one of they key reasons Concorde failed is American jealousy
Simply not true (and I say that as a Brit). Concorde was planned before the OPEC cartel massively raised the cost of oil. The huge increase in the cost of fuel made it uneconomic because it was very inefficient. In addition there was the issue of noise pollution due to the sonic boom. Modern technology has made supersonic flight far more fuel efficient. While I am not in a position to know whether it is efficient enough to be economically viable I would not just dismiss it out of hand.
We don't drive cars only because they are cheaper than public transit, but faster too.
Actually one of the reasons I like to take the bus is that I can then use the time to do something useful because I am not driving. If I drive it would take ~25 minutes but I can do nothing but drive for those 25 minutes. By bus it is ~45 minutes but for ~40 of those minutes I can sit down and answer email, read journal papers, write course material etc. So while the bus may take longer I waste only ~5-10 minutes vs. 25 minutes when driving because I can do nothing but drive. For me the thing that will kill public transport is the self-driving car.
It's the person who believes the lie, or knows that's it's a lie and uses it for profit that creates the problem.
Greece lied to get into the Euro because it thought it was going to be richer with a stronger currency. The EU turned a blind eye to it because they wanted the Eurozone to be as large as possible. Both are now going to suffer because of it. The Eurozone countries are not going to get their money back and Greece is almost certain to exit the Euro and very possibly the EU since there is currently no legal means to drop the Euro while an EU member. At this point the best thing to do is make this happen as quickly and painlessly as possible.
...so until there's a lot of used electric cars available...
I think this is the key point. The characteristics of electric vehicles make them ideal for "secondary" cars - the one you use to run about town in for commuting, errands etc. We spend more on our primary vehicle because that's the one which has to be reliable enough to go long distances when we go on trips. However EVs are a terrible fit for this usage since they have limited range, limited recharge stations and slow recharging.
The budget we have for our secondary car is far less and we will typically buy second hand because reliability is less of an issue if you are only going short distances. While this would be a good fit for an EV there is little to no second hand market in these and, even if there were, the battery packs from several years ago had far shorter lives which is a concern for a used car.
Using Bitcoin to trade doesn't make any more sense than using Google or Apple stocks to trade
Actually it might make sense. The problem is that there are government capital controls on all the standard financial channels to get money out of the Greek banks. While BitCoin is terrible as a store of value it excels at being easy to transfer whether or not a government says that you can. If there is some mechanism to get your Greek bank balance converted into BitCoins then you can transfer these to a foreign exchange and convert them back to another currency - or even back into Euros but outside Greece.
I think you maybe mean "Too much personal data to fail"... which is an incredibly disturbing thought.
Not really - remember that it is your government who decides which companies are too important to fail. So just make sure that you use websites that your politicians use and you should be fine!
Hold the members of government in contempt and jail them for failing to follow a court order?
...and then the government will pass laws making such rulings illegal and limiting the powers of the courts. Then you end up with messy infighting between the courts and government which introduces considerable doubt into who has the authority to do what which will undermine both of them.
The Dutch government made promises and then tried to back out of them.
Much as I disapprove of politicians saying one thing and then doing another there are times when it is necessary e.g. if the situation changes or politicians learn the true cost/implication of the promised action. This is why, in a democracy, the people get to decide. If the government can make a good case to the people as to why it cannot fulfill its promise then they can vote it in again, if not they can give someone else a chance.
Given the number of, sometimes contradictory, promises which politicians make any system where a court can force the government to fulfill a particular promise risks ending up as being government by the courts. This is bad because then you have government by whoever can afford the most lawyers.
It depends on how spread out the fallout is. Spread over a hemisphere it is not a problem but if small meteorite fragments streak over a city leaving a contrail of highly radioactive fallout it may be a big problem for certain locations even if nothing significant makes it to the ground. It is also worth pointing out that the size of a nuclear device capable of shattering an asteroid worth worrying about will be extremely large and multiple such devices might be required.
The way this body is formed is of no interest to the public outside of it.
Actually this is only true if it is formed through some recognizably fair and democratic process. For example if it is formed based on a hereditary concerns or an unfair and biased electoral process the public outside of the group will probably feel free to ignore it as not representing the people it claims to represent. While this may not apply here the way a governing body is formed does play a role in whether people outside it accord it any legitimacy and respect.
I don't think it matters what the laws in the UK are if the website that they are accusing of infringing their copyright is in the US where US laws apply. I think this is a case of a UK company using US law to stifle US free speech in the same way that US companies use it although to be fair it seems a far milder case than the ones you typically hear about. The easy fix would be to just remove the photograph of the front page of the paper. The article criticizing the Sunday Times would still be there for everyone to read - the photo is not really required.
