Why not support both (i.e. wind and nuclear)? Why not indeed?
A lot of the problem is that people who support wind think it is some kind of one-size-fits-all solution to the energy problem and continue to oppose nuclear in any form.
If two objects were flying formation in the Earth's atmosphere at Mach 3, matching their relative speed would be a big deal.
Under terrestrial conditions, there are all manner of random perturbations and ways that energy can couple into systems (i.e. make them smash) that flying high speed formation is tricky. It is even more serious at supersonic speed and that is why rocket staging is non-trivial and all the problems Space-X was having with rocket tests.
But in the vacuum of Earth orbital space, there is not much in the way of perturbations apart from the errant meteoroid, and flying formation is not big deal. Now getting the point of flying formation is a big deal as discovered by the Gemini crews on account of the Alice-in-Wonderland logic of orbital mechanics where thrusting forward (into a higher orbit) slows you down and retro thrusting (into a lower orbit) speed you up.
Where in Russia do they come up with all of these people with such theories?
Suppose the impactor is a comet. Approaching any collision with the Earth, it will have a velocity of about the Earth's escape velocity or even exceeding that.
OK, using liquid H2 and LOX, why don't we build single stage rockets that are able to reach Earth escape velocity? Because orbital velocity let alone escape velocity gives an object a kinetic energy that is large compared to the chemical energy in the hydrogen-oxygen bond. That means a rocket using H2 and LOX as propellant requires most of its mass as fuel, and it needs to impart the energy from that fuel it is rapidly discarding by burning and ejecting it on the tiny remaining mass fraction that is the space craft.
That means that the kinetic (.5 m v^2) energy of the impactor will far exceed any combustion energy of some small mass fraction of hydrogen and oxygen bubbles embedded in an icy substrate.
Which means that any combusting hydrogen will be hardly noticed in the much larger explosion from the kinetic impact of whatever (asteroid, comet) it was.
By the way, it is generally understood that most meteors are cometary and most meteorites are asteroidal. Even though comets put on a big gassy show, the Earth encounters vastly more asteroidal objects big enough to make it to ground level than comets (or explode over Tunguska). On the other hand, the few comets (compared to asteroids) that encounter the Earth are like hairy dogs that shed all over wherever they have gone (their orbital ellipses), and their detritus, the cometary dust grains, form the common meteors seen at night.
IBM or whoever named versions of Eclipse after the moons of Jupiter. The moons of Jupiter are named after the lovers of Zeus/Jupiter.
The version of Eclipse I am using for teaching at the University is Ganymede. The right-wing legislators are all over the U over
a male faculty member soliciting sex from a same-sex youth on the Internet and getting caught by a police sting.
The Greeks and perhaps even the Romans in ancient times had a different view of the gay thing or the bisexual thing or the age of
consent, although I suppose if you are a god, there is no real consent but then not the same kind of punishment either.
So anyway, I am using in class something that is named to celebrate something that got probation and forced retirement for one
of my faculty colleagues.
It is like Sharpe explaining what it is like to lead an infantry assault against a fortified French garrison and that being the first person inside the wall breach, well, your life expectancy isn't too great, but one does this for King, Country, and Glory of it all.
When you rent a car, it is always catch-as-catch-can and whatever-they-want-to-stick-you-with.
I remember once cruising L.A. in the K-Car version of the Chrysler New Yorker or Imperial or whatever the heck they call it. I had driven a rental K-Car before, and this was essentially take your K-Car and pad it with some extra weight and sound insulation. I think it had the turbo 4-cyl motor so it had more oomph -- don't remember about turbo lag though.
So anyway, I make it from LAX to East Los Angeles on the Pomona Freeway before I realize in piloting my Geezer Galleon that I had my left blinker on the whole time. You see, it did not make any clicking sound, and if geezers drive these things, I now understand why the left blinker is always on.
Chief Medical Officer McCoy was on a first-name basis with Kirk, so it would be "He's dead, Jim" when one of the Red Shirts got zapped or "Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer!" or something to that effect.
