibilities comic to the simple minded, but potentially dangerous if the driver is distracted or does something unexpected like braking to a sudden halt.
Over past decades there has been a continuous fall in fatalities per mile driven. This is, to a large extent, due to continuous small improvements, of which this is one. Of course you may be savvy enough to keep your tires properly inflated - but the average Joe Public isn't - or at least 10% of Joe Public. And properly inflated tires reduce the risk of accidents, in which Joe Public can kill not only himself but also you. You may, indeed, be an above average driver (like 90% of the population, in their opinion) but most people (in real tests) are not.
Incidentally, you didn't specify synchromesh, windscreen wipers, indicators, damped suspension, automatic ignition timing... Once upon a time, cars didn't have these. Have you ever driven a car from the 1920s? Would you know how to double-declutch and when to use the ignition advance retard? What you are saying is that cars don't need the improvements since you started driving - a version of the "Good Old Days" fallacy.
Precisely. Most adults can drive a care, but few are petrolheads. Most people wans something that starts when you turn the key. They know how to, and mildly resent having to, fill it with petrol, check the tires, and perform sundry other routines to keep it roadworthy (though some don't bother to their cost).
Contrast that with Kipling, an early car enthusiast writing humorous stories about 1910. First, he employed a full-time driver/mechanic (though he drove himself). For a 200 mile journey he set out with four spare tires, and felt only mildly unlucky when he got his fifth puncture, On the other hand, when, for story purposes, the car had to be driven across field, they took off the shiny bodywork and replaced it with a cart body for the jape. Lighting was calcium carbide (releases acetylene whn water dripped onto it) which entailed searches across country for ponds when darkness fell.
All of this is what the command-line geeks (such as me) were used to do. When cars got easier to use, it changed life massively. But not by making people more interested in cars. By making people expect to have cars to get to distant jobs, visit distant relatives, shop far from home, take dates to quiet places. The social changes brought by the car are huge, and the car industry is huge, But most people care little about what goes on below the metalwork. Much effort has been made to make all cars work the same: same pedals, same wheel, same fuel, indicators etc in one of only two or three places, standard mounts for accessories. When someone visits you, you don't ask what make of car they have so you can prepare the right kind of parking place. You may comment on the status expressed by the price/age of their car, but you are unlikely to comment on its technical specs.
To any independently minded person, it stinks of gerrymandering to change the rules of democracy in order to keep yourself in power. Like some third world dictatorship.
Any change to the rules is bound to favour one group over another, and could therefore be called gerrymandering. This change introduces a little damping or hysteresis into the system which otherwise could be unpleasantly unstable, If the Commons split 50/50, any MP has the power to bring down the government. Whether 5% is the right amount is debatable, but giving the system a little damping is, in my opinion, good engineering not gerrymandering.
The change makes, as is its intention, coalitions more possible. That, in my opinion, is a goof thing. I am fed up with the rush-to-the-left, rush-to-the-right swings that the current system (particularly FPTP voting) brings. A coalition can be a little to the left, a little to the right. Any driver will know that sharp changes in the steering occur only when the system is out of control or in danger of becoming so.Good driving is constant small adjustments - and so is good governing.
Several European capitals have trams which seem not to suffer too many problems. I don't think that is likely to be a killer. This is essentially the upper deck only of a 2-wide 2-decker tram.
But, according to the summary (and I don't disagree), ten times as expensive.
You can make the front and back of the thing very strong indeed - just as trucks round here have bars protecting their rear axles.. Which only leaves people going astray inside, which will probably be less violent but might be the weak link in the scheme
Known uranium resources have about 40 years of life. But this was the state with oil in the 70s. Rising prices and new markets will prompt exploration, which will increase resources. But this predicates rising prices which, in context of TFA, merely proves the point.
Pumped storage is certainly possible. But sites are not common, and it adds to capital costs - which add to production costs. The costs of both PV and pumped storage are dominated by capital costs, so this crossover is unlikely to have occurred if you have to add in pumped (or other) storage.
You didn't read my answer properly. I have not the slightest expectation of influencing Fred Phelps - and I don't think your proposals would either. He and his few fellow fanatics are completely immune to reason. It is the rest of the world I am trying to influence. If Phelps is the only protester seen, his ideas will gradually gain weight and become regarded as more mainstream by ordinary people. Whereas if, wherever he is seen, larger numbers of more interesting and witty counter protesters are seen, his views will be seen as the extremist positions that they are. The need is that, whenever Phelps appears in the media, anti-Phelps appears larger.
