The near misses are happening frequently enough that there will eventually be a hit, likely several. Do you really want to stick your head in the sand and pretend there's no problem until there's loss of life? Aviation regulatory agencies like the FAA are frequently criticized for being too reactionary - not addressing problems until after there's been loss of life. They are attempting to be proactive in this case, and they're getting criticized for that too.
I used to do the accounting at a company which used day laborers. I did my job honestly and paid exactly what each employee's time card said they worked. The biggest problem we had was actually people getting their friend to punch in their time card for them before they'd actually arrived for work, and people hanging around before clocking out to pad the amount of time they'd worked.
We let the latter abuse slide because it was usually done to round off 7.98 hours worked to 8 hours (the employees we knew didn't do this just got bigger end of year bonuses instead). The former abuse got serious enough we actually considered switching to a fingerprint-based time card. In the end we decided doing so would send a "we don't trust you" message to all our employees, when it was only a few employees who did it. Instead we opted to put the time clock in a more public location, and have the managers sit down with any of their employees we knew did this and give them a talk stressing that having a friend punch in for them was not allowed.
What was really fun was when I needed a statement from 3 years back that I had lost in a move to resolve a dispute with a creditor who claimed I hadn't paid a bill. No problem, my bank keeps all those online, or so I thought. I logged in, found the statement, clicked to download the PDF and... "This statement is not currently available. Please wait up to 2 weeks while we retrieve it from our records." WTF? 1TB HDDs were $100 (at the time), and they're archiving records onto tape after just 2 years?
Since then, I download PDFs of all my bank statements at the end of the year, sort them, and store them on my own file server. I don't trust the banks to keep them, much less find them. I hear you about it taking too many clicks though. You'd think they'd have a "download all of this year's statements with one click!" button.
His math is right. The bulk of the energy release when creating CO2 is from the step going from atomic carbon and atomic oxygen (dG = 0).to CO2 (dG = -394.4 kJ/mol), not the decomposition of for example CH4 (methane, dG = -50.8 kJ/mol). In fact it would take more energy to go from CO2 to atomic carbon and oxygen, than was originally released when you burned the CH4.
Basically, this process amounts to you taking the exhaust and soot from someone else burning a tree, then you burn 2-3 trees to generate enough energy to convert that soot and CO2 back into its atomic constitutents, then you convert it into a battery. So yeah batteries don't grow on trees, but it would take less energy to make the battery starting with the tree than what these guys are doing.
CO2 and H2O aren't just byproducts of chemical reactions which can be converted into C, H2, and O2 if you "just" knock the atoms apart. They sit very far down the energy potential well. All the energy that you get when you burn fossil fuels comes from lowering the C, H, and O down the energy potential well (creating CO2 and H2O in the process). Decomposing them back into their constituent atoms (knocking the atoms apart) requires pumping an equivalent amount of energy back into them.
Factor in inefficiencies and you're usually looking at having to put 2-3x as much energy in as you originally got out when you burned the fossil fuel. At that point you're better off just using that energy directly as electricity to power society - prevent the fossil fuel from being burned in the first place, instead of trying to uncreate the CO2 that was formed from burning the fossil fuel.
I've always felt an advocate should be more critical of the cause he is advocating than the average lay person. Presumably he is more knowledgeable about whatever it is he is advocating, and thus able to see more of the flaws, problems, and drawbacks than the average lay person. If someone only posts in favor of what they are advocating while only critical of alternatives, they are merely advocating their bias, not the cause.
That's why I'll often ask people arguing for something to do their best to argue against it, or vice versa. That'll quickly reveal if the person has a good handle on all the pros and cons of both sides of the issue, indicating that they've made an honest attempt to research it before arriving at a conclusion. Or if they've come to a conclusion first and have just memorized only facts and arguments which support their position.
As best as I can tell, mdsolar has never met a solar installation he didn't like. I'm not sure "troll" is the proper classification, but it's pretty close. If you are seeking a messenger to deliver unbiased and even-handed facts and figures, he is not it. If you genuinely want an even-handed overview of the different energy sources, their advantages, and their drawbacks, I'd recommend David MacKay's web book. I should warn you though, it actually requires you to read, comprehend, and think about the trade-offs. There are no "X is good, Y is bad" one-liners.
That's a bad angle to see the phenomenon. I had the (mis)fortune of getting a perfect side view of it while at a restaurant in Amsterdam. A heron took off and its motion caught my eye. My first thought when I looked at it was that it had about a 1 meter piece of yarn tied to its leg. Then the "yarn" started falling and lengthening, and I realized it was actually a bird dropping. I watched it go splat right on top of a bunch of parked bicycles.
