It's a lesson that our sadly flawed founding fathers so desperately needed to learn. (Is that blasphemy to say on July 4th?) Not that they did a bad job, but clearly there's room for improvement. Another 10 or 20 amendments - or just better wording on some of the existing ones - might have saved us all a hell of a lot of trouble.
We recently discussed round-abouts in my city, where I'm on the planning commission.
I like them, but didn't advocate them as they are so unpopular. Instead I pushed for the narrowing of roads at intersections. If a road narrows (by, for example, bringing in the curbs that were set back to allow for on-street parking), then drivers naturally slow. It's a means of traffic control that doesn't require A) roundabouts, B) speedbumps, or C) stop signs.
Of course I was totally against another proposed option, which was to make a street artificially curvy within a straight corridor. That stinks. And kids will just drive right down the center ignoring all the curves if they can, which makes it more dangerous than it would have been.
The cops can already get this information by dangerously and expensively tailing you or flying over your head, and they can do that without a warrant; why should obtaining the same information from a GPS be any different?
Because the burden of cost is one of the ways that our public anonymity is maintained. If the cost barrier is removed, it will need to be erected as a legal barrier.
My sister in law recently cleaned out her grandparent's house after her grandfather died. They'd lived there for more than 50 years, having never in memory deeply cleaned or, say, changed the water in their water bed.
After she got the black sludge drained from the thing, and pulled the deflated mattress out, she found an inch of accumulated skin flakes in the frame around the mattress. Yuck.
In short, with a program that only looks for "tameness" (i.e. does a given animal accept or reject food and petting from a human, measured twice in their life with minimal other human contact), in just 50 years they've bred fully domesticated foxes. The link above points out that some of their domesticated animals have escaped and returned, but that even in this short time they doubt any of them could survive on their own.
The N.G. magazine article included many more photos of some of the foxes. Many of the domesticated group have started being born mottled, with floppy ears, etc., which surprised the researchers because they never included animal appearance in their selection process. From this they conclude that the genetics for some of the traits of domesticated dogs are expressed from the same genes that drive tameness, instead of being complementary features that humans also bred for.
The N.G. article also mentioned that, at the same time, they've been breeding a group of foxes for their lack of tameness (i.e. worst reaction to humans). These are now the most vicious, snarling foxes they've ever seen.
This is the best quote, with my comments in brackets:
As for Mavrik, Luda Mekertycheva [the reporter's translator] was so enthralled by the chestnut-colored fox and another playmate that she decided to adopt them. They arrived at her dacha outside of Moscow a few months later, and not long after, she emailed me an update. "Mavrik and Peter jump on my back when I kneel to give them food, sit when I pet them, and take vitamins from my hand," she wrote. "I love them a lot."
PETA's argument would be to point out that, somewhere, there's the carcass of a dog (of a different breed) that would have also been the happiest dog in the world and you also would have grown to love, except that dog was born despite human effort (at spaying/neutering), then maybe suffered at the end of its life, while your dog was created on purpose and (maybe) suffered at the beginning of its life.
I've never been particularly attached to any given breed to want one that badly right now instead of waiting for one to show up at a rescue facility, but obviously other opinions differ.
I am pretty sure that cable co's scramble most of their digital channels, requiring their descrambling equipment.
In the U.S. at least, supposedly they were required to provide you with a descrambling card, which you could then plug into a host of third-party devices. What actually happened was that their support for the cards was made so bad that most people could never get them to work, thus forcing consumers to use the better-supported set-top device.
I won't call this a regulation fail, because the regulation was good. Let's call it a "punishment for lack of regulation implementation" fail, because the penalties for not abiding by the regulation were nonexistent.
This has been my problem with home-use SAN devices for years. At least at the beginning, none of them would ever bother to spin down the drive. There have been several slashdot posts about this. As a result of the high failure rate on the disks, I've stayed away from them.
Interestingly, now I've seen companies that specifically advertise that their home SAN devices include active power management to idle the drive. It looks like (at least in this case) that the market was able to devise a fix. (Unfortunately that fix took half a decade because the cost of increased power use and early mortality were external costs that were rarely advertised on the box and more rarely understood by the consumers. Home SAN devices need an Energy Star rating just like home DVRs do.)
