My use case has changed, so the crappy smartphone call quality does not matter to me anymore. For a while I lived in Manhattan and frequently found myself in the midst of a surprise conference call while out on the street. Even when it wasn't work related, it was nice to not have to duck into a store to talk to people. Now I use maybe 200 minutes a month.
I had a Motorola v360. It had such a good microphone that I could walk down a Manhattan avenue talking and people would not know I was even outside except for the occasional siren. The volume was actually loud enough to hear people talking on the other end.
Then I had a Sony Ericsson TM506, and while the microphone wasn't quite as good at noise cancelling, the quality was decent and the volume level was loud enough.
I've never used a smart phone that compares favorably to either of those phones. If you know of one, I'd love to give it a try. It's conceivable that the extra distance from mouth to microphone makes it impossible to make a good smartphone microphone, but I don't understand why the volume level seems low on them all.
I usually have to drop mine from 4 feet up onto tile to break them. I'm not sure what could be done to make them survive that reliably and still fit in my pocket.
I have no objection to TSP, and would like government workers to have TSP only. Right now, they also get a defined-benefit plan as part of FERS. It is much better than the old pension system, in that it gets pre-funded - but this funding is based on assumptions about the future. Should one of those assumptions fail, the taxpayer guarantees the pension fund.
Anyone who qualifies for FERS also qualifies for the health benefits, which of course cost a fortune.
Get rid of defined-benefit plans like the private sector did and make them pay the full healthcare cost (even if they can join the plan) and I'll be much happier about my government employees.:)
Don't assume such deals will bring money into your area.
True, but in this case it is an existing installation that is expanding. Either the people are happy with Facebook or they are not. If they are, the expansion is almost a no-brainer.
If you were a professional sending me to Megaupload, I would never do business with you again.
LOL, he's a photographer, not an internet professional. MegaUpload was annoying, but it did work. I set my friend up with GoDaddy accounts and taught him how to make an.htaccess file and transfer files with FTP, but it's not for everyone.
I'm not an aircraft designer, so I'm almost certainly making a bad assumption somewhere.
That said, I am a mechanical engineer, and if someone told me to design a fuel tank and told me that the vents would get plugged up for maintenance, I'd probably try to design one part of the tank to be weaker than the rest so that it fails in a predictable way. As I said before - that may very well be what happened here - I don't have the facts. The plane did not crash, so clearly the tank failure was not catastrophic.
but I honestly don't see the private industry doing a lot better.
Agreed that they don't do a lot better when working as government contractors - but at least we aren't paying them after they are done the job like we are with federal employees. Sure you might get the same crap work - maybe slightly better, maybe slightly worse - but at the end of the day, the contractor goes away and the federal employee is on the books until they die.
Where I grew up, 40 tech-ish jobs would be welcome. Almost everyone professional is either a real estate agent, lawyer, or doctor - everyone else works in the service industry or construction. Not only that, but most of the service work is highly seasonal so unemployment is horrid 6 months out of the year. I left the area because I didn't see a real opportunity for engineers.
It was designed to bleed off excess pressure. The plane tried to do just that. Only some fuckwad left it plugged.
Understood and agreed.
But in light of the existence of fuckwads in the maintenance pipeline, it seems like designing the fuel tank to explode in the least-destructive way might be prudent.
That said, the plane didn't crash, so perhaps this is exactly what happened.
I don't think it was a communications failure on the engineer's part. She read the drawing fine, but made her own design change right then and there. If there was a communications failure, it was in her not asking her supervisor about the drawing that troubled her so much that she needed to ignore it.
The engineer should have made it difficult or impossible to assemble wrong if the clearances were such an important aspect of the design.
But the assembly line worker who thought she was smarter than the drawing is also at fault. She shouldn't take all of the blame, but she was the direct cause.
More than one person can be at fault for something. Complex systems often fail in complex ways.
To come back more directly on topic, sure this idiot mechanic didn't count his tools. But why was the plane designed such that it would cause $25 million if the fuel tank went over-pressure? Seems crazy that it took out the wing.
Turbine engines are some of the most elegantly simple combustion engines in existence so how are they so expensive to produce?
