This illustrates an important point. From a purely rational safety perspective, you don't actually need the electronic display system to be perfect, with an absolutely impossible zero risk of failure. You just need the system to be less likely to fail - in a way that causes a serious accident - than the known weak point (window) it replaces.
Nobody complains about all those people jammed into a metal tube with no windows powered by a nuclear reactor and dumped into the ocean(s)...
On the other hand, the number of accidents per passenger-mile is probably a lot worse in nuclear submarines than in passenger aircraft. Broadly speaking, an overall higher risk of accidents and fatalities is tolerated in the military.
And honestly, military submarines (or any submarines, really) tend to be much more heavily built than aircraft, and travel at much lower speeds, both of which tend to make crashes much more survivable. Consider, for example, the 2005 collision of the USS San Francisco with a poorly-charted seamount. The fast-attack sub was travelling at its maximum speed (probably around 40 mph) when it smacked into solid rock--that it couldn't see, as they had no windows. Nobody drowned; the ship didn't sink; all of the injuries (and the one fatality) were caused by crew members getting bounced about by the collision. Compare and contrast with just about any aircraft incident involving controlled flight into terrain, where aircraft crumple like beer cans and everybody dies.
No, that would wreck the entire engineering of getting rid of the windows in the first place.
In principle, there could be 'emergency' windows that were smaller or more awkwardly placed (perhaps even requiring the use of a periscope or physical light pipe) that could nevertheless still be used to land a plane in the event of a complete failure of the electronic display system. From an engineering standpoint, even a switch from giant wrap-around windows to small portholes is still going to provide some improvement in strength and weight.
That said, it's worth noting two things. First, modern aircraft are so heavily electronics-dependent (and fly-by-wire driven) that in the event of a catastrophic failure of onboard electronics, the loss of virtual windows may not actually be the biggest problem on your plate. Second, modern aircraft are often rated for landing completely blind (at suitably equipped airports); even if you lose the view from the entire front 'window', a landing on instruments is still a reasonable option.
The point is, those solar lights at the dollar store? Yea... Make millions of them, throw them out in the desert, viola, carbon sink. You need to do something more with it beyond the acid, but this is the sort of idea we need to reduce already emitted CO2 after we've stopped creating all the extra.
Even if we ignore the carbon (and other toxic) footprint of creating and strewing millions of semiconductor devices across the desert, I really think you need to think about what happens to the formic acid. Left to its own devices, formic acid slowly and spontaneously decomposes to water and...carbon monoxide. Which is unpleasant enough by itself (and a greenhouse gas in its own right), but which in turn is slowly oxidized in the atmosphere right back to...carbon dioxide.
He died of heart problems. If you read the health effects they are claiming many of them seem just normal for a older person at that time. The rest might could also have been caused by chemical issues more than radiation. Heavy metals are for a large part things you want to avoid putting into your body.
For people who are interested in this sort of thing, the TOXNET entry for americium contains a number of excerpts from published work about the case, medical follow up, and eventual autopsy results. The first six case report entries on that page all involve publications involving McC|uskey; look for entries that refer specifically to "US Transuranium Registry (USTUR) Case 246". Because americium is an alpha emitter that principally deposits in bone, it is the bone and bone marrow that are most affected by exposure, and which show the most lasting (and ongoing) damage.
"...Eight yrs after a 64-year old man was exposed to americium-241 in a chemical explosion/, leukopenia was evaluated by a hematologist. Diagnosis of a possible hypoproliferative, myeloproliferative, or myelodysplastic syndrome was considered...."
"...The bone marrow of/USTUR Case 246/ had been substantially damaged by alpha-irradiation from americium, principally on the bone surfaces. A... finding was a marked decrease in bone marrow cellularity associated with dilatation of blood sinusoids. The severity of these effects varied according to site and was greatest in the vertebral body, where the marrow was almost acellular, and least in the clavicle. In addition, extensive peritrabecular marrow fibrosis was present in some bones, including the rib and clavicle.... Fibrosis is a common observation in bones irradiated by bone-seeking radionuclides and has been linked to bone sarcoma induction...."
