To me, the weird thing is the notion that you could live in an N dimensional universe yet only be able to interact with N-1 of its dimensions.
The 2D person who cannot perceive up and down: both up and down are there and they produce various forms of inputs to the 2D world so how could he possibly not observe them?
What it is about the Nth dimension that makes it fundamentally impossible to observe directly?
With this concept being so weird it doesn't really explain anything for me wrt QM, it just adds a new question.
TSA is a place where money goes to be spent on the premise that spending money on things which do nothing is better than doing nothing, even if the outcomes are the same.
It that were only the case it wouldn't be so much of an issue.
One billion dollars of pork is just one billion dollars of pork: payouts to the friends of the king, business as usual.
But what they are in fact doing is spending that one billion in order to make the entire rest of the economy less efficient. They are spending one billion so they can make sure another 100 billion is lost or never produced that otherwise would have been.
The one billion isn't the problem, the one hundred is.
Strictly speaking pretty much everything we sorround ourselves with is a chemical. (Although a coke oven will typically be several chemicals.)
Obvious exceptions include light and other EM phenomena, plasmas, and elementary particles. Neutrinos aren't chemicals but then we don't really see much of them either even if they are everywhere.
Or, according to/. earlier today. The people approving the patents are actually doing whatever the fuck else they want, instead of their job, and getting paid for it.
Which may be rational enough. Patent examiners are educated, intelligent people and they are inside the patent system so they know it well. They probably realize what a complete and unmitigated disaster it is from end to end and figure they have better things to do with their lives than try to polish a turd.
Cheer up and take heart in the fact that even in these tough times of austerity they did at least commit to buying 58 more Joint Strike Fighters for $12.4 billion. Cut down on sicence and buy more flying lemons, at least they have a sound strategy.
That $12.4 billion buys them the continued good will of the world's strongest military power. It's not really about the Australian air force, it's simply cheap insurance.
My country does the same but only half heartedly tries to claim it's all about strengthening the air force. Hell, if we're really lucky there might actually be some decent jet fighters in it for us in the end. That's not the main point though.
Given the nature of trademarks, DC is pretty much forced to deny such a request since each request granted represents a dilution of the trademark and introduces a small risk of the trademark being lost to DC.
On the other hand it is not clear why their permission is required at all in this case. Trademarks protect against someone other than the trademark owner selling products displaying that mark, but, there is no reason to believe that the intention is to create this statue and then try to sell it to someone as a genuine Superman product. There therefore cannot exist any confusion in the market as to the provenance of the statue since the statue isn't in the market in the first place, and so it doesn't constitute a violation of anyone's trademark.
This would only be an obvious trademark issue if they also intended to create merchandise based upon the statue and then sell that, I don't know if this is the case since as any good slashdotter I never cared to RTFA.
Had this been a copyright issue things would be different.
(I am not a lawyer and these are the random babblings of an amateur.)
That isn't consistent with them selling the units. The moment you charge money you are just selling them. If you are selling them, you can't argue you're trying to target devs.
But of course you can, if that is in fact what you are doing.
Then they shouldn't be selling them to anyone who orders one.
And apparently they are not anymore: they're no longer selling to China because they've learned they don't tend to end up with developers over there.
The devkits are theirs to sell to whoever they wish, and if they don't want to sell to China then that's their business.
I realize they have the right to stop selling anything to anyone at any time for any reason, but I'm struggling to figure out what their beef with this is.
The value of the Oculus brand is greater the more developers they can snag to work on/with their product, and so the more developers that get their hands on the devkit the better for Oculus. They are limited in how many devkits they can build however and so it is important to Oculus that every single one that they make goes to an actual developer, because that developer increases the brand value. Every devkit that goes to a non-developer is a net loss to Oculus because that is a devkit that did not go to a developer.
This would be different if they were not production constrained but I expect that they are.
The main problem with your cynicism in this case is that if the product were to be mainly marketed to imbeciles then why does it have any pretense at privacy protection at all? Such people don't care one whit and so in the previous system they would just always click "accept" and "install" and there wouldn't be a problem (for Google).
The problem instead seems to be that there is in fact a sizable portion of users out there who do care at least a little about their privacy and who do get nervous about it every time an app asks for more permissions on an update. This is why they are (apparently) now changing the permissions system, to give an appearance of privacy protection while not really offering it: they want to sell to people who actually care about their privacy and who are prepared to take reasonable steps to safeguard it, such as click "Hell No" in an installer/updater.
