Because every single one of those 10,000 people is dedicated to answering the phone.
According to the paper you linked, they only have 7000 officers to cover 500 square miles. The entire point of this exercise is to highlight the sheer volume of work they have to deal with and how much of their time is wasted on bullshit calls.
Quite frankly I wish MORE police agencies would do similar. This should be public information to begin with, and it helps create awareness of what these people go through on a daily basis. The transparency is nice. It takes all of 20 seconds for the person taking the call to type it out. =Smidge=
There is also a thing called a performance contract. Dunno if it'll work in the federal level, though.
A company proposes certain specific alterations to infrastructure/facilities/workflow and provides an analysis of how any why these changes will save money. It then provides a cost proposal to actually make these changes and a payback schedule.
The contract guarantees the payback at the responsibility of the contractor. The profit to be made here is log term: the client (government, in this case) fronts all the costs and the contractor takes their profit as a percentage of the savings above estimates, or must pay the client if actual savings fall below estimates. =Smidge=
The TOWN HAS NO TAXING AUTHORITY for non-residents. Pretty simply concept. They can't compel non-residents to pay anything either BEFORE or AFTER a fire.
Yet if that town has a police force I'd likely still have to pay fines levied by them even though I live outside their jurisdiction.
Granted the fire district thing is a slightly different scenario, but to say the town can't compel payment after the fact seems a little spurious. There are ways... =Smidge=
The tribal extremists are ALSO locals. Part of the problem is when you piss off the locals they join the tribal extremists. The Taliban would happily use it as recruiting material, claiming that "the Americans are polluting the land our people desperately need to survive" or something similar.
And yes, lead is a problem too but only if you think people's concerns are wholly rational. Lead and DU, while roughly equivalent from a hazard standpoint, have sufficiently different impact on public opinion. =Smidge=
Depleted uranium is a hazard beyond its radioactivity, too. It's rather unpopular with the locals due to it being used for ammunition and subsequently getting atomized and dispersed into the local environment, causing health problems.
So I can imagine the idea of burying a huge pile of DU somewhere with "blowing it up" as a contingency to prevent misuse would go over like a Depleted Uranium balloon. =Smidge=
"Considering we're willing to (and do) drill for oil that deep I can't see depth being the real problem here."
You drill a couple of holes. You pump water into one of them and high pressure steam comes up out of the others. To pipe the steam into a turbine and presto - geothermal power. Convection and pressure take care of extracting the heat for you. Depth is largely irrelevant.
It's almost exactly like how we extract oil, hence the above quote: dig a hole, attach pipe to hole. (And if there isn't enough pressure to get the oil out on its own, dig another hole and pump something into it to force the oil out the other) =Smidge=
There are no "saves," unless you make periodic backups of the data files. There is one save file per world, and it us updated fairly frequently. It's not like an FPS where you can quicksave any time and restore to that point when you screw up.
That's part of what makes the game more challenging, IMHO. You can respawn but you can't reload. If you drop your stuff in a pool of lava just forget it - because man, they're gone. =Smidge=
Even those this 16-bit alu is impressive I bet the reason his data bus is so long is to equalize all the bits so they come out at the same time.
They DON'T come out at the same time. That's plainly evident in the video. It's not clear if the thing even has a clock generator.
I was thinking about the difficulties regarding timing as well - especially important if he plans to add memory cells or anything with a shared bus. Some kind of buffer + "operation done" signal would be needed, since even careful planning to make equal-time circuits is no guarantee the game will calculate and update all paths at the proper times. Just makes it all the more impressive if he pulls it off, IMHO.
Why the heck did he do a full adder when you could go with boolean logic and micro code.
This statement makes me wonder if you actually understand what he did... =Smidge=
The purpose of the electrical stuff was obstinately for much simpler reasons: Control of in-game elements. Doors open/close when powered, power can set off explosives and alter the direction of mine cart tracks. You have buttons and levers and pressure plates to provide temporary power and the red torches provide constant power unless powered themselves.
Boolean logic is just so simple that it doesn't take much more to implement a whole computer based on it. =Smidge=
What kind of badass microbial life have you been dreaming up that ignores extreme heat, extreme cold, doesn't breathe anything, survives in a vacuum, and doesn't eat?;p
Ignoring the factual errors in your description... Tardigrades seem to fit those requirements quite nicely:
- Survive temperatures from -273C to +151C
- Survive decades without water
- Survive radiation doses thousands of times higher than what would kill other organisms
- Survive when exposed to the vacuum of space =Smidge=
The issue here is what we consider productive work, giving us each different values for efficiency.
