One of the challenges with an electricity grid is distribution (power lines), another generation (power plants/sources), another is storage (capacitor or battery banks).
The demand on a grid is fluctuating. You can fire up or turn down a coal plant reasonably quickly to moderate with demand. The same is probably true of hydro as you can just control how much water you let freeflow and not generate power. That, unfortunately, does not work with nuclear plants - bringing one up or down is not a trivial effort and I'm told they have a very limited ability to moderate their output.
So where do you maintain massive battery banks to allow charging of cars that take 220V drops, presumably at a fair amperage, over 3-5 hours to charge every night for every car? If I'm in a 2-3 car household, the draw only gets worse.
Our grids already have trouble keeping up with demand (not enough generation) and maintaining integrity (transmission).
Electric cars strike me as a solution to move your pollution from the city's streets to the power generating plants. They also strike me as something which would require *massive* infrastructure changes to support and massive increases in generating capacity. If we add the cost of revamping the grid, adding a lot of storage capacity into the grid, and maintaining all of this into the per unit cost of electric cars, even amortizing it over 20 years, we'd still find that the cost per unit would go up by thousands of dollars (possibly tens).
Everyone has spent a long time understanding electric autos vs. conventional autos from the perspectives of car performance, gas mileage, and car emissions. How about we go off and spend some time researching the electricity grid, what's involved in large scale changes to that grid, the technical limitations in generation, transmission and mass storage, etc? Then revisit the electric car idea armed with the full picture.
Real life, in fact, has chapters. You can tell the breakpoints because they are separated by what we call 'sleep'. There is your meatform load screen.
People who want continous flow forget this usually imposes further technical challenges (as someone who has written dynamic cell loading code for a massive multi-user platform, I can say that with some confidence).
If you're going to do dynamic cell loading and you want to do it efficiently, you need to decide how you're going to load the cells intelligently. You also need to find a way to do this in the background, without disrupting currently active cells. Portaling/Teleporting around seemlessly could be an even bigger challenge.
Of course, all these and other challenges can be handled, but they'll eat some CPU, some memory, and add some code complexity. Is that where you want your game dev $$$ expended? Is that really the best use of those $$$?
And besides, I don't know about anyone else, but the logical breakpoints of level loads often let you shake out the tension in arms and wrists, unkink your neck, and refocus your eyes a few times somewhere else. Probably good to have these sorts of minor breaks in game flow.
"They were told that their company was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Sure, they could have sought advice from outside, but why should they expect their employers to be giving them a load of BS?"
--
I don't mean to speak out of turn, but have you ever worked in any sort of industry that has any sort of sales, marketing, or human resources department? I'd guess not, if you'd ask such a question...
The entire world these days is spin management. Optics internally and externally are key focus items. BS is just an unappealing characterization of the typical activity performed by many parts of corporate infrastructure - marketing, legal, communications, HR, etc.
Caveat Emptor applies to any corporate pronouncements. Only the terminally naive expect anything different and they habitually end up on the short end of the stick.
Hmmm. I think the English might have had something to say about Connery playing Bond and then Arthur, King of the Britons.
If I recall, we've also had an Irishman playing Robert Roy MacGregor (Liam Neeson), an American playing William Wallace, Richard Gere playing one of Arthur's Knights, a Canadian Hero of D-Day playing the original Scotty, A Frenchman playing the Highlander, a Scotsman playing an Egyptian in the same movie, and a variety of other rather comedic cross-cultural representations.
My cousin's a Scot with a Glaswegian accent and he's married to a cornsilk blonde from Missouri. I truly pity anyone trying to understand any offspring of that unholy linguistic union.
So, in short, give it up. The Scots have played other nationalities (Ewan MacGregor playing some dude from a long time ago and far far away among many others) so turnabout (or turnaboot) is fair play, ye ken?
Bubble mammary, holographic mammary, Where the hell's my flying car? Why are we still using these Victorian mechanical storage devices. Feel like I'm stuck in Difference Engine World. Now, if it was Girl Genius World, that would be something.
Not quite sure where mammaries came into the picture.......mind you, not like that's a bad thing. I just don't quite know how much storage your average mammary would have, or whether it would be volatile, or how it might replace a 'hard drive'....
I had to browbeat our people for several years before they recently relented and made the change to a dial-out number of 8 (vs 9). The irony is we owned the VOIP PBX and we helped write the software that ran it. There had to be a pile of folks who knew enough about it to change the dial plan. It was just inertia I figure (maybe there's something I don't know).
The problem was exacerbated by phones whose physical buttons didn't always press easily and sometimes when you did jab them hard enough, you got a double digit collection. So you'd hit 9, then 1... the 1 wouldn't register so you'd really jab it, then you had 9-1-1 because it collected the digit twice...
Use 8 to dial out. At least until they really do switch to using '9-1-2' as the real emergency number. (Nods to Homer)
I think the parent has the right of it, at least in the broad sweep. Cell phone risk may have a usage period factor and may depend on which cellular technologies are in place.
I believe that the following are true:
1) You can get RF burns off of antennas used on police cruisers for police radios and data systems. Some of these are cell modems for protocols like CDPD and the like. Now, at peak power some of these can output quite a few times the power of a typical cellphone. But close enough (like in contact), at high output, and with the good old law of inverse squares in play, you can get a nasty RF burn from these antennae. This suggests that, under some circumstances, RF can be fairly dangerous.
2) Microwave techs working in the north and other places where we used microwave transmission, in the early days of the technology, used to align waveguides by inspection - by looking down the waveguide. In some cases, this was done with the system at a sizable portion of full power (not really powered down). Then they wondered why, over time, the one eye got worse and worse and they ended up having to use the other one. Then it too started getting worse. Hmmm. I think they step down or turn off the power now or align the waveguides by a different process. This suggests under some circumstances, microwave radiation can be fairly dangerous.
I have a friend who got testicular cancer. Now, I can't draw a direct A->B relationship with certainty, but in the four years preceding that, he spent 40+ hours a week with a police laptop with a built in modem (capable of outputting several watts in RF power) in his lap doing software development. I can't say that doing this led to his cancer. But I can't say it didn't nor that it didn't exacerbate any predisposition he may have had in this regard or hasten onset. I was glad enough to get out of that RF environment just on the chance that had somehow had a causal relationship.
