Decide if you, collectively, want to bitch about people on unemployment paying $100 or more a month for cable, or bitch about crybabies who have chosen to cut the cord. Complaining about both is hypocricy.
Even the most efficient internal combustion engine is only about 25% efficient, until you start getting into combined-heat-and-power units. Which fuel cells can do just as well, if not better. Remember, their exhaust stream is molecularly purified water in the form of steam, generally - just pipe it into the bottom of your water heater, to distribute the heat, and cut your utility bill in three ways - cheap power, none of which is spent heating water, which is free with the purchase of energy.
I've been rear-ended a few times, and avoided it a few more times. I probably shouldn't have survived the second time, but some combination of nerves, skill, and astoundingly good luck got me out of what I learned later was awfully close to a PIT maneuver. Fast forward four months; I had just fixed my almost-totalled car, and was driving a friend home. I saw someone attempting a similar, ill-advised passing maneuver; I immediately dropped down to 4th gear and put the throttle on the floor. 193 horsepower and 225 foot-pounds of torque were brought to bear, and I accelerated quickly. I was still struck in the back-left quadrant, but this time around I maintained full control of the car, which did not need half of its frame replaced this time around. (Still amazed it wasn't totalled. Still amazed I wasn't totalled.) I needed a new bumper, a dent pounded out, and a replacement taillight, as opposed to a trunk lid, bumper, three frame quarter-panels, and both doors.
Both situations occurred while I was maintaining the speed limit, in a straight line, down the center of my lane, so please don't ask what I was doing wrong at the time.
That was not the only time stomping the gas got me out of trouble; a few other times, I avoided losing yet another bumper entirely.
Please don't assume that just because some people are frightening drivers that some raw horsepower has never solved any problems.
The naval base in Honolulu? Where we dock our Aegis cruisers, specifically the Arleigh Burke class missile destroyer?
The thing we designed for theatre ballistic missile defense?
Good fucking luck with that. Each Arleigh Burke carries up to 90 SM-3 "Standard Missiles" and the Aegis radar that can direct over 100 at a time (yay, overengineering!). How many cruisers will be parked there at any given time? I don't know, but I suspect the point defense fire will begin to resemble something from Macross if the trajectory puts it originating in North Korea. The US has 15 such Aegis cruisers, but there's over 100 kicking around. I suspect the three South Korean ones would take a potshot at anything they see coming their way, and that we'd keep one - at least - in range of the Honolulu base, as it's the closest piece of territory to the North Korean launch sites.
Of course, this is all on Wikipedia. I'd like to doubt that NK could be that crazy, but I wouldn't necessarily put it past them.
Foregoing moderation to point this out: They do just dump the brine back in the ocean in some places. Where that's done, you get huge zones where nothing lives, because the algae at the bottom of the food chain usually can't live in such radically different salinity than they evolved in. This results in blooms of exotic algae, which tends to produce toxins - think red tide - when exposed to agricultural runoff. Fishermen are usually just run out of town, and if there was a commercial fishery, or the place was popular with out-of-town anglers, you've just killed the jobs involved with both of those.
Since biological processes impact coastal erosion, you may or may not also have to worry about your coastline receding, too - that depends mostly on how lucky you get, I think, but I have no data handy.
We engage in biological intelligent design every day to earn our pay. Some of us have even figured out how to sign our in vivo code; others simply copied the method. Therefore, the intelligence responsible for any designed system is rarely in question.
We have something terribly wrong with our culture - perhaps too many desperate, angry people with nothing to lose - and, with the exception of them hunting in packs, I found this scenario in newspapers.
While I understand that argument, I consider the point void if it's accompanied by an increase in home invasions involving gangs of about a half dozen men armed with machetes and nail bats who don't particularly care if the homeowners are home, who don't like leaving witnesses, and can be certain that there won't be any effective armed resistance. I'm frequently disappointed by those on both sides of this argument who assume there's never unintended consequences. And we can test for that using statistics, it's just that frequently people can't be arsed to try - or worse, deliberately fail to consider the side effects of their actions or the public policy they advocate.