Incandescent bulbs are not 100% efficient in any sense, even if you play games with the definitions. It may be cheap and convenient but it is in no sense efficient to use them for heating.
And how do you get 230 watts out of 100 watts? That defies the 1st law of Thermodynamics
No, it doesn't. (Hint: the extra 130 watts of heat is coming from outside, not created ex nihilo) =Smidge=
A good heat pump would have an effective efficiency of 230% or so - delivering 230 watts of heat for every 100 watts of electricity. Incandescent bulbs are still a poor choice in general if you want heat regardless of the situation.
My comment was that an incandescent bulb a few inches over my hands - which are the only things that need heat - is better than a space heater. The efficiency here comes from the focus of energy where it's needed, not the source. (For example, LED lighting and heated gloves would be even better for efficiency) =Smidge=
Electric resistance heat is ridiculously expensive.
That depends entirely on the relative costs of energy sources and how they are applied. However, as heating appliances go, incandescent bulbs are not exactly optimal for that use.
I can attest, though, that an incandescent desk lamp placed near my keyboard satisfies my lighting needs as well as keeps my fingers above freezing even when the main heat is turned way down. Generally having heat only where it is needed is more efficient than large-area heating, even if the energy source itself is more costly. =Smidge=
There was still sustained, massively-energy-positive fusion without tritium, which the parent was saying was essentially impossible. That was my point.
One of the contributions of the early generation computers was showing that the Classical Super would never work, that is, unless you fortified it with gobs of tritium, making it completely impractical.
"Ivy Mike" begs to disagree with you on this point. 10-15 Megaton fusion blast, ignited by a standard fission bomb "next to" (technically above) a huge canister of liquid deuterium, with no tritium used at all.
"Actually, Teller thought for the longest time you could make an H-bomb this way" - and he was essentially right. The trick was in the configuration.
Now practical is another matter... but it still worked.
and whether this is truly a fusion bomb or a monster fusion-boosted fission bomb is a matter of controversy
Only if you have no idea what the differences between the two devices are... What separates fusion from boosted fission is the role the fusion reaction has in the process.
In boosted fission, nearly all of the energy comes from the fissile material - a small quantity of fusion fuel is used only to generate extra neutrons which accelerate the fission reaction and increase yield.
In a fusion bomb, a fission bomb is used to create the large quantity of radiation needed to compress and heat the fusion material to its critical point.
Two very different processes, two very different designs. There really is no "controversy" over this. =Smidge=
Carter was not a nuclear engineer. He was briefly preparing to become an engineering officer of a nuclear sub, but he was never a nuclear engineer.
A better (aka factual) reason for banning reprocessing is nuclear proliferation; reprocessing produces enriched plutonium which had little or no use other than making nuclear bombs. The US essentially promised not to produce enriched plutonium if everyone else would do the same. But in the process we sacrificed a lot of efficiency in the nuclear fuel cycle.
I think it's high time we reevaluated that position and consider allowing reprocessing now that we have well established technology to use plutonium as nuclear fuel. =Smidge=
Actually my first reaction was the "Lost Coast" demo that Valve put out with Half-Life 2 a few years ago. It had dynamic reflections and refractions in animated water surfaces and stained glass windows with refractions.
And it didn't need four high-powered graphics servers to keep it above 10FPS either. =Smidge=
So to recap, in three rounds of replies you've gone from:
"What's wrong with editing for impact?"
to
"He doesn't edit anything! You're a liar!"
to
"OMG your sources are bullshit!" + Grammar Nazi.
Fine. Here's an interview of Assange saying explicitlythat he edited that video and presented that edited video to the public and admitting the vast majority of people never see the unedited version. Go ahead and bitch about it being on a late night comedy/satire show as if that somehow makes Assange not say what he says.
I care that they always give the whole unedited material, and that you claim publicly that they do not.
No, I claim he performs edits. That is not quite the same is it? Though cutting portions out entirely is a form of editing he hasn't been caught doing that. But he has been caught - and readily admitted to - editing in other ways.
