"It doesn't even succeed against known threats. They have regular security screenings where a TSA agent sneaks through a fake bomb disguised as a back brace or something innocuous. Less than a 50% success rate at stopping it. If "the terrorists" actually get to that point, it's more likely than not that TSA will let them through."
It is a common misconception that it is necessary to have a 100% detection rate for security to be effective. In reality it is not necessary to implement security procedures so strict that they will find every single weapon every time. Mounting an attack on an airliner today takes a lot of time, planning, and an organization - so being discovered is a big price for the attacker to pay. That's a 50% chance that his entire operation (bomb-makers, money-men, drivers, planners, methods, contacts) will be discovered in a useless, unsuccessfull attack. An unsuccessful attempt would be a major blow to any terrorist network because years of work and a large part of the organization would be sacrificed for nothing. Terrorists are not going to take that kind of risk when there are easier targets.
Airport security is as much about deterence as detection. Frankly I think it is a very good thing for it to be unpredictable whether MacAirs will get special attention or not - whatever the reason.
The difficulty here is that when people on the "global-warming-isn't-real-and-there's-no-consensus" side of the debate pronounce with great seriousness that they've done "a lot of research"...and a superficial check of easily-available sources doesn't seem to show that they've done any research at all, it rather saps credibility from the argument. If this is what passes for "a lot of research," there seems be something very wrong with the debate.
You're exactly right - there is something very wrong with the global warming debate: one side is PR-based and other is science-based. However, that does not mean that we (the science side) should try to influence the debate in our favor by claiming that anthropomorphic mechanisms for global warming have been accepted as mainstream science for 100 years simply because the possibility was mentioned in an 1895 paper, or a (relatively) few papers were published in the intervening decades. The science from more recent, plentiful research is plenty strong enough to support the theory without having to gin up a fake pedigree.
I believe you must be confusing what I wrote with something somebody else wrote. I am not "revising my argument", since I hadn't previously made an argument to revise. The reply you quote is the first thing I wrote in this thread.
Oops, you are so right - it was another poster that started the thread. His point was that global warming has been well-known for a hundred years and has had "tens of thousands" of scientific papers written supporting it. I incorrectly assumed that when someone asked for citations for those hundred years' of articles and you responded, that you were the same person.
Although not a climatologist, I do have post-grad degrees in the Environmental Sciences, so I don't get the majority of my information from popular press (as you implied). I also do know that 30 years ago Global Warming from non-natural causes was hardly mainstream research. There is always someone investigating backwaters (or bleeding-edge in this case) of any topic so I'm hardly surprised that articles are present, but to claim that it was well-known and accepted in the scientific community 30 years ago is overstatement in my opinion.
You complain about people confusing correlation with causation and then you go right ahead do the exact same thing by claiming causation in the relationships between alone:stress and stress:death. Sheesh.
"Does this mean that I can use my health insurance to pay for cat food?" No, but if you live in the U.S. you may have to EAT cat food to afford health insurance.
LOL. Well done! One of the few LOL posts I've ever read on/.
"Greenhouse-effect studies before the 1990s lacked the detailed numerical models that we have developed since the 1990s, since these depend on massive amounts of computer power, but the effect has been known for a long time, and it was definitely discussed before the 1990s."
You have tried to revise your argument to one that is defensible, but your new position is not the same as your original statements about global warming. In your original post you said that "Global Warming" had been known and discussed in the scientific literature for over 30 years; your revisionist position is now that the "Greenhouse Effect" was known and discussed. True, the greenhouse effect has been recognized for over 30 years, but global warming (planetary temperature rise driven by the atmospheric increase in greenhouse gases produced by man's activities) is a much newer concept. The greenhouse effect *enables* global warming - but the two are not the same as you likely know.
Ah, the myth of drugs in drinking water debunked...but wait, didn't you leave something out? What about hormones in drinking water? Hormone molecules are specifically designed to cause metabolic changes in organisms, and they produce those changes at extremely small concentrations. Hormones in drinking water come from birth control pills and other human medical uses; but mostly from the hormones used by the food industry to increase fat content and muscle mass in meats and poultry, and to increase milk production in cows. Although these hormones are present in the meat and milk products themselves, they also enter the environment directly through the animal's waste products.
