The F-22 is an air superiority fighter, the F-35 is an attack fighter.
First, if all they needed was a strike aircraft with overwhelming air-to-ground capability, they already had it with the A-10 Warthog (or Thunderbolt II for you purists). It can carry a cubic assload of bombs, has extended loiter capability, can take off and land on short, unimproved runways, is perhaps the best aerial gun platform in the history of aviation, and can take an immense amount of punishment, make it back to base, and be repaired for another strike before the pilot has time to grab a sandwich. Alas, it's not "sexy" enough so nobody wants to fly it. Fighter jocks look down on the "air-to-mud" boys, you know. But us grunts -- I'm a former Marine -- absolutely love knowing your call for CAS is being answered by a 'hog.
Second, the F-35 is not just being pitched as an "attack fighter" as you claim. It's being positioned as the Swiss Army Knife of airframes, the complete multi-role, multi-service, multi-theater, all-season do-it-all flying wonder plane. It's stealthy...but not terribly stealthy compared to other airborne threats. It's fast...but not very fast compared to fighters it's likely to face. It can flow slowly for accurate bombing...but not as slowly or as accurately as what we already have. It has endurance...well, not so much. And it costs less than what it's replacing...except it doesn't. McNamara tried this same crap back in the 60's and we ended up with the F-111, a "fighter" that couldn't fight. It was too big, too heavy, too complex, too expensive to make, too expensive to maintain, too hard to fly...and *nobody* wanted it. Today the F-111's are largely rusting away somewhere while B-52's are still flying, delivering bombloads much more effectively, reliably, and cheaply.
Honestly, what the US needs in the way of air power is this:
- A small but elite force of the stealthiest, fastest, most-maneuverable, most survivable, most advanced aircraft this country can possibly produce (i.e. F-22, B-2). These are our "alpha strike" planes. They go in on the first day of a conflict and kick the shit out of SAM sites, ground- and air-based RADAR, Command and Control facilities, fuel and ammo dumps, runways, and staging areas. After a brief but furiously intense campaign, the enemy is left without any effective way to defend against even basic air strikes. Then the war is turned over to...
- A medium-sized force of semi-stealthy and non-stealthy attack aircraft (fixed- and rotary-winged) which can now operate with near impunity due to degraded enemy defenses. A-10's, B-52's, F/A-18's, AH-64's...you get the idea. These are much more affordable than the "alpha strike" package to keep operational. They're also already bought and paid for, have large cadres of trained pilots, and can deliver much bigger attack loads than their stealthier brethren. This phase keeps up until the enemy is more or less fully subdued and organized resistance has almost been wiped out. Then things are turned over to...
- A very large force of unmanned and/or autonomous drones equipped for air-to-air and air-to-ground operations. These can be cheaply maintained for an indefinite period with absolutely zero political cost should one get lost to enemy action. Further, they act like omnipresent snipers, orbiting beyond normal aural and visual range but ready to deliver a laser-guided Hellfire "bolt from the blue" in an instant. The effects of such constant threats on enemy morale cannot be understated. Meanwhile, our "boots on the ground" are largely back home or operating in secure areas, reducing the chance of domestic upheaval by an unhappy populace over some "neverending war."
The biggest mistake this country is currently making is assuming we need just one type of aircraft for just one type of conflict. Modern wars have many different phases, most of which will involve a "low intensity conflict" in an area where large, high-value targets are not present. Having a fleet of super-advanced weapons which costs too much to make and too much to maintain is just stupid when there are better options on the table.
"Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball. If a window was broken or a drain was blocked up, someone was certain to say that Snowball had come in the night and done it, and when the key of the store-shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. Curiously enough, they went on believing this even after the mislaid key was found under a sack of meal." -- Animal Farm, by George Orwell
I'm sure someone will stand up shortly and complain that this is somehow racist, sexist, or otherwise deleterious to the well-being of the pupils being schooled. Can't have kids learning about how money is made, handled, taxed, and invested. That would interfere with them being good little minions who simply do what they're told by their betters...i.e. those in government power.
The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem.