"...The bones examined were the patella, clavicle, sternum, rib, vertebral body and ossified thyroid cartilage; all showed evidence of radiation damage. The cellularity of most bones was reduced, and little evidence of recent active bone remodeling was seen in any bone other than the vertebra, as concluded from the redistribution of the americium in the vertebral body. In several bones, the architecture was disrupted, with woven bone, abnormal appositional bone deposits, bizarre trabecular structures and marked peritrabecular fibrosis. Growth arrest lines were common. When compared with trabecular bone modeling, that of cortical bone in the rib appeared less disrupted. Overall, the results obtained are consistent with those observed in dogs at a similar level of actinide intake...."
In other words, he was 'lucky' that this accident occurred when he was in his mid-sixties, and that he managed to die of heart disease in his mid-seventies. If the patient had been forty years old instead, he likely would have been looking at a cancer of either the bone (an osteosarcoma or some such, and probably at multiple sites if he lived long enough) or the blood-forming cells (leukemia of some sort).
I'm assuming that he's filing suit in California because the Wikimedia Foundation headquarters is there, and it's easier to do it that way than to file fifty-four separate suits (four named editors plus 50 John Does) in 54 different jurisdictions. Further, Barry's lawyers can argue (don't know if it will work) that personal jurisdiction exists for all the defendants, as all of them were engaged in a relationship with the Foundation. Otherwise their case gets a lot messier and a lot more expensive.
Of course, not every lawsuit that is filed is followed through to trial and judgement. (Just as a general observation not related to this particular case -- not every lawsuit is filed with the expectation or intent to follow it through to trial. Lawsuits are often part of PR strategies, sometimes simply to chill public discussion on a particular topic. A big flashy statement of claim is sometimes just a route to a quiet small- or no-money settlement and a gag order.)
And heck, your original point stands. Suing U.S. defendants in a U.K. court would be pretty transparent libel tourism; it wouldn't have a beneficial PR effect, and judgements wouldn't be readily enforceable in the States.
Er...what does the warrantless, essentially-unrestricted search and/or seizure of personal electronic devices - generally belonging to U.S. citizens, legal residents, and legitimate travellers - have to do with immigration policy?
But personally, I could this as the worst administration in history.
That wasn't the worst sentence in history, but it's got to be right up there.
I'll leave aside your amusingly delusional implication that unwarranted invasions of privacy somehow didn't happen - or weren't attempted by law enforcement with similar enthusiasm and vigour - under the preceding 43 Presidents...
Wind and nuclear I understand, but how does gas significantly reduce carbon emmissions? Isn't it still burning stuff and thus producing CO2? How is gas better than coal in this respect?
Nuclear is for a big chunk of base load capacity--plants that take days or weeks to start up and shut down, and so run essentially continuously at their rated output. (Coal plants fill essentially the same niche in fossil-fuel-based generation.) Wind (and solar) stack on top of that; these are variable output plants that can be switched in and out of service quickly as needed to meet demand. Gas turbines, while not emission free, are more efficient (in terms of energy output per ton of carbon emissions) than coal or oil burners, and can be spun up relatively quickly (in a few minutes) to meet spikes in demand. They're a compromise - good fuel efficiency but also high cost - that would be used for a few hours a day, or a few days a month, to fill in gaps in supply.
That is true, and interesting...but beside the particular point at issue here. The SPEECH Act (ugh) deals with defamation suits against U.S. citizens and residents filed in foreign courts. The case here is the mirror image situation: a case filed in the U.S. against a (hypthetical) overseas defendant.
There is, however, an expectation that Wikipedia editors will present information about a person (or any topic, for that matter) in a way that is proportionate to its relevance and importance. Under- or (especially) over-stating the importance of particular facts to give a coloured perspective isn't on; see the section of Wikipedia's neutral-point-of-view policy on Due and undue weight.
In other words, if George W. Bush's biography opened with
George W. Bush was a fighter pilot with the Texas Air National Guard, serving without particular distinction from 1968 to 1974.
It would be an undeniably true statement that nevertheless failed to comply with Wikipedia policy.
Similarly, Wikipedia's policy against using Wikipedia as a venue to publish original research specifically forbids "synthesis of published material". That is, you can't cherry-pick a bunch of sources (or parts of sources) and use them to state - or imply - a particular novel conclusion that hasn't been presented by a reliable, independent source. I could go on at length, but suffice it to say that Wikipedia content is ruled by far more than "It appeared in the newspaper so we have to put in Wikipedia".