... and I filled a four-drawer file cabinet over the course of a four-year degree. Unless your dormitories are going to include a four-drawer file cabinet, and you're going to help your off-campus students purchase one,
I also resent carrying a 2" thick envelope full of the necessary syllibi, handouts, and readings - in addition to a few hardback texts. It's heavy, I wear out expensive backpacks in a year and change (cheap ones in about a semester), and it's generally unpleasant to have to carry your 40 pound backpack while your professor goes over things for the people who only brought a spiral notebook and a pencil, if that.
I'm pretty sure any attempt at banning semiautomatic firearms will make things worse. There aren't many gun nuts out there who would resist a ban with violence, but a ban is usually proposed in the context of reducing a vanishingly rare kind of crime. Even if we assume only a percent of a percent of a percent of American gun owners - one in a million - take it badly, (I have no idea how accurate that is; let's just pretend) one must remember there's slightly more civilian-owned firearms than citizens. Let's pretend that all the old sources of mass shootings are successfully stopped by a ban. By my estimate, there's going to be a substantial short term increase in violence - thank you first-order unintended consequences. If the police response to 300 mass shootings, sniper attacks, and other sorts of high-profile violence in a month is half as bad as the LAPD is demonstrating right now, I'd guess more people - innocent bystanders - will be shot by the police than the bad guys.
This will go over with the public about as well as a church fart, alienating them from their erstwhile protectors - second order unintended consequences. What's the result of a population at odds with its domestic police force? I dunno, I'm not a political scientist, but I get the feeling I don't want to find out firsthand.
Random thoughts related to and inspired by your post; pardon me, but it's late:
* A pistol grip is actually worse for "spraying fire from the hip" than a conventional rifle's grip angle, and vice-versa. There's a reason that, with the rise of bright, green laser sights, gunmakers are prototyping machine guns with chainsaw grips.
* I think there's a scene in "Saving Private Ryan" where Tom Hanks' character is developing carpal tunnel syndrome due to the grip angle of his M1 Garand, which he carries constantly at the ready. If this is well researched like the rest of the movie, I can see why the military prefers pistol grips. VA healthcare is expensive.
* Some of the more egregious lawmakers are proposing mandatory safety standards for firearms, while working to ban safety features. (I can't help but wonder if it's an attempt to set standards, and make meeting them impossible) The barrel shroud is there to keep you from burning your dumbass self, not "that shoulder thing that goes up". Some also promote mandatory ergonomic standards for offices, while trying to ban similar on firearms.
* Olympic shooters rely on custom ergonomics to the point where, if their gun breaks, they bow out of an event instead of borrowing a gun - many times, they simply cannot fire another athlete's gun with acceptable accuracy; "acceptable" defined as "has any hope of winning".
* When I said "By using a separate pistol grip and an adjustable stock", I forgot to point out that there are dozens of manufacturers making differently shaped grips, many making an assortment. By relying on modular parts, you can get a custom fit without a custom pricetag.
Because there's a strong correlation between "looks scary" and "good ergonomics". 1950s vegetable peelers worked, but a quarter-inch-thick round handle was hard for everyone to use, and impossible for the old or arthritic to use. 1950s shotguns worked, but you had to adapt to the tool - if you were rich, you had an obscure English gunsmith make one to fit you; if you weren't, you made do with what the manufacturer thought was going to be popular. By using a separate pistol grip and an adjustable stock, you can approach the ergonomics of a $30,000 British double rifle for a price that mere mortals can afford. Nobody uses a mouse shaped like a rectangular prism any more, and even the cheapest ones now take into account the shape of the human hand. Why would I want to use a rifle stock that does not?
Why do people consider ergonomic weapons scary? That's a much more interesting question in my opinion. Some people, it's because they look and feel of military weapons. (Some - many - vets prefer the AR family for this reason - they already know where the buttons and levers are, and overcoming muscle memory is hard - and in this case, unnecessary.) Some people, I would guess, it's because of video games. Some people, violent media. Others, it's a lack of exposure, leading to an overactive imagination inventing disaster scenarios. But these are all speculation, because I'm not aware of a single study anywhere ever investigating that question, and I'd be fascinated to read it if one in fact exists.
