Any kind of leak and you've suddenly got 5 million gallons of contaminated water. Of course, this assumes that your containment pool doesn't leak (yea right).
The whole point of the NBN is that it's a government chartered corporation that leases access to everyone.
It was never about the "free-market". Instead, the idea was to create a competitive market, on a government built foundation instead of the existing private monopoly/oligopoly.
Infrastructure investments are almost always worth it, even if the price explodes.
Congress regularly has to regulate what anyone would consider common courtesy. What do you think the Do Not Call list and the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act are?
Eventually the buck stops somewhere, and any logical person would have to admit that at this point the Affordable Care Act has been rolled out terribly.
One piece of the Affordable Care Act has been rolled out terribly. It's not even the most important part.
The really important pieces of the Affordable Care Act have been in place for months now. Stuff like requiring insurance companies to spend ~80% of premiums on health care and not disqualifying you because of a pre-existing condition. Or how about removing lifetime caps on coverage.
I could go on, but the Affordable Care Act has a lot of other moving pieces. Eventually people will get signed up and then all the criticism will have done naught but poison the atmosphere.
But peak/off-peak pricing is itself an artificial circumstance caused by inadequate infrastructure.
If there was inadequate infrastructure, you'd constantly see brownouts and blackouts. The reality is that our infrastructure is fairly reliable, except during extreme weather events.
Peak pricing is a result of peaker plants, which use more expensive natural gas or (rarely) petroleum by-products. If you don't want to use peaker plants, your alternatives are to (a) build up base load capacity to match peak demand and then just waste energy/money to keep the plant running (b) have brownouts and blackouts
If you have a better idea, there are plenty of corporations, with deep pockets, who would be extremely interested in your plan.
The convention provides for all forms of mutual assistance including exchange on request, spontaneous tax examinations abroad, simultaneous tax examinations and assistance in tax collection, while protecting taxpayers' rights, the OECD said. Automatic exchange of data is possible under the convention but requires additional agreements between the states involved.
Once this treaty gets passed through the Swiss legislature, their bank secrecy will become a thing of the past.
Give it a few weeks and I bet we'll see a story, sourced from Snowden, about how Switzerland helped the US spy on countries that it doesn't have any diplomatic relations with.
There is not and there never will be a "right" answer or a correct balance - every possible solution has pros and cons.
We don't have to let private corporations own infrastructure installed through easements. A government chartered non-profit corporation has all of the pros and less of the cons.
There's no reason why the city couldn't reclaim AT&T's telephone poles at market rate, then lease it back to AT&T and anyone else that wasn't to use 'em..
Because there's a legal reason to want to keep your wheels spinning while you drive off, it'll be labeled "Snow and Ice".
What are you talking about? This isn't rally Sweden and you don't need to be shooting up rooster tails of snow. The absolute last thing you want on snow or ice is wheel spin.
Anytime you see a traction control system with a "snow" mode, it does any combination of: 1. desensitizes the gas pedal 2. starts you in 2nd gear 3. limits engine power 4. traction control reacts much more aggressively to prevent wheel spin 5. up-shifts your transmission at lower rpm to keep wheel spin down
Sand and mud modes will do the exact opposite, because you want high rpms and varying amounts of wheel spin to keep you moving on those surfaces.
I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf. Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.
Did I mention a broken system that cannot correct errors? I'm waiting for someone to pay me to blog happy things about Deer sipping from ponds over a pump
Just so you know, deer love salt. They will go for miles to find a salt lick (usually clay with a high concentration of salt and other minerals). They'll also go stand on the side of the road in the winter to lick up the salt (and get hit by passing cars).
You can make your own salt lick and wildlife will come from all around to get a taste.
The SR-71 was retired because it wasn't needed, not with satellites that can read a license plate from orbit in real time.
The SR-71 was killed because of *budget cuts. It's a wildly expensive plane to operate and needs a lot of fuel support to go anywhere and come back.
Satellite coverage isn't the panopticon you seem to think it is. Yes they can read your license plate from space, but only if there's a satellite in the right spot, at the right angle. Sometimes it's faster to put real eyes in the sky (SR-71 or *U-2) than it is to re-task an out of place satellite. And despite the magic of satellite imagery, high resolution film from a plane still wins out.
*The military is currently looking at mothballing other types of fleets as a fallout of the sequester. Goodbye A-10 Thunderbolt. **Yea, we're still using the U-2 spy plane since its introduction in 1957. The Pentagon plans to keep it in service until 2023. They're killing the drone program that was supposed to replace it.
but the truth is, there is no risk-free, cost-free, environmental-damage-free answer to the problem of power production.