The level of radation in california is 8 disintegrations per cubic meter per second.
If correct then that rate is far, far lower than the level of radiation in Californians. The tiny amount of potassium-40 in the human body produces 4,400 disintegrations per second. Then there are other isotopes such as carbon-14 to consider so the actual rate of decays will be even higher. In fact if we assume the average Californian has a mass of 80 kg and a density roughly equal to that of water then the decay rate per cubic metre of Californians is just under 55,000 decays/second or 6,875 times your background rate just from potassium-40.
However you typically only get about about 10% of your annual radiation exposure in the US from the potassium-40, carbon-14 etc inside your body so I expect that your background radiation estimate is on the low side.
Do you realize that there is more than one definition of 'subject'?
subject (noun) a person or thing that is being discussed, described, or dealt with.
I thought "creative geniuses" were expected to think laterally and not be confined to rigid, linear thinking? Not everything you learn at school has a special academic lesson devoted to it...which again is something a creative genius should know.
The value of a degree is in what it lets you do not in how much it costs to get it. The skills you acquire are valuable both to the individual and to society.
two it would be discriminatory against those with learning disabilities.
I utterly fail to understand this point. Your statement is as logical as arguing that governments should not fund vaccination programs because some people are allergic to vaccines and can't have them. The reason degrees should be free is the same reason why school education should be free: society as a whole benefits from having highly skilled people available for employment or even who can create new employment.
There are many degrees that have absolutely no value in the modern world.
I would not go that far but I would agree that there are some degrees which are more valuable than others. However this is the great thing about making degrees free: governments can choose how many slots to fund for each program based on the need. The university then selects the best students for those funded slots. Too many english graduates then fund fewer spaces. Not enough teachers then increase the funding for education degrees etc.
This is far better than the current system where many students pick subjects for less sound reasons such as which subject they think is easiest.
Someone earning 21,000 a year only repays 66 a month. There is no reason someone who has taken a serious degree and gotten a job can not pay back that.
You are missing the point. Yes they can afford to pay the amount but the problem is that the loan comes with interest. Someone in a job like teaching gets a reasonable but certainly not high, salary. Given that the interest rates on the load is RPI+3%. On a 36kGBP loan that's just under 2k interest per year which is 166/month. So your person paying 66/month will never, ever pay off their loan. Essentially they will have a permanent extra 9% marginal tax rate throughout their life.
Compare this to those entering a high paid job in finance. They will have a 9% marginal tax rate for a few years until their loan is paid off and then it's over. This means that the loan not only discourages graduates from taking lower paid jobs but the interest means it acts as a regressive tax where those earning less pay more.
In the previous system we had higher rates of tax for high earners and this was used, in part, to fund the university system. Not only was this clearly fairer it did not dissuade people from important jobs with lower pay scales and it reduced the grumbling about tax of those earning a lot because they could see that they had benefited from taxes.
Yes they can, at least for some plastics and I would bet that if we started to run out of oil based plastics the chemists woudl start to come up with replacements for the rest as well.
That would probably be a good idea because if we had to replace all our fossil fuel plants today it would involve building a lot of nuclear fission plants.
Maintenance caused the failure, but it was unquestionably pilot error that caused the crash.
Actually not according to the linked article. The pilots followed the correct procedure which was a slow climb with flaps open but the engine falling off the wing severed the hydraulic lines and caused a partial power failure which meant that the slats retracted on the one wing and the warning indicators both for stall and asymmetric slats did not work. The crash might have been avoidable given hindsight but I would not call it pilot error by any stretch of the imagination and again according to the Wikipedia article neither did the NTSB.
Inspecting the tail fins, and the top of the fuselage is far easier, quicker, and cheaper with a drone.
I agree that it might be easier, quicker and cheaper with a drone. However I don't really care. As a passenger I'm far more interested in whether it is just as effective as spotting problems as the human eyeballs it replaces. On the plus side images can be zoomed and you might see more detail than a human eye. On the downside the image is probably not going to be 3D and it sounds like the person taking the pictures with the drone will not be the engineer who inspects them.
Well, except when the smoke detector catches fire, like in a fire.
In that case if you are still around then clearly the beeping did not wake you up so perhaps the sound of the exploding battery might. See, it's really just an extra safety measure.
Slashdot Mirror
one of they key reasons Concorde failed is American jealousy
Simply not true (and I say that as a Brit). Concorde was planned before the OPEC cartel massively raised the cost of oil. The huge increase in the cost of fuel made it uneconomic because it was very inefficient. In addition there was the issue of noise pollution due to the sonic boom. Modern technology has made supersonic flight far more fuel efficient. While I am not in a position to know whether it is efficient enough to be economically viable I would not just dismiss it out of hand.