The rest of us who have space equivalent to a one-car garage to dedicate to storing components, reloading machinery, and lead casting equipment - plus storing bricks of lead too?
And the spare cash to buy this equipment and stockpile raw materials?
I get it, the marginal cost of each finished cartridge is peanuts, but amortizing the cost of your capital outlay and the increase in rent or mortgage payments on a property that's suitable for manufacturing ammo is definitely a nonzero cost.
Ammo is in short supply with those who can't afford to build a private ammo factory. If you haven't looked lately, a lot of us can't afford that sort of thing.
We only bought as many SeaWolf submarines as we had targets - Russian "Typhoon" boomers - to use them on. By military standards, a 1:1 weapon:target ratio is actually showing restraint.;)
Now that they've scrapped the Typhoon fleet down to 3, we could afford to task one of those SeaWolfs with something an inferior sub would do, and retire the old technology before we have a nuclear accident to spend a trillion dollars cleaning up. Granted the Navy has a perfect nuclear track record; they seem to know where corners cannot be cut and respect their technology.
If you do it right, it'll look like a computerized power strip. Three-pin computer power cord, three pin power outlet, (heating device agnostic!) and a socket for plugging in your temperature probe. For small meals, use the deep fryer; for large meals, use a five-gallon coffee urn.
They moved the door to the back, and it's only present on the 27" model now. This is fairly infuriating, since as much as I'd love a 27" monitor, I'd first need to change desks; finding something decent, with scads of storage, at a reasonable price isn't always easy.
I'm the sort of person who would have instead liked to see the new iMac guts in the old iMac case, with room for two to four 3.5" desktop class hard drives, or an internal PCIe slot for a desktop class graphics card in a transverse mounting. Alas, I hear the new iMac is sealed with adhesives instead of magnets, so there's actually been some backsliding.
Slashdot Mirror
Adequate internet: $20/month
Adequate cable: $100/month
Unwillingly unemployed or underemployed: 27,000,000.
Decide if you, collectively, want to bitch about people on unemployment paying $100 or more a month for cable, or bitch about crybabies who have chosen to cut the cord. Complaining about both is hypocricy.
I waited.
Then I forgot Game of Thrones,
Forgot it got made.
Now, thus reminded,
I discovered my life,
it has not suffered
for lacking this show,
and I doubt I'll watch this show,
until, for five bucks,
I can get seasons
in Wal-Mart's $5 DVD bin.
They have a problem.
Without the lure of
Instant gratification,
They've already lost.
Is that including gains from the regenerative braking, and reusing that kinetic energy?
If not, well, Science marches on and I'll update the data I quote. And, by the way, cooool.
Even the most efficient internal combustion engine is only about 25% efficient, until you start getting into combined-heat-and-power units. Which fuel cells can do just as well, if not better. Remember, their exhaust stream is molecularly purified water in the form of steam, generally - just pipe it into the bottom of your water heater, to distribute the heat, and cut your utility bill in three ways - cheap power, none of which is spent heating water, which is free with the purchase of energy.
The rest, as they say, is hilarity.
Seriously, a 3D printer doesn't really lower the bar to execution any, it just requires a different skillset.
http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2012/11/27/shit-shovel-ak-47/
I've been rear-ended a few times, and avoided it a few more times. I probably shouldn't have survived the second time, but some combination of nerves, skill, and astoundingly good luck got me out of what I learned later was awfully close to a PIT maneuver. Fast forward four months; I had just fixed my almost-totalled car, and was driving a friend home. I saw someone attempting a similar, ill-advised passing maneuver; I immediately dropped down to 4th gear and put the throttle on the floor. 193 horsepower and 225 foot-pounds of torque were brought to bear, and I accelerated quickly. I was still struck in the back-left quadrant, but this time around I maintained full control of the car, which did not need half of its frame replaced this time around. (Still amazed it wasn't totalled. Still amazed I wasn't totalled.) I needed a new bumper, a dent pounded out, and a replacement taillight, as opposed to a trunk lid, bumper, three frame quarter-panels, and both doors.