So it seems the question isn't if RF or Microwaves are dangerous - with enough oomph behind them, I think we know they certainly have deleterious physical effects. The question is at the common power levels in commercial cell phones and other RF/microwave devices, is there sufficient power to cause problems? And if so, are there safe(r) usage limits we should be observing or particular designs or frequency bands we should be avoiding?
A friend had a co-worker at an Ottawa high tech firm who noticed that the company was asking everyone to fill out forms for new business cards. Said sharp cookie also noticed that no one was vetting these requests. So he filled out what he thought would be an excellent job title.
He got back his business cards with the title "Master of Canine Fornication" on them.
Needless to say, the company revised policy to vette subsequent card print runs after word got out. But he still has the cards.
Not that I'm going to defend Ms. Rice's truthfulness of lack thereof, but I will note that the statement that your citation (whose source I wonder a bit about, as they claim to be non-partisan but outline a fairly clearly partisan anti-conservative agenda) covers and that you reference is not particularly contradictory.
Ms. Rice remarked she did not remember. The fact is, perhaps she should have. But only her and any possible divine entities will know if she actually was lying. She could, as it happens, actually not remember something that happened. With the amount of stress these people get placed under and the amount of microanalysis they are subjected to, it surprises me they remember clearly anything at all. They get questioned about many of these things long after the fact and if any of them can render an accurate picture of the past, that's pretty impressive. If they cannot, it is (to me) hardly surprising.
She could be a big fat liar... but I hardly think the point you are digging at is anything akin to proof of that.
I have a friend who was working in Europe when they decided that they were closing up a section of the big IT company he was working for. He was on contract and happened to avoid the cut, but he witnessed another employee walk into a common area and detach a large LCD screen from the wall (others were taking CRT monitors, laptops, etc).
That's sort of 'collecting severance' I suppose. The funny bit is that the manager, also axed, walked in and caught the guy detaching the big LCD TV from the wall. (Maybe it was plasma... doesn't matter). Anyway, instead of kicking his @$$ and sticking security on him for a quick lesson in the use of the PR-24, he *HELPED* the employee dismount the screen and transport it out to his vehicle.
It seems the (former) manager had a lot of sympathy for his (former) employees that day and wasn't particularly interested (any longer) in the interests of the company, especially since it was shipping off a whole whack of work to the Pacific Rim.
I'm not saying this sort of behaviour is right, but the way some business decisions get made and implemented, you find it hard at times to have much sympathy for the company.
A race of sentient golems might be close. Manufactured mobile semi-autonomous weapons for a nasty war, created in massive "Creation Forges" from complex arcane patterns called "Creation Patterns". At some point, they developed full autonomy and sentience (or is that sapience?... ). The war, which raged for a long, long time (tens or hundreds of years?) is now over (2 years ago or so). So we have all these sentient warriors (specialized in some cases as juggernauts, scouts, wizards, etc) of metal and organic (they're a hybrid, but not exactly like a cyborg - the organic could be stuff like wood)... and they are free (ostensibly) by decree in some (all?) places, but don't really have a purpose anymore.
They're sort of like the character most 'AI' becomes in cyberpunk novels or movies (like AI or I,Robot) - creations which are now arguably as smart as their creators, perhaps even tougher, and who have to find their own raison d'etre in the new world.
Some manifestation of that is not good (many support the Lord of the Blades, a Warforged leader who seems to have a somewhat genocidal attitudes towards the pink squishy ones). And yet, many of the warforged have become productive members (if lower caste in some cases) of their societies, still serving a purpose. They end up working as mercenaries, gaurds, adventurers, and sometimes (rarely) in things in no way related to their past warlike uses.
They are interesting, because they aren't just exactly humans with pointy ears. They are notably different in physical requirements and if you want to get into the RP part of RPG, they would have different perceptions of society, of their place in the world, and even of normal physical reality than humans or even pointy-eared tree-huggers (Elves). They make for a fun RP challenge and one of the most interesting additions to a world in a long time, IMO.
In a current Eberron campaign, we have a party of warforged. I'm running a Bard with the handle "Heavy Metal" (okay, yeah, groan...). It's a different kind of experience to a human party - healing magic works half strength on us, we're seen oddly by most softies, and we still try to go out and do the right thing, when we can sort of figure out what that would be.
Eberron is also a world of pulp-ish stories - detective stories, mysteries, ancient temples and sites to be explored a la Indianna Jones, plots and conspiracies by secret agencies out for world domination, the whole nine yards. And is a high-magic world, with lightning rails, fire elemental bound airships, teleportation services for the well-to-do, elemental binding for a lot of things (Heavy Metal wants a lightning elemental bound into a guitar... yes, an electric guitar... groan again...). It has a very different feel and explores both the issues of 'what would a world be like with a lot of magic' (vs. traditional AD&D worlds) and 'what if nations were more important than race' (Al-Quadim was a bit like this) and 'what would society be like if we had a group of 12 or 13 powerful houses acting like Medeival Guilds'? It aims for high-tension adventure, a cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Casablanca with a dash of Three Musketeers thrown in.
Accuracy is generally proportional to the number and variety of sources used. It is quite possible to have data from a large number of incorrect sources and still have a wildly inaccurate result OR to have data from a large number of sources and incorrectly synthesize or aggregate it, thus leading to an inaccurate result.
Having a big list of sources may be statistically more likely to lead to greater accuracy, but in any particular case, it'd be a big leap to go from "this article has a big list of sources" to "this article is therefore of greater accuracy (than one with fewer sources)". If you have an article with few sources that happen to be *better* sources, which themselves are more accurate, you can be better off than with a greater count of sources that end up being poorer sources.
That's not meant to be as nitpicky as it probably sounds, but my point really is that the number of sources can't be directly correlated to the accuracy of an article or fact. 100 wrongs still doesn't make a right, if you see what I'm getting at.
Or did you mean immediately after they've been given a fair trial, had the right to legal counsel, had the right to appeals, etc. and so forth?
I'm not saying this case is one in which there is a lot of doubt, but there are two sides to a lot of stories. Dismissing your police without appropriate compensation (just turfing them out) would (one would think) demand a high level of proof in a court of law to back it up. Just an accusation would hardly be sufficient. At least not if you happen to believe in due process. Administrative suspension, taking the officer off the street for a time while the issue is investigated... that I can believe. But firing them outright before they are brought before either a professional review board or a judge in court? Can't see that being viable.