We don't drive cars only because they are cheaper than public transit, but faster too.
Actually one of the reasons I like to take the bus is that I can then use the time to do something useful because I am not driving. If I drive it would take ~25 minutes but I can do nothing but drive for those 25 minutes. By bus it is ~45 minutes but for ~40 of those minutes I can sit down and answer email, read journal papers, write course material etc. So while the bus may take longer I waste only ~5-10 minutes vs. 25 minutes when driving because I can do nothing but drive. For me the thing that will kill public transport is the self-driving car.
It's the person who believes the lie, or knows that's it's a lie and uses it for profit that creates the problem.
Greece lied to get into the Euro because it thought it was going to be richer with a stronger currency. The EU turned a blind eye to it because they wanted the Eurozone to be as large as possible. Both are now going to suffer because of it. The Eurozone countries are not going to get their money back and Greece is almost certain to exit the Euro and very possibly the EU since there is currently no legal means to drop the Euro while an EU member. At this point the best thing to do is make this happen as quickly and painlessly as possible.
System V was introduced in 1983.
The reason there has not been a new version released since then is because System VI couldn't run emacs.
Once again you've failed to localise properly.
If they really want it entirely sin free it will be easy to localize: a blank page is the same in any language.
...so until there's a lot of used electric cars available...
I think this is the key point. The characteristics of electric vehicles make them ideal for "secondary" cars - the one you use to run about town in for commuting, errands etc. We spend more on our primary vehicle because that's the one which has to be reliable enough to go long distances when we go on trips. However EVs are a terrible fit for this usage since they have limited range, limited recharge stations and slow recharging.
The budget we have for our secondary car is far less and we will typically buy second hand because reliability is less of an issue if you are only going short distances. While this would be a good fit for an EV there is little to no second hand market in these and, even if there were, the battery packs from several years ago had far shorter lives which is a concern for a used car.
Using Bitcoin to trade doesn't make any more sense than using Google or Apple stocks to trade
Actually it might make sense. The problem is that there are government capital controls on all the standard financial channels to get money out of the Greek banks. While BitCoin is terrible as a store of value it excels at being easy to transfer whether or not a government says that you can. If there is some mechanism to get your Greek bank balance converted into BitCoins then you can transfer these to a foreign exchange and convert them back to another currency - or even back into Euros but outside Greece.
I think you maybe mean "Too much personal data to fail"... which is an incredibly disturbing thought.
Not really - remember that it is your government who decides which companies are too important to fail. So just make sure that you use websites that your politicians use and you should be fine!
Hold the members of government in contempt and jail them for failing to follow a court order?
The Dutch government made promises and then tried to back out of them.
Much as I disapprove of politicians saying one thing and then doing another there are times when it is necessary e.g. if the situation changes or politicians learn the true cost/implication of the promised action. This is why, in a democracy, the people get to decide. If the government can make a good case to the people as to why it cannot fulfill its promise then they can vote it in again, if not they can give someone else a chance.
Given the number of, sometimes contradictory, promises which politicians make any system where a court can force the government to fulfill a particular promise risks ending up as being government by the courts. This is bad because then you have government by whoever can afford the most lawyers.
It depends on how spread out the fallout is. Spread over a hemisphere it is not a problem but if small meteorite fragments streak over a city leaving a contrail of highly radioactive fallout it may be a big problem for certain locations even if nothing significant makes it to the ground. It is also worth pointing out that the size of a nuclear device capable of shattering an asteroid worth worrying about will be extremely large and multiple such devices might be required.
The way this body is formed is of no interest to the public outside of it.
Actually this is only true if it is formed through some recognizably fair and democratic process. For example if it is formed based on a hereditary concerns or an unfair and biased electoral process the public outside of the group will probably feel free to ignore it as not representing the people it claims to represent. While this may not apply here the way a governing body is formed does play a role in whether people outside it accord it any legitimacy and respect.
You forgot:
3) Scatter radioactive fallout with
Still cancer takes longer to kill you that a massive asteroid impact followed by a decade of winter so I suppose it's a win?
I don't think it matters what the laws in the UK are if the website that they are accusing of infringing their copyright is in the US where US laws apply. I think this is a case of a UK company using US law to stifle US free speech in the same way that US companies use it although to be fair it seems a far milder case than the ones you typically hear about. The easy fix would be to just remove the photograph of the front page of the paper. The article criticizing the Sunday Times would still be there for everyone to read - the photo is not really required.
