Get out the pitchforks and torches, antisocialists.
What is interesting to me is that private hospitals negotiate rates with medicare and insurers, but basically set their own rates for the uninsured. My limited knowledge on the topic is merely based upon the few articles that have achieved my attention, but medicare rates are apparently the most reality-based, since the federal government gets to collect and analyze more of the pertinent data than anyone else. The private insurers have some strength in numbers/volume, and have their own data, and get to negotiate a bit. The uninsured are basically screwed, and are asked to pay many times what is charged to the insured or medicaid patients.
Your 52kg figure is for a naked sphere of U235. This article mentions a reflector. This article also makes no mention of a second mass, or that the reactor ever reaches criticality. Sub-critical assemblies can still multiply the flux from a static neutron source, so plenty of power with no potential of runaway reactions. Also, the article is about deep-space missions and mentions probes. So I'm guessing no crew, no halves, and no fizzouts.
My family has lost (had stolen) two iphones. I recovered both by seeing who was texted and phoned. This was before find-my-iphone apps were available. My experience so far is that perps are stupid, and will call and text everyone they know. You can probably call up current usage info and logs online at your service provider.
Hello, this is MichaelDelving. I think someone called you from my iphone last night at 8:37... Do you remember? Well, I'm going to call these 5 other numbers, and see if any of these other people know... I just want to get my phone back, not get anyone in any trouble...
Start nice, and then go through the list more angry (or resigned to just giving over phone call and text info to police). Eventually, either someone fesses up, or scares the perp into contacting you.
Arrange to meet somewhere nonscary, like the customer service desk of Walmart.
Utilities must build generation, or rely upon competitors to meet their daily or seasonal peak demand. If storage capability was distributed throughout the grid we could get by with fewer power plants. Plants purpose-built to help meet demand peaks tend to be combustion turbines (which have the highest fuel costs, and deplete a non-replenishable fossil fuel). Also, intermittent sources of power (solar, wind, etc.) really becomes more useful when storage is available.
Ha. Had the most monotone professor, world renowned in his particularly dry and boring field, but he put the Ben Stein teacher drone to shame.
There were apocryphal-seeming stories of students falling asleep in upper-level grad classes of his. Only seeming, because they sound unlikely, unless you ever took one of his classes.
Case 1: 3 or 4 students, one fell asleep, and at end of lecture prof shushed students, and turned out lights and crept out, leaving him asleep. Case 2: single student made it to lecture, fell asleep, professor kept teaching. Sounds unlikely, but I have on good authority (passersby).
Agree, for any HARD class. E.g., upper-level undergrad and grad-level theoretic courses in your (engineering)department/major. You scribble every last greek character in every equation from the board, in a desperate attempt to try to get down every jot of information (also verbal explanations). You read over your notes later to 'unpack' and store the knowledge, because you were writing so fast you were only using the short-short-term buffer of memory. Before the exam, you recopy your notes neatly, and then you magically can reproduce any arcane derivation on demand. And then again, years later, in preparation for the comprehensive exam.
I happen to work for the largest public power utility. Sorry to rain on your parade, but tranmission and distribution losses generally account for around 2-5% of power 'usage'. Probably closer to the 2% side of things when you are considering an industrial/commercial load.
Also, depending on the particular middle man you're thinking of, generally utilities' residential customers basically subsidize business customers. The utilities soak residential customers in order to give corporate rates at or slightly below costs to encourage business (and thus, residential) growth.
Businesses (esp. power intensive) decide where to locate with energy cost as a factor, human beings, not so much. So you've got to offer better industrial rates (especially to high load factor businesses such as data centers) than your neighboring utilities, otherwise the grass will be greener on the other side of your fence.
These boxes are claimed to be twice as efficient as their gas turbines equivalents. But gas turbines, while being cheap to build (comparatively!), are the most expensive to run, and are generally only brought online to meet peak demands. So half the cost of running a gas turbine might still be expensive compared to cost averaged over the entire generation mix (hydro, nuclear, and fossil being much cheaper in a variable cost sense). See also my previous comment about residential customers subsidizing commercial ones.
Finally, I wonder how 'green' these boxes really are? I mean, compared to gas turbines? Carbon goes in, so it must come back out. Maybe in a more easily sequesterable form?
I don't know what you self-named conservatives sit around smoking as you dream up these ridiculous strawmen, but, if I may speak for all liberals and progressives, we never slandered your patriotism. It seems you are projecting your own tendencies upon us.
It does not make you a traitor to oppose universal health care. It just reveals that you are an ignorant jackass.
The texting cost calculations might be missing an important point. You probably don't have to 'provision' any (or much) bandwidth specifically for texting. Most of the time, when the 'pipe' is not already full, you have 'excess' bandwidth available for texting. You probably design your system to handle peak demand (uh, actual calls, and data/internet), which ideally is never quite met or exceeded in practice.