Kind of like how climate change activists erased the Medieval Warm Period off of Wikipedia a few years ago.
[citation needed].
Here's the current article: Medieval Warm Period. It has a couple of pages of detailed text, a pair of graphs of temperature records, and three photographs of locations or artifacts relevant to the MWP's effect on human history. The article has 41 footnotes, mostly to peer-reviewed journal articles.
Five years ago: 2009 version. A little over a page, one graph, one photo. 25 footnotes.
For fun, ten years ago: 2004 version. Six paragraphs (three of which are a single sentence). Zero figures, zero photographs. Just 4 inline references.
Scrolling through the article's editing history I don't find any period where anyone "erased" the MWP, aside from some short-lived vandalism. At no point is there any intimation in the article that the MWP didn't occur or was otherwise not a real thing. The article appears to have grown steadily in length, quality, and detail over the last decade, but its central points appear to have remained essentially unchanged. Your comment, however, appears quite typical of climate change deniers--boldly stating things that are patently untrue in order to gain the emotional support of people who don't fact-check you, while wasting the time of the people who do.
I just hope that none of the poor bastards he is suing happen to live in the UK... If so, they are six flavors of screwed.
The defamation laws and precedent which apply depend on the jurisdiction in which suit was filed, not on where the defendants live. And the second sentence of the article indicates that suit was filed in Ventura County Superior Court: in other words, California.
(Indeed, it might be preferable for a defendant to live in the UK; depending - very much - on the particular details of the case, a California court may dismiss a defamation suit against a UK defendent due to the court's lack of personal jurisdiction. Or, in the event of judgement in favour of the plaintiff against a large number of defendants, the plaintiff may decide that actually trying to extract payment from a person in another country isn't worth the time, effort, and additional billable hours.)
It's over $30,000 in permits to build a small two bedroom house (say, 1000 square feet) in Lake County, CA, counting the water connection fee and other bullshit.
So, not just the price of the building permit, then?
The purpose of development charges is to defray (some of) the costs to local government that they would otherwise incur for doing things like connecting your new home to the water, sewer, electrical, and any other utilities; construction of roads and streetlights; construction and purchase of additional emergency services equipment (fire trucks and fire houses, etc.); construction or enlargement of water reservoirs, sewage treatment plants, and electrical substations....
In other words, there's a heck of a lot of new infrastructure capital costs associated with new expansion of a community--costs that wouldn't be incurred without the new construction. (The rest of your comment notes how precious a commodity water is, and how difficult it is to secure access to more of it.) Instead of loading those costs on to people already living in town, the municipalities put the costs on the developers, who in turn pass them on to the new home buyers.
If you were to instead demolish an existing home and replace it with a new one of similar size, the building permit costs would be far less than $30,000, since the home would already have water, sewer, roads, electrical service....
With conventional, mechanically-linked, non-variable steering, if I twitch the wheel at 2 mph while creeping into a parking space, nothing happens. If I twitch the wheel the same amount on the highway at 60 mph, I lurch sickeningly across a couple of lanes of traffic.
A sensible system would allow me to make moderately-sized inputs at whatever speed I'm travelling, and convert those to appropriate adjustments of the wheels of the car: big deflections of my tires with lots of power assist when I'm parallel parking, tiny deflections when I'm changing lanes on the highway.
Amazon indicates that it considers books to be like any other consumer good. They are not.
My rebuttal: Yes they are.
Absolutely correct.
I presume that you won't mind getting a copy of Meyer's Twilight instead of Stoker's Dracula. I mean, they're both vampire novels, so they're completely fungible, right?
Ethanol IS a scam...It reduces mileage by more than it reduces emissions per gallon.
(That's likely not true, but I'll roll with it for now.) The distinction is that emissions from ethanol burning are carbon neutral, whereas the emissions from fossil fuel burning are not. That is, each gram of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning ethanol came from a gram of carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere by a growing plant. No matter how much ethanol you burn, you're only putting back the carbon dioxide that was pulled out of the air a few months earlier by a sugarcane or corn plant, rather than adding new carbon dioxide. In contrast, burning gasoline releases into the atmosphere carbon stores that had been sequestered for millions of years.