Now kindly stop sucking Assange's dick for a few minutes, take a deep breath and catch up on what's been going on the past few months. Maybe - just maybe - you're also bias. =Smidge=
So you don't care that what you're being given may not be the whole story? That context may have been altered and presentation engineered to predispose you to interpret the information in the way the publisher intends, rather than as it really is?
No one but the evil Wikileaks does it, too!
"B-b-but everyone else does it!!"
Sarcasm aside, I agree; the worst thing someone can do with "powerful material" is to paint their own bias all over it. God forbid we should be objective when considering serious matters, right?
It is impossible to not bias something when you edit it, BTW, least I be again accused of saying Wikileaks is some evil anti-US organization or some other bullshit. The mere fact that something is edited "for impact" necessarily requires implanting a subjective opinion by the editors. You really should care about that. =Smidge=
You assume that all those leaks are things which are bad for the US.
No, I didn't.
Nowhere did I even imply that wikileaks is trying to "make the US look bad" or they were "picking on the US" or anything of the sort - only that the volume of material on wikileaks that pertains to the US appears rather disproportionate.
Pages in category "Iraq" - 1,746 total Pages in category "United Kingdom" - 384 total Pages in category "Afghanistan" - 382 total Pages in category "Germany" - 278 total Pages in category "China" - 215 total Pages in category "Canada" - 159 total Pages in category "Australia" - 134 total Pages in category "France" - 128 total Pages in category "India" - 120 total Pages in category "Poland" - 83 total Pages in category "Sweden" - 73 total Pages in category "Denmark" - 70 total Pages in category "Russia" - 57 total Pages in category "Israel" - 49 total Pages in category "Thailand" - 42 total Pages in category "Greece" - 38 total Pages in category "Iran" - 11 total Pages in category "Italy" - 3 total
Pages in category "United States" - 9,719 total
Note that there is a great deal of overlap here. For example, a majority of articles in category "Iraq" are also (for obvious reasons) in the category "United States."
But you really think that even ignoring the huge overlap, the US's shenanigans outweigh all those other countries combined by a factor of nearly 2.5? Clearly I'm the one turning a blind eye to the rest of the world, right?
Or maybe the US is just really bad at keeping things secret. I guess that's also possible...
And none of that addresses the fact that he admits to editing documents and videos for impact. It's basically impossible to do that without introducing some sort of bias. =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
Because every single one of those 10,000 people is dedicated to answering the phone.
According to the paper you linked, they only have 7000 officers to cover 500 square miles. The entire point of this exercise is to highlight the sheer volume of work they have to deal with and how much of their time is wasted on bullshit calls.
Quite frankly I wish MORE police agencies would do similar. This should be public information to begin with, and it helps create awareness of what these people go through on a daily basis. The transparency is nice. It takes all of 20 seconds for the person taking the call to type it out.
=Smidge=
I agree. I was simply addressing the "can't compel non-residents to pay" part as a general statement.
=Smidge=
There is also a thing called a performance contract. Dunno if it'll work in the federal level, though.
A company proposes certain specific alterations to infrastructure/facilities/workflow and provides an analysis of how any why these changes will save money. It then provides a cost proposal to actually make these changes and a payback schedule.
The contract guarantees the payback at the responsibility of the contractor. The profit to be made here is log term: the client (government, in this case) fronts all the costs and the contractor takes their profit as a percentage of the savings above estimates, or must pay the client if actual savings fall below estimates.
=Smidge=
Yet if that town has a police force I'd likely still have to pay fines levied by them even though I live outside their jurisdiction.
Granted the fire district thing is a slightly different scenario, but to say the town can't compel payment after the fact seems a little spurious. There are ways...
=Smidge=
The tribal extremists are ALSO locals. Part of the problem is when you piss off the locals they join the tribal extremists. The Taliban would happily use it as recruiting material, claiming that "the Americans are polluting the land our people desperately need to survive" or something similar.
And yes, lead is a problem too but only if you think people's concerns are wholly rational. Lead and DU, while roughly equivalent from a hazard standpoint, have sufficiently different impact on public opinion.
=Smidge=
Depleted uranium is a hazard beyond its radioactivity, too. It's rather unpopular with the locals due to it being used for ammunition and subsequently getting atomized and dispersed into the local environment, causing health problems.
So I can imagine the idea of burying a huge pile of DU somewhere with "blowing it up" as a contingency to prevent misuse would go over like a Depleted Uranium balloon.
