... how much watermelon is really grown in the US? Even if you used all of the leftover 20%, I doubt you'd make much of a dent in our fuel supply requirement. And given that it costs rather a lot of money to make a distilling plant, I can't see how you'd recover your costs. I just don't see leftover watermelon as a very important source of energy in any realistic scenario.
You'd basically be making wine out of watermelon juice, and because watermelon doesn't seem to have much acidity or tannin to it, you'd get a very, very insipid beverage. Think weak vodka and water with a faint watermelon aroma. You could make it better by adding acid blend (typically a mixture of malic, tartaric, and citric acids) and grape tannin... but unless I had a source of free watermelons, I doubt I'd bother.
No doubt if you look hard enough, you can find various things that the US does better than other countries. But in the big measures: longevity, infant mortality, cost, etc... we're not in the top 10... or 20... or 30. The numbers I've seen are like 37th place in life expectancy at birth and 33rd in infant mortality. And of course we spend a huge amount more than other countries to get these results.
The only reason government-only health care might be a bad option in the US is because it would be the American government running it, and the American government is uniquely and completely dysfunctional when it comes to delivering effective domestic programmes.
Not true at all - we already have a couple of health programs being run by the US government - Medicare and the VA health system are two of the biggest... and both of these consistently outscore private programs in areas like cost, customer satisfaction, and health outcomes. The idea that the US government can't provide quality domestic services is simply a lie put out by conservatives with an ideological axe to grind.
Other than that, I agree completely with the parent post.
... does it say they used Windows? At a recent conference on software safety and security, I heard a presentation on this topic that indicated that a lot of these incidents are like the one quoted in the article - a disgruntled employee or ex-employee with knowledge of how the system works, hacks into the wireless control network, and causes damage by incorrectly operating valves or altering sensor readings, causing an inappropriate reaction by the system. The example quoted was a water treatment facility that was part of a resort complex in Australia. Like this example, one of the contractors that installed the wirelessly operated system was disgruntled over not getting a permanent job. So he showed up outside the facility with a wireless equipped laptop, gained access to the system, and caused raw sewage to be discharged into the environment. He did this repeatedly before being caught. But this had nothing whatsoever to do with Windows.
Given that the article provides no examples, I take the line about "computer viruses causing injuries and production losses" with a huge grain of salt. I'd bet the mortgage payment that what really happened is that computer viruses in non-essential, but Windows based systems caused economic damages by deleting or altering financially significant data.
According to a group of Stanford researchers... multitaskers are bad at multitasking. The research team is also studying how to design computer voices for cars that result in safer driving.
So, what you're telling me is that multitaskers are bad at multitasking... and the researchers who figured this out were multitasking when they did it?
And the reason they weren't cheaper had little to do with technology and a whole lot to do with legislation. The government made is so difficult and expensive to build a nuclear power plant that the utilities and investors simply gave up.
Ten years ago, at SONGS, the estimate for installing conduit was $1,000 per foot. Not because there was anything special about the conduit being used, but because of the associated documentation, legal, and filing fees.
Right. And of course there's no particular reason that the governments of the world imposed all these regulations on nuclear plants. It's not like they're DANGEROUS or anything.
Much is made of the fact that the TMI accident didn't cause any particular amount of environmental damage (and I believe this view to be correct, by the way). You should realize that the REASON it didn't cause environmental damage is that nuclear plant construction is very, very heavily regulated. Can you imagine what might have happened if, instead of using the expensive, highly quality controlled parts, TMI had been built with lowest-bidder parts? Or used minimum wage operators instead of the highly trained, heavily inspected folks they actually have? A big chunk of Pennsylvania might be uninhabitable today.
The government didn't institute all these regulations because they wanted to be mean to the nuclear industry. They instituted them to protect the population from the danger of nuclear accidents. Yes, accidents are rare. They're rare BECAUSE of the heavy regulations in place. Which means nuclear power is expensive, and will remain so.
The Canadian government claims that some of the waters of the Northwest Passage, particularly those in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, are internal to Canada, giving Canada the right to bar transit through these waters.[6] Most maritime nations,[37] including the United States and the nations of the European Union,[38] consider them to be an international strait, where foreign vessels have the right of "transit passage".
So it's hardly the case that the big, bad, US is beating up on Canada. Pretty much the only country that accepts Canada's claim is, well, Canada.
This is hardly a settled question. The Canadians claim these waters as their territory, the US does not accept the claim. So I don't feel particularly compelled to accept your version of the matter.