See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought. If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not. The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives. If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence. Thus far, you have *some* evidence, but that does not equate to proof.
First, is the planet getting warmer? On that I'd say there's general agreement, although it is not a 100% consensus.
Second, if it is getting warmer, is it caused in large part by human activity or is it part of some natural variation? This is the sticking point. If it's part of a natural variation in temperature -- and I will point out many such variations have happened in the past few million years, all without any input from humans -- then there is no need for us to radically alter our life to stop it because such actions will have no positive climatic effect while having a signficant negative effect on quality of life.
Third, if it is anthropogenic, what should we do about it? Curtainling greenhouse emissions is an obvious choice, but is it the best one? How severe are the predicted warming effects? The economic and socio-political upheavals from drastic policy changes might be worse than adapting to a changing climate. And how much confidence can we have in the predictions regardless of how severe (or not) they may be?
These are not minor issues. They deserve to be studied and debated *in depth* before drastic action is take, if for no other reason than to determine that we're taking the *most effective* action possible. This whole "the debate is settle and if you don't agree with us you're a denier" smacks of the same kind of thinking that gave us an Earth-centric cosmic model and burned "deniers" as heretics.
98% of all marine species went extinct during the Great Dying due to high levels of C02 turning the ocean acidic.
The exact causes of the Permian–Triassic extinction event you reference are not known. High CO2 are but one hypothesis, alongside many others, all of which have at least some supporting evidence. CO2 may be the favorite whipping boy these days but it is a blatant falsification on your part to claim CO2 was the sole driver of this particular extinction event. CO2 may have been the sole cause. It may have been a contributing cause. Or, in the case of something like a catastrophic impact, it may have had *absolutely nothing* to do with the event. I don't know the answer, but you most certainly don't either.
The problem with your sig and issues such as this is that your wrong decisions have a negative effect on everyone else, you rights are not infinite, they end when they negate the rights of others.
And your wrong decisions don't have similar impacts were they to be implemented as national policy? Of course they do! But you're naively assuming you're the only "right" person in this discussion. You've made up your mind and that's the end of it, despite plenty of evidence to show that there just *might* be other climate factors out there that could be just as -- or perhaps even more than -- contributory to what's going on with the climate. It's that kind of dogmatism that marks you as a zealot, and subsequently makes logical people tune you out.
We care because civilization as we know it is really shockingly dependent on climatic patterns like rainfall and seasonal temperature and parameters like sea level being what they are.
All of these factors (rainfall, temp, sea levels) have changed all on their own without human input over the course of this planet's history. They will continue to change, with or without our input. To expect things to stay the way they are just because we happened to evolve at this particular point in history is kind of silly. The climate *will* change. *We* must adapt.
And increased heat in the oceans can (and likely will) lead to increased cloud formation, which will alter the planet's albedo in the opposite direction. How much and how soon? Nobody knows. But the planet has been both warmer and cooler than it is now during it's long history. Each time it's damped out cycles of extreme warming and extreme cooling all by itself.
I'm sure Kim Jong-un is just quivering in his boots at this "strongly worded condemnation" by the UN. After all, the UN has such a strong record of following up such condemnations with action...
What's pathetic about this is such UN declarations just serve to reinforce what an absolute joke the whole organization is. The UN has no power whatsoever to do anything to North Korea and Dear Leader knows this.
Here's an idea: instead of spending all this money now to launch probes from Earth, why not spend it instead on building a base with launch infrastructure on the Moon? No atmosphere, no environment to worry about, lesser gravity well...the list of advantages is quite large. The only disadvantage is it would take a while to get going. But the same could be said for the space industry 50 years ago. So we could spend a lot of money on a lunar base now and get huge payoffs later, or keep spending almost as much on Earth-launched probes for the next several decades and advance the human presence in space not one whit.
NASA still hasn't figured this out. The public is not *interested* in these pure science missions, regardless of how beneficial they are to scientists and engineers. The public wants the glory, grandeur, and *adventure* of Apollo. And without public backing, NASA's budget gets whacked again and again and again. NASA needs to come up with things that capture the public's imagination like the glory days of the 1960's. Then they'll get the money and political clout to do big things. I'm sure most American's don't give two damns about a mission to Uranus or Neptune.