So what? Freedom needs to be continually fought for; if you ignore Phelps and give him no opposition, his viewpoint will gradually become more and more accepted; people will think him "normal" even if they don't agree with him. And good humoured satire seems to me the very best way to deal with him. Amusing, photogenic to spread the word, and non-confrontational. Freedom of speed (correctly) allows him to express his loathsome opinions - it should be used to provide the counterbalance.
I particularly liked "Odin is God - read The Mighty Thor #5". It beautifully encapsulates the curcularity of the bible bashers arguments.
"Release early, release often" - Linus Torvalds. As long as they are properly tested and this hyperactive release schedule doesn't push them into buggy releases, go for it.
When they sun goes Red Giant, it will expand to very nearly the earths orbit, or past it. Either way, the earth gets fried: the sun may be cooler, but it occupies the whole sky. So power supplies on earth are not a problem. But that is 4 billion years away. Since we have had distributable non-animal power generation for just 300 years, I think we have enough time to develop something, if we survive.
Its decommissioning costs will be negligible compared to nuclear, because you can go straight out with curring tools and throw the metal into a scrap mill. I would have thought, at a rough guess, that the scrap metal value would pay for cutting down and carting away the structures, leaving you only the site remediation to do - a well understood problem. Depending, of course, on scrap prices. Whereas nuclear reactors have to be dismantles by radiation tolerant remote handlers in such a way that no dust leaks out, sorted int different levels of radiation, sealed up appropriately to remain secure for thousands of years, and transferred securely to disposal sites.
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Except, as far as I can see, the function of this system is to collect fault logs from all the places the planes might fly to, and correlate them. I.e. central to its primary function is network communications of some sort. Now, they could run a private network over their entire operation range (most of Europe, I would guess), but that would would be prohibitively expensive for what is basically a third-line support function. So I bet they used the internet. Of course, they could have run a locked VPN over the Internet, which would have been better. But I cannot see top security being applied to what is essentially an office system.
Except that this was not really a mission critical system - it was a fault logging system in the maintenance department. So far as one can tell from a machine-translated popular article, it was meant to log if a single aircraft had a number of different faults logged close together, because faults at different stations might not otherwise get correlated. As such, it is basically an IT system with response requirements in minutes, not a real time system with fault tolerance requirements. One of the systems which failed might have been a warning system which would have warned the pilots of the mistake which cause the crash.
It will, of course, be in the form of a check or or other financial transfer, but these are commonly regarded as cash. Intel is paying $48 for each McAfee share, not offering Intel shares. Therefore Intel really is buying McAfee, not merging.
You also have a number of densely populated areas scattered around an enormous amount of not very much. Nobody is suggesting covering the whole US with high speed trains - just as the UK is not covered with high speed trains. This is a straw man. But you have a number of conurbations where large numbers of people live quite close together.
The problem is not the wide open spaces, it is actually the less packed suburbs. Most US suburbs, full of potential passengers, are much less densely packed than in Europe. Europeans have blocks of flats, terrace type houses, or small plots. Americans have detached houses in the middle of significant sized lots. If you have a high-speed city-centre to city-centre train, in Europe people can use local transport to get to and from the central station; in the US, you have to take your car to the centre, then find and pay for parking, then find another car at the other end.
This large-scale scheme is actually dependent on good small scale local public transport to fan in and out.
Two reasons. Firstly, even when you are taxing to raise money, you have a choice what to tax. You can tax alcohol and medicine the same. This is a choice, but most people have shown a preference for taxing what they see as luxuries higher than necessities.
Secondly, sometimes personal use has public costs. Many things produce pollution, whether it be atmospheric, noise, water etc. which produce a cost on everybody but a benefit for the few. It seems reasonable to require the few to compensate the many for the harm they done. The compensation may be used to rectify the harm done, or to buy something different which will compensate. The demand for compensation then produces a pressure on the few to consider others to some extent. Of course, the compensation must be proportionate. But the production of CO2 is a harm to everybody: it is reasonable to expect those who get the benefit from the CO2 to compensate others for the harm they do.
The wish behind this is excellent, but the law had better be carefully drafted. For example, you could mandate that all videos should have subtitles or closed captions. Which, with respect to major broadcasters, would be reasonable. But are you going to force this onto everybody who posts a home video? Obviously not (I think). But now how do you draw the line between home videos, small semi-professional videos, and full-blown broadcasters? And is this likely to produce a de-facto censorship of overseas broadcasters.