On another point:
Last time I talked to a friend from Baltimore, he pointed out they rarely if ever reached their nominal police staffing levels because of the pay being not so good. This led to bleed off to other cities of all of the best cops. So, here we have the remainder of the cops being overworked, underpaid, and knowing that they're just not the top notch cops... they're what is left when those folks have went elsewhere. So, maybe if you want top notch cops, you want to make sure they have top notch training and very good salaries. Otherwise, you'll pretty much get what you (don't) pay for.
I've worked extensively with a national police agency and a number of smaller PDs as a civilian contractor doing computer related work. I've met a lot of officers. I have a lot of respect for the tough job they do, the crappy treatment they often get (dealing with obnoxious drunks is fun for most of us, I'm sure...) and I've seen what happens when things go badly (Mayerthorpe as one example).
But at the same time, I've had senior members of these forces point out that the basic personality type of criminals and of most police has many points of commonality. The points of difference are pretty critical, but it is important to consider the degree of similarity. Projection of authority, taking charge of a situation, meeting violence with violence, attitude with attitude, and being willing to push hard to get the job done... these can make a cop good at his job. But at the same time, they can mean that if you're John Q Public running across him, if you give him grief, you may find his response isn't very tolerant. But to a certain extent, the nature of the job (of beat cops especially) requires a certain mindset and emotional makeup. Most of us could not or would not do the job (most of us don't...).
So, I'm not suggesting bad cops get a bye or are let off. Yet at the same time, they too have to be given due process. That's called not compounding a wrong with another wrong or making a bad situation worse.
Oddly enough, no one wants to see truly bad cops busted and dismissed than the good ones who get a bad name as a result.
The reality is though that they are people doing a tough job, often with insufficient training or remuneration or numbers, and this tends to manifest itself in their attitude. You can attack that situation by blaming those involved but you could also look at the funding for training, for pay scales, and for manpower levels. Policing by the lowest bidder isn't uncommon (contract policing I believe they call it) and often times manpower levels are far below where they should be. Maybe if we dealt with some of these issues, we'd find cops a bit easier to deal with because they'd be a bit less tired, stressed, and pissed off.
With modern disc lifespans not living up to original expectations, I'd be highly surprised to see a BluRay *disk* survive 100 years. Sure, I understand the point about having media you can't play (I'm sure some of those old wax cylinders from early grammaphones are tough to play today), but I think the impermanence of the medium will help to gaurantee that this isn't as much of an issue as one suspects.
Best that we don't store literary classics strictly digitally. Unless of course, the underlying medium is some sort of diamond platter or something.
Hmmm. Ford doesn't tell you that you can't tinker with the cars engine... unless of course you want the warranty to be valid. If you do anything fairly dramatic and it doesn't come out so well, or even if you fail to have documented proof you followed the prescribed maintenance schedules, they can be right buggers when it comes to satisfying a warranty issue. They've outright said that a number of mods, such as chipping, will invalidate warranty.
So, in a sense, they do in fact tell you that you can't tamper with the engine you bought, because you also (generally) bought a warranty from them that is obviously based on the idea that they would be the ones (with their licensed mechanics and all the approved equipment) working on your car over that warranty period and that you wouldn't want (or be able) to do anything with your car during that period.
Note, I'm not singling out Ford either. All car companies do that. I can see why too - I just imagine warranty claims from folks who've screwed around with the computer-controlled engines of today and buggered something up, through ineptitude rather than any design or materials defect on behalf of the manufacturer. So one can understand how that led, in a fairly linear sense, to today's rules about modifying or tinkering with your car invalidating warranties.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily agree this is how things should have progressed, but I can see the logic that brought us here.
Driving can be easily impaired by things like: 1) Conversations with other car occupants (can be quite distractions) 2) Radio fiddling (or even just listening and grooving along) 3) Operating cabin climate controls, navigation systems, etc. 4) External stimuli (car accidents to gawk at, pretty girls to lead the eye, etc) 5) Alcohol 6) Drugs, prescription or otherwise 7) Fatigue (Drowsiness probably kills as many people as cell phones ever will) 8) Drinks and/or food in the car especially if consumed on the move 9) Lipstick application or other personal hygiene tasks performed on the move
The list goes on. Is the cell phone worse? My own experience is because it can be a challenge to one-hand dial, that can be very distracting, as can be rooting around for the phone to answer a call and typing a text message is a real pain. Perhaps a car-set or bluetooth headset and voice dial would alleviate some of these issues, but not all. Cell phones can be quite a hazard.
But so can fishing around for CDs, trying to adjust your MP3 player to the right folder, being distracted by an outside event, being tired (very common), being drunk or stoned (a bit less common), doing other dumb things (lipstick, newspapers, etc). Eating in the car or drinking coffee or the like can be fairly baneful to good driving as well.
So why hack on cellphones? We've got catch-all regulation that covers various unspecified impairments to a driver's ability to operate and we've got particular legislation covering drugs, alcohol and in some cases fatigue. Unless we're going to start banning eating, listening to music, or any other possible distraction (or have cars run by computers that aren't prone to distraction), then we should just admit cell phones probably aren't much different than any other distraction, or at least this has hardly been proven as of this time.
If there ever was an organization dedicated to mediocrity, impeding productivity and forcing people to be on strike and not earning money when they want to, a union would be it.
I've been a programmer for over ten years now. Keep your skills fresh, work hard, be a team player, and you'll tend to get further work (if one job dries up, someone you know and have impressed will pipeline you into another) and plan for contingencies like being out of work for a while. It's a nice indoor job with good benefits (I'm a contractor but I have been an employee enough times to know that) and good pay rates. Sure, you might get outsourced - that just means what you were doing is something somebody else *should* be doing since they can do it cheaper. Get into some part of the industry that is new and not likely to flow to parts of the world with poor infrastructure, language barriers, or non-existent IP laws. Or get into Defense or Security work, those won't likely offshore anytime soon.
In short, stop crying and start working towards the future you want. High-tech is still one of the best ways to get there for the middle class guy. Sure, the rich get richer, but if anyone can tell me when this wasn't the case, I'd be glad to cut the legs out from under them. Yes, you work hard. But if you enjoy the job, that's actually not a bad thing.