Where is the harm in saying that KÃlsch has to be made in the designated area around KÃln.
(I don't know why I can't get proper umlauts but you can.)
The main issue is that the public has had hundreds of years to learn that Champagne is a particular type of bubbly alcohol, and now that specific public awareness gets thrown under a train in order to co-opt a couple centuries of goodwill into money into the pockets of local special interests. This is exactly the opposite of what trademarks are meant to be: this explicitly deludes the public as to the nature of the goods that they are buying so that they are tricked into not purchasing the item that they actually wanted which may have been bubbly from California but they can't have this anymore because they're searching for Champagne which no longer means what they thought it meant.
The public perception will correct itself within a couple decades but this shouldn't have been necessary. Trademark laws should help preserve the public awareness, not randomly undermine it.
(Of course these aren't actually trademark laws, they are localised protectionism, but in my opinion proper trademark and consumer protection concerns should trump such shenanigans.)
Give the pilots an Oculus Rift headset with images fed from cameras mounted on the headset. Make sure you don't get a high-end headset "now capable of accurate reproduction of laser beams". While you can still blind the cameras with a laser you cannot burn out the pilot's retinas.
(I do hate myself a little for plugging a Facebook product.)
Those diesel generators will not be feeding power to the grid so that statement is irrelevant.
They very well might, you cannot know that they will not.
Falsely calling something zero emission stops progress because if falsely states that the goal is already met.
Which indeed it is for the vehicles themselves. Now it's time to start working on the power grid.
This is a factually false statement. You miss the CO2 produced by the electricity plants to produce the electricity to charge the vehicle.
No you are mistaken, European CO2 caps on electricity generation guarantee that the switch from gas guzzler to EV will cut CO2 emissions to zero for your car use. If you are in Europe, of course.
Would a processed food be organic if no pesticides were used during the processing of the food?
Meh, "organic" foods is modern voodoo, not interested in the debate.
In every country of the world at least some of the electricity is produced from fossil fuels. If you want to say "zero emission" and not "low emission" then all the electricity has to be produced from non-fossil fuel sources.
Again you are demanding an absurd and impossible standard. However green your national power grid is, there is always going to someone somewhere using a diesel generator for something or other. This cannot be the yardstick used for moving towards a greener economy because all progress would be impossible.
Someone buying a green certificate does not decrease CO2 production because it does not change how the energy used is produces. All it does is allow the buyer the smug idea that they are using clean energy while someone else who does note buy the certificates is using more unclean energy. CO2 caps are different in that they require a limit in the production of CO2. The deciding factor is that at the CO2 cap is not zero. Therefore anything that uses electricity is not zero emission.
It remains a fact that anyone exchanging their gas guzzler for an electric vehicle is causing a reduction in CO2 emissions equal to what the gas guzzler used to produce. Simple arithmetic then reveals that the electric vehicle is in fact zero emission even at the power plant. And this is even before we start considering the various steps an individual can take to make sure that his own electricity use is completely emission free in the first place.
It all comes down to the use of an absolute term like "zero emission". Terms like these should be used very carefully as they are very powerful. Would you consider a food fat free if it has.1% fat in it? I would call that low fat but "fat free" makes better marketing. To me , plug in electric vehicles are low emission.
I would consider a food fat free even if the people working at the food manufacturing plant do have fat in them. You could have picked a better analogy however because I don't see why I would ever want to mandate that employees in the food industry should be fat free.
The driver of the vehicle does have a choice; to drive or not to drive.
The choice between having a life and not having a life, is no choice at all.
The choice to drive causes the power plants that generate the electricity to power the vehicle to emit CO2.
Only if those power plants actually do produce CO2, which is often not the case. Your assumption that all power generation always emits CO2 is over one hundred years out of date.
That is a marketing ploy as it does not decrease that actual emissions. It only causes people who don't buy certificates to use a higher proportion of dirty energy. It makes the buyer feel good but has no effect on the environment.
You are mistaken. Europe has a cap on total CO2 emissions in electricity generation, but no cap on total CO2 emissions from vehicles. It follows that every fossil burning car that is replaced by an electric one reduces CO2 emissions from the vehicle pool, and that the extra electricity that must be generated to power this new electric car will come from non-CO2 emitting power generation. That is the law. Your region may or may not have similar regulations, but of course, if your politicians have decreed that there shall be CO2 generation then the problem is with them not with the vehicles that enable emission free transport.