What *should* be scary but is being ignored by the larger public is how utilities are increasingly running "peak load" assets as if they were "base load" assets. To wit, combined-cycle turbine plants are not usually designed for continuous operation like this; they're designed to be brought online during peak load *only*. Base load assets like coal and nuclear carry the non-peak loads. The peak load assets are going to have much more intensive maintenance costs if they keep running them like this, leading to higher prices for consumers and the ugly potential for brownout/blackout when these peak load assets break down unexpectedly.
Disclosure: I'm a tech consultant working with TVA right now, and this info comes direct from people who run these assets. We *need* more base load assets like coal and nuclear, but government regulations are making that extremely difficult. Indeed, we're having to *shut down* coal plants due to new government regulations, further stressing an already-fragile national power infrastructure. Thank god we're *finally* building some new nuclear assets (TVA's Watts Bar Unit 2, and Georgia Power's Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4) but we need to be doing this on a much larger scale to meet growing demands for power. Conservation will only take you so far; at some point -- a point I think we passed some years ago -- you must expand capacity to keep your system fault-tolerant.
Being a former Marine, I've followed the development of the USMC version of the F-35 with some interest. And I'm disgusted by it. This plane is inferior to its predecessors in every way possible that matters to the main mission of USMC air power: Close Air Support. Sure, it's stealthier. And it's a better dogfighter than the AV-8B (but arguably not the F-18 Super Hornet). But neither of those matter a damn with CAS missions. You need a reliable, rugged bomb truck for CAS. The F-35, with its internal weapons bay, is pathetic for CAS. Stealth doesn't matter much for CAS, either...or at least it doesn't matter in ways that make the F-18 Super Hornet notably inferior. And let's not forget you can buy *three* Hornets for the cost of *one* F-35.
Really, what I've always thought the USMC needs is an A-10 Warthog. Surely the cost of a carrier-spec A-10 would be much cheaper than even Super Hornets...just not as glamorous to fly by fighter jocks. But us grunts on the ground would much appreciate having a GAU-8 Avenger 30mm Gatling cannon on call any day over the whizz-bang-but-underarmed F-35. If jet jockeys want fast fighters, let them join the Air Force or the Navy. We want CAS platforms.
On the other hand, we now know the complete value of Pi to enough digits that we can encircle the entire Universe and be accurate to the NANOSECOND. How accurate is enough?
You can quit when you reach the last digit of Pi. That'll be enough. Call me when you're done.
and if they were prescription glasses he should consider getting a pair of non-google glass prescription glasses
Why? To satisfy some policy he never violated in the first place? He turned Glass off. That should be enough. That was enough to comply with the "do not record" policy. Prescription eyeglasses aren't cheap. You've no reason to demand he carry around Glass *and* another set of glasses with the same prescription.
You only need to look marginally further into the future to see a point where the functionality of something like Glass could be feasibly *implanted* and thus *non-removable* by the end user *by design*. What then? Do you ban implants? Good luck with trying to stop the march of technology because everyone in history who's tried has failed miserably.
you should consider taking it off before going places video cameras are not allowed
Perhaps you missed the part about where this fellow's Google Glass also happened to be his prescription eyeglasses. You can order Glass that way, you know. And Glass is not detachable from the lenses once this is done. So the best you can do is turn Glass off...which is exactly what this fellow did. Or would you prefer he try to watch the movie all blurry and out of focus?
The Glasshole was stupid for sitting in a cinema quite openly pointing a camera at the screen
What part of "Glass with prescription lenses, which he needed to even *see* the movie" did you not understand? He wasn't wearing Glass to be an ass; he was wearing them because those were his prescription glasses.
Except that, if you'd read the fucking article, you'd know he *needed* Glass because he was wearing them with *prescription lenses*. Taking them off would kinda make it hard to see the movie. Idiot.