Chief Science Officer Spock also had a close relationship with Kirk, but he would only call him "Jim" on rare occasions when he would let his Vulcan-logic show-no-emotion guard down for a a nanosecond. I am sure it would be "It's life, Captain, but not as we know it." Also, the determination of whether alien entities were life was a Science Office job, not a Medical Officer responsibility, as the Medical Officer was quick to point out the things that were outside his job description.
It is a practical means of transportation in some but not other environments, it is supposed to be good for you and it is Politically Correct, people seem to think they can pick it up with a minimum of skill and many do, but you would have a whole heck of a lot more fun if you were on downhill skiis or on a snowboard and knew what you were doing.
Fermi famously wondered that if life evolving into intelligent beings were common, we would be visited by aliens from other worlds all the time. And since the evidence for UFO sightings being aliens is slim, where are all of these alien beings?
Maybe the answer is that each had evolved to doing such physics experiments that their home planets all got chomped by black holes.
I second your remarks about the costs not being anywhere near "only 50 percent more than a conventional system."
A colleague of mine lives on a small exurban farm, does hot water heat with LP gas, and supplements with a wood stove. His hot water furnace gave its death rattle and he had to put in a new system.
His replacement hot water furnace as $8000 as in eight-thousand-freakin'-dollars. I put in a new hot-air furnace (condensing, variable-speed DC blower, top-of-line) and a new 13.5 SEER central air 15 years ago for about half that money. But he got bids on "geothermal" (i.e. ground-sourced heat pump) in the $30,000 range.
Mind you he lives on enough land that it is not one of the these deals, "oh, we have to figure out to get the backhoe into your yard without trampling the neighbors flower garden." He has enough space to put some equipment in and trench away. Thirty-thousand-even-more-freakin'-dollars, what is that all about? You can get a septic mound put in for 10K as a more or less standard install.
I am beginning to think this is tied into the housing bubble. A lot of those exurban home owners are retired doctors from the town with the teaching hospital, a lot of them are politically "progressive" about energy use and have money, and the 30K may be a question of sticking it too people for what the market can take. The 8K high-efficiency propane hot water furnace may be the same deal, and I suspect that prices of heating plants and central air are at an all-time high. My colleague is not in that category and had to take out a second loan on his house.
I went to this evening energy-saving seminar from the local utility company a couple years back, where they lay the guilt trip on you for not spending on the latest energy saving appliances. One of the people drawn to this thing was this lady who lived out in the exurbs (yeah, yeah, if you believe the hype, these people living "in the country" in the far outskirts of cities are "part of the problem", but these are the folks who have enough land to dig the trenches for these systems).
She had put in a ground-source heatpump, and it was nothing but trouble along with getting the contractor to give her some kind of satisfaction on getting the system working. I think at the time that system had broken down, and she was in October in a Northern state without heat, having waited all summer for a new compressor. She was there at this "energy seminar" to get some sort of feedback or help on how to get this wonder energy-saving system working. She also wasn't getting much satisfaction from the utility-company dudes. I took a look at the bills she brought and was able to tell her that this system was seriously underperforming, essentially performing at the level of electric resistance heat. She thought too that the compressor breakdown had to do that the system wasn't installed or sized correctly and was putting too much wear on the unit.
The other thing to consider is that they got rid of that gosh-darn Rankine (steam or vapor cycle) in railroad locomotives long ago, they are getting rid of it in electric power plants, and the last holdout of the troublesome thing is in nuclear power plants and home AC/heatpumps. Given that you have to maintain a charge of fake-Freon, which tends to leak out of systems over time, and what they stick you for of repairs of such leaks, and then issues of the lifetime of a compressor compared to a combustion furnace without such moving parts, it is possible to spend as much on first costs and maintenance of such systems as you get back in fuel or electric cost.