The presence of hormones in drinking water is suspected of being a major cause of the lowering of the age of puberty in both males and females, as well as the abnormal rate of breast development in very young girls. I'm not worried about a few molecules of acetomeniphine in my drinking water, but a few molecules of hormones is a whole other thing. You wouldn't worry yet? Well, you should.
I dropped out from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science once upon a time and switched to these "easy" majors, and let me tell you: the only subject that really is easy is the one you enjoy doing.
I suspect you are correct, but changing hated subjects into favorite subjects is surprisingly easy to do. After miserably flunking out of college I decided a few years later to go back, and somehow managed to beg my way back into the university. Two years later I graduated with no grade below A- (and darned few of those), was listed on the Dean's List for two solid years, and then continued on to graduate school - and I did this by constantly changing my worst subjects into my favorite subjects.
I would study every one of my subjects every night, even if the last few only got 10-15 minutes; but before I started each night I would sit back and decide which one of them I least wanted to study. I then _started_ with that subject and devoted at least an hour of my study time to it. Within a week or two that subject would become my favorite and I would no longer be able to start with it. It was an interesting effect in itself - my least favorite course would invariably become my favorite and get moved to the bottom of the stack and a new least-favorite would take the lead position. It was an amazingly effective study method.
OK, which spacecraft do you consider beautiful? Most are more functional than aesthetically pleasing./i>
I certainly don't know them all and I only knew Ulysses from the link you provided, so the only beautiful spacecraft I can name off the top of my head was Sputnik.
As for Ulysses - it looks an awfull lot like a commercial air conditioner with a wok glued to it to me. Mama, does this wok on my head make me pretty?:-)
Well it certainly is shiney, but I'm not sure I can go along with it being "one of the most beautiful spacecraft ever built". It reminds me of the Larson cartoon of the baby warthog asking it's mother: "Mama, am I pretty?"
The odds of it hitting something out in space has to be incredibly slim, but they installed gyroscopes anyway, and as a result were able to continue the mission.
That argument, and to a lesser extent your argument about the reprogramming capability of the Mar's Rovers, is falacious. The gyroscopes on Mariner were there to keep the spacecraft antennae oriented toward Earth. They were a necessary part of the mission, and were NOT installed on the off-chance that Mariner would hit something in space. The reboot and reprogramming abilities of the on-board computers in the Rovers was also a necessary part of the mission. That ability was needed to change the behavior of the craft if something interesting came up or there was some unexpected environmental issues that needed a work-around. They were NOT there solely in case some internal computer glitch unexpectedly developed.
The engineers all know how long the thing is going to last, but lie about it to make themselves and NASA look good.[?] You meant that to be your absurd choice, but I think it is actually the way it is - they underestimate the life-expectancy to make themselves look good; but it isn't the engineers, its the administrators. I think it is obvious that they set ridiculously low estimates so they can define the mission as successful as quickly as possible - thier future funding depends on it.
Its clear that they take the minimum lifetime of every single component, multiply them together to get a very low lifetime for the craft, and then claim that number for it's design lifetime (presumably because all the components were spec'd to those levels). What would be more honest would be a range - from the lowest estimate to the highest, or even one using MTBF values. I'll also argue it would be better for NASA to give a range. An expected lifetime of "between 3 months and 5 years" would highlight the extreme difficulty of designing these craft.
What would be even more honest would be a definition of success that was mission-related, not time-related. It would be a success in anyone's book if your craft discovered water on the moon in five minutes even if the thing conked out after half an hour.
... the car seems impractical for temperate regions. Our vehicles need to generate heat for the passenger compartment. Sure, the old VW Beetle had an electric heater in it, [...]
No, beetles did not have electric heaters. They had a shroud that collected warm air from around the engine. But good point about the passenger heat issue with an air-powered car. On the other hand, just as heat is produced when the air is compressed, heat is absorbed when the air re-expands. Voila - free A/C in the summer.
Give me a break please. First, I never accused "you" of anything - I said "most people" don't realize... But if you want to internalize that comment to yourself I think it fits. You said it would never sell because who wanted to get up and lift weights. You didn't even THINK about people who did not have alternatives. Its only after I pointed it out that you became all knowedgable and concerned about the world's poor.