And if you don't like the field, get out. If you don't like your employer, move on. If you don't like the work, retrain, expend some of your resources readying yourself for something you do like.
It seems to me the article's poster expects the world owes him/her something. Get over yourself, I say. The world owes you nothing, isn't fair, and a Union won't do anything but take your money, impose restrictions that hamper the hard workers and the competent, and drive the work away faster. Oh, and add to that sometimes pull you out of work when you don't want to go. And consume your union dues along the way (like all bureaucracies).
Unions... no thanks. I'm doing just fine without them. The only people who need unions are lazy folks, people without foresight, or people without initiative. Do yourself a favour and go out and take the world on and beat it into the shape you want, don't wait for someone to fix it for you.
The irony here of course is that most "News Organizations" are companies, hence really at the root have a profit motive. Any that are not may well have a non-profit but perhaps equally slanting agenda.
This is a nice theory. But they charged Jason over $500 for what was just over a $200 part. So apparently, this isn't as straightforward as you naively assume, or the Ford Dealer was an outright crook. But since it was hours put in, and Jason sat and watched, I think that's probably not the case. The fact is, removing a couple of screws on the outside of a lens, removing the lens, removing and replacing a bulb, reinstalling the lens, is still easier and (as far as I can see, though their may be some reason this is not the case) cheaper and faster than the alternatives. Most interior body panels on doors such as a trucks rear hatch also have wiring running around them, for wipers, for power windows, for power door locks, for security sensors. All of this stuff starts to make interior access more fun.
Now, in my Mustang, to get at a headlight, I have to be fairly flexible and I have to remove annoying plastic covers that they've stuck over every engine part (good places for salt and crud to collect in Northern winters), which were obviously installed because some folks aren't bright enough to know that a car has hot and/or moving parts that they should be aware of. So instead, we now have cars that you have to do surgery on to get at the parts you need to do surgery on. And of course, all the crud that collects under the plastic battery covers, plastic rad covers, plastic headlight and grill shields, etc. has absolutely no negative effect... yah right.
Now, taking off a body panel to replace a battery is rather ridiculous, I grant you. But Corvette != well designed for maintenance. One look should have told anyone that.
I know a fellow who is now retired from the life of a mechanic (back issues) and went into IT instead.
We talked about this very sort of issue and he gave much the same response as the parent of my reply, except he pointed out it is getting more and more expensive for garages to have all the tools and machines they need to service the vehicles. This is helping to drive those $50-60-70-80/hr. mechanic rates up and up. Also, it is effectively acting as a barrier to individuals working on their cars at home, and thus conserving money. It forces you into the hands of the dealership, squeezes out the small non-dealership garage (or really reduces the range of work they can do lacking the tools, because each manufacturer is doing things a bit differently requiring different tools).
Everyone rails on on slashdot about corporate actions in the computer world, yet in the automotive world, we love the things that are forcing the little local guy out of business or the do it yourselfer.
And car designs don't progress in a better-and-better direction only. I had a friend who had to pay $530 to replace the back third brake light on his explorer. Those LCD strips are expensive, and the installation method was positively retarded - not accessible from outside by removing the lens, but instead from inside requiring the removal of the inside panel on the door, a much more costly and involved process.
Torx screws and bolts are one example. Robertson is probably a superior design. Even Phillips heads, as much as they had flaws, were a well known quantity. Along came Torx. Anyone working at home needed to buy some new sockets and screw drivers to fit. But wait! A lot of cars weren't totally Torx, so you couldn't get rid of your Phillips and bladed screw drivers.... no. You just needed another set. And they're pretty bad for distintegrating like the Phillips screws do (not as bad, but still not good) when they get stuck and you have to give them a good twist. Why was this change made? Was there a burning need for a new screw? Nope. It made it easier for machine assembly. That's it.
So, we see something that made things better for the corporation (easier machine assembly) and harder for the do-it-yourselfer and more expensive for him and for the small garage. And this was a good thing?
Similarly, these hybrid vehicles and all the new emission testing comes with a cost to the garages that is non-trivial. It isn't just training new staff, its buying and supporting new machinery and finding space to house it. And in the case of hybrids, developing multi-layered expertise. Don't tell me a two engine car is easier to troubleshoot than a single engine car... that defies logic. So, certainly, this system is more complex, hence inherently more failure prone, and also therefore more expensive to service and maintain.
Oh wait, the BMW dealer can help you! But just get ready for the wallet-ectomy.
And I'm sure we'll never have problems with any of these hybrids in tough northern winters either. Nor will we have increased risks from all the extra water being dumped out onto the roads (this is a guess, but they do seem to spit out more water vapour, which seems to end up in cold northern weather directly on the roads, in the city this translates to ice + rush hour).
So, internal combusion... it may be on its way out. But certainly, as it goes and is replaced by hybrids, this comes at a variety of not so obvious costs.
And I know a firefighter who attends crash scenes. After the things he's seen, he'll never buy a little car and that goes double for these golf-carts on wheels. They look lovely after a nice car accident... for scrap. As do their occupants, for the organ banks. Add to which, in places like Ontario, you need weight to crush down road slush and ice ridges to give you a stable, safe driving environment. You also need weight and a reasonable sideways cross section to give you wind stability. The little golf-cart style smart cars have neither. They blow all over with the wind
I wonder if this speech would sound sane if you substituted the word 'kid' for 'kitty'?
At what point did you get the impression that you owned a particular piece of land? Just because you could build a fence around it and some other human sold you a deed? Fascinating idea. When you can explain that, with something slightly more advanced than 'the logic of might makes right' to our animal friends, let me know.
It scares me more than a little that you know people with such a slight grasp of reality that they'd think US Commandos destroyed the twin towers. I suppose all the major news stations collaborated? This defies description.
This is a day of national embarassment on many fronts.
I don't know if you can say the same things about banks or not. And even if it were true, that might mean we should abandon banks, not necessarily the concept of money. Money existed before banks (in some form).
The system is broken, and is broken enough that I'm not sure it can be fixed. Maybe it can, but as it sits, yes it should be abandoned. Did I say nothing should replace it? Hmmmm. Nope.
And if banks are as badly broken, the same logic applies.
Slashdot Mirror
Lookup tables? That's new-fangled pizzazz! Real engineers grab a pencil, bash out the calcs by hand, eyeball a safety factor, and go for a beer.