Talking about the utility-company guilt trip about going with the latest gadgets, the suits were pushing on-demand gas water heaters. Not soon after that, flames started shooting out of my gas water heater, and I had the utility guy over (one of the service techs, and you pay for the service call), not one of the suits, who condemned my water heater. I made some calls to plumbing companies without finding anyone who would install an on-demand unit. I asked the u
What I gather from those links is that R is largely a kind of "server" application for which there are a number of GUI front ends or "clients", some of them platform-specific, and one of them -- JGR -- Java based, which in theory is platform neutral, but I will consider your warning about difficulties under Linux that may require some patience.
To make the GUI front end Java based seems to be a trend (if Matlab, Mathematica, and Maple make up a trend), and JGR appears to be the R answer to my question.
The question about calling R from Java is also addressed. Unanswered is whether R can invoke Java. If it can do that, it would make R Yet Another Java Scripting Language along with Groovy, Beanshell, Jython, and yes, even Matlab. I guess the thing to do is try out JGR and see what features it supports and whether Java classes may be invoked from the Command Window or from scripts. Once the GUI is written in Java the ability to operate on Java classes is not far behind owing to class loaders, reflection, and related features in Java.
One of the "secrets" I tell students about Matlab is that is Java in reality.
On one level, Matlab, or at least the Figure Windows and M-File editor and Command Windows are written in Java and the main Matlab windows are JFrames. People talk about Java having not gotten anywhere "on the client" and "where are the Java shrinkwrap apps", but a bunch of stuff -- Matlab, Mathematica, Maple -- have GUI front-ends done in Java. You can tell because when one of these packages is slow to load, you see the "flaming coffee cup" icon on the taskbar.
Word and even OO may not be written in Java, but for the apps in question, there is a big demand for having them on the Unices on account of the academic market for them, and Java appears to be the cross-platform GUI thingy of choice for this tier of commercial apps.
So, is the R front end Java-based, or are they using something else to be cross-platform?
The other thing about Matlab is that it is usable as a Java scripting environment. You can create instances of Java classes from the command window, assign these instances to Matlab variables, pass (by value) Matlab arrays in and out of Java functions without too much fuss, poke at Java class instances (that is invoke methods on them).
You can even embed Java Swing widgets in Figure Windows, although the javacomponent Matlab command is thinly documented and perhaps not yet officially supported.
Does R allow the same thing? How Java friendy/compatible/implemented is it?
The issue I see MVC addressing is the transition from Model-View-Controller to Model-View (or Document-View) to just plain View, or widget, the MS Windows default state of affairs.
The temptation is to place all of the functionality into one entity -- a widget, an ActiveX control. Model, GUI presentation logic, how it interacts with everything else, all this is packaged into a unitary entity. Great for lock-in to a vendor or OS or platform.
In my thinking, controllers serve a useful purpose to break free of vendor-GUI lock-in. The model, of course, contains the data and logic in a GUI-agnostic way. But the problem is that "model" may only constitute 10 percent of your program -- the bulk of code in a GUI app deals with GUI concerns of one kind or another.
The controller, on the other hand, contains GUI logic, but in a platform-agnostic way. It is the view and the view alone that has the lock-in to Windows or Java Swing or whatever the GUI-du-jour. Separating view and controller, I believe, is the way to get more of your application not tied into whatever GUI you are using.
I encountered this situation when I used green and cyan (blue-green) to distinguish a pair of plots, and a colleague asked if I could use different colors instead of different shades of the same color on those plots.
You can get mad at me if you want for being insensitive to this condition, but my colleauge asks, "what is this cat-that-ate-the-canary grin all about", in a friendly way as we are long-time friends. I answered, "I didn't know that I had put one of those DMV vision tests into the software. At least I don't think I use a cyan-green contrast in the following version of the software.
I am not sure if my colleague knew about his color receptor condition as what is called "color blindness" varies genetically, and he may not have known he had this condition as he may have been reasonably well adapted to the contrasts he was required to distinguish in daily life.
It just goes to show you that you get what you pay for when you buy something like a chain saw at a discount outlet.