Second, the simplicity of this device makes it both more reliable and cheaper to manufacture than devices with springs, pulleys, batteries or other moving parts that break and wear out. You seem to have some sort of creativity-bashing mindset that trashes new ideas. This is NOT a toy for eco-nuts, as you say, but a real tool that could provide reliable light for years to those that don't have it.
And third, you don't have to dead-lift the weight - you simply spin the device 180 degrees like an hour-glass. How much more simple could that be? Yet you want springs, batteries and pulleys. You have a strange idea of simple.
Having read your orignal post and now this reply, I find it hard to believe you could fit anything on one page! Just kidding - don't take offense.
But back to the topic - this is similar to the "begs the question" merry-go-round on slashdot. Just because many people incorrectly use a term doesn't mean the incorrect usage magically becomes correct. You think chronic misuse of "CV" makes it correct to substitute for "resume", I don't. Cheers.
Not sure if this will become a product too soon. The best possible efficiency is 1700 lumens/watt (a fluorescent lamp is 100 lumens/watt, LEDs and incandescent lights are even less efficient) [...] so that's 720g of weight lifted 1 meter up as a best case scenario. In reality this would have to be a pretty hefty weight and/or a pretty long lamp and/or a pretty dim light to be practical. Just imagine every four hours having to go over to your lamp, bend over (remember to use your legs not your back!), and lift up a 10kg weight up to your chest height.
You are forgetting that not everyone on the planet lives in the lap of luxury. To us it might seem unreasonable to have to lift a weight every few hours to run a lamp, but there are many places on the planet where such a lamp would be a life-changing possession. Most people raised in an environment where they expect light at the flick of a switch find it almost impossible to imagine how little much of the world's population actually has - and an equally hard time comprehending how valuable a gravity-powered light could be to a remote village.
What strikes me as astonishing about this topic, other than the fact that the majority of the discussion seems to revolve around the utility of assembly programming, is that the list itself displays a marked lack of understanding of the ongoing utility of low technology devices
I have to agree with you. Many of the tasks listed as "obsolete" are incorrectly included simply because few people have to do them for themselves anymore. It is interesting to look at the list with an eye toward which of these "obsolete" skills would become critical knowledge once again with a simple lack of batteries.
I make a point of putting it on my CV (resume for you Americans) Pardon me, but a curriculum vitae and a resume are different things. CVs are a history of academic/research experience (life's study) while resumes are a history of, well, work experience. Labeling one's work history (as a self-described hot-shot programmer, for example) as a CV is considered more than a bit pretentious - at least on this side of the Atlantic.
Or do you think scientists are so stupid that, after more than a hundred years of research, they would have overlooked a basic principle that a dyslexic cook can discover by himself? Actually I CAN see it being overlooked. This isn't something anyone would do except by accident. If a scientist had coils setup like this in his experimental design he would spot the logical error and take it out (smacking himself on the head and saying Duh!).
Ahhh. A very good explanation. Gotta admit that this one had me stumped until you flipped my thinking around to realize that the motor starts out inhibited and he just removes the EM brake when he shorts the coils. He could do the same thing by just moving the coils away from the magnets. I can't believe in all the years he has been working on this and testing it he never bothered to measure RPM with no coils anywhere near the spinning magnets - which would have clearly indicated what was happening.
But wait - this just struck me as I was congratulating you on your perception... why doesn't the motor speed up when there is a non-conductive section in the shaft? If you remember from the video, shorting the coils had no effect on motor speed when there was a brass coupling in the drive shaft. If it were just a matter of removing the EM brake on the spinning armature, the conductivity of the shaft should not have mattered. Someting else appears to be going on here.
This is not news. The US intelligence community, including the fbi, has been a known user of key loggers and spyware for about a decade. My link is from 2001, but I have knowledge of a federal investigation in 1998 that used key loggers to track suspects' use of certain services. Not only is it not news, it's REALLY not news. In the 70's the Federal government had devices that were able to tell what was being typed on typewriters in real time. These were devices that were attached to the typerwriter power cord (or installed behind the power outlet) that measured current changes. By recording the changes it was possible to re-create the letters typed. This was possible because in Selectric-type typewriters each letter took a slightly different amount of energy to print. Traditional typewriters (with type bars that rise to strike the paper) use the same energy for every letter and were immune.