That's assuming that the proportion of bandwidth eaten up by instant messaging is tiny, though.
There has to be collusion begind it. All one carrier would have to do is make texting free (or in the neighborhood of reasonable), and they'd start picking up their competitor's texting customers as contracts expired.
I think a lawsuit is definitely in order here.
Mensa is the lowest rung of the high IQ societies. Amusingly enough, some (most?) of its members tend to flaunt their membership and from it derive much of their self-image of superiority.
It's pretty obvious that if you are secure in your self-worth in an absolute sense, then you don't have define yourself relative to someone 'inferior.'
By the way, some of the more selective societies require demonstration of a certain level of professional or humanitarian accomplishment as a qualification.
Oh, and (striving to be on topic a little) I think we should require all journalists to pass an elementary statistics exam before they're allowed to report on scientific matters. Maybe a background in, I don't know, SCIENCE would be useful, too.
Gah!!! I have moderator points, and there's no -1 (stupid) moderation option. I am not surprised that a lone idiot (that would be you, Elwood) spouted nonsense. I AM disappointed that the moderation system resulted in a +4 (and probably a +5 by the time I finish typing) rating for the parent post. Sigh, overrated just doesn't cover it.
Okay concrete thinkers, forget the A, B, and C example. Each participant can specify how many hops they want. So generalize to an B (leacher), C, D, E and F (seeder) example. Only C has B's IP address. And only E has F's address. And as far as C knows, there's an A involved. And as far as E is concerned, there might be a G.
The upshot is that any intermediary isn't aware of whether it's dealing with the seeder, the leacher, or another intermediary. And I believe the law of the land is still "innocent 'til proven guilty."
I'd guess this was a troll, but then again it's non-offensive, so I'll bite.
Yes, most definitely your IP address can be 'traced.' How do you suppose the other seeders and leechers know where to send the evil packets containing little pieces of copyrighted files?
Step 1: hack up P2P client to record IPs
Step 2: participate in a little of the P2P action
Step 3: PROFIT???
I think the current situation is kind of like 'safe sex.' The only way to be safe is not to trade with strangers. Or you can rely upon some sort of anonymisation service, but if you're paranoid like me, that's just a different sort of stranger.
I am the "inventor" of three patents, yet receive no proceeds from them. Well, I did receive a nice salary and some share options...
It's called work. You sign intellectual property papers, then they start telling you what to do and pay you for it. In the course of your job, you invent things. The company pays for all the lawyering, and processing fees. Sometimes, the company licenses or assigns/sells the rights to other companies. One of those might very well be a law firm.
When the bubble popped, and I dot-bombed, our intellectual property law firm expressed interest in one of my patents. But it eventually sold to another company for $60k. Which with any other liquidated assets went to the VCs.
My senior year science fair project was coding an Enigma-E in C-64 basic. Only took an afternoon - actually Sunday afternoon before the Monday it was due.
No wonder the poor college students can't afford to pay for CDs. Instead of picking on the file sharers, the RIAA should go after the text publishing industry.
Fortunately for Dr. Fermi, you are not quite correct.
As any introductory text on fission physics will tell you, there's more than one time constant governing nuclear fission. The majority of neutrons 'created' in any particular fission event are indeed released fast enough that any biological or electronic sensor/control system could not feasably react to control a transient. But, conveniently, a small fraction of fission neutrons are released by decay of the unstable fission products some seconds or minutes after the initiating fission.
So, it conveniently works out that if you are just critical (number of neutrons created are equal to the number absorbed), or slightly supercritical (net neutron production slightly positive), you could easily manually control the process.
The NRC might take issue with your manual control scheme, however. If you accidentally pull the control elements far enough out that even neglecting the contribution of the "delayed" neutrons, you go "prompt" supercritical? Well, in that scenario, you probably just melted your fuel rods, and lost all control of your geometry - think of a puddle of uranium at the bottom of your core, instead of a nicely spaced array of fuel. Have you ever seen the movie China Syndrome?
Ramen microscopy, Ramen scattering, mmm... Is it lunchtime yet?
Now when someone catches me subverting the coffee machine's hot water tap, I can claim I'm just doing my part for science. Lunch or Science? You decide.
Don't worry, only the CHEATERS will go to the trouble to change their MAC address or swap out network cards. The rest of the non-cheating gamers won't go to the trouble to circumvent the system.
Nope, I telecommuted over ISDN for two years before Cable access became available. ISDN phone line = $40, not counting any long distance plans. Access = $20/semester, from local university. Usage = $0/whatever. Grand total = $45/month, no bandwidth caps, no limitations. Good luck getting DSL this cheap, Mr. Smarty Pants!