=Smidge=
I didn't misread you;
"Considering we're willing to (and do) drill for oil that deep I can't see depth being the real problem here."
You drill a couple of holes. You pump water into one of them and high pressure steam comes up out of the others. To pipe the steam into a turbine and presto - geothermal power. Convection and pressure take care of extracting the heat for you. Depth is largely irrelevant.
It's almost exactly like how we extract oil, hence the above quote: dig a hole, attach pipe to hole. (And if there isn't enough pressure to get the oil out on its own, dig another hole and pump something into it to force the oil out the other)
=Smidge=
Current drilling tech gets us to 10 kilometers or so, so the short answer is "yes."
Considering we're willing to (and do) drill for oil that deep I can't see depth being the real problem here.
=Smidge=
There are no "saves," unless you make periodic backups of the data files. There is one save file per world, and it us updated fairly frequently. It's not like an FPS where you can quicksave any time and restore to that point when you screw up.
That's part of what makes the game more challenging, IMHO. You can respawn but you can't reload. If you drop your stuff in a pool of lava just forget it - because man, they're gone.
=Smidge=
They DON'T come out at the same time. That's plainly evident in the video. It's not clear if the thing even has a clock generator.
I was thinking about the difficulties regarding timing as well - especially important if he plans to add memory cells or anything with a shared bus. Some kind of buffer + "operation done" signal would be needed, since even careful planning to make equal-time circuits is no guarantee the game will calculate and update all paths at the proper times. Just makes it all the more impressive if he pulls it off, IMHO.
This statement makes me wonder if you actually understand what he did...
=Smidge=
The purpose of the electrical stuff was obstinately for much simpler reasons: Control of in-game elements. Doors open/close when powered, power can set off explosives and alter the direction of mine cart tracks. You have buttons and levers and pressure plates to provide temporary power and the red torches provide constant power unless powered themselves.
Boolean logic is just so simple that it doesn't take much more to implement a whole computer based on it.
=Smidge=
Ignoring the factual errors in your description... Tardigrades seem to fit those requirements quite nicely:
- Survive temperatures from -273C to +151C
- Survive decades without water
- Survive radiation doses thousands of times higher than what would kill other organisms
- Survive when exposed to the vacuum of space
=Smidge=
Incandescent bulbs are not 100% efficient in any sense, even if you play games with the definitions. It may be cheap and convenient but it is in no sense efficient to use them for heating.
No, it doesn't. (Hint: the extra 130 watts of heat is coming from outside, not created ex nihilo)
=Smidge=
They really don't though.
A good heat pump would have an effective efficiency of 230% or so - delivering 230 watts of heat for every 100 watts of electricity. Incandescent bulbs are still a poor choice in general if you want heat regardless of the situation.
My comment was that an incandescent bulb a few inches over my hands - which are the only things that need heat - is better than a space heater. The efficiency here comes from the focus of energy where it's needed, not the source. (For example, LED lighting and heated gloves would be even better for efficiency)
=Smidge=
That depends entirely on the relative costs of energy sources and how they are applied. However, as heating appliances go, incandescent bulbs are not exactly optimal for that use.
I can attest, though, that an incandescent desk lamp placed near my keyboard satisfies my lighting needs as well as keeps my fingers above freezing even when the main heat is turned way down. Generally having heat only where it is needed is more efficient than large-area heating, even if the energy source itself is more costly.
=Smidge=
Thank you for the links, but please don't get angry with me just because you didn't read my entire post?
=Smidge=
There was still sustained, massively-energy-positive fusion without tritium, which the parent was saying was essentially impossible. That was my point.
=Smidge=
"Ivy Mike" begs to disagree with you on this point. 10-15 Megaton fusion blast, ignited by a standard fission bomb "next to" (technically above) a huge canister of liquid deuterium, with no tritium used at all.
"Actually, Teller thought for the longest time you could make an H-bomb this way" - and he was essentially right. The trick was in the configuration.
Now practical is another matter... but it still worked.
Only if you have no idea what the differences between the two devices are... What separates fusion from boosted fission is the role the fusion reaction has in the process.
In boosted fission, nearly all of the energy comes from the fissile material - a small quantity of fusion fuel is used only to generate extra neutrons which accelerate the fission reaction and increase yield.
