This is one reason why we should be keeping more of the research money on terra firma. As far as helping humankind, the oceans have much more to offer than Mars or a passing meteor or a distant galaxy (at least at this point). I'm not saying that stuff isn't academically enriching, but it doesn't (directly) solve our earth-bound problems.
Part of the problem with the crap movies is that people actually pay to see them, begetting more crap movies.
The other night I watched About Schmidt with the girlfriend and her mother. I loved the movie! Character driven, emotional roles you can relate to.
The problem was I kept having to put up with the other two in the room making stupid comments ("That sure is an ugly wedding...looks like something from the 70s!") or asking out loud why so-and-so was or wasn't doing something. I tried to explain that the point of the movie was not a beautiful wedding scene, but a look at the life of Warren Schmidt.
It never sank in. I kept wanting to yell "Shut the fuck up!" Luckily, they both fell asleep (only to ask me what happened later).
A hint for those of you that like to "discuss" the movie: watch it and shut up, you might figure out what's going on. If not, you can always ask someone after the fact. Don't ruin it for the rest of us.
That's why I mentioned not holding on to a lightning rod.
Obviously, if I were standing in a puddle of water, I wouldn't have tried it. But most of the time I was in thick-soled work boots, standing on the plywood subfloor of a partially-constructed house.
I was also being a little sarcastic. Yes, I did grab 120V on many occasions (more like "brush up against" 120V), and occasionally wired circuits hot, but I had a healthy respect. Besides, if you're going to do electrical work for a living you ought to know what 120V feels like so you know what to expect and aren't unnecessarily skiddish.
Given that you do not take this disclaimer to heart and decide that you should like to attempt suicide with HV equipment, please read on.
Exactly. If you want to committ suicide follow this guy's advice.
Parent advises replacing all individual branch circuits coming from the panel, but fails to mention that the problem could easily lie in the main wiring to the panel.
Don't waste your time, money, or the safety of yourself or others. Hire a professional.
If your employer says they can't afford it, tell them to go fuck themselves, walk out, and immediately call your local inspector and report it. Then call OSHA and report your boss.
If you work for a unionized place, make sure to call your local IBEW and let them know your employer was trying to get you to do electrical work (just for kicks).
I was working for an electrician installing a large deli in a grocery store. We had pulled all our runs and left the pigtails hanging until after lunch.
When we returned, I started terminating the pigtails for outlets. I was assured by a coworker that everything was off. But another sub had flipped on everything looking for power for a drill.
I walked up to a pigtail for 240v, took my strippers, and snipped into all conductors at once (which I usually wouldn't have done). While this act blew a nice pretty hole in my strippers, it probably saved me a nasty shock in the end. The voltage decided to go back through the ground wire I shorted rather than through me.
Needless to say, my coworker about kicked some ass over that one.
I worked for a couple of electricians. Rather than pulling out the tester each time I needed to see if a circuit was "hot," I'd just touch it. No biggie as long as you weren't holding a lightning rod.
We also routinely wired in receptacles/switches (110) hot.
Usually when you have systems with high voltage they are designed to carry high current.
Relatively speaking (to kill a human), yes. But the reason we have high voltage lines in the first place is to reduce the needed current carrying capacity of the lines, and in turn reduce losses to heat.
Re:Good grief - In the good old days
on
Solving a Wiring Mess?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, in this case, it would be the massive amount of virtually unregulated power from a transformer that could kill you (no breaker to trip if mains shorts across you).
And while we're at it, you've got to also consider P=IV (although in this case the P is quite massive). If the voltage increases, the current must decrease in order to maintain the same power. This is the reason a stun gun won't kill you; it can only pump out X watts.
While I agree that generally speaking, standards are important, they don't apply so much in this case.
Your example of international shipping involves cargo being traded back and forth between countries, thereby necessitating standard shipping practices.