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Get out the pitchforks and torches, antisocialists.
What is interesting to me is that private hospitals negotiate rates with medicare and insurers, but basically set their own rates for the uninsured. My limited knowledge on the topic is merely based upon the few articles that have achieved my attention, but medicare rates are apparently the most reality-based, since the federal government gets to collect and analyze more of the pertinent data than anyone else. The private insurers have some strength in numbers/volume, and have their own data, and get to negotiate a bit. The uninsured are basically screwed, and are asked to pay many times what is charged to the insured or medicaid patients.
Google chargemaster, if you are interested.
Bzzt.
Your 52kg figure is for a naked sphere of U235. This article mentions a reflector. This article also makes no mention of a second mass, or that the reactor ever reaches criticality. Sub-critical assemblies can still multiply the flux from a static neutron source, so plenty of power with no potential of runaway reactions. Also, the article is about deep-space missions and mentions probes. So I'm guessing no crew, no halves, and no fizzouts.
Hello, this is MichaelDelving. I think someone called you from my iphone last night at 8:37... Do you remember? Well, I'm going to call these 5 other numbers, and see if any of these other people know... I just want to get my phone back, not get anyone in any trouble...
Start nice, and then go through the list more angry (or resigned to just giving over phone call and text info to police). Eventually, either someone fesses up, or scares the perp into contacting you.
Arrange to meet somewhere nonscary, like the customer service desk of Walmart.
Utilities must build generation, or rely upon competitors to meet their daily or seasonal peak demand. If storage capability was distributed throughout the grid we could get by with fewer power plants. Plants purpose-built to help meet demand peaks tend to be combustion turbines (which have the highest fuel costs, and deplete a non-replenishable fossil fuel). Also, intermittent sources of power (solar, wind, etc.) really becomes more useful when storage is available.
Ha. Had the most monotone professor, world renowned in his particularly dry and boring field, but he put the Ben Stein teacher drone to shame.
There were apocryphal-seeming stories of students falling asleep in upper-level grad classes of his. Only seeming, because they sound unlikely, unless you ever took one of his classes.
Case 1: 3 or 4 students, one fell asleep, and at end of lecture prof shushed students, and turned out lights and crept out, leaving him asleep. Case 2: single student made it to lecture, fell asleep, professor kept teaching. Sounds unlikely, but I have on good authority (passersby).
Agree, for any HARD class. E.g., upper-level undergrad and grad-level theoretic courses in your (engineering)department/major. You scribble every last greek character in every equation from the board, in a desperate attempt to try to get down every jot of information (also verbal explanations). You read over your notes later to 'unpack' and store the knowledge, because you were writing so fast you were only using the short-short-term buffer of memory. Before the exam, you recopy your notes neatly, and then you magically can reproduce any arcane derivation on demand. And then again, years later, in preparation for the comprehensive exam.
Also, depending on the particular middle man you're thinking of, generally utilities' residential customers basically subsidize business customers. The utilities soak residential customers in order to give corporate rates at or slightly below costs to encourage business (and thus, residential) growth.
Businesses (esp. power intensive) decide where to locate with energy cost as a factor, human beings, not so much. So you've got to offer better industrial rates (especially to high load factor businesses such as data centers) than your neighboring utilities, otherwise the grass will be greener on the other side of your fence.
These boxes are claimed to be twice as efficient as their gas turbines equivalents. But gas turbines, while being cheap to build (comparatively!), are the most expensive to run, and are generally only brought online to meet peak demands. So half the cost of running a gas turbine might still be expensive compared to cost averaged over the entire generation mix (hydro, nuclear, and fossil being much cheaper in a variable cost sense). See also my previous comment about residential customers subsidizing commercial ones.
Finally, I wonder how 'green' these boxes really are? I mean, compared to gas turbines? Carbon goes in, so it must come back out. Maybe in a more easily sequesterable form?
I don't know what you self-named conservatives sit around smoking as you dream up these ridiculous strawmen, but, if I may speak for all liberals and progressives, we never slandered your patriotism. It seems you are projecting your own tendencies upon us. It does not make you a traitor to oppose universal health care. It just reveals that you are an ignorant jackass.
The texting cost calculations might be missing an important point. You probably don't have to 'provision' any (or much) bandwidth specifically for texting. Most of the time, when the 'pipe' is not already full, you have 'excess' bandwidth available for texting. You probably design your system to handle peak demand (uh, actual calls, and data/internet), which ideally is never quite met or exceeded in practice. That's assuming that the proportion of bandwidth eaten up by instant messaging is tiny, though.
There has to be collusion begind it. All one carrier would have to do is make texting free (or in the neighborhood of reasonable), and they'd start picking up their competitor's texting customers as contracts expired. I think a lawsuit is definitely in order here.