As an added bonus, ethanol is itself cleaner burning (and encourages cleaner burning of gasoline in blends), reducing emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and particulates (soot), especially in high-ethanol blends like E85.
That said, there is a caveat--there is an energy cost associated with the process of growing, harvesting, fermenting the crops used to produce ethanol. In many places, these processes still depend to some extent on fossil fuels--which can in turn offset some of the emissions benefits associated with producing carbon neutral ethanol fuels.
One of the great advantages of this new tech is the super capacitor can be charged and discharged for millions of cycles, versus thousands of cycles for existing battery technology.
Actually, that's not really the point of the article, either. Large numbers of charge-discharge cycles are a feature of pretty much any supercapacitor, not just these ones. They're arguing that these new supercapacitors have sufficient mechanical strength and robustness that that could be used as structural, load-bearing components in some applications. In other words, you don't have to put a box around them; they can be an integral part of the frame or case of your device. The battery (or capacitor) doesn't have to be a separate, discrete, armored lump inside the case.
In practice, as long as the energy storage density of these things is still just a tenth that of rechargeable lithium ion batteries, they're going to have problems in mobile applications. Near-indestructible material and near-instantaneous charging are both good things. But I'm not really "liberated from my power cord" if I have to top up the capacitor every couple of hours, or if my new battery-less iPhone weighs a couple of pounds with its giant supercapacitor frame.
You do realize that 'voluntary Ritalin usage" is another way of say methamphetamine abuse.
Well no, it's not, actually. The active ingredient in Ritalin, methylphenidate is quite distinct, chemically, from amphetamine, methamphetamine, or any of the related close derivatives. While methylphenidate and methamphetamine both start with the same four letters, their biochemical effects are different. (For example, both compounds are dopamine reuptake inhibitors, but only methamphetamine is a dopamine releasing agent. The two compounds have opposite effects on neuronal firing rates. And so forth.)
Huh, I thought bullet proof vests were real. Silly me.
Which would be a sound argument if (a) ballistic vests were actually able to safely absorb all shots that hit them without allowing the person wearing them to be seriously injured or even killed; and (b) police officers were only ever shot in the torso--and never below the waist, on the arms, or in the neck or head.
Ballistic vests aren't a magical wall, except in the movies.
When this happens in Finland they shoot to incapacate(in the leg etc.)...
That's a special brand of gullible you have, wherever it is you're from. The only place where police deliberately take non-lethal, specifically-incapacitating shots with a firearm is in the movies.
...or they don't shoot at all and instead take cover and negotiate the guy into dropping the gun.
The only place where there is readily available, secure, bulletproof cover within a split-second's reach of every foot chase is, once again, in the movies. Seriously, dude. When someone fleeing an armed robbery points a gun at a cop, it's one of those occasions when use of deadly force by the police is actually justified, and not just "justified".
Okay, so my new device (a LeakyTech router, say) has a five-year expiry clock on it. A vulnerability is discovered a year after I buy it. It spends 80% of its lifetime completely exposed. I'm now out of pocket for the cost of a new device every five years, and I'm only protected for 20% of the time. Nice.
Or, my new device (from Securitron, this time) is actually quite secure. It takes ten years for the bad guys to find an unpatched or unpatchable hole. Five years of reliable, trustworthy use I could have had get thrown away. I've pointlessly reduced the safe, working lifetime of my electronic device by 50%, doubling my hardware cost and incurring extra downtime for no improvement in my security. Nice.
Better yet, I've gone through a couple of cycles of forced obsolescence. This time around, I've moved from the Securitron product to the LeakyTech one, and now introduced a hole in my security that wasn't there before. Either the LeakyTech device has another rapidly-discovered vulnerability - maybe it was introduced when they tried to patch their first one-year defect- or I didn't configure the new hardware properly when I was making my enforced switchover. Nice.
Thus freedom is preserved, and only those who are actually guilty of harming others are punished, rather than the population as a whole.
Similarly, we should cease enforcement of all traffic rules and regulations. We should only punish drivers whose actions actually injure or kill someone else. Anything else is government overreach.
Slashdot Mirror
This illustrates an important point. From a purely rational safety perspective, you don't actually need the electronic display system to be perfect, with an absolutely impossible zero risk of failure. You just need the system to be less likely to fail - in a way that causes a serious accident - than the known weak point (window) it replaces.