ArcherB, excellent post.
:0)
One of the challenges with an electricity grid is distribution (power lines), another generation (power plants/sources), another is storage (capacitor or battery banks).
The demand on a grid is fluctuating. You can fire up or turn down a coal plant reasonably quickly to moderate with demand. The same is probably true of hydro as you can just control how much water you let freeflow and not generate power. That, unfortunately, does not work with nuclear plants - bringing one up or down is not a trivial effort and I'm told they have a very limited ability to moderate their output.
So where do you maintain massive battery banks to allow charging of cars that take 220V drops, presumably at a fair amperage, over 3-5 hours to charge every night for every car?
If I'm in a 2-3 car household, the draw only gets worse.
Our grids already have trouble keeping up with demand (not enough generation) and maintaining integrity (transmission).
Electric cars strike me as a solution to move your pollution from the city's streets to the power generating plants. They also strike me as something which would require *massive* infrastructure changes to support and massive increases in generating capacity. If we add the cost of revamping the grid, adding a lot of storage capacity into the grid, and maintaining all of this into the per unit cost of electric cars, even amortizing it over 20 years, we'd still find that the cost per unit would go up by thousands of dollars (possibly tens).
Everyone has spent a long time understanding electric autos vs. conventional autos from the perspectives of car performance, gas mileage, and car emissions. How about we go off and spend some time researching the electricity grid, what's involved in large scale changes to that grid, the technical limitations in generation, transmission and mass storage, etc? Then revisit the electric car idea armed with the full picture.
Of course, this *is* Slashdot
Real life, in fact, has chapters. You can tell the breakpoints because they are separated by what we call 'sleep'. There is your meatform load screen. People who want continous flow forget this usually imposes further technical challenges (as someone who has written dynamic cell loading code for a massive multi-user platform, I can say that with some confidence). If you're going to do dynamic cell loading and you want to do it efficiently, you need to decide how you're going to load the cells intelligently. You also need to find a way to do this in the background, without disrupting currently active cells. Portaling/Teleporting around seemlessly could be an even bigger challenge. Of course, all these and other challenges can be handled, but they'll eat some CPU, some memory, and add some code complexity. Is that where you want your game dev $$$ expended? Is that really the best use of those $$$? And besides, I don't know about anyone else, but the logical breakpoints of level loads often let you shake out the tension in arms and wrists, unkink your neck, and refocus your eyes a few times somewhere else. Probably good to have these sorts of minor breaks in game flow.
"They were told that their company was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Sure, they could have sought advice from outside, but why should they expect their employers to be giving them a load of BS?" -- I don't mean to speak out of turn, but have you ever worked in any sort of industry that has any sort of sales, marketing, or human resources department? I'd guess not, if you'd ask such a question... The entire world these days is spin management. Optics internally and externally are key focus items. BS is just an unappealing characterization of the typical activity performed by many parts of corporate infrastructure - marketing, legal, communications, HR, etc. Caveat Emptor applies to any corporate pronouncements. Only the terminally naive expect anything different and they habitually end up on the short end of the stick.
A note: Real football gives you only 3 tries.
Hmmm. I think the English might have had something to say about Connery playing Bond and then Arthur, King of the Britons.
If I recall, we've also had an Irishman playing Robert Roy MacGregor (Liam Neeson), an American playing William Wallace, Richard Gere playing one of Arthur's Knights, a Canadian Hero of D-Day playing the original Scotty, A Frenchman playing the Highlander, a Scotsman playing an Egyptian in the same movie, and a variety of other rather comedic cross-cultural representations.
My cousin's a Scot with a Glaswegian accent and he's married to a cornsilk blonde from Missouri. I truly pity anyone trying to understand any offspring of that unholy linguistic union.
So, in short, give it up. The Scots have played other nationalities (Ewan MacGregor playing some dude from a long time ago and far far away among many others) so turnabout (or turnaboot) is fair play, ye ken?
Bubble mammary, holographic mammary, Where the hell's my flying car? Why are we still using these Victorian mechanical storage devices. Feel like I'm stuck in Difference Engine World. Now, if it was Girl Genius World, that would be something. Not quite sure where mammaries came into the picture.... ...mind you, not like that's a bad thing. I just don't quite know how much storage your average mammary would have, or whether it would be volatile, or how it might replace a 'hard drive'....
I had to browbeat our people for several years before they recently relented and made the change to a dial-out number of 8 (vs 9). The irony is we owned the VOIP PBX and we helped write the software that ran it. There had to be a pile of folks who knew enough about it to change the dial plan. It was just inertia I figure (maybe there's something I don't know).
The problem was exacerbated by phones whose physical buttons didn't always press easily and sometimes when you did jab them hard enough, you got a double digit collection. So you'd hit 9, then 1... the 1 wouldn't register so you'd really jab it, then you had 9-1-1 because it collected the digit twice...
Use 8 to dial out. At least until they really do switch to using '9-1-2' as the real emergency number. (Nods to Homer)
I think the parent has the right of it, at least in the broad sweep. Cell phone risk may have a usage period factor and may depend on which cellular technologies are in place.
I believe that the following are true:
1) You can get RF burns off of antennas used on police cruisers for police radios and data systems. Some of these are cell modems for protocols like CDPD and the like. Now, at peak power some of these can output quite a few times the power of a typical cellphone. But close enough (like in contact), at high output, and with the good old law of inverse squares in play, you can get a nasty RF burn from these antennae. This suggests that, under some circumstances, RF can be fairly dangerous.
2) Microwave techs working in the north and other places where we used microwave transmission, in the early days of the technology, used to align waveguides by inspection - by looking down the waveguide. In some cases, this was done with the system at a sizable portion of full power (not really powered down). Then they wondered why, over time, the one eye got worse and worse and they ended up having to use the other one. Then it too started getting worse. Hmmm. I think they step down or turn off the power now or align the waveguides by a different process. This suggests under some circumstances, microwave radiation can be fairly dangerous.
I have a friend who got testicular cancer. Now, I can't draw a direct A->B relationship with certainty, but in the four years preceding that, he spent 40+ hours a week with a police laptop with a built in modem (capable of outputting several watts in RF power) in his lap doing software development. I can't say that doing this led to his cancer. But I can't say it didn't nor that it didn't exacerbate any predisposition he may have had in this regard or hasten onset. I was glad enough to get out of that RF environment just on the chance that had somehow had a causal relationship.