And it's guys like you who don't RTFA that give...well, guys like you a bad name. The fellow had Glass ordered with *prescription lenses*. He wasn't wearing Glass to be an ass; he was wearing Glass because he needed them to actually see the movie.
I strongly suspect this theater has a "No Camera" sign posted in the lobby - almost every theater I visit has one.
If they do then every patron with even a relatively modern cell phone is violating this rule. No, what you see is there is a "No Recording" sign. And this fellow wasn't recording anything; Glass was off.
It doesn't matter whether the casual observer can or can't easily determine whether Glass was on or off. Coming in and snatching a $1500 piece of hardware off someone's face is not the proper way to handle this.
Dave, let me ask you this: if I bring a video camera into a theater and point it at the screen the entire time a movie is playing...yet the camera is *off*...exactly what crime have I committed? Since when is *carrying* a camera considering sufficient evidence to say a crime has been committed? There is no statute, law, or even *warning* at a movie about carrying a camera. There *are* warnings about *recording* the movie, but he wasn't recording it and nobody could prove he was before they snatched them off his head. If somebody had tried that with me in a darkened room, this former Marine would've given them a broken arm and my foot on their neck immediately thereafter. And *I'd* be perfectly within my rights to do so given the cost of Google Glass and my immediate perception of attempted theft of property.
And I'll remind you, this fellow was wearing *prescription lens* Google Glass, which means he *needed* the glasses to actually see the movie. The fact that Glass was attached is incidental.
I have no sympathy for the author. He only got the new lenses two weeks before the incident so I really doubt his old prescription was terrible. He either made a consciable decision to wear the google glasses instead of his non-camera prescription into an area that is well known to have issues with recording equipment or he discarded his old prescription and has no redundancy should something happen to the google glasses prescription.
The beauty of living in a free country is the author is not required to carry two kinds of prescription glasses. If he wants to carry one pair, he can carry one pair even if Google Glass is attached to it. Just *having* an item that *might* be used to commit a crime does not make you a criminal, nor does it give the police/FBI the right to treat you as one. Your logic is the same asinine "logic" used to impugn non-violent, non-threatening people who wish to carry weapons purely for self defense.
There's plenty of molecular oxygen dissolved in seawater. The fish know.
There's sufficient molecular oxygen dissolved in seawater for a fish. Humans have much higher metabolic rates and require a great deal more oxygen...too much for a device like this to supply. The "gills" would either have to be massively larger or they'd have to have a very powerful pump pulling huge quantities of seawater through them. The former is obviously not the case, and the latter would require a much larger battery and pump.
A power plant is supposedly a controlled environment, and the people there certainly thought they knew what they were doing...
Well, that's true if you consider "knew what they were doing" as disabling all the safety measures, disregarding all standard operating procedures, and operating the reactor in a known-unsafe condition. The Chernobyl operators were doing and ill-advised, poorly-planned, badly-implemented test of some reactor systems that involved going completely off the farm vis-a-vis approved operation of the reactor. True, the RBMK designs were fickle and dangerous to begin with, but they'd operated for a long time without incident because operators *respected* that danger. Chernobyl was an example of what happens when you don't respect it. Had the reactor been operated within its safety margins, nothing would've happened.
I never did get straight why these did not work (maybe loss of power affected them?) or were not present (this was a first gen reactor design).
My understanding of the situation is Fukushima had a PORV for hydrogen venting but *not* a flare-off stack that would be present in more current designs. They vented the hydrogen only to prevent reactor vessel overpressurization, and crossed their fingers there wouldn't be an ignition source that would cause an explosion. Obviously they lost that gamble.
I work in the nuclear power industry as a consultant (IT, not nuclear tech, but I'm around a lot of nuclear engineers who I chat with). It was ridiculous that a flare-off stack was never implemented at Fukushima. I'm really curious why. I know first hand that modifications to existing plants is a red tape nightmare, but adding a flare-off stack should've been something that was easy to get approved and to implement given it's a proven technology.
Slashdot Mirror
The F-22 is an air superiority fighter, the F-35 is an attack fighter.