Nobody complains about all those people jammed into a metal tube with no windows powered by a nuclear reactor and dumped into the ocean(s)...
On the other hand, the number of accidents per passenger-mile is probably a lot worse in nuclear submarines than in passenger aircraft. Broadly speaking, an overall higher risk of accidents and fatalities is tolerated in the military.
And honestly, military submarines (or any submarines, really) tend to be much more heavily built than aircraft, and travel at much lower speeds, both of which tend to make crashes much more survivable. Consider, for example, the 2005 collision of the USS San Francisco with a poorly-charted seamount. The fast-attack sub was travelling at its maximum speed (probably around 40 mph) when it smacked into solid rock--that it couldn't see, as they had no windows. Nobody drowned; the ship didn't sink; all of the injuries (and the one fatality) were caused by crew members getting bounced about by the collision. Compare and contrast with just about any aircraft incident involving controlled flight into terrain, where aircraft crumple like beer cans and everybody dies.
No, that would wreck the entire engineering of getting rid of the windows in the first place.
In principle, there could be 'emergency' windows that were smaller or more awkwardly placed (perhaps even requiring the use of a periscope or physical light pipe) that could nevertheless still be used to land a plane in the event of a complete failure of the electronic display system. From an engineering standpoint, even a switch from giant wrap-around windows to small portholes is still going to provide some improvement in strength and weight.
That said, it's worth noting two things. First, modern aircraft are so heavily electronics-dependent (and fly-by-wire driven) that in the event of a catastrophic failure of onboard electronics, the loss of virtual windows may not actually be the biggest problem on your plate. Second, modern aircraft are often rated for landing completely blind (at suitably equipped airports); even if you lose the view from the entire front 'window', a landing on instruments is still a reasonable option.
The point is, those solar lights at the dollar store? Yea... Make millions of them, throw them out in the desert, viola, carbon sink. You need to do something more with it beyond the acid, but this is the sort of idea we need to reduce already emitted CO2 after we've stopped creating all the extra.
Even if we ignore the carbon (and other toxic) footprint of creating and strewing millions of semiconductor devices across the desert, I really think you need to think about what happens to the formic acid. Left to its own devices, formic acid slowly and spontaneously decomposes to water and...carbon monoxide. Which is unpleasant enough by itself (and a greenhouse gas in its own right), but which in turn is slowly oxidized in the atmosphere right back to...carbon dioxide.
He died of heart problems. If you read the health effects they are claiming many of them seem just normal for a older person at that time. The rest might could also have been caused by chemical issues more than radiation. Heavy metals are for a large part things you want to avoid putting into your body.
For people who are interested in this sort of thing, the TOXNET entry for americium contains a number of excerpts from published work about the case, medical follow up, and eventual autopsy results. The first six case report entries on that page all involve publications involving McC|uskey; look for entries that refer specifically to "US Transuranium Registry (USTUR) Case 246". Because americium is an alpha emitter that principally deposits in bone, it is the bone and bone marrow that are most affected by exposure, and which show the most lasting (and ongoing) damage.
"...Eight yrs after a 64-year old man was exposed to americium-241 in a chemical explosion/, leukopenia was evaluated by a hematologist. Diagnosis of a possible hypoproliferative, myeloproliferative, or myelodysplastic syndrome was considered...."
"...The bone marrow of /USTUR Case 246/ had been substantially damaged by alpha-irradiation from americium, principally on the bone surfaces. A ... finding was a marked decrease in bone marrow cellularity associated with dilatation of blood sinusoids. The severity of these effects varied according to site and was greatest in the vertebral body, where the marrow was almost acellular, and least in the clavicle. In addition, extensive peritrabecular marrow fibrosis was present in some bones, including the rib and clavicle. ... Fibrosis is a common observation in bones irradiated by bone-seeking radionuclides and has been linked to bone sarcoma induction...."
"...The bones examined were the patella, clavicle, sternum, rib, vertebral body and ossified thyroid cartilage; all showed evidence of radiation damage. The cellularity of most bones was reduced, and little evidence of recent active bone remodeling was seen in any bone other than the vertebra, as concluded from the redistribution of the americium in the vertebral body. In several bones, the architecture was disrupted, with woven bone, abnormal appositional bone deposits, bizarre trabecular structures and marked peritrabecular fibrosis. Growth arrest lines were common. When compared with trabecular bone modeling, that of cortical bone in the rib appeared less disrupted. Overall, the results obtained are consistent with those observed in dogs at a similar level of actinide intake...."