Why do you have to make all devices accessible? Does, for example, a waterproof phone designed for surfers/canoeists have to have features for the blind? While not saying the blind cannot surf, the population of blind surfers is pretty small, and they do not really need access to what seems at first glance a trivial gadget. The blind must not be locked off the Web - but they don't need it while canoeing.
Put it the other way, do you have to make all web devices available to the non-disabled? Am I required to make a braille web-interpreter (a device) accessible to the sighted but braille-impaired?
Will this effectively ban ultra-low-power long battery life devices which, for example, don't have speaker-phones and use e-paper without back lights, which are harder for this with impaired vision to use?
So, while I applaud the idea, I fear the detail.
In the West, the $€£ is king; in China, to a large extent the Party is king. Many of these factories will be extremely inefficient and would have bell closed or replaces long long ago in the West, but have been kept going in China because of the effect on local jobs - especially local party jobs. The power that says that 2000 factories must close because of central policy is the same power that kept them open regardless of whether it was in most people's best interest to do so. Central control works both ways: when the centre is right, it can get things done very fast. But when it is wrong it can get things don, or not done, with equal efficicency. For all its defects, when the market is working properly it is remarkably efficient.
A friend's wife had a problem with her car which caused the dashboard to light up with multiple warning lights. My friend, a highly skilled hardware engineer, traced the fault after half an hour's work: a single underinflated tire, presumably reported by the sensors referred to in TFA. The tire sensor had turned on its own warning light - so far so good. But it had also talked to the ABS, which had decided to turn itself off, producing another red warning. And this had talked to the central monitoring system, which had flagged up a safety critical fault and ordered her to a garage. And maybe some other faults.
So a malicious prankster could suddenly turn on a christmas tree of warning lights on many passing cars, with results comic to some but potentially dangerous if the driver is distracted and/or does something unexpected like an emergency stop or a swerve to the shoulder.
A colleague recently got a call from his wife: her car dash had lit up with warning lights. After about half an hour he traced it to a single fault: an under-inflated tire, presumably reported (correctly) by one of the sensors described in TFO. One tire warning light - OK so far.But the tire warning system had talked to the ABS system, which had decided for inscrutable reasons that it wouldn't work with an underinflated tire. And that had talked to the central monitoring system, which had turned on the "Safety Critical Fault" light. And maybe a few other things. The result was, like Three Mile Island, a single underlying fault had turned into a christmas tree of warnings that an unskilled interpreter (the wife) was terrified of and a skilled engineer (my colleague, a very good hardware engineer) took half an hour to troubleshoot.
The point being that there is a possibility for a dangerous prank here. By fooling cars into thinking their tires are dangerously underinflated, you can give the driver a serious fright - with possibilities comic to the simple minded, but potentially dangerous if the driver is distracted or does something unexpected like braking to a sudden halt.
Over past decades there has been a continuous fall in fatalities per mile driven. This is, to a large extent, due to continuous small improvements, of which this is one. Of course you may be savvy enough to keep your tires properly inflated - but the average Joe Public isn't - or at least 10% of Joe Public. And properly inflated tires reduce the risk of accidents, in which Joe Public can kill not only himself but also you. You may, indeed, be an above average driver (like 90% of the population, in their opinion) but most people (in real tests) are not.
Incidentally, you didn't specify synchromesh, windscreen wipers, indicators, damped suspension, automatic ignition timing... Once upon a time, cars didn't have these. Have you ever driven a car from the 1920s? Would you know how to double-declutch and when to use the ignition advance retard? What you are saying is that cars don't need the improvements since you started driving - a version of the "Good Old Days" fallacy.
Precisely. Most adults can drive a care, but few are petrolheads. Most people wans something that starts when you turn the key. They know how to, and mildly resent having to, fill it with petrol, check the tires, and perform sundry other routines to keep it roadworthy (though some don't bother to their cost).
Contrast that with Kipling, an early car enthusiast writing humorous stories about 1910. First, he employed a full-time driver/mechanic (though he drove himself). For a 200 mile journey he set out with four spare tires, and felt only mildly unlucky when he got his fifth puncture, On the other hand, when, for story purposes, the car had to be driven across field, they took off the shiny bodywork and replaced it with a cart body for the jape. Lighting was calcium carbide (releases acetylene whn water dripped onto it) which entailed searches across country for ponds when darkness fell.
All of this is what the command-line geeks (such as me) were used to do. When cars got easier to use, it changed life massively. But not by making people more interested in cars. By making people expect to have cars to get to distant jobs, visit distant relatives, shop far from home, take dates to quiet places. The social changes brought by the car are huge, and the car industry is huge, But most people care little about what goes on below the metalwork. Much effort has been made to make all cars work the same: same pedals, same wheel, same fuel, indicators etc in one of only two or three places, standard mounts for accessories. When someone visits you, you don't ask what make of car they have so you can prepare the right kind of parking place. You may comment on the status expressed by the price/age of their car, but you are unlikely to comment on its technical specs.