Two interesting things there -- first is that plants are only inspected every two years unless they are flagged due to poor prior performance or consumer complaints. Why not have inspections with a random interval? Yah, I know -- cost. But considering how many pills these plants pump out, you'd think there'd be stricter oversight. Or is it that we just trust pharmaceutical companies to do the right thing (which means avoid the nightmare of tainted pills splashed across the evening news)?
Other interesting point is that the FDA chooses not to fine companies/enforce regulations because of the cost of responding to legal challenges from the manufacturers. What excatly is the point of having oversight and inspections, then? Basically, the FDA must have crystal-clear evidence of plant-to-market malefeasance before they can do anything. Usually I would agree that it is not possible to over-estimate US industry's willingness to get around regulations to save money (lead in toys is the most recent example), but as far as the pharm industry's manufacturing practices I have to disagree. I have several decades of experience in pharmaceutical safety so I know a bit about this.
At least for the major pharm companies, Good Manufacturing Practices are of paramount importance. Yes FDA inspectors may come by on average once every two years to a facility that has a good record (not as you have inferred - on a two-year schedule) but the pharm companies themselves have GMP auditors that visit every facility much more frequently. Before you scoff at that, there are several reasons why these internal inspectors are taken very seriously: 1) the threat of a lawsuit from a contaminated drug, 2)the threat of sanctions against the company by the FDA, 3)bad publicity, 4)loss of sales of the drug in question, and last but not least 5)the loss of manufacturing capacity that may cause a shortage of the drug worldwide (a very bad thing for both patients and the company). Just the hint that the FDA may close a line (not even the whole plant) is a major seismic event in the pharma industry. Oh yes, and some pharm employees actually want to keep their drugs safe - remember, we take drugs, too.
You imply that there are never any Federal penalties for poor GMP practices by pharm companies, and that is not true at all. When FDA inspectors find a serious or chronic problem they will shut that plant down in a heartbeat and the pharm company then has to get it re-certified to manufacture pharmaceuticals again - and that is a Very Big Deal and very time consumming. The plant then has to operate under a consent decree for many years with much more supervision by inspectors and much, much more frequent and onerous recordkeeping and reporting rules. You can also bet that the plant manager and several of his staff will be looking for new jobs outside the pharm industry.
Most of these contamination problems that you read about (but not all, true) come from smaller companies who ARE trying to game the system but get caught. Of the two large pharm companies I worked for I never thought either were trying to game the GMP system. They could be unethical in other areas (which I won't get into here), but not in the quality of their manufacturing.
I'd love it for the FDA to get anal retentive about inspection regimes.
If you knew anything about the pharma industry, [...] You are like the pot calling the kettle black when you acuse someone of not knowing anything about the pharmaceutical industry and then make a dumb statement like you'd "love it if the FDA got [strict] about inspections". The FDA is *very* strict about GMPs (Good Manufacturing Practices) in the pharmaceutical industry. What happened here is that the company violated the regulations in 1)allowing the contamination in the first place, 2)not reporting it to the FDA immediately, and 3)not recalling the drug batches that could have been contaminated. After working in the Pharm industry for many years I assure you that the FDA's GMP procedures DO cover paint chips in the drugs. That is one company that will get very tired of FDA inspectors on-site for the next five to seven years.
The high retail price of drugs bears almost no relation to its cost, That depends on how you define "cost". Sure, once the drug is discovered, evaluated, tested, and approved the actual cost of squishing into a pill and putting it in a bottle is trivial, but those upfront cost are VERY high.
...partially because the drug industry spends more on advertising than R&D, That is simply NOT true. Oh, they spend a bunch on promotion (not just advertising), but they spend much, much more on new compound research and Phase I, II and III testing. What is bad is that they often lump their promotional costs in with their R&D costs to inflate the figure, but still the R&D part is a lot more than the promotion part.
I'm no apologist for the drug companies - their profits are obscene and their ethics questionable (to say the least), but there isn't any reason to misrepresent the real situation by making stuff up.