In other words, he was 'lucky' that this accident occurred when he was in his mid-sixties, and that he managed to die of heart disease in his mid-seventies. If the patient had been forty years old instead, he likely would have been looking at a cancer of either the bone (an osteosarcoma or some such, and probably at multiple sites if he lived long enough) or the blood-forming cells (leukemia of some sort).
I'm assuming that he's filing suit in California because the Wikimedia Foundation headquarters is there, and it's easier to do it that way than to file fifty-four separate suits (four named editors plus 50 John Does) in 54 different jurisdictions. Further, Barry's lawyers can argue (don't know if it will work) that personal jurisdiction exists for all the defendants, as all of them were engaged in a relationship with the Foundation. Otherwise their case gets a lot messier and a lot more expensive.
Of course, not every lawsuit that is filed is followed through to trial and judgement. (Just as a general observation not related to this particular case -- not every lawsuit is filed with the expectation or intent to follow it through to trial. Lawsuits are often part of PR strategies, sometimes simply to chill public discussion on a particular topic. A big flashy statement of claim is sometimes just a route to a quiet small- or no-money settlement and a gag order.)
And heck, your original point stands. Suing U.S. defendants in a U.K. court would be pretty transparent libel tourism; it wouldn't have a beneficial PR effect, and judgements wouldn't be readily enforceable in the States.
Er...what does the warrantless, essentially-unrestricted search and/or seizure of personal electronic devices - generally belonging to U.S. citizens, legal residents, and legitimate travellers - have to do with immigration policy?
But personally, I could this as the worst administration in history.
That wasn't the worst sentence in history, but it's got to be right up there.
I'll leave aside your amusingly delusional implication that unwarranted invasions of privacy somehow didn't happen - or weren't attempted by law enforcement with similar enthusiasm and vigour - under the preceding 43 Presidents...
Wind and nuclear I understand, but how does gas significantly reduce carbon emmissions? Isn't it still burning stuff and thus producing CO2? How is gas better than coal in this respect?
Nuclear is for a big chunk of base load capacity--plants that take days or weeks to start up and shut down, and so run essentially continuously at their rated output. (Coal plants fill essentially the same niche in fossil-fuel-based generation.) Wind (and solar) stack on top of that; these are variable output plants that can be switched in and out of service quickly as needed to meet demand. Gas turbines, while not emission free, are more efficient (in terms of energy output per ton of carbon emissions) than coal or oil burners, and can be spun up relatively quickly (in a few minutes) to meet spikes in demand. They're a compromise - good fuel efficiency but also high cost - that would be used for a few hours a day, or a few days a month, to fill in gaps in supply.
That is true, and interesting...but beside the particular point at issue here. The SPEECH Act (ugh) deals with defamation suits against U.S. citizens and residents filed in foreign courts. The case here is the mirror image situation: a case filed in the U.S. against a (hypthetical) overseas defendant.
There is, however, an expectation that Wikipedia editors will present information about a person (or any topic, for that matter) in a way that is proportionate to its relevance and importance. Under- or (especially) over-stating the importance of particular facts to give a coloured perspective isn't on; see the section of Wikipedia's neutral-point-of-view policy on Due and undue weight.
In other words, if George W. Bush's biography opened with
George W. Bush was a fighter pilot with the Texas Air National Guard, serving without particular distinction from 1968 to 1974.
It would be an undeniably true statement that nevertheless failed to comply with Wikipedia policy.
Similarly, Wikipedia's policy against using Wikipedia as a venue to publish original research specifically forbids "synthesis of published material". That is, you can't cherry-pick a bunch of sources (or parts of sources) and use them to state - or imply - a particular novel conclusion that hasn't been presented by a reliable, independent source. I could go on at length, but suffice it to say that Wikipedia content is ruled by far more than "It appeared in the newspaper so we have to put in Wikipedia".
Kind of like how climate change activists erased the Medieval Warm Period off of Wikipedia a few years ago.
[citation needed].