"Streamer" is a very apt term for what it looks like
You want a good case which burns away irrelevant fluff and centers the issue solely on the principles at stake. If you pick a bad case, the court could decide against you based on that fluff, inadvertently setting a precedent which influences the balance of those principles. The principles at stake in this case (or what people are hoping this case will be about) are an individual's right to privacy and a company's right of self-determination against government coercion, vs. the government's duty to keep society safe. Here are the flaws I can see with this case:
Privacy rights and the 4th Amendment aren't relevant. It's not the shooter's phone. The phone belongs to the San Bernardino County government.
The shooter was indisputably guilty of the crime. You want the test case to highlight how the power the government is asking for could be abused, not one which validates the government's argument. That way the rights violation is real while the benefit the government is arguing for is hypothetical. Not the other way around.
Even if you argue that the shooter's privacy is somehow relevant, he's dead. It's questionable if or to what extent privacy rights survive after your death. If we're going to have a test case about privacy rights after death, I'd rather it be of an innocent guy wrongly accused by the government and his reputation consequently smeared. Not some guy who was indisputably guilty.
The shooter was a terrorist, and his victims were innocent. I wish this weren't a factor, but it is. The best way to get a guy off a murder charge is to convince the jury that the victim deserved to die. The polls showing a slim majority of Americans supporting the FBI in this wouldn't be coming out that way if this were the FBI asking Apple to help it break into some grandmother's phone because she might have poisoned an axe murderer who hacked her grandkids to bits.
The strongest argument supporting Apple in this case is that the government cannot coerce an individual or company to do something against their will. Well, the exceptions to that in general law are pretty much all tied to a state of war or national emergencies. People can be drafted into military service. Stores' inventories can be confiscated for redistribution as the government sees fit. This being a terrorism case comes uncomfortably close to meeting that criterion.
Waiting for a future, better case would sure end up looking foolish when the government argues, "What's the problem? You agreed to do this exact same thing before, in the San Bernardino case..."
All the points I listed above can be used to refute that argument. That's why this is a bad case. Heck, even the recent New York case (defendant is a drug dealer, but he is the phone's owner, and he didn't kill anyone) is a better case.
WinCE became Windows Mobile (this was back in the PDA days when Palm was the main competitor), which became the starting point for Windows Phone.
Windows RT was a port of the Windows API from x86 and AMD64 to ARM. People erroneously refer to it as a flop. Yes it was a flop in the market, but it succeeded at what it was intended to do - to allow Microsoft to hedge their bets.
Back when Microsoft began working on Win RT, mobile devices had just become the fastest growing computing sector. Nobody knew what the future held - if Intel/AMD desktop and laptop processors would continue to dominate, or if ARM processors were going to erode away their market share until ARM became the dominant player. Despite Microsoft's long relationship with Intel, they were a software company so didn't really have a horse in the race. Consequently they hedged their bets. The created both Windows 8 and Windows RT. Developers could then write their programs to a single API. Regardless of which processor architecture won, they would just be one recompile away from having a functioning Windows program that would run on contemporary computing devices.
Basically Microsoft threw Intel in the way of the ARM bus, telling Intel that if they wanted to continue to be the CPU that Windows ran on, they'd be solely responsible for making their CPUs competitive with ARM processors. That's a large part of the reason Intel has been concentrating so heavily on Atom and ultra low voltage Core processors lately - so they could compete with ARM in power consumption, and prevent ARM processors from spreading beyond the phone/tablet market into the laptop and eventually desktop market..
Intel was mostly successful, so Win 8 became dominant and Win RT was tossed into the dust bin. If Intel had failed, Win RT would've become dominant and Win 8 would've been put into the dust bin. Microsoft made both knowing one of them would fail. They just didn't know which one ahead of time.
Small flaw in your argument. If "your" phone is being monitored, it's not really your phone. It belongs to someone else, they are lending it to you, and it's their right to know what you're doing with their stuff. If you ask for features which the phone owner objects to, Apple is going to listen to the guy paying them for the phone, not the guy using the phone for free.
If you're that worried about other people monitoring your phone use, buy your own phone. If work requires you to carry their phone around 24/7 and you're worried about cam/mic/GPS tracking, just give them your personal phone number and turn your work phone off. Tell them if they need to contact you, to text you at your personal number, and you'll turn the work phone on long enough to communicate with them.