Almost no electric heating is done via resistive burn, which (as you point out) is no better than 100% efficient in converting energy you draw from the grid into heat in your house (and that's 100% of what enters your house, not counting all the losses on the grid or at the generator).
On the contrary, most electric heating is done with a heat pump, which uses electricity from the grid to draw heat from colder outside air and move it into your warmer house. Sometimes you'll even see heat pumps that claim to have "400% efficiency" or some such, which doesn't on its face make sense, but is done to compare it with the efficiency of resistive heating, and is meant to imply the efficiency of heat entering your home compared to power drawn from the grid.
The problem with heat pumps is that the temperature difference between the colder outside air (from which you will draw heat) and the warmer inside air (to which you will add heat) is limited. In order to make the inside air in the mid-70s, most heat pumps require the outside air to be no colder than, say, the lower 30s. The heat cycle isn't designed to work on a large difference. This means that some houses have lower-grade resistive heating as a backup.
Now I've lived in homes with heat pumps twice (as a youth), and over the course of 8-9 total years I recall us turning on the resistive heater (in either house) exactly once. In the South, heat pumps really are good enough most of the time. (I remember the one time we turned on the heater, because it dumped a bad burning smell into the house, and my mom called the fire department. After they determined there was no fire, they switched it off, and as it was a rental house we never got it fixed or used it again.)
It also legalizes it anywhere that states don't have control, unless the local controlling body has laws that keep it illegal, i.e. D.C., reservations, territories, etc. Right?
Of the ones you list, TUV is pretty strict. The rest are pretty much all self-certificates, though with UL you probably had to go to a third-party agency to give you your rubber stamp.
UL doesn't exactly staff itself with the best and the brightest, either. It's all about extracting as much revenue as possible from every company in an end-product's supply chain, while ultimately giving enough approvals to keep the companies from going to a competing service like CSA or TUV.
How is it a coincidence? Bob Pease died while leaving Jim Williams' memorial service, which he was late for, presumably because he was distraught. While there's no proof (and may never be), there's certainly enough correlation that I can postulate a reasonable hypothesis of causation.
He had just arrived a half hour late to the private funeral service for friend and fellow analog guru Jim Williams. While the most dedicated, most professional, most technical of engineers might be able to apply that skill to their day-to-day life on most days, maybe just this one day he was too distraught to run down life's usual safety checklist.
If anything, it shows that even the most independent of people shouldn't be left alone when a friend has passed.
And who would step up to privately fund them? Andrew Carnegie is long dead, and philanthropic rich people are rare and tend to pick their pet projects arbitrarily. And it's not like local libraries turn down private donations now; if people were willing to donate to them, they'd all be in better shape than they are.
While I don't believe your claim, even if it were true, I doubt very much that many use the public libraries to do so.
I think the public-good-costs-too-much tea partiers / fiscal conservatives will eventually shut down all the public libraries without Amazon or Apple's help.
They'll say, "Why should taxpayers who never use the library pay for it? If you want to read a book go to the local Barnes and Noble; they have a reading section. If anything the 'public' library is hurting this private business." Then later when all the Barnes and Noble stores close, they'll just point out that "if we needed access to paper books, the free-market would have kept B&N open."
And I think the Library of Congress falls into the "go to the zoo to see a lion" analogy for a physical book. Sure, they aren't going to close. But they no longer take a copy of every printed book. Their funding will be cut, too, and their outdated collections will simply become a research library. And it's not like important libraries have ever been accidentally burnt down.
Well if neural inhibitors (which interfere with the processing of certain parts of our neural network) cause us to lose consciousness, then one could hypothesize that those parts of our neural network must play a role in consciousness. And that makes us at least a little closer to understanding it.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends on how fast the chutes open.
It's a lesson that our sadly flawed founding fathers so desperately needed to learn. (Is that blasphemy to say on July 4th?) Not that they did a bad job, but clearly there's room for improvement. Another 10 or 20 amendments - or just better wording on some of the existing ones - might have saved us all a hell of a lot of trouble.
We recently discussed round-abouts in my city, where I'm on the planning commission.