Here's the current article: Medieval Warm Period. It has a couple of pages of detailed text, a pair of graphs of temperature records, and three photographs of locations or artifacts relevant to the MWP's effect on human history. The article has 41 footnotes, mostly to peer-reviewed journal articles.
Five years ago: 2009 version. A little over a page, one graph, one photo. 25 footnotes.
For fun, ten years ago: 2004 version. Six paragraphs (three of which are a single sentence). Zero figures, zero photographs. Just 4 inline references.
Scrolling through the article's editing history I don't find any period where anyone "erased" the MWP, aside from some short-lived vandalism. At no point is there any intimation in the article that the MWP didn't occur or was otherwise not a real thing. The article appears to have grown steadily in length, quality, and detail over the last decade, but its central points appear to have remained essentially unchanged. Your comment, however, appears quite typical of climate change deniers--boldly stating things that are patently untrue in order to gain the emotional support of people who don't fact-check you, while wasting the time of the people who do.
I just hope that none of the poor bastards he is suing happen to live in the UK... If so, they are six flavors of screwed.
The defamation laws and precedent which apply depend on the jurisdiction in which suit was filed, not on where the defendants live. And the second sentence of the article indicates that suit was filed in Ventura County Superior Court: in other words, California.
(Indeed, it might be preferable for a defendant to live in the UK; depending - very much - on the particular details of the case, a California court may dismiss a defamation suit against a UK defendent due to the court's lack of personal jurisdiction. Or, in the event of judgement in favour of the plaintiff against a large number of defendants, the plaintiff may decide that actually trying to extract payment from a person in another country isn't worth the time, effort, and additional billable hours.)
It's over $30,000 in permits to build a small two bedroom house (say, 1000 square feet) in Lake County, CA, counting the water connection fee and other bullshit.
So, not just the price of the building permit, then?
The purpose of development charges is to defray (some of) the costs to local government that they would otherwise incur for doing things like connecting your new home to the water, sewer, electrical, and any other utilities; construction of roads and streetlights; construction and purchase of additional emergency services equipment (fire trucks and fire houses, etc.); construction or enlargement of water reservoirs, sewage treatment plants, and electrical substations....
In other words, there's a heck of a lot of new infrastructure capital costs associated with new expansion of a community--costs that wouldn't be incurred without the new construction. (The rest of your comment notes how precious a commodity water is, and how difficult it is to secure access to more of it.) Instead of loading those costs on to people already living in town, the municipalities put the costs on the developers, who in turn pass them on to the new home buyers.
If you were to instead demolish an existing home and replace it with a new one of similar size, the building permit costs would be far less than $30,000, since the home would already have water, sewer, roads, electrical service....
IS it more stable, or does it FEEL more stable?
Yes. Also, yes.
With conventional, mechanically-linked, non-variable steering, if I twitch the wheel at 2 mph while creeping into a parking space, nothing happens. If I twitch the wheel the same amount on the highway at 60 mph, I lurch sickeningly across a couple of lanes of traffic.
A sensible system would allow me to make moderately-sized inputs at whatever speed I'm travelling, and convert those to appropriate adjustments of the wheels of the car: big deflections of my tires with lots of power assist when I'm parallel parking, tiny deflections when I'm changing lanes on the highway.
But things that are considered consumer goods, like many technologies, are not completely fungible by that standard.
This is true. So...?
FTFA:
Amazon indicates that it considers books to be like any other consumer good. They are not.
My rebuttal: Yes they are.
Absolutely correct.
I presume that you won't mind getting a copy of Meyer's Twilight instead of Stoker's Dracula. I mean, they're both vampire novels, so they're completely fungible, right?
Ethanol IS a scam...It reduces mileage by more than it reduces emissions per gallon.
(That's likely not true, but I'll roll with it for now.) The distinction is that emissions from ethanol burning are carbon neutral, whereas the emissions from fossil fuel burning are not. That is, each gram of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning ethanol came from a gram of carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere by a growing plant. No matter how much ethanol you burn, you're only putting back the carbon dioxide that was pulled out of the air a few months earlier by a sugarcane or corn plant, rather than adding new carbon dioxide. In contrast, burning gasoline releases into the atmosphere carbon stores that had been sequestered for millions of years.