First, if all they needed was a strike aircraft with overwhelming air-to-ground capability, they already had it with the A-10 Warthog (or Thunderbolt II for you purists). It can carry a cubic assload of bombs, has extended loiter capability, can take off and land on short, unimproved runways, is perhaps the best aerial gun platform in the history of aviation, and can take an immense amount of punishment, make it back to base, and be repaired for another strike before the pilot has time to grab a sandwich. Alas, it's not "sexy" enough so nobody wants to fly it. Fighter jocks look down on the "air-to-mud" boys, you know. But us grunts -- I'm a former Marine -- absolutely love knowing your call for CAS is being answered by a 'hog.
Second, the F-35 is not just being pitched as an "attack fighter" as you claim. It's being positioned as the Swiss Army Knife of airframes, the complete multi-role, multi-service, multi-theater, all-season do-it-all flying wonder plane. It's stealthy...but not terribly stealthy compared to other airborne threats. It's fast...but not very fast compared to fighters it's likely to face. It can flow slowly for accurate bombing...but not as slowly or as accurately as what we already have. It has endurance...well, not so much. And it costs less than what it's replacing...except it doesn't. McNamara tried this same crap back in the 60's and we ended up with the F-111, a "fighter" that couldn't fight. It was too big, too heavy, too complex, too expensive to make, too expensive to maintain, too hard to fly...and *nobody* wanted it. Today the F-111's are largely rusting away somewhere while B-52's are still flying, delivering bombloads much more effectively, reliably, and cheaply.
Honestly, what the US needs in the way of air power is this:
- A small but elite force of the stealthiest, fastest, most-maneuverable, most survivable, most advanced aircraft this country can possibly produce (i.e. F-22, B-2). These are our "alpha strike" planes. They go in on the first day of a conflict and kick the shit out of SAM sites, ground- and air-based RADAR, Command and Control facilities, fuel and ammo dumps, runways, and staging areas. After a brief but furiously intense campaign, the enemy is left without any effective way to defend against even basic air strikes. Then the war is turned over to...
- A medium-sized force of semi-stealthy and non-stealthy attack aircraft (fixed- and rotary-winged) which can now operate with near impunity due to degraded enemy defenses. A-10's, B-52's, F/A-18's, AH-64's...you get the idea. These are much more affordable than the "alpha strike" package to keep operational. They're also already bought and paid for, have large cadres of trained pilots, and can deliver much bigger attack loads than their stealthier brethren. This phase keeps up until the enemy is more or less fully subdued and organized resistance has almost been wiped out. Then things are turned over to...
- A very large force of unmanned and/or autonomous drones equipped for air-to-air and air-to-ground operations. These can be cheaply maintained for an indefinite period with absolutely zero political cost should one get lost to enemy action. Further, they act like omnipresent snipers, orbiting beyond normal aural and visual range but ready to deliver a laser-guided Hellfire "bolt from the blue" in an instant. The effects of such constant threats on enemy morale cannot be understated. Meanwhile, our "boots on the ground" are largely back home or operating in secure areas, reducing the chance of domestic upheaval by an unhappy populace over some "neverending war."
The biggest mistake this country is currently making is assuming we need just one type of aircraft for just one type of conflict. Modern wars have many different phases, most of which will involve a "low intensity conflict" in an area where large, high-value targets are not present. Having a fleet of super-advanced weapons which costs too much to make and too much to maintain is just stupid when there are better options on the table.
"Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball. If a window was broken or a drain was blocked up, someone was certain to say that Snowball had come in the night and done it, and when the key of the store-shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. Curiously enough, they went on believing this even after the mislaid key was found under a sack of meal." -- Animal Farm, by George Orwell
“This is the most transparent administration in history,” -- Barack Obama, February 2013
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." -- Napoleon, Animal Farm, by George Orwell
I'm sure someone will stand up shortly and complain that this is somehow racist, sexist, or otherwise deleterious to the well-being of the pupils being schooled. Can't have kids learning about how money is made, handled, taxed, and invested. That would interfere with them being good little minions who simply do what they're told by their betters...i.e. those in government power.