With space travel, however, you're mostly looking at each country doing this independently. The only example to support your case would be the ISS, where both US and Russian shuttles had to dock. They didn't have to design their entire craft to a set of common standards, though, just the interface from their respective shuttles to the ISS.
Unless we're very, very close to doing joint missions with other countries, I think the standardization issue is actually a non-issue. In fact, it would probably benefit technology and discovery more at this point to avoid standards between nations. Darwin's theories will go to work on a much grander (albeit unintended by Darwin) scale, weeding out the inferior designs and ideas, whether by minor failure or full-out destruction.
Don't worry. Dean is cloaking himself as a super liberal Democrat for the primaries (and voters like you) in order to grab the nomination. If he becomes the Democratic candidate, he will mellow out like a hippy at a peace rally in order to not appear so extreme.
I think your theory isn't very accurate. You seem to be saying "Gore didn't work last time because he was too conservative - we need a flaming liberal!" I think the better way for the Democrats to handle this would be to nominate the candidate that matches the pulse of the country. I mean really, are you looking for another Dukakis?
Think about it... Which would you rather vote for, someone who truly embodied what you believe a president should be, including the strength of their beliefs, or someone who based their platform on what they believe will get them elected?
A candidate can be as "strong" in their beliefs as they want - if they don't match mine they won't get my vote. Sure, honesty's good, but it doesn't mean I'll like you.
You think "the other guy" bases their platform "on what they believe will get them elected." To me, that's exactly what Dean is doing. Listen to some Sunday morning political quarterbacking shows. Many of the commentators will tell you Dean is out on the campaign trail lobbing liberal phrases in order to pull primary votes...very different from his rhetoric while governor.
In fact, if Dean is nominated, watch how shockingly fast he'll morph into a "middle-of-the-road" candidate.
Dean's an opportunist like the rest. He was a nobody, then realized he had some support with the "net-savvy" crowd, and embraced it. Big frickin' deal.
Does he run the damn blog? Does he code his own site? It's like saying John Kerry is "print-savvy" because his campaign makes yard signs.
If you like Dean because you like his ideas, great. But let's not get carried away with labelling him "net-savvy" because his campaign saw an opportunity to capitalize.
Spam is much, much cheaper for a candidate to send than snail mail. If political spam is protected as free speech, we will all be barraged with the crap from all levels of government (monthly, weekly, daily, hourly).
Also, it costs me money, directly or not, to receive tons of spam. It's not free speech when I have to pay for it.
Besides, since you're a political consultant, you should know that unsolicited ads from a candidate are not the best way to determine the truth. All your ads do is throw out little "one-liners" that make people drool.
Candidate X is for women's rights!
Candidate X thinks our soldiers should be paid more money!
Citizens that are truly interested in the candidates do their own research, not listen to the junk spewed by the campaign.
Yes, because Bush won't let Beavis and Butthead and half a million morons email him personally, wasting much money paying staff members to read the trash, his campaign isn't "net-savvy."
That is not going to happen in time for the 2004 election. But think of this, until the Internet US politics has been game where you take as much money in bribes from corporate America and then you spend your whole time in office paying back favors. Bush and Cheney are paying back $2000 for every $1 they collected from the super-rich. Next election they plan to spend $200 million. That means another $400 billion to be spent on tax cuts for the super rich when the budget deficit is heading for $700 billion. Don't think you are getting any of that unless you are one of the insider investors. Otherwise you are more likely to find that your investment in Bush reaps the same results as your investment in 'Kenny Boy' Lay's Enron.
You were going pretty good here with your reply until you went political, and you should be modded Offtopic.
This issue has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It has to do with politicians understanding how to (and not to) intelligently utilize a modern communication medium to spread their message. I can't imagine what your reply would have been like if Karl Rove would have authorized the spam.
If a hired admin fucks something up, they can only fire him. If the company you signed the support contract with fucks up you can sue them into oblivion, and save face for management by being able to say "at least it wasn't our people that screwed this up!"