This year is notable because it will see the first new nuclear plant brought online in 20 years, contributing 1.1 GigaWatts to the grid. But that contribution will be dwarfed by renewable power sources
Not really dwarfed.
1.1 GW * 0.903 capacity factor = 0.99 GW actual production by nuclear
9.5 GW * 0.145 capacity factor = 1.38 GW actual production by solar
6.8 GW * 0.25 capacity factor = 1.7 GW actual production by wind
I mean we get it, renewables = good. But comparing based on installed capacity is like comparing farmland based solely on land area, not how much of that land is actually arable.
Cost to launch a payload into low earth orbit is currently around $3000/kg for the smaller rockets, $10,000/kg for the larger ones. About $20,000 - $30,000/kg for geosynchronous orbit. So yeah this is a really big deal.
For those who don't grok just how atrocious Concorde's fuel economy was, just look at the right-most column of these charts (liters per 100 km per seat). Concorde was 16.7 L/100 km per seat.
It's a stepping stone. The long-term hope is for hypersonic transports which reduce the energy cost by "flying" above the atmosphere (sub-orbital ballistic trajectory) for a good portion of the trip. But to do that, you have to go through the supersonic regime.
And aerospace has always been heavily subsidized by the government. The physics in these high-speed / high-altitude / high-temperature environments is frequently not well understood. It makes little sense for every aerospace company out there to do duplicate research into it. So the government pays for that research that all companies have access to, and the companies pay for whatever designs they think will work best based on that research.
It's important to understand that the cost advantage of operating an electric car is only slightly due to improved energy efficiency. The vast majority of the price differential is due to the extremely low price of coal and natural gas relative to gasoline.
An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).
Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.
Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
So really not that big a difference. If battery discharge efficiency is also 80%, then the EV is basically identical to an ICE in overall energy efficiency. Yes if solar and wind come down in price to match or beat coal, then you can drop the 50% at the front. But wind is still about 1.5x-2x the price of coal, and solar about 5x-7x the price.
Now look at the fuel price side.
Coal costs about $50/ton, and contains about 24 GJ/ton. That's $2.08 per GJ.
Gasoline costs about $2/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's $16.67 per GJ. Almost an order of magnitude more.
So there you have it. EVs are only 1.1x-1.3x more energy efficient than ICE cars. But their fuel source is 8x cheaper. That's why EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles.
Incidentally, if you're wondering why we're burning gasoline in our cars instead of cheap coal, the two obvious reasons are emissions and a liquid fuel being easier to manage than a solid fuel. But the biggest reason is energy density. At 24 GJ/ton, coal has 24 MJ/kg. Gasoline is 44 MJ/kg. So you only need to carry around half as much fuel (by weight) if you use gasoline instead of coal.
Unlike digital data and software, physical hardware has a cost of distribution. He is offering a 3D printing service to people without a 3D printer. The sale price pays for the time his printer is occupied, materials, and his time maintaining the system. In contrast, the designs only have a cost associated with initial production. Once that cost has been paid, the cost to store, maintain, and distribute the design is virtually nil.
This is the same silliness as the court decision which shut down Aereo. A group of people who are giving the software away for free decide that renting out your hardware to use that software is illegal, and that anyone wishing to use the software must do so using their own hardware.
I wouldn't recommend this. I've tried using it for a while and it's very finicky. For one, it needs to be maintained within a tight temperature range of between about 35-42 C. Allow it to drift outside that range even for a few minutes and you're looking at total loss of the hardware and neural net. It has some built-in temperature regulating capability, but still needs supplemental insulation and heating at cooler temperatures, and active cooling at higher temps. Blocking the air vent results in system hibernation in less than a minute, and total loss of the system within 5-10 minutes.
Also, you don't immediately get a fully functional system. It takes a long time - a couple decades - before it reaches stability. Granted most of that time is spent priming the neural net. But the neural net is slow too. It seems to function based on creating new physical connections which take time to grow, instead of virtual ones which can be made or destroyed instantly. In contrast, a silicon-based system can be up and running in a few months, with priming the neural net taking about a year, quicker if you can dump in the data from a previous iteration (also something you can't do with these biological systems).
It does have some nifty self-repair mechanisms though, allowing it to last many decades with little to no maintenance. The silicon-based hardware I've tried only lasts a few years to a decade, with the longest-lived example only making it to 2 decades because it was barely used. But the ability to quickly copy data from previous hardware makes this a moot point.