As an added bonus, ethanol is itself cleaner burning (and encourages cleaner burning of gasoline in blends), reducing emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and particulates (soot), especially in high-ethanol blends like E85.
That said, there is a caveat--there is an energy cost associated with the process of growing, harvesting, fermenting the crops used to produce ethanol. In many places, these processes still depend to some extent on fossil fuels--which can in turn offset some of the emissions benefits associated with producing carbon neutral ethanol fuels.
So, its a System that gives you your Position on the Globe, but not a GPS(TM). Thanks for the clarification...
You snark, but yes. My computer's Disk has an Operating System, but I'm pretty sure I'm not actually using DOS.
TFS is misleading.
One of the great advantages of this new tech is the super capacitor can be charged and discharged for millions of cycles, versus thousands of cycles for existing battery technology.
Actually, that's not really the point of the article, either. Large numbers of charge-discharge cycles are a feature of pretty much any supercapacitor, not just these ones. They're arguing that these new supercapacitors have sufficient mechanical strength and robustness that that could be used as structural, load-bearing components in some applications. In other words, you don't have to put a box around them; they can be an integral part of the frame or case of your device. The battery (or capacitor) doesn't have to be a separate, discrete, armored lump inside the case.
In practice, as long as the energy storage density of these things is still just a tenth that of rechargeable lithium ion batteries, they're going to have problems in mobile applications. Near-indestructible material and near-instantaneous charging are both good things. But I'm not really "liberated from my power cord" if I have to top up the capacitor every couple of hours, or if my new battery-less iPhone weighs a couple of pounds with its giant supercapacitor frame.
You do realize that 'voluntary Ritalin usage" is another way of say methamphetamine abuse.
Well no, it's not, actually. The active ingredient in Ritalin, methylphenidate is quite distinct, chemically, from amphetamine, methamphetamine, or any of the related close derivatives. While methylphenidate and methamphetamine both start with the same four letters, their biochemical effects are different. (For example, both compounds are dopamine reuptake inhibitors, but only methamphetamine is a dopamine releasing agent. The two compounds have opposite effects on neuronal firing rates. And so forth.)
Huh, I thought bullet proof vests were real. Silly me.
Which would be a sound argument if (a) ballistic vests were actually able to safely absorb all shots that hit them without allowing the person wearing them to be seriously injured or even killed; and (b) police officers were only ever shot in the torso--and never below the waist, on the arms, or in the neck or head.
Ballistic vests aren't a magical wall, except in the movies.
When this happens in Finland they shoot to incapacate(in the leg etc.)...
That's a special brand of gullible you have, wherever it is you're from. The only place where police deliberately take non-lethal, specifically-incapacitating shots with a firearm is in the movies.
...or they don't shoot at all and instead take cover and negotiate the guy into dropping the gun.
The only place where there is readily available, secure, bulletproof cover within a split-second's reach of every foot chase is, once again, in the movies. Seriously, dude. When someone fleeing an armed robbery points a gun at a cop, it's one of those occasions when use of deadly force by the police is actually justified, and not just "justified".
Okay, so my new device (a LeakyTech router, say) has a five-year expiry clock on it. A vulnerability is discovered a year after I buy it. It spends 80% of its lifetime completely exposed. I'm now out of pocket for the cost of a new device every five years, and I'm only protected for 20% of the time. Nice.
Or, my new device (from Securitron, this time) is actually quite secure. It takes ten years for the bad guys to find an unpatched or unpatchable hole. Five years of reliable, trustworthy use I could have had get thrown away. I've pointlessly reduced the safe, working lifetime of my electronic device by 50%, doubling my hardware cost and incurring extra downtime for no improvement in my security. Nice.
Better yet, I've gone through a couple of cycles of forced obsolescence. This time around, I've moved from the Securitron product to the LeakyTech one, and now introduced a hole in my security that wasn't there before. Either the LeakyTech device has another rapidly-discovered vulnerability - maybe it was introduced when they tried to patch their first one-year defect- or I didn't configure the new hardware properly when I was making my enforced switchover. Nice.
Thus freedom is preserved, and only those who are actually guilty of harming others are punished, rather than the population as a whole.
Similarly, we should cease enforcement of all traffic rules and regulations. We should only punish drivers whose actions actually injure or kill someone else. Anything else is government overreach.