Nice to see geeks branching out
on
Mirror, Mirror
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's always nice to see technology applied to art.
Ok, so it's not cutting edge stuff, but it sure does beat some of the dry, mundane applications we engineers use technology for on a daily basis.
On the other hand, engineers sometimes get more of an emotion from opening a control cabinet and seeing all the components neatly laid out, the wires nicely routed through ductwork, and little blinky LEDs. Not that I would, but...
Isn't it entirely possible that before said deregulation you were paying the same price, except you only saw what was on the bill? The utility industry was most likely subsidized by your tax dollars, in addition to the monthly bill you paid.
Post deregulation, your power company (private) probably didn't have the luxury of having a healthy tax revenue in addition to billed customers, so it had to get the income from somewhere...increased prices!
Add to this the decreased revenue seen by the government since the bubble-burst, and you've got a recipe for an ill-informed, seemingly cause-and-effect, backlash against the deregulation.
Considering Quebec's power grid had power to sell to our NYS neighours(that was a spokesperson on tv), but couldn't, because their grid was down, this seems more like a distribution problem, than a production problem.
It could actually be considered both, and have two solutions (redundancy?).
1. One power plant goes down, forcing its customers to pull power from a neighboring grid. The interface between grids should be "smart" enough to know that it can only suck so much power from the neighboring grid, and open the circuit, isolating the outage to a small area. One vote for a distribution problem.
2. One power plant goes down, forcing its customers to pull power from a neighboring grid. The neighboring grid has enough excess production capacity available to supply the downed grid next door, thereby not overloading its own system. Alternatively, the grid with the original problem has enough excess production capacity to cover its own ass in the event one of its plants goes down.
Two solutions to the same problem, and maybe a way to provide redundancy.
Amtrak loses money every day. In fact, if you purchase an Amtrak ticket, they lose money on you. They only stay in business because of government backing.
The USPS is in bad financial shape also. They're increasingly finding it harder to compete with FedEx/DHL/UPS. Hell, if it weren't for those private companies, the USPS wouldn't offer anywhere near the number of shipping options they do.
In the end, it's probably good that the USPS exists to provide some competition in the mail delivery business. But don't kid yourself into thinking your $0.37 stamp is the only thing paying the mailman's salary.
From the examples we've seen of "deregulation" thus far with major utilities, it doesn't work very well.
It seems that privatization could work, however, if the companies involved are held to very high standards by regulations. When a utility is planning on going from public to private, the gov't should strictly outline what is expected of the private company. If the company thinks the expectations are unreasonable, they don't take the contract.
If the company agrees to the regulations, then jacks prices to the customer (unreasonable above what the public utility prices were) after the utility is transferred to them, you'll get an immediate public outcry, and can know very quickly whether a private entity is capable of managing the utility.
I'm not saying privatization is the key everywhere, I just think it may not be handled correctly in all situations. Municipalities can't just throw a set of keys to a private company and hope for the best...it needs to be a gradual process, with oversight, as the company proves its capability to provide for the public good while making themselves enough profit to survive.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one reason why we should be keeping more of the research money on terra firma. As far as helping humankind, the oceans have much more to offer than Mars or a passing meteor or a distant galaxy (at least at this point). I'm not saying that stuff isn't academically enriching, but it doesn't (directly) solve our earth-bound problems.
The other night I watched About Schmidt with the girlfriend and her mother. I loved the movie! Character driven, emotional roles you can relate to.
The problem was I kept having to put up with the other two in the room making stupid comments ("That sure is an ugly wedding...looks like something from the 70s!") or asking out loud why so-and-so was or wasn't doing something. I tried to explain that the point of the movie was not a beautiful wedding scene, but a look at the life of Warren Schmidt.
It never sank in. I kept wanting to yell "Shut the fuck up!" Luckily, they both fell asleep (only to ask me what happened later).