"Is there CO2 created in generating the energy used to move the vehicle? "
This is not a property of the vehicle, it is a property of the power plant. There definitely are electric vehicles that get their electricity from emission free sources such as wind, solar, hydro or nuclear. Norway, for one, is full of them.
There could be power plants that produce electricity from burning little babies for all I know and if there are then this does not reflect negatively on the vehicle that ends up using that power because it doesn't really have much choice: once an electron enters the grid it goes where it goes. It does of course reflect negatively on the power plant itself (and perhaps you'd be able to buy pink certificates to ensure your power comes from non baby burning sources).
It keeps getting repeated because people keep misusing the term "zero emission". When you use an absolute term such as "zero emission" it is either true or false. In this case "zero emission" is false. All electricity from the grid, which is where these aircraft will probably be charged from, has some component of fossil fuel based generation. Therefore by using grid power the aircraft is causing emission; just on another location.
You are trying to hold the term to an absurd and impossible standard. By this standard you will find that in fact no human activity can ever be zero emission because if there is just one single human involved in the activity then that human breathes oxygen in and CO2 out, and this is not zero emission.
The term "zero emission" was not invented just so that it could never be used and so a much more reasonable interpretation of the term "zero emission vehicle" is that the vehicle itself doesn't emit CO2 in operation. The fact that its electricity production, and marketers, and fanboys, etc., may emit CO2 in their various activities has no impact on this.
Rules of thumb that seem to be used in connection with Tesla is 90% efficiency battery to engine, and 90% efficiency engine to road, for ~80% efficiency battery to road. Then regenerative braking goes through that twice: once from road into battery and once back from the battery down into the road, and so gets 80% x 80% = ~60% efficiency overall for regenerative braking.
A supercharger isn't necessarily powered by its solar panels, the current idea seems more along the lines of it being powered by some solar farm somewhere. And then there are plans to roll out more solar panels to each actual station at some time in the future.
It seems to me to border on the religious to believe that if such a great filter exists then each species has one and only one of them. Much more likely, to my thinking, there is a number of great filters and while we may have put some of them behind us there are others yet to come.
We may have dodged the asteroid extinctions, the numerous disease vectors, and nuclear annihilation; but how will we deal with overpopulation, environmental collapse, and the corruption inherent in our increasingly large political constructs? To think that we're out of the woods just because we had one or two close shaves in the past is to be blind to the perils that still lie ahead of us.
The architect says this (bridge/power plant/building) will stand for (20/30/40) years with proper maintenance. Then, we should outright replace it. We know it'll cost x dollars now, plus y dollars of the life of the item. Sounds good, so we buy in.
At the end of the lifespan, somebody who is not that architect says we can't afford to replace a (still perfectly good) piece of infrastructure. Let's agree that if we (inspect more often/inspect in greater detail/upgrade this piece here), we can get (10/20/30) more years of life out of it. Y'know, I can already hear the original architect screaming "That isn't what I said!".
The original architect necessarily has to be very conservative in his estimates because he has, in your example, 20-40 years of future uncertainty messing up his predictions. He cannot actually know how high the humidity will be, how much the ambient temperature will fluctuate, how much the soil will shift, what sorts of loads the facility will come under, etc., except as some form of probability distribution. And this distribution becomes more uncertain the further into the future he tries to plan it.
After the 20, 30 or 40 years have actually passed however we know all these things, or can find them out, pretty exactly. And if life has fared gentler with the facility than the architect's worst fears accounted for then there may still be decades of useful life left in it. In this case it is perfectly sensible to make a new maintenance plan and life estimate for it, and then take it from there.
Slashdot Mirror
To me, the weird thing is the notion that you could live in an N dimensional universe yet only be able to interact with N-1 of its dimensions.
The 2D person who cannot perceive up and down: both up and down are there and they produce various forms of inputs to the 2D world so how could he possibly not observe them?
What it is about the Nth dimension that makes it fundamentally impossible to observe directly?
With this concept being so weird it doesn't really explain anything for me wrt QM, it just adds a new question.
TSA is a place where money goes to be spent on the premise that spending money on things which do nothing is better than doing nothing, even if the outcomes are the same.
It that were only the case it wouldn't be so much of an issue.