I bought a chain saw because the guy I contracted to paint some buildings on the property told me I had to clear all of the brush, or it would cost me a lot of money if he did it. He told me what brand and model of saw to get, and he told me to buy three extra chains on account of the kind of work I was taking on: "the second you touch stone working close to the building, you have dulled the chain and are going to have to change it out, and by the amount of work you have, you are going to need three spares."
I also bought it from a place that showed me how to start and stop the saw, how to set the chain tension, how to change the chain. I also checked with them about their arrangement for sharpening chains.
So my wife is cleaning out some junk on one of those buildings and comes across one of those cheapo saws you buy at the discount store. It must have been left behind by my dad some years ago. I cleaned out the gummed up gas and got the saw to run -- it doesn't cut quite as fast as the fancy saw the painting guy made me get, but with a new chain on it, it runs OK.
When the saw was rediscovered, the chain tension was completely slack and the chain teeth were as dull as toothless gums. I guess this saw didn't see much use as I never remember my dad doing anything with it. It probably got used until the chain dulled up and Dad decided that "this saw is no good" and it got buried in a pile of other junk. But I suppose no one told him about keeping sharp chains on the thing or how to do change outs or even how to set the tension.
As to blaming customers for being stupid about user interfaces on everything from chain saws to computers, there is something to be said about proper training and for purchasing from sales outlets that provide that training.
How much of this effect you are seeing is compression or coder artifact, and how much is the LCD display (if that is what you are using)?
People are catching on to the "sample-and-hold" effect that even the fastest response-time LCDs produce loads of motion blur on account that they hold the image rather than scan-strobe it as a traditional video monitor. Google "LCD motion blur sample and hold" to see what people say on this.
Wrong answers to questions on central planning vs. free markets, however, are due to a devotion to a philosophy that is just wrong.
There was only one question on the whole test that solicited an answer that favored free markets over central planning. There was another question that appeared to favor government action to solve the "free rider" or "tragedy of the commons" problem that is commonly cited as a defect of unregulated free enterprise. And there was another question that was backed up by Keynesian Theory of how a government should respond to an economic recession.
The ISI is an organization that many would characterize as "right wing." I see the question about the advantages of free enterprise as "getting their licks in." But if one has a left-wing world view, there might be only one question on the whole test one would get wrong.
I would think that someone with a "liberal", "progressive", or "left-wing" world view would be at an advantage to get the question about War Powers correct -- yes, presidents have been sending our soldiers all over the place, but that Congress has not declared war on anybody since 1941 is a major talking point in such circles.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the problem is that people who support wind think it is some kind of one-size-fits-all solution to the energy problem and continue to oppose nuclear in any form.
Wings by British Aerospace
System integration by Aerospatiale
Engines by . . . God help us . . . Fiat
Under terrestrial conditions, there are all manner of random perturbations and ways that energy can couple into systems (i.e. make them smash) that flying high speed formation is tricky. It is even more serious at supersonic speed and that is why rocket staging is non-trivial and all the problems Space-X was having with rocket tests.
But in the vacuum of Earth orbital space, there is not much in the way of perturbations apart from the errant meteoroid, and flying formation is not big deal. Now getting the point of flying formation is a big deal as discovered by the Gemini crews on account of the Alice-in-Wonderland logic of orbital mechanics where thrusting forward (into a higher orbit) slows you down and retro thrusting (into a lower orbit) speed you up.
Suppose the impactor is a comet. Approaching any collision with the Earth, it will have a velocity of about the Earth's escape velocity or even exceeding that.
OK, using liquid H2 and LOX, why don't we build single stage rockets that are able to reach Earth escape velocity? Because orbital velocity let alone escape velocity gives an object a kinetic energy that is large compared to the chemical energy in the hydrogen-oxygen bond. That means a rocket using H2 and LOX as propellant requires most of its mass as fuel, and it needs to impart the energy from that fuel it is rapidly discarding by burning and ejecting it on the tiny remaining mass fraction that is the space craft.
That means that the kinetic (.5 m v^2) energy of the impactor will far exceed any combustion energy of some small mass fraction of hydrogen and oxygen bubbles embedded in an icy substrate.