The level of radation in california is 8 disintegrations per cubic meter per second.
If correct then that rate is far, far lower than the level of radiation in Californians. The tiny amount of potassium-40 in the human body produces 4,400 disintegrations per second. Then there are other isotopes such as carbon-14 to consider so the actual rate of decays will be even higher. In fact if we assume the average Californian has a mass of 80 kg and a density roughly equal to that of water then the decay rate per cubic metre of Californians is just under 55,000 decays/second or 6,875 times your background rate just from potassium-40.
However you typically only get about about 10% of your annual radiation exposure in the US from the potassium-40, carbon-14 etc inside your body so I expect that your background radiation estimate is on the low side.
Do you realize that there is more than one definition of 'subject'?
subject (noun) a person or thing that is being discussed, described, or dealt with.
I thought "creative geniuses" were expected to think laterally and not be confined to rigid, linear thinking? Not everything you learn at school has a special academic lesson devoted to it...which again is something a creative genius should know.
One you would remove the value of the degree,
The value of a degree is in what it lets you do not in how much it costs to get it. The skills you acquire are valuable both to the individual and to society.
two it would be discriminatory against those with learning disabilities.
I utterly fail to understand this point. Your statement is as logical as arguing that governments should not fund vaccination programs because some people are allergic to vaccines and can't have them. The reason degrees should be free is the same reason why school education should be free: society as a whole benefits from having highly skilled people available for employment or even who can create new employment.
There are many degrees that have absolutely no value in the modern world.
I would not go that far but I would agree that there are some degrees which are more valuable than others. However this is the great thing about making degrees free: governments can choose how many slots to fund for each program based on the need. The university then selects the best students for those funded slots. Too many english graduates then fund fewer spaces. Not enough teachers then increase the funding for education degrees etc.
This is far better than the current system where many students pick subjects for less sound reasons such as which subject they think is easiest.
Someone earning 21,000 a year only repays 66 a month. There is no reason someone who has taken a serious degree and gotten a job can not pay back that.
You are missing the point. Yes they can afford to pay the amount but the problem is that the loan comes with interest. Someone in a job like teaching gets a reasonable but certainly not high, salary. Given that the interest rates on the load is RPI+3%. On a 36kGBP loan that's just under 2k interest per year which is 166/month. So your person paying 66/month will never, ever pay off their loan. Essentially they will have a permanent extra 9% marginal tax rate throughout their life.
Compare this to those entering a high paid job in finance. They will have a 9% marginal tax rate for a few years until their loan is paid off and then it's over. This means that the loan not only discourages graduates from taking lower paid jobs but the interest means it acts as a regressive tax where those earning less pay more.
In the previous system we had higher rates of tax for high earners and this was used, in part, to fund the university system. Not only was this clearly fairer it did not dissuade people from important jobs with lower pay scales and it reduced the grumbling about tax of those earning a lot because they could see that they had benefited from taxes.
Thanks to this video probably not anymore.
It isn't getting outsourced until roto-rooter starts sending robots.
Ah but when they do you will be glad you took that pre-school computing science class won't you!
Many of the creative geniuses in know, including myself, educated ourselves in technology and other subjects.
Clearly modesty was not one of the subjects you covered.
Yes they can, at least for some plastics and I would bet that if we started to run out of oil based plastics the chemists woudl start to come up with replacements for the rest as well.
That would probably be a good idea because if we had to replace all our fossil fuel plants today it would involve building a lot of nuclear fission plants.
Maintenance caused the failure, but it was unquestionably pilot error that caused the crash.
Actually not according to the linked article. The pilots followed the correct procedure which was a slow climb with flaps open but the engine falling off the wing severed the hydraulic lines and caused a partial power failure which meant that the slats retracted on the one wing and the warning indicators both for stall and asymmetric slats did not work. The crash might have been avoidable given hindsight but I would not call it pilot error by any stretch of the imagination and again according to the Wikipedia article neither did the NTSB.
Inspecting the tail fins, and the top of the fuselage is far easier, quicker, and cheaper with a drone.
I agree that it might be easier, quicker and cheaper with a drone. However I don't really care. As a passenger I'm far more interested in whether it is just as effective as spotting problems as the human eyeballs it replaces. On the plus side images can be zoomed and you might see more detail than a human eye. On the downside the image is probably not going to be 3D and it sounds like the person taking the pictures with the drone will not be the engineer who inspects them.
Well, except when the smoke detector catches fire, like in a fire.
In that case if you are still around then clearly the beeping did not wake you up so perhaps the sound of the exploding battery might. See, it's really just an extra safety measure.