One billion dollars of pork is just one billion dollars of pork: payouts to the friends of the king, business as usual.
But what they are in fact doing is spending that one billion in order to make the entire rest of the economy less efficient. They are spending one billion so they can make sure another 100 billion is lost or never produced that otherwise would have been.
The one billion isn't the problem, the one hundred is.
If it takes 1000 of these little guys to make a composite bot that is actually interesting, then they are in fact millibots.
Which means they're only off by six orders of magnitude.
A coke oven is a chemical?
Strictly speaking pretty much everything we sorround ourselves with is a chemical. (Although a coke oven will typically be several chemicals.)
Obvious exceptions include light and other EM phenomena, plasmas, and elementary particles. Neutrinos aren't chemicals but then we don't really see much of them either even if they are everywhere.
Or, according to /. earlier today. The people approving the patents are actually doing whatever the fuck else they want, instead of their job, and getting paid for it.
Which may be rational enough. Patent examiners are educated, intelligent people and they are inside the patent system so they know it well. They probably realize what a complete and unmitigated disaster it is from end to end and figure they have better things to do with their lives than try to polish a turd.
They do like the wages though.
Cheer up and take heart in the fact that even in these tough times of austerity they did at least commit to buying 58 more Joint Strike Fighters for $12.4 billion. Cut down on sicence and buy more flying lemons, at least they have a sound strategy.
That $12.4 billion buys them the continued good will of the world's strongest military power. It's not really about the Australian air force, it's simply cheap insurance.
My country does the same but only half heartedly tries to claim it's all about strengthening the air force. Hell, if we're really lucky there might actually be some decent jet fighters in it for us in the end. That's not the main point though.
Given the nature of trademarks, DC is pretty much forced to deny such a request since each request granted represents a dilution of the trademark and introduces a small risk of the trademark being lost to DC.
On the other hand it is not clear why their permission is required at all in this case. Trademarks protect against someone other than the trademark owner selling products displaying that mark, but, there is no reason to believe that the intention is to create this statue and then try to sell it to someone as a genuine Superman product. There therefore cannot exist any confusion in the market as to the provenance of the statue since the statue isn't in the market in the first place, and so it doesn't constitute a violation of anyone's trademark.
This would only be an obvious trademark issue if they also intended to create merchandise based upon the statue and then sell that, I don't know if this is the case since as any good slashdotter I never cared to RTFA.
Had this been a copyright issue things would be different.
(I am not a lawyer and these are the random babblings of an amateur.)
That isn't consistent with them selling the units. The moment you charge money you are just selling them. If you are selling them, you can't argue you're trying to target devs.
But of course you can, if that is in fact what you are doing.
Then they shouldn't be selling them to anyone who orders one.
And apparently they are not anymore: they're no longer selling to China because they've learned they don't tend to end up with developers over there.
The devkits are theirs to sell to whoever they wish, and if they don't want to sell to China then that's their business.
I realize they have the right to stop selling anything to anyone at any time for any reason, but I'm struggling to figure out what their beef with this is.
The value of the Oculus brand is greater the more developers they can snag to work on/with their product, and so the more developers that get their hands on the devkit the better for Oculus. They are limited in how many devkits they can build however and so it is important to Oculus that every single one that they make goes to an actual developer, because that developer increases the brand value. Every devkit that goes to a non-developer is a net loss to Oculus because that is a devkit that did not go to a developer.
This would be different if they were not production constrained but I expect that they are.
STFU until you get a lawyer
Cops can lie and get away with it
So is there anything to stop a cop from saying, "I'm your court appointed lawyer now tell me everything"?
Out of interest - what makes a lawyer so special that he can talk to the cops? Are lawyers vaccinated against cop-tricks or something?
The lawyer isn't under suspicion and so need not be afraid that the cops are trying to build a case against him.
A lawyer that is under suspicion should only say "I wish to remain silent and I want a lawyer" just like anyone else.
The main problem with your cynicism in this case is that if the product were to be mainly marketed to imbeciles then why does it have any pretense at privacy protection at all? Such people don't care one whit and so in the previous system they would just always click "accept" and "install" and there wouldn't be a problem (for Google).
The problem instead seems to be that there is in fact a sizable portion of users out there who do care at least a little about their privacy and who do get nervous about it every time an app asks for more permissions on an update. This is why they are (apparently) now changing the permissions system, to give an appearance of privacy protection while not really offering it: they want to sell to people who actually care about their privacy and who are prepared to take reasonable steps to safeguard it, such as click "Hell No" in an installer/updater.