The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .
See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought. If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not. The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives. If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence. Thus far, you have *some* evidence, but that does not equate to proof.
First, is the planet getting warmer? On that I'd say there's general agreement, although it is not a 100% consensus.
Second, if it is getting warmer, is it caused in large part by human activity or is it part of some natural variation? This is the sticking point. If it's part of a natural variation in temperature -- and I will point out many such variations have happened in the past few million years, all without any input from humans -- then there is no need for us to radically alter our life to stop it because such actions will have no positive climatic effect while having a signficant negative effect on quality of life.
Third, if it is anthropogenic, what should we do about it? Curtainling greenhouse emissions is an obvious choice, but is it the best one? How severe are the predicted warming effects? The economic and socio-political upheavals from drastic policy changes might be worse than adapting to a changing climate. And how much confidence can we have in the predictions regardless of how severe (or not) they may be?
These are not minor issues. They deserve to be studied and debated *in depth* before drastic action is take, if for no other reason than to determine that we're taking the *most effective* action possible. This whole "the debate is settle and if you don't agree with us you're a denier" smacks of the same kind of thinking that gave us an Earth-centric cosmic model and burned "deniers" as heretics.
98% of all marine species went extinct during the Great Dying due to high levels of C02 turning the ocean acidic.
The exact causes of the Permian–Triassic extinction event you reference are not known. High CO2 are but one hypothesis, alongside many others, all of which have at least some supporting evidence. CO2 may be the favorite whipping boy these days but it is a blatant falsification on your part to claim CO2 was the sole driver of this particular extinction event. CO2 may have been the sole cause. It may have been a contributing cause. Or, in the case of something like a catastrophic impact, it may have had *absolutely nothing* to do with the event. I don't know the answer, but you most certainly don't either.
The problem with your sig and issues such as this is that your wrong decisions have a negative effect on everyone else, you rights are not infinite, they end when they negate the rights of others.
And your wrong decisions don't have similar impacts were they to be implemented as national policy? Of course they do! But you're naively assuming you're the only "right" person in this discussion. You've made up your mind and that's the end of it, despite plenty of evidence to show that there just *might* be other climate factors out there that could be just as -- or perhaps even more than -- contributory to what's going on with the climate. It's that kind of dogmatism that marks you as a zealot, and subsequently makes logical people tune you out.
We care because civilization as we know it is really shockingly dependent on climatic patterns like rainfall and seasonal temperature and parameters like sea level being what they are.
All of these factors (rainfall, temp, sea levels) have changed all on their own without human input over the course of this planet's history. They will continue to change, with or without our input. To expect things to stay the way they are just because we happened to evolve at this particular point in history is kind of silly. The climate *will* change. *We* must adapt.
And increased heat in the oceans can (and likely will) lead to increased cloud formation, which will alter the planet's albedo in the opposite direction. How much and how soon? Nobody knows. But the planet has been both warmer and cooler than it is now during it's long history. Each time it's damped out cycles of extreme warming and extreme cooling all by itself.
I'm sure Kim Jong-un is just quivering in his boots at this "strongly worded condemnation" by the UN. After all, the UN has such a strong record of following up such condemnations with action...
What's pathetic about this is such UN declarations just serve to reinforce what an absolute joke the whole organization is. The UN has no power whatsoever to do anything to North Korea and Dear Leader knows this.
Here's an idea: instead of spending all this money now to launch probes from Earth, why not spend it instead on building a base with launch infrastructure on the Moon? No atmosphere, no environment to worry about, lesser gravity well...the list of advantages is quite large. The only disadvantage is it would take a while to get going. But the same could be said for the space industry 50 years ago. So we could spend a lot of money on a lunar base now and get huge payoffs later, or keep spending almost as much on Earth-launched probes for the next several decades and advance the human presence in space not one whit.