So it seems the question isn't if RF or Microwaves are dangerous - with enough oomph behind them, I think we know they certainly have deleterious physical effects. The question is at the common power levels in commercial cell phones and other RF/microwave devices, is there sufficient power to cause problems? And if so, are there safe(r) usage limits we should be observing or particular designs or frequency bands we should be avoiding?
A friend had a co-worker at an Ottawa high tech firm who noticed that the company was asking everyone to fill out forms for new business cards. Said sharp cookie also noticed that no one was vetting these requests. So he filled out what he thought would be an excellent job title.
He got back his business cards with the title "Master of Canine Fornication" on them.
Needless to say, the company revised policy to vette subsequent card print runs after word got out. But he still has the cards.
Not that I'm going to defend Ms. Rice's truthfulness of lack thereof, but I will note that the statement that your citation (whose source I wonder a bit about, as they claim to be non-partisan but outline a fairly clearly partisan anti-conservative agenda) covers and that you reference is not particularly contradictory.
Ms. Rice remarked she did not remember. The fact is, perhaps she should have. But only her and any possible divine entities will know if she actually was lying. She could, as it happens, actually not remember something that happened. With the amount of stress these people get placed under and the amount of microanalysis they are subjected to, it surprises me they remember clearly anything at all. They get questioned about many of these things long after the fact and if any of them can render an accurate picture of the past, that's pretty impressive. If they cannot, it is (to me) hardly surprising.
She could be a big fat liar... but I hardly think the point you are digging at is anything akin to proof of that.
I have a friend who was working in Europe when they decided that they were closing up a section of the big IT company he was working for. He was on contract and happened to avoid the cut, but he witnessed another employee walk into a common area and detach a large LCD screen from the wall (others were taking CRT monitors, laptops, etc).
That's sort of 'collecting severance' I suppose. The funny bit is that the manager, also axed, walked in and caught the guy detaching the big LCD TV from the wall. (Maybe it was plasma... doesn't matter). Anyway, instead of kicking his @$$ and sticking security on him for a quick lesson in the use of the PR-24, he *HELPED* the employee dismount the screen and transport it out to his vehicle.
It seems the (former) manager had a lot of sympathy for his (former) employees that day and wasn't particularly interested (any longer) in the interests of the company, especially since it was shipping off a whole whack of work to the Pacific Rim.
I'm not saying this sort of behaviour is right, but the way some business decisions get made and implemented, you find it hard at times to have much sympathy for the company.
Warforged:
A race of sentient golems might be close. Manufactured mobile semi-autonomous weapons for a nasty war, created in massive "Creation Forges" from complex arcane patterns called "Creation Patterns". At some point, they developed full autonomy and sentience (or is that sapience?... ). The war, which raged for a long, long time (tens or hundreds of years?) is now over (2 years ago or so). So we have all these sentient warriors (specialized in some cases as juggernauts, scouts, wizards, etc) of metal and organic (they're a hybrid, but not exactly like a cyborg - the organic could be stuff like wood)... and they are free (ostensibly) by decree in some (all?) places, but don't really have a purpose anymore.
They're sort of like the character most 'AI' becomes in cyberpunk novels or movies (like AI or I,Robot) - creations which are now arguably as smart as their creators, perhaps even tougher, and who have to find their own raison d'etre in the new world.
Some manifestation of that is not good (many support the Lord of the Blades, a Warforged leader who seems to have a somewhat genocidal attitudes towards the pink squishy ones). And yet, many of the warforged have become productive members (if lower caste in some cases) of their societies, still serving a purpose. They end up working as mercenaries, gaurds, adventurers, and sometimes (rarely) in things in no way related to their past warlike uses.
They are interesting, because they aren't just exactly humans with pointy ears. They are notably different in physical requirements and if you want to get into the RP part of RPG, they would have different perceptions of society, of their place in the world, and even of normal physical reality than humans or even pointy-eared tree-huggers (Elves). They make for a fun RP challenge and one of the most interesting additions to a world in a long time, IMO.
In a current Eberron campaign, we have a party of warforged. I'm running a Bard with the handle "Heavy Metal" (okay, yeah, groan...). It's a different kind of experience to a human party - healing magic works half strength on us, we're seen oddly by most softies, and we still try to go out and do the right thing, when we can sort of figure out what that would be.
Eberron is also a world of pulp-ish stories - detective stories, mysteries, ancient temples and sites to be explored a la Indianna Jones, plots and conspiracies by secret agencies out for world domination, the whole nine yards. And is a high-magic world, with lightning rails, fire elemental bound airships, teleportation services for the well-to-do, elemental binding for a lot of things (Heavy Metal wants a lightning elemental bound into a guitar... yes, an electric guitar... groan again...). It has a very different feel and explores both the issues of 'what would a world be like with a lot of magic' (vs. traditional AD&D worlds) and 'what if nations were more important than race' (Al-Quadim was a bit like this) and 'what would society be like if we had a group of 12 or 13 powerful houses acting like Medeival Guilds'? It aims for high-tension adventure, a cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Casablanca with a dash of Three Musketeers thrown in.
Hope that helps.
Accuracy is generally proportional to the number and variety of sources used. It is quite possible to have data from a large number of incorrect sources and still have a wildly inaccurate result OR to have data from a large number of sources and incorrectly synthesize or aggregate it, thus leading to an inaccurate result.
Having a big list of sources may be statistically more likely to lead to greater accuracy, but in any particular case, it'd be a big leap to go from "this article has a big list of sources" to "this article is therefore of greater accuracy (than one with fewer sources)". If you have an article with few sources that happen to be *better* sources, which themselves are more accurate, you can be better off than with a greater count of sources that end up being poorer sources.
That's not meant to be as nitpicky as it probably sounds, but my point really is that the number of sources can't be directly correlated to the accuracy of an article or fact. 100 wrongs still doesn't make a right, if you see what I'm getting at.
Immediately lose their job?
Or did you mean immediately after they've been given a fair trial, had the right to legal counsel, had the right to appeals, etc. and so forth?