The biological neural net has some strange quirks too. After about a decade and half of priming, it starts spending more of its time trying to spread its blueprints and base code around, instead of solving the problems I assign it. I mean sure, when it succeeds it results in more neural nets which increases the overall computational capability of my systems. But as I said, each one takes over a decade to prime, so that represents a lot of time and resources you have to dump into a new system before you see any return on investment.
The 4th amendment is actually irrelevant in this case. The phone belongs to the San Bernardino County government. It was a work phone assigned to the shooter, not the shooter's personal phone.
That's a crucial fact which keeps being omitted from this debate. Apple's argument holds no water if this software can only be used at the device owner's request. It's not the government coercing them to hack an iPhone that they fear. It's Johnny's mom and dad coercing them to hack Johnny's iPhone they fear (times a couple dozen million parents). They don't want the bad PR of having the capability to hack Johnny's iPhone, but having to explain to parents why they won't do it for them.
It's probably the median. Mean is skewed by grossly disproportionate pay at the high end, so median is in fact the correct figure you want to be using for this comparison. Mean however is the correct figure to use when evaluating how much money is going to CEOs instead of regular workers. From some quick googling, the $177k figure does include benefits and stock options.
Median is what you want to use to see how much pay the [average CEO] makes.
Mean is what you want to use to see how much [the average pay] of a CEO is.
Subtle but important difference.
Step 1: Make it extraordinarily difficult to media-shift the movies you buy from disc to your media server.
Step 2: Put a required component to play legitimate discs on a single point of failure on the Internet.
Step 3: Watch the masses buy the movies on disc.
Or at least that's what Hollywood thinks step 3 is. What's really gonna happen is
Step 3: Watch every script kiddie in the world DDoS the encryption key servers, causing legitimate discs to become impossible to watch and UHD-BD players to become useless at viewing protected discs. Then watch the masses who own the movie on disc go to pirate sites to download the movie, and do so guilt-free because they already paid for it when they bought it on disc.
Seriously, I cannot think of a better way to turn all the honest movie buyers out there into pirate downloaders, and simultaneously make them feel they're justified in pirating.
I'm Asian and I keep having to emphasize this with my Caucasian friends. Standards of behavior are arbitrary. Just because you're used to one standard doesn't mean you should expect other people elsewhere in the world to adhere to the same standard.
The Western standard is that you don't directly steal things someone is trying to keep secret. You pass a few laws making the behavior illegal, and that's it. Anyone who breaks the law and steals your secret is a "shithead" (to quote another comment), and should be tried and jailed. You can infer the secret from afar, based on secondary information which leaks out, but stealing it directly is a no-no.
The Eastern standard is that if you want to keep something secret, you'd better do everything you can to keep it secret. If someone manages to hack you and steal your secrets, it's your own damn fault for not protecting yourself. Corporate and state-sponsored espionage isn't just encouraged, it's expected. You can be fired if you refuse your company's orders to spy on a competing company. Just don't get caught doing it. That'll result in you being fired in order for the company to save face - everyone pretends they respect each others' secrets, even while they're secretly trying to steal them.
The Hainan Island incident is a good example. The U.S. felt justified spying because they flew the EP-3 just outside Chinese territorial waters. They weren't breaking any laws, so by Western standards the behavior was OK. By Eastern standards, the behavior became unacceptable the moment it was clear they were spying. If the U.S. had been spying secretly, it'd be OK. But doing it overtly and openly by flying the EP-3 in plain sight just outside the Chinese border was a faux pas.
Because of this difference in standards of behavior, I read about all the joint technology deals Western companies make with China, and just shake my head in disbelief. Like the German company agreeing to manufacture high speed trains in China, instead of manufacturing them in Germany and shipping them to China. After a couple years, the Chinese told them they didn't need their help anymore, and didn't renew the contract. Obviously what happened was the Chinese went over every inch of the production facilities during off-hours to glean every nugget of information they could about manufacturing these trains. And after a couple years when they felt they had a good enough handle on how it all worked, they ditched the German company and started manufacturing the trains themselves. The Germans expected the Western standard of behavior - that the Chinese would "respect" the sanctity of their production secrets and not try to copy them. (Kawasaki did the same thing to my surprise, since they knew going in that this would happen.)
So don't expect the Chinese hacking and spying to stop. As long as there's plausible deniability, they're going to keep at it. The onus is on Western companies and governments to protect themselves as best they can, because the Eastern standard wins in a race to the bottom.