That is hilarious. Watch this. And those are the cheap ones - some need to be grown from a single crystal in a vacuum furnace... let me know when you can do that cheaply.
My problem is all the suggestions that Private industry does significantly better, ESPECIALLY when funded by the government.
Maybe with things like "no bid" contracts, but in general buying things on competitive bids seems pretty efficient. The exception is when corruption enters the scene, or when the item is big enough (space shuttle, military contracts, etc) that legislators start getting involved and putting BS restrictions on the contract.
The main benefit is that you don't have to pay pension and healthcare for someone for the rest of their lives. That's my biggest beef with the way our government hires people - their salary is lower but they make up for it by going into debt that is often hidden from the books. Do you have any idea what health care costs for former federal workers are going to cost in 30 years? I have no idea, but my kids sure will! It's just not a moral policy - we are making promises to people that we can't possibly follow up on, because we'll also be old. So we're lying. Then we burden our kids with the costs of our present-day activities.
I'd say she shares some blame, by making a design decision at assembly time rather than bring the matter to the attention of her supervisor.
But yeah, bad design. If bolt orientation is so critical, you need to make the design idiot (or self-declared assembly expert) proof. I suspect "shorter bolt" wouldn't have worked - and in any event, having one bolt shorter than the others might be asking for trouble as well. But even something as simple as stamping or stenciling "bolt head down!" might have averted the situation.
Where do people like you live? I ask honestly, because I've never lived anywhere that people wouldn't kill for a high-tech datacenter to provide some real jobs close by. The only scenario I can imagine are where the road system is so bad that you already need 45 minutes to go a mile and bedroom communities in the suburbs where people would like to keep it all-residential. In the first case, you just insist upon road improvement. In the second, you'd need consent of the majority (in theory anyhow) before you changed zoning.
One? There are several health care systems in the US. There is the single-provider VA system, there is the single-payer medicare/medicaid system, and there is the private system that is heavily regulated such that you cannot deny emergency care, but you don't actually get paid for this service.
The private system ends up picking up the slack in the least efficient way - through the ER and by overcharging the uninsured. If you pay cash for health care, you actually have to haggle... it's insane. We have a really inefficient form of socialized healthcare just so people can delude themselves into believing it is not socialized.
From what I've read, our VA system vacillates between underfunded and over-funded. I'm pretty sure the standard of care and cost, on average, represents pretty much what they get in other single-provider systems. If the federal government took over all of our hospitals and clinics, you'd get a version of the VA. Medicare/Medicaid mostly underpays, and you have to be destitute or old to receive it, so it is hard to compare with other single-payer systems - but that is (obviously) what an American single-payer system would look like. The private system works great if you have employer-supplied insurance - otherwise you are overpaying or getting emergency-only care for free until you are destitute enough to apply for Medicaid. Terrible situation. I think in cities the government should offer free clinics and in the rural part of the country vouchers for private care. The private care vouchers could even be provided by lowest-bidder HMOs. The clinics would not be pleasant places, and the government HMOs would be the worst possible HMO, so there would be strong incentive for people to seek private insurance. You could offer further incentive by capping benefits by income or something like that. The government should also force providers and insurers into a common electronic system to reduce the administrative burden of health care work.
Given that uranium weighs a lot and the reactor didn't explode and that water doesn't stay as "steam" very long once you remove the pressure, I don't think much uranium "evaporated into high flying atmosphere streams".
The only explosion was a hydrogen gas explosion above containment that did not involve steam, if that is where you were going next.
what happened to the millions of tonnes of seawater which was pumped in to cool exposed radioactive rods and evaporated into high flying atmosphere streams ?
Well, if it evaporated, then it certainly didn't take any uranium with it.
And if it flooded into the sea, it carried some dilute amount of uranium with it. Uranium is mostly harmless. TFA says it will settle onto the sea floor.
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My use case has changed, so the crappy smartphone call quality does not matter to me anymore. For a while I lived in Manhattan and frequently found myself in the midst of a surprise conference call while out on the street. Even when it wasn't work related, it was nice to not have to duck into a store to talk to people. Now I use maybe 200 minutes a month.
Cool... now I just have to find someone with a rooted Android who is willing to install this :)
I had a Motorola v360. It had such a good microphone that I could walk down a Manhattan avenue talking and people would not know I was even outside except for the occasional siren. The volume was actually loud enough to hear people talking on the other end.