I'm not saying this case is one in which there is a lot of doubt, but there are two sides to a lot of stories. Dismissing your police without appropriate compensation (just turfing them out) would (one would think) demand a high level of proof in a court of law to back it up. Just an accusation would hardly be sufficient. At least not if you happen to believe in due process. Administrative suspension, taking the officer off the street for a time while the issue is investigated... that I can believe. But firing them outright before they are brought before either a professional review board or a judge in court? Can't see that being viable.
On another point:
Last time I talked to a friend from Baltimore, he pointed out they rarely if ever reached their nominal police staffing levels because of the pay being not so good. This led to bleed off to other cities of all of the best cops. So, here we have the remainder of the cops being overworked, underpaid, and knowing that they're just not the top notch cops... they're what is left when those folks have went elsewhere. So, maybe if you want top notch cops, you want to make sure they have top notch training and very good salaries. Otherwise, you'll pretty much get what you (don't) pay for.
I've worked extensively with a national police agency and a number of smaller PDs as a civilian contractor doing computer related work. I've met a lot of officers. I have a lot of respect for the tough job they do, the crappy treatment they often get (dealing with obnoxious drunks is fun for most of us, I'm sure...) and I've seen what happens when things go badly (Mayerthorpe as one example).
But at the same time, I've had senior members of these forces point out that the basic personality type of criminals and of most police has many points of commonality. The points of difference are pretty critical, but it is important to consider the degree of similarity. Projection of authority, taking charge of a situation, meeting violence with violence, attitude with attitude, and being willing to push hard to get the job done... these can make a cop good at his job. But at the same time, they can mean that if you're John Q Public running across him, if you give him grief, you may find his response isn't very tolerant. But to a certain extent, the nature of the job (of beat cops especially) requires a certain mindset and emotional makeup. Most of us could not or would not do the job (most of us don't...).
So, I'm not suggesting bad cops get a bye or are let off. Yet at the same time, they too have to be given due process. That's called not compounding a wrong with another wrong or making a bad situation worse.
Oddly enough, no one wants to see truly bad cops busted and dismissed than the good ones who get a bad name as a result.
The reality is though that they are people doing a tough job, often with insufficient training or remuneration or numbers, and this tends to manifest itself in their attitude. You can attack that situation by blaming those involved but you could also look at the funding for training, for pay scales, and for manpower levels. Policing by the lowest bidder isn't uncommon (contract policing I believe they call it) and often times manpower levels are far below where they should be. Maybe if we dealt with some of these issues, we'd find cops a bit easier to deal with because they'd be a bit less tired, stressed, and pissed off.
With modern disc lifespans not living up to original expectations, I'd be highly surprised to see a BluRay *disk* survive 100 years. Sure, I understand the point about having media you can't play (I'm sure some of those old wax cylinders from early grammaphones are tough to play today), but I think the impermanence of the medium will help to gaurantee that this isn't as much of an issue as one suspects.
Best that we don't store literary classics strictly digitally. Unless of course, the underlying medium is some sort of diamond platter or something.
Hmmm. Ford doesn't tell you that you can't tinker with the cars engine... unless of course you want the warranty to be valid. If you do anything fairly dramatic and it doesn't come out so well, or even if you fail to have documented proof you followed the prescribed maintenance schedules, they can be right buggers when it comes to satisfying a warranty issue. They've outright said that a number of mods, such as chipping, will invalidate warranty.
So, in a sense, they do in fact tell you that you can't tamper with the engine you bought, because you also (generally) bought a warranty from them that is obviously based on the idea that they would be the ones (with their licensed mechanics and all the approved equipment) working on your car over that warranty period and that you wouldn't want (or be able) to do anything with your car during that period.
Note, I'm not singling out Ford either. All car companies do that. I can see why too - I just imagine warranty claims from folks who've screwed around with the computer-controlled engines of today and buggered something up, through ineptitude rather than any design or materials defect on behalf of the manufacturer. So one can understand how that led, in a fairly linear sense, to today's rules about modifying or tinkering with your car invalidating warranties.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily agree this is how things should have progressed, but I can see the logic that brought us here.
Driving can be easily impaired by things like:
1) Conversations with other car occupants (can be quite distractions)
2) Radio fiddling (or even just listening and grooving along)
3) Operating cabin climate controls, navigation systems, etc.
4) External stimuli (car accidents to gawk at, pretty girls to lead the eye, etc)
5) Alcohol
6) Drugs, prescription or otherwise
7) Fatigue (Drowsiness probably kills as many people as cell phones ever will)
8) Drinks and/or food in the car especially if consumed on the move
9) Lipstick application or other personal hygiene tasks performed on the move
The list goes on. Is the cell phone worse? My own experience is because it can be a challenge to one-hand dial, that can be very distracting, as can be rooting around for the phone to answer a call and typing a text message is a real pain. Perhaps a car-set or bluetooth headset and voice dial would alleviate some of these issues, but not all. Cell phones can be quite a hazard.
But so can fishing around for CDs, trying to adjust your MP3 player to the right folder, being distracted by an outside event, being tired (very common), being drunk or stoned (a bit less common), doing other dumb things (lipstick, newspapers, etc). Eating in the car or drinking coffee or the like can be fairly baneful to good driving as well.
So why hack on cellphones? We've got catch-all regulation that covers various unspecified impairments to a driver's ability to operate and we've got particular legislation covering drugs, alcohol and in some cases fatigue. Unless we're going to start banning eating, listening to music, or any other possible distraction (or have cars run by computers that aren't prone to distraction), then we should just admit cell phones probably aren't much different than any other distraction, or at least this has hardly been proven as of this time.
If there ever was an organization dedicated to mediocrity, impeding productivity and forcing people to be on strike and not earning money when they want to, a union would be it.
I've been a programmer for over ten years now. Keep your skills fresh, work hard, be a team player, and you'll tend to get further work (if one job dries up, someone you know and have impressed will pipeline you into another) and plan for contingencies like being out of work for a while. It's a nice indoor job with good benefits (I'm a contractor but I have been an employee enough times to know that) and good pay rates. Sure, you might get outsourced - that just means what you were doing is something somebody else *should* be doing since they can do it cheaper. Get into some part of the industry that is new and not likely to flow to parts of the world with poor infrastructure, language barriers, or non-existent IP laws. Or get into Defense or Security work, those won't likely offshore anytime soon.