It's usually "pick two out of three" when you are given any three factors. In this case, one of the articles assigns a specific value ($600k/year) to the cost of not-killing bald eagles.
and coal miners have a nasty habit of dying of black lung.
This is purely a failure of regulatory oversight. The laws regarding mining ventilation and dust reduction are effective. They were so effective that black lung mostly disappeared as a cause of miners deaths. Black lung has only had a resurgence because mining operations have been cutting costs and intentionally lying to &/or deceiving the inspectors.
The problem is that, the way the statistics work, it doesn't take the number of anti-vaccine nutters to be very large before the numbers reach a kind of tipping point and the number of outbreaks starts to dramatically increase.
If the anti-vaxxers were evenly distributed throughout the population, we could ignore them and go merrily on our way, safe in the knowledge that their refusal will cause no significant harm.
Unfortunately, the anti-vaccination ideology is somewhat infectious itself and these like-minded individuals end up living in clusters.
There's no particular reason to assume that bitcoin is the cryptocurrency that will win the future. There are plenty of contenders and nothing to stop [large financial institution] from latching on to one of those.
maybe we will see more powerful wifi standards emerging and we will eventually do away with the proprietary UMTS/LTE standards and hopefully we will eventually see the end of having to pay for bandwidth while on the move (everyone simply runs and shares their own AP, kind of like FON)
Mobile wireless will always be hamstrung by real world limitations. 1. Wireless towers are expensive 2. Wireless bandwidth is expensive 3. There is a limit to the number of clients you can connect to any 1 tower
As a result, wireless providers have been doing their damnedest to get data off their OTA networks and onto wifi where/when ever possible.
1. Much of the existing copper is in bad condition and would need to be replaced anyway anyway to deliver decent VDSL speeds and reliability. Telstra, responsible for managing the copper network, has publicly stated that they consider the copper network at end of life.
I have three questions: 1. Does Telestra still own the copper? 2. As part of the NBN, does Telestra have to lease their copper to anyone that wants to provide service over it?
2. The Liberals' plan, compared to the original Labor plan, would only result in cost savings of 20-30%, yet deliver an outcome that is a lot more than 20-30% worse (in terms of speeds, reliability and future capacity for growth and upgrades).
I recall reading a few months ago that Rupert Murdoch was trying to screw with the elections so that Rudd (Labor) would lose and his 90%+ FTTH plan would die and be replaced by FTTN.
3. So how did it come to pass that Rudd won, yet Labor's FTTH plan died and got replaced by the Liberal Party's FTTN?
3) The compliance officer should then have the juice to get something done if they determine this is a legitimate issue. If they determine it isn't an issue then their neck is on the line not yours.
The submitter doesn't just want to cover their ass, they want to do a good job. It's endlessly frustrating when it seems like your boss or co-workers are conspiring to keep you from doing the best work that you can.
How come applying thermal grease is still such a big problem in the semiconductor industry? They've been doing it for decades, but still haven't figured out how to get it right every time.
Even Apple, who are renowned for their design and manufacturing prowess, keeps hiring companies that screw it up.
What's so special about climatology that even rather small technical problems can't be discussed publicly?
There's nothing special about climatology in that regards. It's completely normal for people doing work to not want you to see their errors; only the successfully completed result.
The only thing special about climatology is the number of people (who are completely unable to form an educated opinion on the subject) that grasp at any straw to support their preconceived ideas. This applies to both sides.
What doesn't apply to both sides is the concerted effort, by the same lobbyists and think tanks who shilled for Big Tobacco, to manufacture misinformation and bad science in order to cloud the debate.
Don't confuse group think and tribalism. The main difference is that group think is a problem for leaders, while tribalism is what motivates all the followers.
You can't combat tribalism nearly so easily as group think, since the group identification is more than just a matter of facts. Otherwise, the Red Sox wouldn't have any fans.
1. AFAIK, unlike Amazon, you don't actually buy anything directly from the Alibaba corporation. 2. Most *Chinese sellers lie on the customs declaration so that you don't have to pay fees.
*I'm not picking on China, most overseas sellers do this.
Slashdot Mirror
Any kind of leak and you've suddenly got 5 million gallons of contaminated water.
Of course, this assumes that your containment pool doesn't leak (yea right).
The whole point of the NBN is that it's a government chartered corporation that leases access to everyone.
It was never about the "free-market".
Instead, the idea was to create a competitive market, on a government built foundation instead of the existing private monopoly/oligopoly.