Although not any more, I used to fly as much as you do and your arguments are mostly self-pity crap. You checked bottles of wine in your luggage and were shocked to find them broken at your destination!? Athlete's-foot infections from removing your shoes? Nope - the environment has to be wet for that to happen and it won't happen on dry carpet. You have to check bags because you can't get your toiletries into smaller bottles? Baloney - as you, yourself, stated - you fly twice a week so how many large bottles of toiletries do you need for a two day trip? I used to transfer all my liquids to smaller bottles simply because it saved so much weight. I call baloney. And what kind of toiletries do you need anyway? Soap, shampoo, lotion and sometimes even toothpaste come free at hotels. And of course the big one - your assertion that half of all TSA employees are arrogant, racist losers. Maybe, just maybe that attitude shows through and you get hassled because of it. Serves you right. But of course YOU aren't racist when you call them not qualified for minimun wage jobs, or they should not be *allowed* to have jobs, or stupid, or losers, or racists, or arrogant. If YOU think security gets tiresome just imagine what TSA and airline employees think about you.
I'm no fan of TSA, but you, sir, are the passenger from Hell, and unfortunately I see your ilk far too often.
With paper, if you didn't vote for the candidate you intended to...it's your fault and visible if you follow the directions. With a compromised e-voting machine, you could walk in and have the machine say "Thanks for voting for candidate A" while it adds a vote for candidate B. Although I agree with your overall premise, your first statement is not entirely true. The design of paper ballots makes a big difference in the ease or difficulty of voting for your candidate. I have seen examples of ballots that were so poorly designed no one could tell who they were really voting for. A common example everyone can relate to are ATM machines. How many times have you used an ATM machine where you needed to push a particular button to continue, but the arrow on the screen pointed to the space between two buttons? Even on a paper ballot if it isn't clear which check-box goes with a candidate's name it isn't the voter's fault if errors are made.
That was the problem with the butterfly ballots in Florida - it wasn't that people were too stupid to vote, but that the check boxes were not aligned with the candidates' names. That was not the voters' fault and it wasn't at all obvious that many were casting their votes for the wrong person.
Slashdot Mirror
"It doesn't even succeed against known threats. They have regular security screenings where a TSA agent sneaks through a fake bomb disguised as a back brace or something innocuous. Less than a 50% success rate at stopping it. If "the terrorists" actually get to that point, it's more likely than not that TSA will let them through."
It is a common misconception that it is necessary to have a 100% detection rate for security to be effective. In reality it is not necessary to implement security procedures so strict that they will find every single weapon every time. Mounting an attack on an airliner today takes a lot of time, planning, and an organization - so being discovered is a big price for the attacker to pay. That's a 50% chance that his entire operation (bomb-makers, money-men, drivers, planners, methods, contacts) will be discovered in a useless, unsuccessfull attack. An unsuccessful attempt would be a major blow to any terrorist network because years of work and a large part of the organization would be sacrificed for nothing. Terrorists are not going to take that kind of risk when there are easier targets.
Airport security is as much about deterence as detection. Frankly I think it is a very good thing for it to be unpredictable whether MacAirs will get special attention or not - whatever the reason.
You're exactly right - there is something very wrong with the global warming debate: one side is PR-based and other is science-based. However, that does not mean that we (the science side) should try to influence the debate in our favor by claiming that anthropomorphic mechanisms for global warming have been accepted as mainstream science for 100 years simply because the possibility was mentioned in an 1895 paper, or a (relatively) few papers were published in the intervening decades. The science from more recent, plentiful research is plenty strong enough to support the theory without having to gin up a fake pedigree.
Oops, you are so right - it was another poster that started the thread. His point was that global warming has been well-known for a hundred years and has had "tens of thousands" of scientific papers written supporting it. I incorrectly assumed that when someone asked for citations for those hundred years' of articles and you responded, that you were the same person.
Although not a climatologist, I do have post-grad degrees in the Environmental Sciences, so I don't get the majority of my information from popular press (as you implied). I also do know that 30 years ago Global Warming from non-natural causes was hardly mainstream research. There is always someone investigating backwaters (or bleeding-edge in this case) of any topic so I'm hardly surprised that articles are present, but to claim that it was well-known and accepted in the scientific community 30 years ago is overstatement in my opinion.
You complain about people confusing correlation with causation and then you go right ahead do the exact same thing by claiming causation in the relationships between alone:stress and stress:death. Sheesh.