Where is the harm in saying that KÃlsch has to be made in the designated area around KÃln.
(I don't know why I can't get proper umlauts but you can.)
The main issue is that the public has had hundreds of years to learn that Champagne is a particular type of bubbly alcohol, and now that specific public awareness gets thrown under a train in order to co-opt a couple centuries of goodwill into money into the pockets of local special interests. This is exactly the opposite of what trademarks are meant to be: this explicitly deludes the public as to the nature of the goods that they are buying so that they are tricked into not purchasing the item that they actually wanted which may have been bubbly from California but they can't have this anymore because they're searching for Champagne which no longer means what they thought it meant.
The public perception will correct itself within a couple decades but this shouldn't have been necessary. Trademark laws should help preserve the public awareness, not randomly undermine it.
(Of course these aren't actually trademark laws, they are localised protectionism, but in my opinion proper trademark and consumer protection concerns should trump such shenanigans.)
Give the pilots an Oculus Rift headset with images fed from cameras mounted on the headset. Make sure you don't get a high-end headset "now capable of accurate reproduction of laser beams". While you can still blind the cameras with a laser you cannot burn out the pilot's retinas.
(I do hate myself a little for plugging a Facebook product.)
While that is a standard "piracy has no effect on sales" arguement I don't buy it.
If you don't buy it then you are part of the problem.
(Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week!)
I've maintained for years 'civilization' is a thin veneer over mankind essentially being barbarians, and that it's getting thinner every year.
They were saying the same thing 1000 years ago.
And 2000 years ago....
The first half of the topmost speculation is probably correct, and the last half is probably not.
It is a mark of the great strength of human culture that we have been able to so effectively suppress our barbaric animal nature.
Those diesel generators will not be feeding power to the grid so that statement is irrelevant.
They very well might, you cannot know that they will not.
Falsely calling something zero emission stops progress because if falsely states that the goal is already met.
Which indeed it is for the vehicles themselves. Now it's time to start working on the power grid.
This is a factually false statement. You miss the CO2 produced by the electricity plants to produce the electricity to charge the vehicle.
No you are mistaken, European CO2 caps on electricity generation guarantee that the switch from gas guzzler to EV will cut CO2 emissions to zero for your car use. If you are in Europe, of course.
Would a processed food be organic if no pesticides were used during the processing of the food?
Meh, "organic" foods is modern voodoo, not interested in the debate.
In every country of the world at least some of the electricity is produced from fossil fuels. If you want to say "zero emission" and not "low emission" then all the electricity has to be produced from non-fossil fuel sources.
Again you are demanding an absurd and impossible standard. However green your national power grid is, there is always going to someone somewhere using a diesel generator for something or other. This cannot be the yardstick used for moving towards a greener economy because all progress would be impossible.
Someone buying a green certificate does not decrease CO2 production because it does not change how the energy used is produces. All it does is allow the buyer the smug idea that they are using clean energy while someone else who does note buy the certificates is using more unclean energy. CO2 caps are different in that they require a limit in the production of CO2. The deciding factor is that at the CO2 cap is not zero. Therefore anything that uses electricity is not zero emission.
It remains a fact that anyone exchanging their gas guzzler for an electric vehicle is causing a reduction in CO2 emissions equal to what the gas guzzler used to produce. Simple arithmetic then reveals that the electric vehicle is in fact zero emission even at the power plant. And this is even before we start considering the various steps an individual can take to make sure that his own electricity use is completely emission free in the first place.
It all comes down to the use of an absolute term like "zero emission". Terms like these should be used very carefully as they are very powerful. Would you consider a food fat free if it has .1% fat in it? I would call that low fat but "fat free" makes better marketing. To me , plug in electric vehicles are low emission.
I would consider a food fat free even if the people working at the food manufacturing plant do have fat in them. You could have picked a better analogy however because I don't see why I would ever want to mandate that employees in the food industry should be fat free.
The driver of the vehicle does have a choice; to drive or not to drive.
The choice between having a life and not having a life, is no choice at all.
The choice to drive causes the power plants that generate the electricity to power the vehicle to emit CO2.
Only if those power plants actually do produce CO2, which is often not the case. Your assumption that all power generation always emits CO2 is over one hundred years out of date.