Then I had a Sony Ericsson TM506, and while the microphone wasn't quite as good at noise cancelling, the quality was decent and the volume level was loud enough.
I've never used a smart phone that compares favorably to either of those phones. If you know of one, I'd love to give it a try. It's conceivable that the extra distance from mouth to microphone makes it impossible to make a good smartphone microphone, but I don't understand why the volume level seems low on them all.
I usually have to drop mine from 4 feet up onto tile to break them. I'm not sure what could be done to make them survive that reliably and still fit in my pocket.
Apparently they are bringing back the PowerPC for the new Amiga.
I have no objection to TSP, and would like government workers to have TSP only. Right now, they also get a defined-benefit plan as part of FERS. It is much better than the old pension system, in that it gets pre-funded - but this funding is based on assumptions about the future. Should one of those assumptions fail, the taxpayer guarantees the pension fund.
Anyone who qualifies for FERS also qualifies for the health benefits, which of course cost a fortune.
Get rid of defined-benefit plans like the private sector did and make them pay the full healthcare cost (even if they can join the plan) and I'll be much happier about my government employees. :)
Don't assume such deals will bring money into your area.
True, but in this case it is an existing installation that is expanding. Either the people are happy with Facebook or they are not. If they are, the expansion is almost a no-brainer.
FERS is a defined-benefit plan. Maybe you don't call it a "pension", but it's the same thing.
If you were a professional sending me to Megaupload, I would never do business with you again.
LOL, he's a photographer, not an internet professional. MegaUpload was annoying, but it did work. I set my friend up with GoDaddy accounts and taught him how to make an .htaccess file and transfer files with FTP, but it's not for everyone.
I'm not an aircraft designer, so I'm almost certainly making a bad assumption somewhere.
That said, I am a mechanical engineer, and if someone told me to design a fuel tank and told me that the vents would get plugged up for maintenance, I'd probably try to design one part of the tank to be weaker than the rest so that it fails in a predictable way. As I said before - that may very well be what happened here - I don't have the facts. The plane did not crash, so clearly the tank failure was not catastrophic.
but I honestly don't see the private industry doing a lot better.
Agreed that they don't do a lot better when working as government contractors - but at least we aren't paying them after they are done the job like we are with federal employees. Sure you might get the same crap work - maybe slightly better, maybe slightly worse - but at the end of the day, the contractor goes away and the federal employee is on the books until they die.
Where I grew up, 40 tech-ish jobs would be welcome. Almost everyone professional is either a real estate agent, lawyer, or doctor - everyone else works in the service industry or construction. Not only that, but most of the service work is highly seasonal so unemployment is horrid 6 months out of the year. I left the area because I didn't see a real opportunity for engineers.
It was designed to bleed off excess pressure. The plane tried to do just that. Only some fuckwad left it plugged.
Understood and agreed.
But in light of the existence of fuckwads in the maintenance pipeline, it seems like designing the fuel tank to explode in the least-destructive way might be prudent.
That said, the plane didn't crash, so perhaps this is exactly what happened.
I don't think it was a communications failure on the engineer's part. She read the drawing fine, but made her own design change right then and there. If there was a communications failure, it was in her not asking her supervisor about the drawing that troubled her so much that she needed to ignore it.
The engineer should have made it difficult or impossible to assemble wrong if the clearances were such an important aspect of the design.
Don't get me wrong, the design is faulty.
But the assembly line worker who thought she was smarter than the drawing is also at fault. She shouldn't take all of the blame, but she was the direct cause.
More than one person can be at fault for something. Complex systems often fail in complex ways.
To come back more directly on topic, sure this idiot mechanic didn't count his tools. But why was the plane designed such that it would cause $25 million if the fuel tank went over-pressure? Seems crazy that it took out the wing.
Turbine engines are some of the most elegantly simple combustion engines in existence so how are they so expensive to produce?
That is hilarious. Watch this. And those are the cheap ones - some need to be grown from a single crystal in a vacuum furnace... let me know when you can do that cheaply.
My problem is all the suggestions that Private industry does significantly better, ESPECIALLY when funded by the government.