A hint for those of you that like to "discuss" the movie: watch it and shut up, you might figure out what's going on. If not, you can always ask someone after the fact. Don't ruin it for the rest of us.
Obviously, if I were standing in a puddle of water, I wouldn't have tried it. But most of the time I was in thick-soled work boots, standing on the plywood subfloor of a partially-constructed house.
I was also being a little sarcastic. Yes, I did grab 120V on many occasions (more like "brush up against" 120V), and occasionally wired circuits hot, but I had a healthy respect. Besides, if you're going to do electrical work for a living you ought to know what 120V feels like so you know what to expect and aren't unnecessarily skiddish.
Exactly. If you want to committ suicide follow this guy's advice.
Parent advises replacing all individual branch circuits coming from the panel, but fails to mention that the problem could easily lie in the main wiring to the panel.
Don't waste your time, money, or the safety of yourself or others. Hire a professional.
If your employer says they can't afford it, tell them to go fuck themselves, walk out, and immediately call your local inspector and report it. Then call OSHA and report your boss.
If you work for a unionized place, make sure to call your local IBEW and let them know your employer was trying to get you to do electrical work (just for kicks).
I was working for an electrician installing a large deli in a grocery store. We had pulled all our runs and left the pigtails hanging until after lunch.
When we returned, I started terminating the pigtails for outlets. I was assured by a coworker that everything was off. But another sub had flipped on everything looking for power for a drill.
I walked up to a pigtail for 240v, took my strippers, and snipped into all conductors at once (which I usually wouldn't have done). While this act blew a nice pretty hole in my strippers, it probably saved me a nasty shock in the end. The voltage decided to go back through the ground wire I shorted rather than through me.
Needless to say, my coworker about kicked some ass over that one.
I worked for a couple of electricians. Rather than pulling out the tester each time I needed to see if a circuit was "hot," I'd just touch it. No biggie as long as you weren't holding a lightning rod.
We also routinely wired in receptacles/switches (110) hot.
Relatively speaking (to kill a human), yes. But the reason we have high voltage lines in the first place is to reduce the needed current carrying capacity of the lines, and in turn reduce losses to heat.
And while we're at it, you've got to also consider P=IV (although in this case the P is quite massive). If the voltage increases, the current must decrease in order to maintain the same power. This is the reason a stun gun won't kill you; it can only pump out X watts.
Your example of international shipping involves cargo being traded back and forth between countries, thereby necessitating standard shipping practices.
With space travel, however, you're mostly looking at each country doing this independently. The only example to support your case would be the ISS, where both US and Russian shuttles had to dock. They didn't have to design their entire craft to a set of common standards, though, just the interface from their respective shuttles to the ISS.
Unless we're very, very close to doing joint missions with other countries, I think the standardization issue is actually a non-issue. In fact, it would probably benefit technology and discovery more at this point to avoid standards between nations. Darwin's theories will go to work on a much grander (albeit unintended by Darwin) scale, weeding out the inferior designs and ideas, whether by minor failure or full-out destruction.
I think your theory isn't very accurate. You seem to be saying "Gore didn't work last time because he was too conservative - we need a flaming liberal!" I think the better way for the Democrats to handle this would be to nominate the candidate that matches the pulse of the country. I mean really, are you looking for another Dukakis?
A candidate can be as "strong" in their beliefs as they want - if they don't match mine they won't get my vote. Sure, honesty's good, but it doesn't mean I'll like you.
You think "the other guy" bases their platform "on what they believe will get them elected." To me, that's exactly what Dean is doing. Listen to some Sunday morning political quarterbacking shows. Many of the commentators will tell you Dean is out on the campaign trail lobbing liberal phrases in order to pull primary votes...very different from his rhetoric while governor.
In fact, if Dean is nominated, watch how shockingly fast he'll morph into a "middle-of-the-road" candidate.
But Dean uses a blog!
Dean takes contributions online!
Dean's an opportunist like the rest. He was a nobody, then realized he had some support with the "net-savvy" crowd, and embraced it. Big frickin' deal.