Which means that any combusting hydrogen will be hardly noticed in the much larger explosion from the kinetic impact of whatever (asteroid, comet) it was.
By the way, it is generally understood that most meteors are cometary and most meteorites are asteroidal. Even though comets put on a big gassy show, the Earth encounters vastly more asteroidal objects big enough to make it to ground level than comets (or explode over Tunguska). On the other hand, the few comets (compared to asteroids) that encounter the Earth are like hairy dogs that shed all over wherever they have gone (their orbital ellipses), and their detritus, the cometary dust grains, form the common meteors seen at night.
The Greeks and perhaps even the Romans in ancient times had a different view of the gay thing or the bisexual thing or the age of consent, although I suppose if you are a god, there is no real consent but then not the same kind of punishment either.
So anyway, I am using in class something that is named to celebrate something that got probation and forced retirement for one of my faculty colleagues.
Shylock (not a lender of money, but a plastic surgeon): I will have my 5 pounds of butt flesh!
Stedmann: (As lawyer representing Oprah). Be my guest. It won't even be missed!
How about the guy trying to get the gopher singing "The Balad of the Green Beret"?
It is like Sharpe explaining what it is like to lead an infantry assault against a fortified French garrison and that being the first person inside the wall breach, well, your life expectancy isn't too great, but one does this for King, Country, and Glory of it all.
Atlanta, however, is the one place where people seem to think NASCAR is real life.
I remember once cruising L.A. in the K-Car version of the Chrysler New Yorker or Imperial or whatever the heck they call it. I had driven a rental K-Car before, and this was essentially take your K-Car and pad it with some extra weight and sound insulation. I think it had the turbo 4-cyl motor so it had more oomph -- don't remember about turbo lag though.
So anyway, I make it from LAX to East Los Angeles on the Pomona Freeway before I realize in piloting my Geezer Galleon that I had my left blinker on the whole time. You see, it did not make any clicking sound, and if geezers drive these things, I now understand why the left blinker is always on.
Chief Science Officer Spock also had a close relationship with Kirk, but he would only call him "Jim" on rare occasions when he would let his Vulcan-logic show-no-emotion guard down for a a nanosecond. I am sure it would be "It's life, Captain, but not as we know it." Also, the determination of whether alien entities were life was a Science Office job, not a Medical Officer responsibility, as the Medical Officer was quick to point out the things that were outside his job description.
It is a practical means of transportation in some but not other environments, it is supposed to be good for you and it is Politically Correct, people seem to think they can pick it up with a minimum of skill and many do, but you would have a whole heck of a lot more fun if you were on downhill skiis or on a snowboard and knew what you were doing.
Maybe the answer is that each had evolved to doing such physics experiments that their home planets all got chomped by black holes.
I second your remarks about the costs not being anywhere near "only 50 percent more than a conventional system." A colleague of mine lives on a small exurban farm, does hot water heat with LP gas, and supplements with a wood stove. His hot water furnace gave its death rattle and he had to put in a new system. His replacement hot water furnace as $8000 as in eight-thousand-freakin'-dollars. I put in a new hot-air furnace (condensing, variable-speed DC blower, top-of-line) and a new 13.5 SEER central air 15 years ago for about half that money. But he got bids on "geothermal" (i.e. ground-sourced heat pump) in the $30,000 range. Mind you he lives on enough land that it is not one of the these deals, "oh, we have to figure out to get the backhoe into your yard without trampling the neighbors flower garden." He has enough space to put some equipment in and trench away. Thirty-thousand-even-more-freakin'-dollars, what is that all about? You can get a septic mound put in for 10K as a more or less standard install. I am beginning to think this is tied into the housing bubble. A lot of those exurban home owners are retired doctors from the town with the teaching hospital, a lot of them are politically "progressive" about energy use and have money, and the 30K may be a question of sticking it too people for what the market can take. The 8K high-efficiency propane hot water furnace may be the same deal, and I suspect that prices of heating plants and central air are at an all-time high. My colleague is not in that category and had to take out a second loan on his house. I went to this evening energy-saving seminar from