Both situations occurred while I was maintaining the speed limit, in a straight line, down the center of my lane, so please don't ask what I was doing wrong at the time.
That was not the only time stomping the gas got me out of trouble; a few other times, I avoided losing yet another bumper entirely.
Please don't assume that just because some people are frightening drivers that some raw horsepower has never solved any problems.
Actually there were two. But we can't just go using the last one left on piddly shit like facebook users. ;)
By your logic, half of the middle east and Africa have engaged in acts of war against America.
I sincerely suggest against prosecuting a conventional war against them, or this will be a world war in more than an academic sense.
The laws weren't written to deal with non-state armies operating across international borders.
Really, step 1 is setting down some reasonable guidelines on how to deal with declaring war on some group that isn't a nation-state.
The naval base in Honolulu? Where we dock our Aegis cruisers, specifically the Arleigh Burke class missile destroyer?
The thing we designed for theatre ballistic missile defense?
Good fucking luck with that. Each Arleigh Burke carries up to 90 SM-3 "Standard Missiles" and the Aegis radar that can direct over 100 at a time (yay, overengineering!). How many cruisers will be parked there at any given time? I don't know, but I suspect the point defense fire will begin to resemble something from Macross if the trajectory puts it originating in North Korea. The US has 15 such Aegis cruisers, but there's over 100 kicking around. I suspect the three South Korean ones would take a potshot at anything they see coming their way, and that we'd keep one - at least - in range of the Honolulu base, as it's the closest piece of territory to the North Korean launch sites.
Of course, this is all on Wikipedia. I'd like to doubt that NK could be that crazy, but I wouldn't necessarily put it past them.
7200s are available in a size-category larger than hybrids. For example, you can get a 1tb 7200, or a 750 gig hybrid. Also, guess which one's cheaper?
Foregoing moderation to point this out: They do just dump the brine back in the ocean in some places. Where that's done, you get huge zones where nothing lives, because the algae at the bottom of the food chain usually can't live in such radically different salinity than they evolved in. This results in blooms of exotic algae, which tends to produce toxins - think red tide - when exposed to agricultural runoff. Fishermen are usually just run out of town, and if there was a commercial fishery, or the place was popular with out-of-town anglers, you've just killed the jobs involved with both of those.
Since biological processes impact coastal erosion, you may or may not also have to worry about your coastline receding, too - that depends mostly on how lucky you get, I think, but I have no data handy.
I am a molecular biologist.
We engage in biological intelligent design every day to earn our pay. Some of us have even figured out how to sign our in vivo code; others simply copied the method. Therefore, the intelligence responsible for any designed system is rarely in question.
We have something terribly wrong with our culture - perhaps too many desperate, angry people with nothing to lose - and, with the exception of them hunting in packs, I found this scenario in newspapers.
Canadians are lucky.
While I understand that argument, I consider the point void if it's accompanied by an increase in home invasions involving gangs of about a half dozen men armed with machetes and nail bats who don't particularly care if the homeowners are home, who don't like leaving witnesses, and can be certain that there won't be any effective armed resistance. I'm frequently disappointed by those on both sides of this argument who assume there's never unintended consequences. And we can test for that using statistics, it's just that frequently people can't be arsed to try - or worse, deliberately fail to consider the side effects of their actions or the public policy they advocate.
... and I filled a four-drawer file cabinet over the course of a four-year degree. Unless your dormitories are going to include a four-drawer file cabinet, and you're going to help your off-campus students purchase one,
I also resent carrying a 2" thick envelope full of the necessary syllibi, handouts, and readings - in addition to a few hardback texts. It's heavy, I wear out expensive backpacks in a year and change (cheap ones in about a semester), and it's generally unpleasant to have to carry your 40 pound backpack while your professor goes over things for the people who only brought a spiral notebook and a pencil, if that.