To any independently minded person, it stinks of gerrymandering to change the rules of democracy in order to keep yourself in power. Like some third world dictatorship.
Any change to the rules is bound to favour one group over another, and could therefore be called gerrymandering. This change introduces a little damping or hysteresis into the system which otherwise could be unpleasantly unstable, If the Commons split 50/50, any MP has the power to bring down the government. Whether 5% is the right amount is debatable, but giving the system a little damping is, in my opinion, good engineering not gerrymandering.
The change makes, as is its intention, coalitions more possible. That, in my opinion, is a goof thing. I am fed up with the rush-to-the-left, rush-to-the-right swings that the current system (particularly FPTP voting) brings. A coalition can be a little to the left, a little to the right. Any driver will know that sharp changes in the steering occur only when the system is out of control or in danger of becoming so.Good driving is constant small adjustments - and so is good governing.
It makes it commercially easier - that is, it makes it easier to get paid to do it. In the real world, coding takes time, and time is money.
Some things get done because people want to do them of their own accord - GPL land.
Some thing get done because people want to sell stuff - BSD land.
Neither is right or wrong: they serve different needs.
Trademark and copyright are completely separate systems. Arguments from one do not copy over to the other.
Several European capitals have trams which seem not to suffer too many problems. I don't think that is likely to be a killer. This is essentially the upper deck only of a 2-wide 2-decker tram.
But, according to the summary (and I don't disagree), ten times as expensive.
You can make the front and back of the thing very strong indeed - just as trucks round here have bars protecting their rear axles.. Which only leaves people going astray inside, which will probably be less violent but might be the weak link in the scheme
The comparison is between existing fully amortized nuclear reactors and brand new nuclear reactors with their expected high construction costs.
Known uranium resources have about 40 years of life. But this was the state with oil in the 70s. Rising prices and new markets will prompt exploration, which will increase resources. But this predicates rising prices which, in context of TFA, merely proves the point.
Pumped storage is certainly possible. But sites are not common, and it adds to capital costs - which add to production costs. The costs of both PV and pumped storage are dominated by capital costs, so this crossover is unlikely to have occurred if you have to add in pumped (or other) storage.
You didn't read my answer properly. I have not the slightest expectation of influencing Fred Phelps - and I don't think your proposals would either. He and his few fellow fanatics are completely immune to reason. It is the rest of the world I am trying to influence. If Phelps is the only protester seen, his ideas will gradually gain weight and become regarded as more mainstream by ordinary people. Whereas if, wherever he is seen, larger numbers of more interesting and witty counter protesters are seen, his views will be seen as the extremist positions that they are. The need is that, whenever Phelps appears in the media, anti-Phelps appears larger.
So what? Freedom needs to be continually fought for; if you ignore Phelps and give him no opposition, his viewpoint will gradually become more and more accepted; people will think him "normal" even if they don't agree with him. And good humoured satire seems to me the very best way to deal with him. Amusing, photogenic to spread the word, and non-confrontational. Freedom of speed (correctly) allows him to express his loathsome opinions - it should be used to provide the counterbalance.
I particularly liked "Odin is God - read The Mighty Thor #5". It beautifully encapsulates the curcularity of the bible bashers arguments.
"Release early, release often" - Linus Torvalds. As long as they are properly tested and this hyperactive release schedule doesn't push them into buggy releases, go for it.
When they sun goes Red Giant, it will expand to very nearly the earths orbit, or past it. Either way, the earth gets fried: the sun may be cooler, but it occupies the whole sky. So power supplies on earth are not a problem. But that is 4 billion years away. Since we have had distributable non-animal power generation for just 300 years, I think we have enough time to develop something, if we survive.
Its decommissioning costs will be negligible compared to nuclear, because you can go straight out with curring tools and throw the metal into a scrap mill. I would have thought, at a rough guess, that the scrap metal value would pay for cutting down and carting away the structures, leaving you only the site remediation to do - a well understood problem. Depending, of course, on scrap prices. Whereas nuclear reactors have to be dismantles by radiation tolerant remote handlers in such a way that no dust leaks out, sorted int different levels of radiation, sealed up appropriately to remain secure for thousands of years, and transferred securely to disposal sites.
Fusion power is thirty years away. Always has been, always will be.