the local utility company a couple years back, where they lay the guilt trip on you for not spending on the latest energy saving appliances. One of the people drawn to this thing was this lady who lived out in the exurbs (yeah, yeah, if you believe the hype, these people living "in the country" in the far outskirts of cities are "part of the problem", but these are the folks who have enough land to dig the trenches for these systems). She had put in a ground-source heatpump, and it was nothing but trouble along with getting the contractor to give her some kind of satisfaction on getting the system working. I think at the time that system had broken down, and she was in October in a Northern state without heat, having waited all summer for a new compressor. She was there at this "energy seminar" to get some sort of feedback or help on how to get this wonder energy-saving system working. She also wasn't getting much satisfaction from the utility-company dudes. I took a look at the bills she brought and was able to tell her that this system was seriously underperforming, essentially performing at the level of electric resistance heat. She thought too that the compressor breakdown had to do that the system wasn't installed or sized correctly and was putting too much wear on the unit. The other thing to consider is that they got rid of that gosh-darn Rankine (steam or vapor cycle) in railroad locomotives long ago, they are getting rid of it in electric power plants, and the last holdout of the troublesome thing is in nuclear power plants and home AC/heatpumps. Given that you have to maintain a charge of fake-Freon, which tends to leak out of systems over time, and what they stick you for of repairs of such leaks, and then issues of the lifetime of a compressor compared to a combustion furnace without such moving parts, it is possible to spend as much on first costs and maintenance of such systems as you get back in fuel or electric cost. Talking about the utility-company guilt trip about going with the latest gadgets, the suits were pushing on-demand gas water heaters. Not soon after that, flames started shooting out of my gas water heater, and I had the utility guy over (one of the service techs, and you pay for the service call), not one of the suits, who condemned my water heater. I made some calls to plumbing companies without finding anyone who would install an on-demand unit. I asked the u
What I gather from those links is that R is largely a kind of "server" application for which there are a number of GUI front ends or "clients", some of them platform-specific, and one of them -- JGR -- Java based, which in theory is platform neutral, but I will consider your warning about difficulties under Linux that may require some patience.
To make the GUI front end Java based seems to be a trend (if Matlab, Mathematica, and Maple make up a trend), and JGR appears to be the R answer to my question.
The question about calling R from Java is also addressed. Unanswered is whether R can invoke Java. If it can do that, it would make R Yet Another Java Scripting Language along with Groovy, Beanshell, Jython, and yes, even Matlab. I guess the thing to do is try out JGR and see what features it supports and whether Java classes may be invoked from the Command Window or from scripts. Once the GUI is written in Java the ability to operate on Java classes is not far behind owing to class loaders, reflection, and related features in Java.
On one level, Matlab, or at least the Figure Windows and M-File editor and Command Windows are written in Java and the main Matlab windows are JFrames. People talk about Java having not gotten anywhere "on the client" and "where are the Java shrinkwrap apps", but a bunch of stuff -- Matlab, Mathematica, Maple -- have GUI front-ends done in Java. You can tell because when one of these packages is slow to load, you see the "flaming coffee cup" icon on the taskbar.
Word and even OO may not be written in Java, but for the apps in question, there is a big demand for having them on the Unices on account of the academic market for them, and Java appears to be the cross-platform GUI thingy of choice for this tier of commercial apps.
So, is the R front end Java-based, or are they using something else to be cross-platform?
The other thing about Matlab is that it is usable as a Java scripting environment. You can create instances of Java classes from the command window, assign these instances to Matlab variables, pass (by value) Matlab arrays in and out of Java functions without too much fuss, poke at Java class instances (that is invoke methods on them).
You can even embed Java Swing widgets in Figure Windows, although the javacomponent Matlab command is thinly documented and perhaps not yet officially supported.
Does R allow the same thing? How Java friendy/compatible/implemented is it?
The article is about "engineer Age-Raymond Riise", and no jokes yet about, you know?