Infrastructure investments are almost always worth it, even if the price explodes.
Congress regularly has to regulate what anyone would consider common courtesy.
What do you think the Do Not Call list and the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act are?
Eventually the buck stops somewhere, and any logical person would have to admit that at this point the Affordable Care Act has been rolled out terribly.
One piece of the Affordable Care Act has been rolled out terribly.
It's not even the most important part.
The really important pieces of the Affordable Care Act have been in place for months now.
Stuff like requiring insurance companies to spend ~80% of premiums on health care
and not disqualifying you because of a pre-existing condition. Or how about removing lifetime caps on coverage.
I could go on, but the Affordable Care Act has a lot of other moving pieces.
Eventually people will get signed up and then all the criticism will have done naught but poison the atmosphere.
But peak/off-peak pricing is itself an artificial circumstance caused by inadequate infrastructure.
If there was inadequate infrastructure, you'd constantly see brownouts and blackouts.
The reality is that our infrastructure is fairly reliable, except during extreme weather events.
Peak pricing is a result of peaker plants, which use more expensive natural gas or (rarely) petroleum by-products.
If you don't want to use peaker plants, your alternatives are to
(a) build up base load capacity to match peak demand and then just waste energy/money to keep the plant running
(b) have brownouts and blackouts
If you have a better idea, there are plenty of corporations, with deep pockets, who would be extremely interested in your plan.
Switzerland signs [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] tax convention
October 15, 2013
The convention provides for all forms of mutual assistance including exchange on request, spontaneous tax examinations abroad, simultaneous tax examinations and assistance in tax collection, while protecting taxpayers' rights, the OECD said. Automatic exchange of data is possible under the convention but requires additional agreements between the states involved.
Once this treaty gets passed through the Swiss legislature, their bank secrecy will become a thing of the past.
Give it a few weeks and I bet we'll see a story, sourced from Snowden, about how Switzerland helped the US spy on countries that it doesn't have any diplomatic relations with.
There is not and there never will be a "right" answer or a correct balance - every possible solution has pros and cons.
We don't have to let private corporations own infrastructure installed through easements.
A government chartered non-profit corporation has all of the pros and less of the cons.
There's no reason why the city couldn't reclaim AT&T's telephone poles at market rate, then lease it back to AT&T and anyone else that wasn't to use 'em..
Because there's a legal reason to want to keep your wheels spinning while you drive off, it'll be labeled "Snow and Ice".
What are you talking about?
This isn't rally Sweden and you don't need to be shooting up rooster tails of snow.
The absolute last thing you want on snow or ice is wheel spin.
Anytime you see a traction control system with a "snow" mode, it does any combination of:
1. desensitizes the gas pedal
2. starts you in 2nd gear
3. limits engine power
4. traction control reacts much more aggressively to prevent wheel spin
5. up-shifts your transmission at lower rpm to keep wheel spin down
Sand and mud modes will do the exact opposite, because you want high rpms and varying amounts of wheel spin to keep you moving on those surfaces.
I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf.
Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.
Did I mention a broken system that cannot correct errors? I'm waiting for someone to pay me to blog happy things about Deer sipping from ponds over a pump
Just so you know, deer love salt.
They will go for miles to find a salt lick (usually clay with a high concentration of salt and other minerals).
They'll also go stand on the side of the road in the winter to lick up the salt (and get hit by passing cars).
You can make your own salt lick and wildlife will come from all around to get a taste.
The SR-71 was retired because it wasn't needed, not with satellites that can read a license plate from orbit in real time.
The SR-71 was killed because of *budget cuts.
It's a wildly expensive plane to operate and needs a lot of fuel support to go anywhere and come back.
Satellite coverage isn't the panopticon you seem to think it is.
Yes they can read your license plate from space, but only if there's a satellite in the right spot, at the right angle.
Sometimes it's faster to put real eyes in the sky (SR-71 or *U-2) than it is to re-task an out of place satellite.
And despite the magic of satellite imagery, high resolution film from a plane still wins out.
*The military is currently looking at mothballing other types of fleets as a fallout of the sequester. Goodbye A-10 Thunderbolt.
**Yea, we're still using the U-2 spy plane since its introduction in 1957. The Pentagon plans to keep it in service until 2023. They're killing the drone program that was supposed to replace it.
but the truth is, there is no risk-free, cost-free, environmental-damage-free answer to the problem of power production.