Does he run the damn blog? Does he code his own site? It's like saying John Kerry is "print-savvy" because his campaign makes yard signs.
If you like Dean because you like his ideas, great. But let's not get carried away with labelling him "net-savvy" because his campaign saw an opportunity to capitalize.
Also, it costs me money, directly or not, to receive tons of spam. It's not free speech when I have to pay for it.
Besides, since you're a political consultant, you should know that unsolicited ads from a candidate are not the best way to determine the truth. All your ads do is throw out little "one-liners" that make people drool.
Candidate X is for women's rights!
Candidate X thinks our soldiers should be paid more money!
Citizens that are truly interested in the candidates do their own research, not listen to the junk spewed by the campaign.
I see the association now. Really...I do.
It's funny how the slashdot crowd attacks spam like a rabid dog, then makes excuses when Dean does the spamming.
Ask yourself this: would you have forgiven so easily had it been the Bush campaign? If so, great. If not, let's try a little consistency.
You were going pretty good here with your reply until you went political, and you should be modded Offtopic.
This issue has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It has to do with politicians understanding how to (and not to) intelligently utilize a modern communication medium to spread their message. I can't imagine what your reply would have been like if Karl Rove would have authorized the spam.
If a hired admin fucks something up, they can only fire him. If the company you signed the support contract with fucks up you can sue them into oblivion, and save face for management by being able to say "at least it wasn't our people that screwed this up!"
Ok, so it's not cutting edge stuff, but it sure does beat some of the dry, mundane applications we engineers use technology for on a daily basis.
On the other hand, engineers sometimes get more of an emotion from opening a control cabinet and seeing all the components neatly laid out, the wires nicely routed through ductwork, and little blinky LEDs. Not that I would, but...
The sacking of Byzantium...Hadrian's wall being broken...I could go on and on...
Post deregulation, your power company (private) probably didn't have the luxury of having a healthy tax revenue in addition to billed customers, so it had to get the income from somewhere...increased prices!
Add to this the decreased revenue seen by the government since the bubble-burst, and you've got a recipe for an ill-informed, seemingly cause-and-effect, backlash against the deregulation.
It could actually be considered both, and have two solutions (redundancy?).
1. One power plant goes down, forcing its customers to pull power from a neighboring grid. The interface between grids should be "smart" enough to know that it can only suck so much power from the neighboring grid, and open the circuit, isolating the outage to a small area. One vote for a distribution problem.
2. One power plant goes down, forcing its customers to pull power from a neighboring grid. The neighboring grid has enough excess production capacity available to supply the downed grid next door, thereby not overloading its own system. Alternatively, the grid with the original problem has enough excess production capacity to cover its own ass in the event one of its plants goes down.
Two solutions to the same problem, and maybe a way to provide redundancy.
The USPS is in bad financial shape also. They're increasingly finding it harder to compete with FedEx/DHL/UPS. Hell, if it weren't for those private companies, the USPS wouldn't offer anywhere near the number of shipping options they do.
In the end, it's probably good that the USPS exists to provide some competition in the mail delivery business. But don't kid yourself into thinking your $0.37 stamp is the only thing paying the mailman's salary.
It seems that privatization could work, however, if the companies involved are held to very high standards by regulations. When a utility is planning on going from public to private, the gov't should strictly outline what is expected of the private company. If the company thinks the expectations are unreasonable, they don't take the contract.
If the company agrees to the regulations, then jacks prices to the customer (unreasonable above what the public utility prices were) after the utility is transferred to them, you'll get an immediate public outcry, and can know very quickly whether a private entity is capable of managing the utility.
I'm not saying privatization is the key everywhere, I just think it may not be handled correctly in all situations. Municipalities can't just throw a set of keys to a private company and hope for the best...it needs to be a gradual process, with oversight, as the company proves its capability to provide for the public good while making themselves enough profit to survive.