LOL. Well done! One of the few LOL posts I've ever read on
"Greenhouse-effect studies before the 1990s lacked the detailed numerical models that we have developed since the 1990s, since these depend on massive amounts of computer power, but the effect has been known for a long time, and it was definitely discussed before the 1990s."
You have tried to revise your argument to one that is defensible, but your new position is not the same as your original statements about global warming. In your original post you said that "Global Warming" had been known and discussed in the scientific literature for over 30 years; your revisionist position is now that the "Greenhouse Effect" was known and discussed. True, the greenhouse effect has been recognized for over 30 years, but global warming (planetary temperature rise driven by the atmospheric increase in greenhouse gases produced by man's activities) is a much newer concept. The greenhouse effect *enables* global warming - but the two are not the same as you likely know.
Ah, the myth of drugs in drinking water debunked...but wait, didn't you leave something out? What about hormones in drinking water? Hormone molecules are specifically designed to cause metabolic changes in organisms, and they produce those changes at extremely small concentrations. Hormones in drinking water come from birth control pills and other human medical uses; but mostly from the hormones used by the food industry to increase fat content and muscle mass in meats and poultry, and to increase milk production in cows. Although these hormones are present in the meat and milk products themselves, they also enter the environment directly through the animal's waste products.
The presence of hormones in drinking water is suspected of being a major cause of the lowering of the age of puberty in both males and females, as well as the abnormal rate of breast development in very young girls. I'm not worried about a few molecules of acetomeniphine in my drinking water, but a few molecules of hormones is a whole other thing. You wouldn't worry yet? Well, you should.
I dropped out from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science once upon a time and switched to these "easy" majors, and let me tell you: the only subject that really is easy is the one you enjoy doing.
I suspect you are correct, but changing hated subjects into favorite subjects is surprisingly easy to do. After miserably flunking out of college I decided a few years later to go back, and somehow managed to beg my way back into the university. Two years later I graduated with no grade below A- (and darned few of those), was listed on the Dean's List for two solid years, and then continued on to graduate school - and I did this by constantly changing my worst subjects into my favorite subjects.
I would study every one of my subjects every night, even if the last few only got 10-15 minutes; but before I started each night I would sit back and decide which one of them I least wanted to study. I then _started_ with that subject and devoted at least an hour of my study time to it. Within a week or two that subject would become my favorite and I would no longer be able to start with it. It was an interesting effect in itself - my least favorite course would invariably become my favorite and get moved to the bottom of the stack and a new least-favorite would take the lead position. It was an amazingly effective study method.
OK, which spacecraft do you consider beautiful? Most are more functional than aesthetically pleasing./i>
:-)
I certainly don't know them all and I only knew Ulysses from the link you provided, so the only beautiful spacecraft I can name off the top of my head was Sputnik.
As for Ulysses - it looks an awfull lot like a commercial air conditioner with a wok glued to it to me. Mama, does this wok on my head make me pretty?
For those that havn't seen pictures, Ulysses is one of the most beautiful spacecraft ever built. Some future archeologist will love getting this for their museum: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Ulysses_spacecraft.jpg
Well it certainly is shiney, but I'm not sure I can go along with it being "one of the most beautiful spacecraft ever built". It reminds me of the Larson cartoon of the baby warthog asking it's mother: "Mama, am I pretty?"
The odds of it hitting something out in space has to be incredibly slim, but they installed gyroscopes anyway, and as a result were able to continue the mission.
That argument, and to a lesser extent your argument about the reprogramming capability of the Mar's Rovers, is falacious. The gyroscopes on Mariner were there to keep the spacecraft antennae oriented toward Earth. They were a necessary part of the mission, and were NOT installed on the off-chance that Mariner would hit something in space. The reboot and reprogramming abilities of the on-board computers in the Rovers was also a necessary part of the mission. That ability was needed to change the behavior of the craft if something interesting came up or there was some unexpected environmental issues that needed a work-around. They were NOT there solely in case some internal computer glitch unexpectedly developed.
The engineers all know how long the thing is going to last, but lie about it to make themselves and NASA look good.[?]
You meant that to be your absurd choice, but I think it is actually the way it is - they underestimate the life-expectancy to make themselves look good; but it isn't the engineers, its the administrators. I think it is obvious that they set ridiculously low estimates so they can define the mission as successful as quickly as possible - thier future funding depends on it.