It's usually "pick two out of three" when you are given any three factors. In this case, one of the articles assigns a specific value ($600k/year) to the cost of not-killing bald eagles.
and coal miners have a nasty habit of dying of black lung.
This is purely a failure of regulatory oversight.
The laws regarding mining ventilation and dust reduction are effective.
They were so effective that black lung mostly disappeared as a cause of miners deaths.
Black lung has only had a resurgence because mining operations have been cutting costs and intentionally lying to &/or deceiving the inspectors.
The problem is that, the way the statistics work, it doesn't take the number of anti-vaccine nutters to be very large before the numbers reach a kind of tipping point and the number of outbreaks starts to dramatically increase.
If the anti-vaxxers were evenly distributed throughout the population, we could ignore them and go merrily on our way, safe in the knowledge that their refusal will cause no significant harm.
Unfortunately, the anti-vaccination ideology is somewhat infectious itself and these like-minded individuals end up living in clusters.
But I do know that either one billion of Christians are right and one billion of Muslims are wrong about Jesus's divinity, or vice versa.
Why can't they both be wrong?
There's around 1 billion Hindus and 500 million Buddhists who think the whole "God of Abraham" is nonsense.
P.S. There's actually a bit more than 2 billion Christians disagreeing with each other over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
No civil fines.
No criminal penalties.
No admission of guilt.
There's no particular reason to assume that bitcoin is the cryptocurrency that will win the future.
There are plenty of contenders and nothing to stop [large financial institution] from latching on to one of those.
maybe we will see more powerful wifi standards emerging and we will eventually do away with the proprietary UMTS/LTE standards and hopefully we will eventually see the end of having to pay for bandwidth while on the move (everyone simply runs and shares their own AP, kind of like FON)
Mobile wireless will always be hamstrung by real world limitations.
1. Wireless towers are expensive
2. Wireless bandwidth is expensive
3. There is a limit to the number of clients you can connect to any 1 tower
As a result, wireless providers have been doing their damnedest to get data off their OTA networks and onto wifi where/when ever possible.
1. Much of the existing copper is in bad condition and would need to be replaced anyway anyway to deliver decent VDSL speeds and reliability. Telstra, responsible for managing the copper network, has publicly stated that they consider the copper network at end of life.
I have three questions:
1. Does Telestra still own the copper?
2. As part of the NBN, does Telestra have to lease their copper to anyone that wants to provide service over it?
2. The Liberals' plan, compared to the original Labor plan, would only result in cost savings of 20-30%, yet deliver an outcome that is a lot more than 20-30% worse (in terms of speeds, reliability and future capacity for growth and upgrades).
I recall reading a few months ago that Rupert Murdoch was trying to screw with the elections so that Rudd (Labor) would lose and his 90%+ FTTH plan would die and be replaced by FTTN.
3. So how did it come to pass that Rudd won, yet Labor's FTTH plan died and got replaced by the Liberal Party's FTTN?
Yea, let's just ignore all the systemic factors that lead to crime and write those guys off as "less scum to worry about".
3) The compliance officer should then have the juice to get something done if they determine this is a legitimate issue. If they determine it isn't an issue then their neck is on the line not yours.
The submitter doesn't just want to cover their ass, they want to do a good job.
It's endlessly frustrating when it seems like your boss or co-workers are conspiring to keep you from doing the best work that you can.
How come applying thermal grease is still such a big problem in the semiconductor industry?
They've been doing it for decades, but still haven't figured out how to get it right every time.
Even Apple, who are renowned for their design and manufacturing prowess, keeps hiring companies that screw it up.
What's so special about climatology that even rather small technical problems can't be discussed publicly?
There's nothing special about climatology in that regards.
It's completely normal for people doing work to not want you to see their errors; only the successfully completed result.
The only thing special about climatology is the number of people (who are completely unable to form an educated opinion on the subject)
that grasp at any straw to support their preconceived ideas. This applies to both sides.
What doesn't apply to both sides is the concerted effort, by the same lobbyists and think tanks who shilled for Big Tobacco, to manufacture misinformation and bad science in order to cloud the debate.
Don't confuse group think and tribalism.
The main difference is that group think is a problem for leaders, while tribalism is what motivates all the followers.
You can't combat tribalism nearly so easily as group think,
since the group identification is more than just a matter of facts.
Otherwise, the Red Sox wouldn't have any fans.
1. AFAIK, unlike Amazon, you don't actually buy anything directly from the Alibaba corporation.
2. Most *Chinese sellers lie on the customs declaration so that you don't have to pay fees.
*I'm not picking on China, most overseas sellers do this.