That is a marketing ploy as it does not decrease that actual emissions. It only causes people who don't buy certificates to use a higher proportion of dirty energy. It makes the buyer feel good but has no effect on the environment.
You are mistaken. Europe has a cap on total CO2 emissions in electricity generation, but no cap on total CO2 emissions from vehicles. It follows that every fossil burning car that is replaced by an electric one reduces CO2 emissions from the vehicle pool, and that the extra electricity that must be generated to power this new electric car will come from non-CO2 emitting power generation. That is the law. Your region may or may not have similar regulations, but of course, if your politicians have decreed that there shall be CO2 generation then the problem is with them not with the vehicles that enable emission free transport.
"Is there CO2 created in generating the energy used to move the vehicle? "
This is not a property of the vehicle, it is a property of the power plant. There definitely are electric vehicles that get their electricity from emission free sources such as wind, solar, hydro or nuclear. Norway, for one, is full of them.
There could be power plants that produce electricity from burning little babies for all I know and if there are then this does not reflect negatively on the vehicle that ends up using that power because it doesn't really have much choice: once an electron enters the grid it goes where it goes. It does of course reflect negatively on the power plant itself (and perhaps you'd be able to buy pink certificates to ensure your power comes from non baby burning sources).
It keeps getting repeated because people keep misusing the term "zero emission". When you use an absolute term such as "zero emission" it is either true or false. In this case "zero emission" is false. All electricity from the grid, which is where these aircraft will probably be charged from, has some component of fossil fuel based generation. Therefore by using grid power the aircraft is causing emission; just on another location.
You are trying to hold the term to an absurd and impossible standard. By this standard you will find that in fact no human activity can ever be zero emission because if there is just one single human involved in the activity then that human breathes oxygen in and CO2 out, and this is not zero emission.
The term "zero emission" was not invented just so that it could never be used and so a much more reasonable interpretation of the term "zero emission vehicle" is that the vehicle itself doesn't emit CO2 in operation. The fact that its electricity production, and marketers, and fanboys, etc., may emit CO2 in their various activities has no impact on this.
Rules of thumb that seem to be used in connection with Tesla is 90% efficiency battery to engine, and 90% efficiency engine to road, for ~80% efficiency battery to road. Then regenerative braking goes through that twice: once from road into battery and once back from the battery down into the road, and so gets 80% x 80% = ~60% efficiency overall for regenerative braking.
http://www.teslamotors.com/blo...
A supercharger isn't necessarily powered by its solar panels, the current idea seems more along the lines of it being powered by some solar farm somewhere. And then there are plans to roll out more solar panels to each actual station at some time in the future.
It seems to me to border on the religious to believe that if such a great filter exists then each species has one and only one of them. Much more likely, to my thinking, there is a number of great filters and while we may have put some of them behind us there are others yet to come.
We may have dodged the asteroid extinctions, the numerous disease vectors, and nuclear annihilation; but how will we deal with overpopulation, environmental collapse, and the corruption inherent in our increasingly large political constructs? To think that we're out of the woods just because we had one or two close shaves in the past is to be blind to the perils that still lie ahead of us.
The architect says this (bridge/power plant/building) will stand for (20/30/40) years with proper maintenance. Then, we should outright replace it. We know it'll cost x dollars now, plus y dollars of the life of the item. Sounds good, so we buy in.
At the end of the lifespan, somebody who is not that architect says we can't afford to replace a (still perfectly good) piece of infrastructure. Let's agree that if we (inspect more often/inspect in greater detail/upgrade this piece here), we can get (10/20/30) more years of life out of it. Y'know, I can already hear the original architect screaming "That isn't what I said!".
The original architect necessarily has to be very conservative in his estimates because he has, in your example, 20-40 years of future uncertainty messing up his predictions. He cannot actually know how high the humidity will be, how much the ambient temperature will fluctuate, how much the soil will shift, what sorts of loads the facility will come under, etc., except as some form of probability distribution. And this distribution becomes more uncertain the further into the future he tries to plan it.
After the 20, 30 or 40 years have actually passed however we know all these things, or can find them out, pretty exactly. And if life has fared gentler with the facility than the architect's worst fears accounted for then there may still be decades of useful life left in it. In this case it is perfectly sensible to make a new maintenance plan and life estimate for it, and then take it from there.