Mensa is the lowest rung of the high IQ societies. Amusingly enough, some (most?) of its members tend to flaunt their membership and from it derive much of their self-image of superiority.
It's pretty obvious that if you are secure in your self-worth in an absolute sense, then you don't have define yourself relative to someone 'inferior.'
By the way, some of the more selective societies require demonstration of a certain level of professional or humanitarian accomplishment as a qualification.
Oh, and (striving to be on topic a little) I think we should require all journalists to pass an elementary statistics exam before they're allowed to report on scientific matters. Maybe a background in, I don't know, SCIENCE would be useful, too.
Gah!!! I have moderator points, and there's no -1 (stupid) moderation option. I am not surprised that a lone idiot (that would be you, Elwood) spouted nonsense. I AM disappointed that the moderation system resulted in a +4 (and probably a +5 by the time I finish typing) rating for the parent post. Sigh, overrated just doesn't cover it. Okay concrete thinkers, forget the A, B, and C example. Each participant can specify how many hops they want. So generalize to an B (leacher), C, D, E and F (seeder) example. Only C has B's IP address. And only E has F's address. And as far as C knows, there's an A involved. And as far as E is concerned, there might be a G. The upshot is that any intermediary isn't aware of whether it's dealing with the seeder, the leacher, or another intermediary. And I believe the law of the land is still "innocent 'til proven guilty."
Yes, most definitely your IP address can be 'traced.' How do you suppose the other seeders and leechers know where to send the evil packets containing little pieces of copyrighted files?
Step 1: hack up P2P client to record IPs
Step 2: participate in a little of the P2P action
Step 3: PROFIT???
I think the current situation is kind of like 'safe sex.' The only way to be safe is not to trade with strangers. Or you can rely upon some sort of anonymisation service, but if you're paranoid like me, that's just a different sort of stranger.
>where/how did a law firm get this patent?
I am the "inventor" of three patents, yet receive no proceeds from them. Well, I did receive a nice salary and some share options...
It's called work. You sign intellectual property papers, then they start telling you what to do and pay you for it. In the course of your job, you invent things. The company pays for all the lawyering, and processing fees. Sometimes, the company licenses or assigns/sells the rights to other companies. One of those might very well be a law firm.
When the bubble popped, and I dot-bombed, our intellectual property law firm expressed interest in one of my patents. But it eventually sold to another company for $60k. Which with any other liquidated assets went to the VCs.
But hey, I'm not bitter or anything!
Anyone else have trouble viewing this article?
Took second place in the city Science Fair. Bleh.
No wonder the poor college students can't afford to pay for CDs. Instead of picking on the file sharers, the RIAA should go after the text publishing industry.
And I, for one, welcome our mouse overlords.
The puppet strings are showing. The mice are behind everything after all.
Fortunately for Dr. Fermi, you are not quite correct.
As any introductory text on fission physics will tell you, there's more than one time constant governing nuclear fission. The majority of neutrons 'created' in any particular fission event are indeed released fast enough that any biological or electronic sensor/control system could not feasably react to control a transient. But, conveniently, a small fraction of fission neutrons are released by decay of the unstable fission products some seconds or minutes after the initiating fission.
So, it conveniently works out that if you are just critical (number of neutrons created are equal to the number absorbed), or slightly supercritical (net neutron production slightly positive), you could easily manually control the process.
The NRC might take issue with your manual control scheme, however. If you accidentally pull the control elements far enough out that even neglecting the contribution of the "delayed" neutrons, you go "prompt" supercritical? Well, in that scenario, you probably just melted your fuel rods, and lost all control of your geometry - think of a puddle of uranium at the bottom of your core, instead of a nicely spaced array of fuel. Have you ever seen the movie China Syndrome?
Rules revision to allow scripting/botting to automate menial/trivial/frequent tasks.
What a bloodthirsty kid:
'..my question is how much g's does it take for the skin to fall off a human's body?'
Probably worthy enough research, but hellish death for the volunteer research subjects.
Ramen microscopy, Ramen scattering, mmm... Is it lunchtime yet? Now when someone catches me subverting the coffee machine's hot water tap, I can claim I'm just doing my part for science. Lunch or Science? You decide.
Don't worry, only the CHEATERS will go to the trouble to change their MAC address or swap out network cards. The rest of the non-cheating gamers won't go to the trouble to circumvent the system.
Nope, I telecommuted over ISDN for two years before Cable access became available. ISDN phone line = $40, not counting any long distance plans. Access = $20/semester, from local university. Usage = $0/whatever. Grand total = $45/month, no bandwidth caps, no limitations. Good luck getting DSL this cheap, Mr. Smarty Pants!