Its clear that they take the minimum lifetime of every single component, multiply them together to get a very low lifetime for the craft, and then claim that number for it's design lifetime (presumably because all the components were spec'd to those levels). What would be more honest would be a range - from the lowest estimate to the highest, or even one using MTBF values. I'll also argue it would be better for NASA to give a range. An expected lifetime of "between 3 months and 5 years" would highlight the extreme difficulty of designing these craft.
What would be even more honest would be a definition of success that was mission-related, not time-related. It would be a success in anyone's book if your craft discovered water on the moon in five minutes even if the thing conked out after half an hour.
... the car seems impractical for temperate regions. Our vehicles need to generate heat for the passenger compartment. Sure, the old VW Beetle had an electric heater in it, [...]
No, beetles did not have electric heaters. They had a shroud that collected warm air from around the engine. But good point about the passenger heat issue with an air-powered car. On the other hand, just as heat is produced when the air is compressed, heat is absorbed when the air re-expands. Voila - free A/C in the summer.
Give me a break please. First, I never accused "you" of anything - I said "most people" don't realize... But if you want to internalize that comment to yourself I think it fits. You said it would never sell because who wanted to get up and lift weights. You didn't even THINK about people who did not have alternatives. Its only after I pointed it out that you became all knowedgable and concerned about the world's poor.
Second, the simplicity of this device makes it both more reliable and cheaper to manufacture than devices with springs, pulleys, batteries or other moving parts that break and wear out. You seem to have some sort of creativity-bashing mindset that trashes new ideas. This is NOT a toy for eco-nuts, as you say, but a real tool that could provide reliable light for years to those that don't have it.
And third, you don't have to dead-lift the weight - you simply spin the device 180 degrees like an hour-glass. How much more simple could that be? Yet you want springs, batteries and pulleys. You have a strange idea of simple.
Having read your orignal post and now this reply, I find it hard to believe you could fit anything on one page! Just kidding - don't take offense.
But back to the topic - this is similar to the "begs the question" merry-go-round on slashdot. Just because many people incorrectly use a term doesn't mean the incorrect usage magically becomes correct. You think chronic misuse of "CV" makes it correct to substitute for "resume", I don't. Cheers.
You are forgetting that not everyone on the planet lives in the lap of luxury. To us it might seem unreasonable to have to lift a weight every few hours to run a lamp, but there are many places on the planet where such a lamp would be a life-changing possession. Most people raised in an environment where they expect light at the flick of a switch find it almost impossible to imagine how little much of the world's population actually has - and an equally hard time comprehending how valuable a gravity-powered light could be to a remote village.
I have to agree with you. Many of the tasks listed as "obsolete" are incorrectly included simply because few people have to do them for themselves anymore. It is interesting to look at the list with an eye toward which of these "obsolete" skills would become critical knowledge once again with a simple lack of batteries.
Ahhh. A very good explanation. Gotta admit that this one had me stumped until you flipped my thinking around to realize that the motor starts out inhibited and he just removes the EM brake when he shorts the coils. He could do the same thing by just moving the coils away from the magnets. I can't believe in all the years he has been working on this and testing it he never bothered to measure RPM with no coils anywhere near the spinning magnets - which would have clearly indicated what was happening.
But wait - this just struck me as I was congratulating you on your perception... why doesn't the motor speed up when there is a non-conductive section in the shaft? If you remember from the video, shorting the coils had no effect on motor speed when there was a brass coupling in the drive shaft. If it were just a matter of removing the EM brake on the spinning armature, the conductivity of the shaft should not have mattered. Someting else appears to be going on here.
Other interesting point is that the FDA chooses not to fine companies/enforce regulations because of the cost of responding to legal challenges from the manufacturers. What excatly is the point of having oversight and inspections, then? Basically, the FDA must have crystal-clear evidence of plant-to-market malefeasance before they can do anything. Usually I would agree that it is not possible to over-estimate US industry's willingness to get around regulations to save money (lead in toys is the most recent example), but as far as the pharm industry's manufacturing practices I have to disagree. I have several decades of experience in pharmaceutical safety so I know a bit about this.