But, of course, coastal cities might be in for a world of hurt (although given that holland has an average elevation of -2 meter, whereas the worst US coastal city has an average elevation of +3 meter, and something like New York has over 5, the absolute worst case sea level rise of 95 centimeters by 2100
Right. They "average" significantly higher than the expected sea level. So only PARTS of our highly expensive coastal real estate will end up underwater. That shouldn't be any problem at all. Not mention the fact that much of the densely populated and very low-lying nation of Bangladesh, for example, will end up submerged. And this:
Not to burst your bubble, but "our habitat", of large mammals in general becomes actually much better (esp. much larger, but also easier to farm) at a higher global temperature. Lush forests in greenland house a hell of a lot more creatures, and humans, than ice valleys and gletsjers.
Except that the great plains, the breadbasket of the US, is predicted to become significantly drier... to the point where agriculture would become essentially impossible over large areas currently being farmed. But that's OK, Greenland is going to become very productive!
I've got a Powerbook G4, running 10.5.x... which is still a fairly powerful machine, right? Well, yes, but... increasing numbers of software packages won't run on anything but Intel-based Macs, or alternatively, have features crippled when running on PPC Macs. So even though there's nothing wrong with the machine, and it still has sufficient horsepower to do just about anything... Steve is going to force me to buy a new one if I want to run modern software. Yay, Mac.
In short (and unlike some examples), the summary is perfectly accurate.
Yes, and perfectly misleading. The summary deliberately leaves out this relevant information to make the discovery sound more interesting than it is. It's clearly meant to sound like a real-life version of the stuff they used in the Star Trek film, when in fact, this material bears little resemblance to that. Let's not blame the Slashdot readers for being misled, when the author plainly meant to mislead them.
Not only does the "transparency" only last for 40 femtoseconds (!), but it's only transparent in the extreme ultraviolet. So don't go dusting off your plans for whale tanks yet.
... the App Store sucks. This is yet another example of why it's bad that for a given platform, you are required to get your software from a manufacturer approved repository. Don't get me wrong, repositories are great. But not if you're forced to use them, and especially not when the repository owner manipulates the software selection to suit themselves. I smell an anti-competitive lawsuit in the making here.
There are different solutions in place. One system I worked on used a mixture of OSs: VxWorks for the actual fire control computers, a commercial *nix for the display/control computers, and Red Hat for the program loading/data extraction functions. The actual software running on these was all custom. Obviously there would be serious issues trying to design malware for such a thing, and I can't think how you'd implant it. Of course, there was simply no way to connect to the internet with this. You'd essentially have to subvert a servicemember - getting him to deliberately load a bad program, and hope no one noticed. And how you'd design malware for this is beyond me, since you'd have no access to the hardware (which was a mixture of COTS and custom stuff).
While I'm generally in favor of reducing the number of nukes out there, the linked article is just crap. A few items for consideration:
Nuclear command and control networks are not connected to the internet (duh).
Windows is not used in weapons systems.
The military does not permit the use of flash drives, etc, even in unclassified systems, which makes moving malware from the internet to closed, non-internet connected systems rather more difficult. Really secure systems (like nuclear weapons control, etc) don't even HAVE floppy drives, USB ports, or other ways to sneak in malware (they're typically loaded via tape drive, or they use CDs that are cryptographically signed).
Over-the-air communications involving any weapon system control data are heavily encrypted.
I tried reading the report, but the intro was so stupid I couldn't be bothered to continue. This is pure scare-mongering.
I work in the world of USN conventional weapon safety, and I absolutely freakin' guarantee you that the nuclear world does not allow Windows to mix with nuclear weapon control. You can't even get permission to use Windows for conventional weapon controls, and you can't blow up a whole city with a conventional weapon.
What I read was simply that wind power was not all sweetness and light like some in the eco movement would have us believe. Those that slam on minute amounts of radioactive waste from a nuclear power plant don't bat an eye on the primary (making the thing) or secondary (transporting) or even tertiary (road damage requiring massive amounts of oil to repair) costs of wind power.
Whereas drilling for/mining, refining, and transporting coal and oil is cost free, right? Last summer on I-95 in the DC area, a tanker truck full of some kind of petroleum product turned over and caught fire. 95 was shutdown for hours just to cleanup the mess, with the ensuing traffic chaos. Then, it turned out the asphalt had been weakened, so they had to grind off an extensive area of the highway and repave it. And of course, there are significant "primary" and "secondary" costs involved in conventional energy production too. And then you have to burn it, leading to giant discharges of CO2 and other pollutants. So it's not like avoiding the use of wind power is going to lead us to the land of magical ponies and no consequences.
The other party should have to prove he does have the money.
The other party, did, in fact, present considerable evidence that he was still in control of this money. He refused to show any evidence at all that he didn't. He was therefore ordered to pay, and refused.