I'm pretty sure any attempt at banning semiautomatic firearms will make things worse. There aren't many gun nuts out there who would resist a ban with violence, but a ban is usually proposed in the context of reducing a vanishingly rare kind of crime. Even if we assume only a percent of a percent of a percent of American gun owners - one in a million - take it badly, (I have no idea how accurate that is; let's just pretend) one must remember there's slightly more civilian-owned firearms than citizens. Let's pretend that all the old sources of mass shootings are successfully stopped by a ban. By my estimate, there's going to be a substantial short term increase in violence - thank you first-order unintended consequences. If the police response to 300 mass shootings, sniper attacks, and other sorts of high-profile violence in a month is half as bad as the LAPD is demonstrating right now, I'd guess more people - innocent bystanders - will be shot by the police than the bad guys.
This will go over with the public about as well as a church fart, alienating them from their erstwhile protectors - second order unintended consequences. What's the result of a population at odds with its domestic police force? I dunno, I'm not a political scientist, but I get the feeling I don't want to find out firsthand.
Random thoughts related to and inspired by your post; pardon me, but it's late:
Because there's a strong correlation between "looks scary" and "good ergonomics". 1950s vegetable peelers worked, but a quarter-inch-thick round handle was hard for everyone to use, and impossible for the old or arthritic to use. 1950s shotguns worked, but you had to adapt to the tool - if you were rich, you had an obscure English gunsmith make one to fit you; if you weren't, you made do with what the manufacturer thought was going to be popular. By using a separate pistol grip and an adjustable stock, you can approach the ergonomics of a $30,000 British double rifle for a price that mere mortals can afford. Nobody uses a mouse shaped like a rectangular prism any more, and even the cheapest ones now take into account the shape of the human hand. Why would I want to use a rifle stock that does not?
Why do people consider ergonomic weapons scary? That's a much more interesting question in my opinion. Some people, it's because they look and feel of military weapons. (Some - many - vets prefer the AR family for this reason - they already know where the buttons and levers are, and overcoming muscle memory is hard - and in this case, unnecessary.) Some people, I would guess, it's because of video games. Some people, violent media. Others, it's a lack of exposure, leading to an overactive imagination inventing disaster scenarios. But these are all speculation, because I'm not aware of a single study anywhere ever investigating that question, and I'd be fascinated to read it if one in fact exists.
There's a new robot that lets you recycle used soda bottles into plastic filament.
Somehow, I doubt Coke and Pepsi are willing to go back to glass bottles.
The rest of us who have space equivalent to a one-car garage to dedicate to storing components, reloading machinery, and lead casting equipment - plus storing bricks of lead too?
And the spare cash to buy this equipment and stockpile raw materials?
I get it, the marginal cost of each finished cartridge is peanuts, but amortizing the cost of your capital outlay and the increase in rent or mortgage payments on a property that's suitable for manufacturing ammo is definitely a nonzero cost.
Ammo is in short supply with those who can't afford to build a private ammo factory. If you haven't looked lately, a lot of us can't afford that sort of thing.
We only bought as many SeaWolf submarines as we had targets - Russian "Typhoon" boomers - to use them on. By military standards, a 1:1 weapon:target ratio is actually showing restraint. ;)
Now that they've scrapped the Typhoon fleet down to 3, we could afford to task one of those SeaWolfs with something an inferior sub would do, and retire the old technology before we have a nuclear accident to spend a trillion dollars cleaning up. Granted the Navy has a perfect nuclear track record; they seem to know where corners cannot be cut and respect their technology.
If you do it right, it'll look like a computerized power strip. Three-pin computer power cord, three pin power outlet, (heating device agnostic!) and a socket for plugging in your temperature probe. For small meals, use the deep fryer; for large meals, use a five-gallon coffee urn.
It's worth pointing out the Thrustmaster joysticks are patterned after fighter joysticks, not the other way around.
They moved the door to the back, and it's only present on the 27" model now. This is fairly infuriating, since as much as I'd love a 27" monitor, I'd first need to change desks; finding something decent, with scads of storage, at a reasonable price isn't always easy.
I'm the sort of person who would have instead liked to see the new iMac guts in the old iMac case, with room for two to four 3.5" desktop class hard drives, or an internal PCIe slot for a desktop class graphics card in a transverse mounting. Alas, I hear the new iMac is sealed with adhesives instead of magnets, so there's actually been some backsliding.
No, they just ban you from Xbox Live for life if you play a game before its release date. ;)