At least for the major pharm companies, Good Manufacturing Practices are of paramount importance. Yes FDA inspectors may come by on average once every two years to a facility that has a good record (not as you have inferred - on a two-year schedule) but the pharm companies themselves have GMP auditors that visit every facility much more frequently. Before you scoff at that, there are several reasons why these internal inspectors are taken very seriously: 1) the threat of a lawsuit from a contaminated drug, 2)the threat of sanctions against the company by the FDA, 3)bad publicity, 4)loss of sales of the drug in question, and last but not least 5)the loss of manufacturing capacity that may cause a shortage of the drug worldwide (a very bad thing for both patients and the company). Just the hint that the FDA may close a line (not even the whole plant) is a major seismic event in the pharma industry. Oh yes, and some pharm employees actually want to keep their drugs safe - remember, we take drugs, too.
You imply that there are never any Federal penalties for poor GMP practices by pharm companies, and that is not true at all. When FDA inspectors find a serious or chronic problem they will shut that plant down in a heartbeat and the pharm company then has to get it re-certified to manufacture pharmaceuticals again - and that is a Very Big Deal and very time consumming. The plant then has to operate under a consent decree for many years with much more supervision by inspectors and much, much more frequent and onerous recordkeeping and reporting rules. You can also bet that the plant manager and several of his staff will be looking for new jobs outside the pharm industry.
Most of these contamination problems that you read about (but not all, true) come from smaller companies who ARE trying to game the system but get caught. Of the two large pharm companies I worked for I never thought either were trying to game the GMP system. They could be unethical in other areas (which I won't get into here), but not in the quality of their manufacturing.
If you knew anything about the pharma industry, [...] You are like the pot calling the kettle black when you acuse someone of not knowing anything about the pharmaceutical industry and then make a dumb statement like you'd "love it if the FDA got [strict] about inspections". The FDA is *very* strict about GMPs (Good Manufacturing Practices) in the pharmaceutical industry. What happened here is that the company violated the regulations in 1)allowing the contamination in the first place, 2)not reporting it to the FDA immediately, and 3)not recalling the drug batches that could have been contaminated. After working in the Pharm industry for many years I assure you that the FDA's GMP procedures DO cover paint chips in the drugs. That is one company that will get very tired of FDA inspectors on-site for the next five to seven years. The high retail price of drugs bears almost no relation to its cost, That depends on how you define "cost". Sure, once the drug is discovered, evaluated, tested, and approved the actual cost of squishing into a pill and putting it in a bottle is trivial, but those upfront cost are VERY high.
...partially because the drug industry spends more on advertising than R&D, That is simply NOT true. Oh, they spend a bunch on promotion (not just advertising), but they spend much, much more on new compound research and Phase I, II and III testing. What is bad is that they often lump their promotional costs in with their R&D costs to inflate the figure, but still the R&D part is a lot more than the promotion part.I'm no apologist for the drug companies - their profits are obscene and their ethics questionable (to say the least), but there isn't any reason to misrepresent the real situation by making stuff up.
Although not any more, I used to fly as much as you do and your arguments are mostly self-pity crap. You checked bottles of wine in your luggage and were shocked to find them broken at your destination!? Athlete's-foot infections from removing your shoes? Nope - the environment has to be wet for that to happen and it won't happen on dry carpet. You have to check bags because you can't get your toiletries into smaller bottles? Baloney - as you, yourself, stated - you fly twice a week so how many large bottles of toiletries do you need for a two day trip? I used to transfer all my liquids to smaller bottles simply because it saved so much weight. I call baloney. And what kind of toiletries do you need anyway? Soap, shampoo, lotion and sometimes even toothpaste come free at hotels. And of course the big one - your assertion that half of all TSA employees are arrogant, racist losers. Maybe, just maybe that attitude shows through and you get hassled because of it. Serves you right. But of course YOU aren't racist when you call them not qualified for minimun wage jobs, or they should not be *allowed* to have jobs, or stupid, or losers, or racists, or arrogant. If YOU think security gets tiresome just imagine what TSA and airline employees think about you.
I'm no fan of TSA, but you, sir, are the passenger from Hell, and unfortunately I see your ilk far too often.
That was the problem with the butterfly ballots in Florida - it wasn't that people were too stupid to vote, but that the check boxes were not aligned with the candidates' names. That was not the voters' fault and it wasn't at all obvious that many were casting their votes for the wrong person.