I like them, but didn't advocate them as they are so unpopular. Instead I pushed for the narrowing of roads at intersections. If a road narrows (by, for example, bringing in the curbs that were set back to allow for on-street parking), then drivers naturally slow. It's a means of traffic control that doesn't require A) roundabouts, B) speedbumps, or C) stop signs.
Of course I was totally against another proposed option, which was to make a street artificially curvy within a straight corridor. That stinks. And kids will just drive right down the center ignoring all the curves if they can, which makes it more dangerous than it would have been.
The cops can already get this information by dangerously and expensively tailing you or flying over your head, and they can do that without a warrant; why should obtaining the same information from a GPS be any different?
Because the burden of cost is one of the ways that our public anonymity is maintained. If the cost barrier is removed, it will need to be erected as a legal barrier.
I've worked with UL and TUV and would take the Germans over the Georgians any day.
My sister in law recently cleaned out her grandparent's house after her grandfather died. They'd lived there for more than 50 years, having never in memory deeply cleaned or, say, changed the water in their water bed.
After she got the black sludge drained from the thing, and pulled the deflated mattress out, she found an inch of accumulated skin flakes in the frame around the mattress. Yuck.
You can't expect me to change the world for you
I usually word it as "I can't save the world myself", but yeah I understand. I do what I can and don't worry about the big things I can't fix.
Did you see the recent National Geographic story about the fox domestication experiment that's been running in Russia for the last 50 years? Here's that article and another about the program:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/taming-wild-animals/ratliff-text/1
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/807641/posts
In short, with a program that only looks for "tameness" (i.e. does a given animal accept or reject food and petting from a human, measured twice in their life with minimal other human contact), in just 50 years they've bred fully domesticated foxes. The link above points out that some of their domesticated animals have escaped and returned, but that even in this short time they doubt any of them could survive on their own.
The N.G. magazine article included many more photos of some of the foxes. Many of the domesticated group have started being born mottled, with floppy ears, etc., which surprised the researchers because they never included animal appearance in their selection process. From this they conclude that the genetics for some of the traits of domesticated dogs are expressed from the same genes that drive tameness, instead of being complementary features that humans also bred for.
The N.G. article also mentioned that, at the same time, they've been breeding a group of foxes for their lack of tameness (i.e. worst reaction to humans). These are now the most vicious, snarling foxes they've ever seen.
This is the best quote, with my comments in brackets:
As for Mavrik, Luda Mekertycheva [the reporter's translator] was so enthralled by the chestnut-colored fox and another playmate that she decided to adopt them. They arrived at her dacha outside of Moscow a few months later, and not long after, she emailed me an update. "Mavrik and Peter jump on my back when I kneel to give them food, sit when I pet them, and take vitamins from my hand," she wrote. "I love them a lot."
PETA's argument would be to point out that, somewhere, there's the carcass of a dog (of a different breed) that would have also been the happiest dog in the world and you also would have grown to love, except that dog was born despite human effort (at spaying/neutering), then maybe suffered at the end of its life, while your dog was created on purpose and (maybe) suffered at the beginning of its life.
I've never been particularly attached to any given breed to want one that badly right now instead of waiting for one to show up at a rescue facility, but obviously other opinions differ.
There are only two things one needs in order to succeed; Knowing when to start, and when to stop.
... and not mailing goatse to potential employers, apparently.
Then he was too irresponsible to be permitted to drive.
I already said that:
If anything, it shows that even the most independent of people shouldn't be left alone when a friend has passed.
I am pretty sure that cable co's scramble most of their digital channels, requiring their descrambling equipment.
In the U.S. at least, supposedly they were required to provide you with a descrambling card, which you could then plug into a host of third-party devices. What actually happened was that their support for the cards was made so bad that most people could never get them to work, thus forcing consumers to use the better-supported set-top device.
I won't call this a regulation fail, because the regulation was good. Let's call it a "punishment for lack of regulation implementation" fail, because the penalties for not abiding by the regulation were nonexistent.
This has been my problem with home-use SAN devices for years. At least at the beginning, none of them would ever bother to spin down the drive. There have been several slashdot posts about this. As a result of the high failure rate on the disks, I've stayed away from them.
Interestingly, now I've seen companies that specifically advertise that their home SAN devices include active power management to idle the drive. It looks like (at least in this case) that the market was able to devise a fix. (Unfortunately that fix took half a decade because the cost of increased power use and early mortality were external costs that were rarely advertised on the box and more rarely understood by the consumers. Home SAN devices need an Energy Star rating just like home DVRs do.)