In a fusion bomb, a fission bomb is used to create the large quantity of radiation needed to compress and heat the fusion material to its critical point.
Two very different processes, two very different designs. There really is no "controversy" over this.
=Smidge=
Carter was not a nuclear engineer. He was briefly preparing to become an engineering officer of a nuclear sub, but he was never a nuclear engineer.
A better (aka factual) reason for banning reprocessing is nuclear proliferation; reprocessing produces enriched plutonium which had little or no use other than making nuclear bombs. The US essentially promised not to produce enriched plutonium if everyone else would do the same. But in the process we sacrificed a lot of efficiency in the nuclear fuel cycle.
I think it's high time we reevaluated that position and consider allowing reprocessing now that we have well established technology to use plutonium as nuclear fuel.
=Smidge=
Actually my first reaction was the "Lost Coast" demo that Valve put out with Half-Life 2 a few years ago. It had dynamic reflections and refractions in animated water surfaces and stained glass windows with refractions.
And it didn't need four high-powered graphics servers to keep it above 10FPS either.
=Smidge=
So to recap, in three rounds of replies you've gone from:
"What's wrong with editing for impact?"
to
"He doesn't edit anything! You're a liar!"
to
"OMG your sources are bullshit!" + Grammar Nazi.
Fine. Here's an interview of Assange saying explicitly that he edited that video and presented that edited video to the public and admitting the vast majority of people never see the unedited version. Go ahead and bitch about it being on a late night comedy/satire show as if that somehow makes Assange not say what he says.
Give it a rest. You lost.
=Smidge=
No, I claim he performs edits. That is not quite the same is it? Though cutting portions out entirely is a form of editing he hasn't been caught doing that. But he has been caught - and readily admitted to - editing in other ways.
"The problem, according to many who have viewed the video, is that WikiLeaks appears to have done selective editing that tells only half the story."
"So more people come away influenced by Assange’s selective editing than understanding the whole of the situation those soldiers were in. For Assange, it’s mission accomplished."
Now kindly stop sucking Assange's dick for a few minutes, take a deep breath and catch up on what's been going on the past few months. Maybe - just maybe - you're also bias.
=Smidge=
So you don't care that what you're being given may not be the whole story? That context may have been altered and presentation engineered to predispose you to interpret the information in the way the publisher intends, rather than as it really is?
"B-b-but everyone else does it!!"
Sarcasm aside, I agree; the worst thing someone can do with "powerful material" is to paint their own bias all over it. God forbid we should be objective when considering serious matters, right?
It is impossible to not bias something when you edit it, BTW, least I be again accused of saying Wikileaks is some evil anti-US organization or some other bullshit. The mere fact that something is edited "for impact" necessarily requires implanting a subjective opinion by the editors. You really should care about that.
=Smidge=
No, I didn't.
Nowhere did I even imply that wikileaks is trying to "make the US look bad" or they were "picking on the US" or anything of the sort - only that the volume of material on wikileaks that pertains to the US appears rather disproportionate.
Nice strawman, though.
=Smidge=
From the "Most Read Countries" category:
Pages in category "Iraq" - 1,746 total
Pages in category "United Kingdom" - 384 total
Pages in category "Afghanistan" - 382 total
Pages in category "Germany" - 278 total
Pages in category "China" - 215 total
Pages in category "Canada" - 159 total
Pages in category "Australia" - 134 total
Pages in category "France" - 128 total
Pages in category "India" - 120 total
Pages in category "Poland" - 83 total
Pages in category "Sweden" - 73 total
Pages in category "Denmark" - 70 total
Pages in category "Russia" - 57 total
Pages in category "Israel" - 49 total
Pages in category "Thailand" - 42 total
Pages in category "Greece" - 38 total
Pages in category "Iran" - 11 total
Pages in category "Italy" - 3 total
Pages in category "United States" - 9,719 total
Note that there is a great deal of overlap here. For example, a majority of articles in category "Iraq" are also (for obvious reasons) in the category "United States."
But you really think that even ignoring the huge overlap, the US's shenanigans outweigh all those other countries combined by a factor of nearly 2.5? Clearly I'm the one turning a blind eye to the rest of the world, right?
Or maybe the US is just really bad at keeping things secret. I guess that's also possible...
And none of that addresses the fact that he admits to editing documents and videos for impact. It's basically impossible to do that without introducing some sort of bias.
=Smidge=