Dude, he HAD the damn trial. The plantiffs presented evidence that he had control of this money. The judge ordered him to pay it. He refused and was jailed for contempt. He appealed 14 times and was each time told to obey the original court's order. This business of being imprisoned without trial is BS... he had the trial, and refused to abide by the results.
Geez, the assumption around here that the judge was some kind of moron who likes throwing people in jail for no particular reason is nuts. The guy appealed this order over a dozen times, and every time he was told (based on evidence the plaintiff had gathered) "you have the money - cough up". He just refused.
The plaintiff produced credible evidence that the guy was lying when he said he had used the funds to pay off a debt. He sent the money overseas, then snuck it back into the US and hid it somehow. He was far from innocent.
There was substantial evidence that the guy 1) moved the money out of the country, and 2) snuck it back into the country and hid it. He had like 14 appeals, and all the judges agreed with the original: the guy was thumbing his nose at the court. He could have gotten out of jail at any time if he had just done what the original court ordered. I have absolutely zero sympathy.
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Yeah, we should ignore all those hopelessly biased programmers, and listen to totally impartial you.
... how much watermelon is really grown in the US? Even if you used all of the leftover 20%, I doubt you'd make much of a dent in our fuel supply requirement. And given that it costs rather a lot of money to make a distilling plant, I can't see how you'd recover your costs. I just don't see leftover watermelon as a very important source of energy in any realistic scenario.
You'd basically be making wine out of watermelon juice, and because watermelon doesn't seem to have much acidity or tannin to it, you'd get a very, very insipid beverage. Think weak vodka and water with a faint watermelon aroma. You could make it better by adding acid blend (typically a mixture of malic, tartaric, and citric acids) and grape tannin... but unless I had a source of free watermelons, I doubt I'd bother.
No doubt if you look hard enough, you can find various things that the US does better than other countries. But in the big measures: longevity, infant mortality, cost, etc... we're not in the top 10... or 20... or 30. The numbers I've seen are like 37th place in life expectancy at birth and 33rd in infant mortality. And of course we spend a huge amount more than other countries to get these results.
Not true at all - we already have a couple of health programs being run by the US government - Medicare and the VA health system are two of the biggest... and both of these consistently outscore private programs in areas like cost, customer satisfaction, and health outcomes. The idea that the US government can't provide quality domestic services is simply a lie put out by conservatives with an ideological axe to grind.
Other than that, I agree completely with the parent post.
... but the actual article doesn't. I think we're assuming too much here.
... does it say they used Windows? At a recent conference on software safety and security, I heard a presentation on this topic that indicated that a lot of these incidents are like the one quoted in the article - a disgruntled employee or ex-employee with knowledge of how the system works, hacks into the wireless control network, and causes damage by incorrectly operating valves or altering sensor readings, causing an inappropriate reaction by the system. The example quoted was a water treatment facility that was part of a resort complex in Australia. Like this example, one of the contractors that installed the wirelessly operated system was disgruntled over not getting a permanent job. So he showed up outside the facility with a wireless equipped laptop, gained access to the system, and caused raw sewage to be discharged into the environment. He did this repeatedly before being caught. But this had nothing whatsoever to do with Windows.
Given that the article provides no examples, I take the line about "computer viruses causing injuries and production losses" with a huge grain of salt. I'd bet the mortgage payment that what really happened is that computer viruses in non-essential, but Windows based systems caused economic damages by deleting or altering financially significant data.
So, what you're telling me is that multitaskers are bad at multitasking... and the researchers who figured this out were multitasking when they did it?
Right. And of course there's no particular reason that the governments of the world imposed all these regulations on nuclear plants. It's not like they're DANGEROUS or anything.
Much is made of the fact that the TMI accident didn't cause any particular amount of environmental damage (and I believe this view to be correct, by the way). You should realize that the REASON it didn't cause environmental damage is that nuclear plant construction is very, very heavily regulated. Can you imagine what might have happened if, instead of using the expensive, highly quality controlled parts, TMI had been built with lowest-bidder parts? Or used minimum wage operators instead of the highly trained, heavily inspected folks they actually have? A big chunk of Pennsylvania might be uninhabitable today.
The government didn't institute all these regulations because they wanted to be mean to the nuclear industry. They instituted them to protect the population from the danger of nuclear accidents. Yes, accidents are rare. They're rare BECAUSE of the heavy regulations in place. Which means nuclear power is expensive, and will remain so.
... but, per Wikipedia:
So it's hardly the case that the big, bad, US is beating up on Canada. Pretty much the only country that accepts Canada's claim is, well, Canada.