Almost no electric heating is done via resistive burn, which (as you point out) is no better than 100% efficient in converting energy you draw from the grid into heat in your house (and that's 100% of what enters your house, not counting all the losses on the grid or at the generator).
On the contrary, most electric heating is done with a heat pump, which uses electricity from the grid to draw heat from colder outside air and move it into your warmer house. Sometimes you'll even see heat pumps that claim to have "400% efficiency" or some such, which doesn't on its face make sense, but is done to compare it with the efficiency of resistive heating, and is meant to imply the efficiency of heat entering your home compared to power drawn from the grid.
The problem with heat pumps is that the temperature difference between the colder outside air (from which you will draw heat) and the warmer inside air (to which you will add heat) is limited. In order to make the inside air in the mid-70s, most heat pumps require the outside air to be no colder than, say, the lower 30s. The heat cycle isn't designed to work on a large difference. This means that some houses have lower-grade resistive heating as a backup.
Now I've lived in homes with heat pumps twice (as a youth), and over the course of 8-9 total years I recall us turning on the resistive heater (in either house) exactly once. In the South, heat pumps really are good enough most of the time. (I remember the one time we turned on the heater, because it dumped a bad burning smell into the house, and my mom called the fire department. After they determined there was no fire, they switched it off, and as it was a rental house we never got it fixed or used it again.)
Yeah, that's how I make changes to Encyclopedia Britannica, too!
It also legalizes it anywhere that states don't have control, unless the local controlling body has laws that keep it illegal, i.e. D.C., reservations, territories, etc. Right?
Of the ones you list, TUV is pretty strict. The rest are pretty much all self-certificates, though with UL you probably had to go to a third-party agency to give you your rubber stamp.
UL doesn't exactly staff itself with the best and the brightest, either. It's all about extracting as much revenue as possible from every company in an end-product's supply chain, while ultimately giving enough approvals to keep the companies from going to a competing service like CSA or TUV.
$4,600 a month for nursing home care. $4,600.
Medicare beds are virtually nonexistent, or are in the most awful of homes.
It's not a choice I would casually make for anyone I cared about.
That said, if you have any family member that you remotely think you'll be responsible for as they age... buy long-term care insurance NOW.
How is it a coincidence? Bob Pease died while leaving Jim Williams' memorial service, which he was late for, presumably because he was distraught. While there's no proof (and may never be), there's certainly enough correlation that I can postulate a reasonable hypothesis of causation.
He had just arrived a half hour late to the private funeral service for friend and fellow analog guru Jim Williams. While the most dedicated, most professional, most technical of engineers might be able to apply that skill to their day-to-day life on most days, maybe just this one day he was too distraught to run down life's usual safety checklist.
If anything, it shows that even the most independent of people shouldn't be left alone when a friend has passed.
It does cover ozone.
And who would step up to privately fund them? Andrew Carnegie is long dead, and philanthropic rich people are rare and tend to pick their pet projects arbitrarily. And it's not like local libraries turn down private donations now; if people were willing to donate to them, they'd all be in better shape than they are.
While I don't believe your claim, even if it were true, I doubt very much that many use the public libraries to do so.
I think the public-good-costs-too-much tea partiers / fiscal conservatives will eventually shut down all the public libraries without Amazon or Apple's help.
They'll say, "Why should taxpayers who never use the library pay for it? If you want to read a book go to the local Barnes and Noble; they have a reading section. If anything the 'public' library is hurting this private business." Then later when all the Barnes and Noble stores close, they'll just point out that "if we needed access to paper books, the free-market would have kept B&N open."
And I think the Library of Congress falls into the "go to the zoo to see a lion" analogy for a physical book. Sure, they aren't going to close. But they no longer take a copy of every printed book. Their funding will be cut, too, and their outdated collections will simply become a research library. And it's not like important libraries have ever been accidentally burnt down.
Well if neural inhibitors (which interfere with the processing of certain parts of our neural network) cause us to lose consciousness, then one could hypothesize that those parts of our neural network must play a role in consciousness. And that makes us at least a little closer to understanding it.