NASA still hasn't figured this out. The public is not *interested* in these pure science missions, regardless of how beneficial they are to scientists and engineers. The public wants the glory, grandeur, and *adventure* of Apollo. And without public backing, NASA's budget gets whacked again and again and again. NASA needs to come up with things that capture the public's imagination like the glory days of the 1960's. Then they'll get the money and political clout to do big things. I'm sure most American's don't give two damns about a mission to Uranus or Neptune.
What *should* be scary but is being ignored by the larger public is how utilities are increasingly running "peak load" assets as if they were "base load" assets. To wit, combined-cycle turbine plants are not usually designed for continuous operation like this; they're designed to be brought online during peak load *only*. Base load assets like coal and nuclear carry the non-peak loads. The peak load assets are going to have much more intensive maintenance costs if they keep running them like this, leading to higher prices for consumers and the ugly potential for brownout/blackout when these peak load assets break down unexpectedly.
Disclosure: I'm a tech consultant working with TVA right now, and this info comes direct from people who run these assets. We *need* more base load assets like coal and nuclear, but government regulations are making that extremely difficult. Indeed, we're having to *shut down* coal plants due to new government regulations, further stressing an already-fragile national power infrastructure. Thank god we're *finally* building some new nuclear assets (TVA's Watts Bar Unit 2, and Georgia Power's Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4) but we need to be doing this on a much larger scale to meet growing demands for power. Conservation will only take you so far; at some point -- a point I think we passed some years ago -- you must expand capacity to keep your system fault-tolerant.
Being a former Marine, I've followed the development of the USMC version of the F-35 with some interest. And I'm disgusted by it. This plane is inferior to its predecessors in every way possible that matters to the main mission of USMC air power: Close Air Support. Sure, it's stealthier. And it's a better dogfighter than the AV-8B (but arguably not the F-18 Super Hornet). But neither of those matter a damn with CAS missions. You need a reliable, rugged bomb truck for CAS. The F-35, with its internal weapons bay, is pathetic for CAS. Stealth doesn't matter much for CAS, either...or at least it doesn't matter in ways that make the F-18 Super Hornet notably inferior. And let's not forget you can buy *three* Hornets for the cost of *one* F-35.
Really, what I've always thought the USMC needs is an A-10 Warthog. Surely the cost of a carrier-spec A-10 would be much cheaper than even Super Hornets...just not as glamorous to fly by fighter jocks. But us grunts on the ground would much appreciate having a GAU-8 Avenger 30mm Gatling cannon on call any day over the whizz-bang-but-underarmed F-35. If jet jockeys want fast fighters, let them join the Air Force or the Navy. We want CAS platforms.
+100 Ivanova points for you!
On the other hand, we now know the complete value of Pi to enough digits that we can encircle the entire Universe and be accurate to the NANOSECOND. How accurate is enough?
You can quit when you reach the last digit of Pi. That'll be enough. Call me when you're done.
and if they were prescription glasses he should consider getting a pair of non-google glass prescription glasses
Why? To satisfy some policy he never violated in the first place? He turned Glass off. That should be enough. That was enough to comply with the "do not record" policy. Prescription eyeglasses aren't cheap. You've no reason to demand he carry around Glass *and* another set of glasses with the same prescription.
You only need to look marginally further into the future to see a point where the functionality of something like Glass could be feasibly *implanted* and thus *non-removable* by the end user *by design*. What then? Do you ban implants? Good luck with trying to stop the march of technology because everyone in history who's tried has failed miserably.
you should consider taking it off before going places video cameras are not allowed
Perhaps you missed the part about where this fellow's Google Glass also happened to be his prescription eyeglasses. You can order Glass that way, you know. And Glass is not detachable from the lenses once this is done. So the best you can do is turn Glass off...which is exactly what this fellow did. Or would you prefer he try to watch the movie all blurry and out of focus?
The Glasshole was stupid for sitting in a cinema quite openly pointing a camera at the screen
What part of "Glass with prescription lenses, which he needed to even *see* the movie" did you not understand? He wasn't wearing Glass to be an ass; he was wearing them because those were his prescription glasses.
Except that, if you'd read the fucking article, you'd know he *needed* Glass because he was wearing them with *prescription lenses*. Taking them off would kinda make it hard to see the movie. Idiot.