Also need to work some reference to going blind . . .
All your billboard are belong to us!
The issue I see MVC addressing is the transition from Model-View-Controller to Model-View (or Document-View) to just plain View, or widget, the MS Windows default state of affairs.
The temptation is to place all of the functionality into one entity -- a widget, an ActiveX control. Model, GUI presentation logic, how it interacts with everything else, all this is packaged into a unitary entity. Great for lock-in to a vendor or OS or platform.
In my thinking, controllers serve a useful purpose to break free of vendor-GUI lock-in. The model, of course, contains the data and logic in a GUI-agnostic way. But the problem is that "model" may only constitute 10 percent of your program -- the bulk of code in a GUI app deals with GUI concerns of one kind or another.
The controller, on the other hand, contains GUI logic, but in a platform-agnostic way. It is the view and the view alone that has the lock-in to Windows or Java Swing or whatever the GUI-du-jour. Separating view and controller, I believe, is the way to get more of your application not tied into whatever GUI you are using.
You can get mad at me if you want for being insensitive to this condition, but my colleauge asks, "what is this cat-that-ate-the-canary grin all about", in a friendly way as we are long-time friends. I answered, "I didn't know that I had put one of those DMV vision tests into the software. At least I don't think I use a cyan-green contrast in the following version of the software.
I am not sure if my colleague knew about his color receptor condition as what is called "color blindness" varies genetically, and he may not have known he had this condition as he may have been reasonably well adapted to the contrasts he was required to distinguish in daily life.
I bought a chain saw because the guy I contracted to paint some buildings on the property told me I had to clear all of the brush, or it would cost me a lot of money if he did it. He told me what brand and model of saw to get, and he told me to buy three extra chains on account of the kind of work I was taking on: "the second you touch stone working close to the building, you have dulled the chain and are going to have to change it out, and by the amount of work you have, you are going to need three spares."
I also bought it from a place that showed me how to start and stop the saw, how to set the chain tension, how to change the chain. I also checked with them about their arrangement for sharpening chains.
So my wife is cleaning out some junk on one of those buildings and comes across one of those cheapo saws you buy at the discount store. It must have been left behind by my dad some years ago. I cleaned out the gummed up gas and got the saw to run -- it doesn't cut quite as fast as the fancy saw the painting guy made me get, but with a new chain on it, it runs OK.
When the saw was rediscovered, the chain tension was completely slack and the chain teeth were as dull as toothless gums. I guess this saw didn't see much use as I never remember my dad doing anything with it. It probably got used until the chain dulled up and Dad decided that "this saw is no good" and it got buried in a pile of other junk. But I suppose no one told him about keeping sharp chains on the thing or how to do change outs or even how to set the tension.
As to blaming customers for being stupid about user interfaces on everything from chain saws to computers, there is something to be said about proper training and for purchasing from sales outlets that provide that training.
People are catching on to the "sample-and-hold" effect that even the fastest response-time LCDs produce loads of motion blur on account that they hold the image rather than scan-strobe it as a traditional video monitor. Google "LCD motion blur sample and hold" to see what people say on this.
So I tell the salesman, this HD display looks like c...p. And he tells, "its not HD, its SD."
Wrong answers to questions on central planning vs. free markets, however, are due to a devotion to a philosophy that is just wrong.
There was only one question on the whole test that solicited an answer that favored free markets over central planning. There was another question that appeared to favor government action to solve the "free rider" or "tragedy of the commons" problem that is commonly cited as a defect of unregulated free enterprise. And there was another question that was backed up by Keynesian Theory of how a government should respond to an economic recession.
The ISI is an organization that many would characterize as "right wing." I see the question about the advantages of free enterprise as "getting their licks in." But if one has a left-wing world view, there might be only one question on the whole test one would get wrong.
I would think that someone with a "liberal", "progressive", or "left-wing" world view would be at an advantage to get the question about War Powers correct -- yes, presidents have been sending our soldiers all over the place, but that Congress has not declared war on anybody since 1941 is a major talking point in such circles.