This is hardly a settled question. The Canadians claim these waters as their territory, the US does not accept the claim. So I don't feel particularly compelled to accept your version of the matter.
And oh, by the way: it's "Arctic".
Right. They "average" significantly higher than the expected sea level. So only PARTS of our highly expensive coastal real estate will end up underwater. That shouldn't be any problem at all. Not mention the fact that much of the densely populated and very low-lying nation of Bangladesh, for example, will end up submerged. And this:
Except that the great plains, the breadbasket of the US, is predicted to become significantly drier... to the point where agriculture would become essentially impossible over large areas currently being farmed. But that's OK, Greenland is going to become very productive!
I've got a Powerbook G4, running 10.5.x... which is still a fairly powerful machine, right? Well, yes, but... increasing numbers of software packages won't run on anything but Intel-based Macs, or alternatively, have features crippled when running on PPC Macs. So even though there's nothing wrong with the machine, and it still has sufficient horsepower to do just about anything... Steve is going to force me to buy a new one if I want to run modern software. Yay, Mac.
Yes, and perfectly misleading. The summary deliberately leaves out this relevant information to make the discovery sound more interesting than it is. It's clearly meant to sound like a real-life version of the stuff they used in the Star Trek film, when in fact, this material bears little resemblance to that. Let's not blame the Slashdot readers for being misled, when the author plainly meant to mislead them.
Not only does the "transparency" only last for 40 femtoseconds (!), but it's only transparent in the extreme ultraviolet. So don't go dusting off your plans for whale tanks yet.
... the App Store sucks. This is yet another example of why it's bad that for a given platform, you are required to get your software from a manufacturer approved repository. Don't get me wrong, repositories are great. But not if you're forced to use them, and especially not when the repository owner manipulates the software selection to suit themselves. I smell an anti-competitive lawsuit in the making here.
There are different solutions in place. One system I worked on used a mixture of OSs: VxWorks for the actual fire control computers, a commercial *nix for the display/control computers, and Red Hat for the program loading/data extraction functions. The actual software running on these was all custom. Obviously there would be serious issues trying to design malware for such a thing, and I can't think how you'd implant it. Of course, there was simply no way to connect to the internet with this. You'd essentially have to subvert a servicemember - getting him to deliberately load a bad program, and hope no one noticed. And how you'd design malware for this is beyond me, since you'd have no access to the hardware (which was a mixture of COTS and custom stuff).
While I'm generally in favor of reducing the number of nukes out there, the linked article is just crap. A few items for consideration:
I tried reading the report, but the intro was so stupid I couldn't be bothered to continue. This is pure scare-mongering.
I work in the world of USN conventional weapon safety, and I absolutely freakin' guarantee you that the nuclear world does not allow Windows to mix with nuclear weapon control. You can't even get permission to use Windows for conventional weapon controls, and you can't blow up a whole city with a conventional weapon.
Whereas drilling for/mining, refining, and transporting coal and oil is cost free, right? Last summer on I-95 in the DC area, a tanker truck full of some kind of petroleum product turned over and caught fire. 95 was shutdown for hours just to cleanup the mess, with the ensuing traffic chaos. Then, it turned out the asphalt had been weakened, so they had to grind off an extensive area of the highway and repave it. And of course, there are significant "primary" and "secondary" costs involved in conventional energy production too. And then you have to burn it, leading to giant discharges of CO2 and other pollutants. So it's not like avoiding the use of wind power is going to lead us to the land of magical ponies and no consequences.
The other party, did, in fact, present considerable evidence that he was still in control of this money. He refused to show any evidence at all that he didn't. He was therefore ordered to pay, and refused.
Dude, he HAD the damn trial. The plantiffs presented evidence that he had control of this money. The judge ordered him to pay it. He refused and was jailed for contempt. He appealed 14 times and was each time told to obey the original court's order. This business of being imprisoned without trial is BS... he had the trial, and refused to abide by the results.
Geez, the assumption around here that the judge was some kind of moron who likes throwing people in jail for no particular reason is nuts. The guy appealed this order over a dozen times, and every time he was told (based on evidence the plaintiff had gathered) "you have the money - cough up". He just refused.
The plaintiff produced credible evidence that the guy was lying when he said he had used the funds to pay off a debt. He sent the money overseas, then snuck it back into the US and hid it somehow. He was far from innocent.
There was substantial evidence that the guy 1) moved the money out of the country, and 2) snuck it back into the country and hid it. He had like 14 appeals, and all the judges agreed with the original: the guy was thumbing his nose at the court. He could have gotten out of jail at any time if he had just done what the original court ordered. I have absolutely zero sympathy.