Guys like this are what gives glass a bad name.
And it's guys like you who don't RTFA that give...well, guys like you a bad name. The fellow had Glass ordered with *prescription lenses*. He wasn't wearing Glass to be an ass; he was wearing Glass because he needed them to actually see the movie.
I strongly suspect this theater has a "No Camera" sign posted in the lobby - almost every theater I visit has one.
If they do then every patron with even a relatively modern cell phone is violating this rule. No, what you see is there is a "No Recording" sign. And this fellow wasn't recording anything; Glass was off.
It doesn't matter whether the casual observer can or can't easily determine whether Glass was on or off. Coming in and snatching a $1500 piece of hardware off someone's face is not the proper way to handle this.
Dave, let me ask you this: if I bring a video camera into a theater and point it at the screen the entire time a movie is playing...yet the camera is *off*...exactly what crime have I committed? Since when is *carrying* a camera considering sufficient evidence to say a crime has been committed? There is no statute, law, or even *warning* at a movie about carrying a camera. There *are* warnings about *recording* the movie, but he wasn't recording it and nobody could prove he was before they snatched them off his head. If somebody had tried that with me in a darkened room, this former Marine would've given them a broken arm and my foot on their neck immediately thereafter. And *I'd* be perfectly within my rights to do so given the cost of Google Glass and my immediate perception of attempted theft of property.
And I'll remind you, this fellow was wearing *prescription lens* Google Glass, which means he *needed* the glasses to actually see the movie. The fact that Glass was attached is incidental.
I have no sympathy for the author. He only got the new lenses two weeks before the incident so I really doubt his old prescription was terrible. He either made a consciable decision to wear the google glasses instead of his non-camera prescription into an area that is well known to have issues with recording equipment or he discarded his old prescription and has no redundancy should something happen to the google glasses prescription.
The beauty of living in a free country is the author is not required to carry two kinds of prescription glasses. If he wants to carry one pair, he can carry one pair even if Google Glass is attached to it. Just *having* an item that *might* be used to commit a crime does not make you a criminal, nor does it give the police/FBI the right to treat you as one. Your logic is the same asinine "logic" used to impugn non-violent, non-threatening people who wish to carry weapons purely for self defense.
There's plenty of molecular oxygen dissolved in seawater. The fish know.
There's sufficient molecular oxygen dissolved in seawater for a fish. Humans have much higher metabolic rates and require a great deal more oxygen...too much for a device like this to supply. The "gills" would either have to be massively larger or they'd have to have a very powerful pump pulling huge quantities of seawater through them. The former is obviously not the case, and the latter would require a much larger battery and pump.
A power plant is supposedly a controlled environment, and the people there certainly thought they knew what they were doing...
Well, that's true if you consider "knew what they were doing" as disabling all the safety measures, disregarding all standard operating procedures, and operating the reactor in a known-unsafe condition. The Chernobyl operators were doing and ill-advised, poorly-planned, badly-implemented test of some reactor systems that involved going completely off the farm vis-a-vis approved operation of the reactor. True, the RBMK designs were fickle and dangerous to begin with, but they'd operated for a long time without incident because operators *respected* that danger. Chernobyl was an example of what happens when you don't respect it. Had the reactor been operated within its safety margins, nothing would've happened.
I never did get straight why these did not work (maybe loss of power affected them?) or were not present (this was a first gen reactor design).
My understanding of the situation is Fukushima had a PORV for hydrogen venting but *not* a flare-off stack that would be present in more current designs. They vented the hydrogen only to prevent reactor vessel overpressurization, and crossed their fingers there wouldn't be an ignition source that would cause an explosion. Obviously they lost that gamble.
I work in the nuclear power industry as a consultant (IT, not nuclear tech, but I'm around a lot of nuclear engineers who I chat with). It was ridiculous that a flare-off stack was never implemented at Fukushima. I'm really curious why. I know first hand that modifications to existing plants is a red tape nightmare, but adding a flare-off stack should've been something that was easy to get approved and to implement given it's a proven technology.