In short, stop crying and start working towards the future you want. High-tech is still one of the best ways to get there for the middle class guy. Sure, the rich get richer, but if anyone can tell me when this wasn't the case, I'd be glad to cut the legs out from under them. Yes, you work hard. But if you enjoy the job, that's actually not a bad thing.
And if you don't like the field, get out. If you don't like your employer, move on. If you don't like the work, retrain, expend some of your resources readying yourself for something you do like.
It seems to me the article's poster expects the world owes him/her something. Get over yourself, I say. The world owes you nothing, isn't fair, and a Union won't do anything but take your money, impose restrictions that hamper the hard workers and the competent, and drive the work away faster. Oh, and add to that sometimes pull you out of work when you don't want to go. And consume your union dues along the way (like all bureaucracies).
Unions... no thanks. I'm doing just fine without them. The only people who need unions are lazy folks, people without foresight, or people without initiative. Do yourself a favour and go out and take the world on and beat it into the shape you want, don't wait for someone to fix it for you.
The irony here of course is that most "News Organizations" are companies, hence really at the root have a profit motive. Any that are not may well have a non-profit but perhaps equally slanting agenda.
This is a nice theory. But they charged Jason over $500 for what was just over a $200 part. So apparently, this isn't as straightforward as you naively assume, or the Ford Dealer was an outright crook. But since it was hours put in, and Jason sat and watched, I think that's probably not the case. The fact is, removing a couple of screws on the outside of a lens, removing the lens, removing and replacing a bulb, reinstalling the lens, is still easier and (as far as I can see, though their may be some reason this is not the case) cheaper and faster than the alternatives. Most interior body panels on doors such as a trucks rear hatch also have wiring running around them, for wipers, for power windows, for power door locks, for security sensors. All of this stuff starts to make interior access more fun.
Now, in my Mustang, to get at a headlight, I have to be fairly flexible and I have to remove annoying plastic covers that they've stuck over every engine part (good places for salt and crud to collect in Northern winters), which were obviously installed because some folks aren't bright enough to know that a car has hot and/or moving parts that they should be aware of. So instead, we now have cars that you have to do surgery on to get at the parts you need to do surgery on. And of course, all the crud that collects under the plastic battery covers, plastic rad covers, plastic headlight and grill shields, etc. has absolutely no negative effect... yah right.
Now, taking off a body panel to replace a battery is rather ridiculous, I grant you. But Corvette != well designed for maintenance. One look should have told anyone that.
I know a fellow who is now retired from the life of a mechanic (back issues) and went into IT instead.
We talked about this very sort of issue and he gave much the same response as the parent of my reply, except he pointed out it is getting more and more expensive for garages to have all the tools and machines they need to service the vehicles. This is helping to drive those $50-60-70-80/hr. mechanic rates up and up. Also, it is effectively acting as a barrier to individuals working on their cars at home, and thus conserving money. It forces you into the hands of the dealership, squeezes out the small non-dealership garage (or really reduces the range of work they can do lacking the tools, because each manufacturer is doing things a bit differently requiring different tools).
Everyone rails on on slashdot about corporate actions in the computer world, yet in the automotive world, we love the things that are forcing the little local guy out of business or the do it yourselfer.
And car designs don't progress in a better-and-better direction only. I had a friend who had to pay $530 to replace the back third brake light on his explorer. Those LCD strips are expensive, and the installation method was positively retarded - not accessible from outside by removing the lens, but instead from inside requiring the removal of the inside panel on the door, a much more costly and involved process.
Torx screws and bolts are one example. Robertson is probably a superior design. Even Phillips heads, as much as they had flaws, were a well known quantity. Along came Torx. Anyone working at home needed to buy some new sockets and screw drivers to fit. But wait! A lot of cars weren't totally Torx, so you couldn't get rid of your Phillips and bladed screw drivers.... no. You just needed another set. And they're pretty bad for distintegrating like the Phillips screws do (not as bad, but still not good) when they get stuck and you have to give them a good twist. Why was this change made? Was there a burning need for a new screw? Nope. It made it easier for machine assembly. That's it.
So, we see something that made things better for the corporation (easier machine assembly) and harder for the do-it-yourselfer and more expensive for him and for the small garage. And this was a good thing?
Similarly, these hybrid vehicles and all the new emission testing comes with a cost to the garages that is non-trivial. It isn't just training new staff, its buying and supporting new machinery and finding space to house it. And in the case of hybrids, developing multi-layered expertise. Don't tell me a two engine car is easier to troubleshoot than a single engine car... that defies logic. So, certainly, this system is more complex, hence inherently more failure prone, and also therefore more expensive to service and maintain.
Oh wait, the BMW dealer can help you! But just get ready for the wallet-ectomy.
And I'm sure we'll never have problems with any of these hybrids in tough northern winters either. Nor will we have increased risks from all the extra water being dumped out onto the roads (this is a guess, but they do seem to spit out more water vapour, which seems to end up in cold northern weather directly on the roads, in the city this translates to ice + rush hour).
So, internal combusion... it may be on its way out. But certainly, as it goes and is replaced by hybrids, this comes at a variety of not so obvious costs.
And I know a firefighter who attends crash scenes. After the things he's seen, he'll never buy a little car and that goes double for these golf-carts on wheels. They look lovely after a nice car accident... for scrap. As do their occupants, for the organ banks. Add to which, in places like Ontario, you need weight to crush down road slush and ice ridges to give you a stable, safe driving environment. You also need weight and a reasonable sideways cross section to give you wind stability. The little golf-cart style smart cars have neither. They blow all over with the wind
I wonder if this speech would sound sane if you substituted the word 'kid' for 'kitty'?
At what point did you get the impression that you owned a particular piece of land? Just because you could build a fence around it and some other human sold you a deed? Fascinating idea. When you can explain that, with something slightly more advanced than 'the logic of might makes right' to our animal friends, let me know.
It scares me more than a little that you know people with such a slight grasp of reality that they'd think US Commandos destroyed the twin towers. I suppose all the major news stations collaborated? This defies description.
This is a day of national embarassment on many fronts.
I don't know if you can say the same things about banks or not. And even if it were true, that might mean we should abandon banks, not necessarily the concept of money. Money existed before banks (in some form).
The system is broken, and is broken enough that I'm not sure it can be fixed. Maybe it can, but as it sits, yes it should be abandoned. Did I say nothing should replace it? Hmmmm. Nope.
And if banks are as badly broken, the same logic applies.