Maybe with things like "no bid" contracts, but in general buying things on competitive bids seems pretty efficient. The exception is when corruption enters the scene, or when the item is big enough (space shuttle, military contracts, etc) that legislators start getting involved and putting BS restrictions on the contract.
The main benefit is that you don't have to pay pension and healthcare for someone for the rest of their lives. That's my biggest beef with the way our government hires people - their salary is lower but they make up for it by going into debt that is often hidden from the books. Do you have any idea what health care costs for former federal workers are going to cost in 30 years? I have no idea, but my kids sure will! It's just not a moral policy - we are making promises to people that we can't possibly follow up on, because we'll also be old. So we're lying. Then we burden our kids with the costs of our present-day activities.
Really? In a mechanics story? Are you that single-minded? A few years ago it was Bush hating in every thread, no it's "the bankers".
I'd say she shares some blame, by making a design decision at assembly time rather than bring the matter to the attention of her supervisor.
But yeah, bad design. If bolt orientation is so critical, you need to make the design idiot (or self-declared assembly expert) proof. I suspect "shorter bolt" wouldn't have worked - and in any event, having one bolt shorter than the others might be asking for trouble as well. But even something as simple as stamping or stenciling "bolt head down!" might have averted the situation.
Where do people like you live? I ask honestly, because I've never lived anywhere that people wouldn't kill for a high-tech datacenter to provide some real jobs close by. The only scenario I can imagine are where the road system is so bad that you already need 45 minutes to go a mile and bedroom communities in the suburbs where people would like to keep it all-residential. In the first case, you just insist upon road improvement. In the second, you'd need consent of the majority (in theory anyhow) before you changed zoning.
It's conceivable that all the datacenters aren't 35MW.
it's *still* cheaper than the American one.
One? There are several health care systems in the US. There is the single-provider VA system, there is the single-payer medicare/medicaid system, and there is the private system that is heavily regulated such that you cannot deny emergency care, but you don't actually get paid for this service.
The private system ends up picking up the slack in the least efficient way - through the ER and by overcharging the uninsured. If you pay cash for health care, you actually have to haggle... it's insane. We have a really inefficient form of socialized healthcare just so people can delude themselves into believing it is not socialized.
From what I've read, our VA system vacillates between underfunded and over-funded. I'm pretty sure the standard of care and cost, on average, represents pretty much what they get in other single-provider systems. If the federal government took over all of our hospitals and clinics, you'd get a version of the VA. Medicare/Medicaid mostly underpays, and you have to be destitute or old to receive it, so it is hard to compare with other single-payer systems - but that is (obviously) what an American single-payer system would look like. The private system works great if you have employer-supplied insurance - otherwise you are overpaying or getting emergency-only care for free until you are destitute enough to apply for Medicaid. Terrible situation. I think in cities the government should offer free clinics and in the rural part of the country vouchers for private care. The private care vouchers could even be provided by lowest-bidder HMOs. The clinics would not be pleasant places, and the government HMOs would be the worst possible HMO, so there would be strong incentive for people to seek private insurance. You could offer further incentive by capping benefits by income or something like that. The government should also force providers and insurers into a common electronic system to reduce the administrative burden of health care work.
Given that uranium weighs a lot and the reactor didn't explode and that water doesn't stay as "steam" very long once you remove the pressure, I don't think much uranium "evaporated into high flying atmosphere streams".
The only explosion was a hydrogen gas explosion above containment that did not involve steam, if that is where you were going next.
what happened to the millions of tonnes of seawater which was pumped in to cool exposed radioactive rods and evaporated into high flying atmosphere streams ?
Well, if it evaporated, then it certainly didn't take any uranium with it.
And if it flooded into the sea, it carried some dilute amount of uranium with it. Uranium is mostly harmless. TFA says it will settle onto the sea floor.
So when it wound up with a parachute I thought, "Ahh, Lazarus was exaggerating, this ain't so bad."
Then it deployed a rocket lander and I thought, "Oh, maybe he's right."
Then it popped the rover out on a Mars yo-yo, and I said, "Oh, come on!"
Then it gently releases the rover and goes shooting off over the horizon and I just started chuckling.
If this thing works, NASA rules.