You can't use H1Bs to replace existing workers, at least not in theory. Heck, legally you can't even use them in place of a new domestic hiree. For a business to get a H1B hire approved, they first have to advertise the exact same job for x weeks (I don't recall how long - yes our company went through this process). And only if no qualified and suitable American workers apply for the job, then can the H1B be approved.
Unfortunately, the process is badly abused. You've probably seen those wanted ads which combine a very peculiar and specific set of requirements. Like Ph.D, 8 years experience with one skill, and 4 years experience with a totally unrelated different skill, and some obscure certification which doesn't relate to what the job is about. That's a H1B ad - designed so that no individual on earth qualifies except for the foreign worker they've already picked out and are trying to get a H1B visa for. A few years back someone on/. posted that they happened to meet nearly all of the requirements for one such job ad, went out of their way to get the obscure unrelated certification they were missing, and applied for the job. And were still declined for an interview.
As for TFS, IT and software development are totally different. Not to insult IT workers, but IT is more a maintenance job you can pick up as you work, while development is more creative with higher formal education requirements. I can totally believe that there's a shortage of domestic software developers, but an excess of domestic IT workers. That both types of jobs can be filled with H1B workers does not mean those jobs are comparable. H1Bs cover a huge range of jobs, from software development to accounting to statisticians to pharmacists. Just because they're helping in one job field doesn't mean they aren't being abused in another.
If the government wants to fix H1Bs, I'd suggest a standard job description. The company sponsoring the H1B can add one or two specific requirements peculiar to what they're doing, but the rest of the qualifications should be based on a uniform standard for expected skill set.
I know everyone has seen the example where two waves meet up and their amplitudes add up, creating a huge peak. While the arithmetic of that is correct, the actual dynamic behavior of waves is a lot more complex. What you see as a wave is only a partial instantaneous manifestation of an energy pulse in the water. Waves do not propagate in isolation like you learned in high school. As with coupled pendulums, there is energy transference between individual waves.
So instead of taking the arithmetic approach - measuring every wave, and trying to predict when a rogue wave will happen - they're measuring wave train profiles and analyzing how they'll combine and interact. The calculations are a lot more complex, but you need a lot fewer measurements and calculations.
That's just it. The vast majority of people have called their representative, senator, Governor, or President that or worse at one time or another. The moment most politicians get in front of the cameras, they're walking on eggshells being careful not to offend anyone. They carefully vet their political stances with trial balloons, surveys, and marketing research before actually proclaiming it as their stance.
Trump doesn't do that. He calls important people a pussy on national TV as easily as the common man does it at the bar or the office cooler. That's what's driving his popularity - he's an anti-politicians. He acts like regular people act, with none of the pretense politicians wear, none of the false gratuity they give off. Given how fed up the electorate is with politicians (Congress' approval rating was just 11% in the latest poll), it's a strategy which may actually work.
I don't particularly like Trump, but I think it's good that we're finally getting a candidate who's doing what he's doing. For too long now, people have expected their politicians to be perfect little angels with no blemish on their record, no skeletons in their closet. Nobody is perfect. Everyone has done something considered "wrong" in their past (whether it be smoking pot or shoplifting or mooning the school principal). Everyone has skeletons in their closet. If you demand a perfectly clean record from political candidates, the only people who can succeed at politics are pathological liars who are great at covering up their flaws.
See, the reason you say he needs an attitude adjustment isn't because he called the Governor a pussy. If that's your standard, then 3/4ths of the country needs an attitude adjustment. The reason is because he said it on national TV, and for some arbitrary reason we just expect people to behave better on TV than they do in real life. Look at all the open mic gaffes, where politicians have been caught saying what they really think instead of what they say in front of the cameras. That's the disconnect people expect between what politicians say, and what they actually think. Would you rather have a candidate who actually says what he thinks? Or a candidate who thinks one thing, but says another in front of the cameras?
Utilities generally only have a maintenance contract to build and maintain transmission equipment along public easements (that's a swath of land that crosses private property for placing transmission conduits the greater good, like electrical and telephone lines, gas lines, sewer lines, etc.). So while technically AT&T owns the poles, they do not get to decide what gets put on them. The poles are only allowed to exist because of the easement, and the local government controls the easement. Unless the utility agreement is extremely unusual, AT&T's contract would be to maintain the poles and lines for anyone the city decides to give access. If they tried to play hardball, the city could simply not renew AT&T's contract and hire someone else to maintain the lines. AT&T would then have to remove all its poles and lines from the easement. They could in theory throw a tantrum and tear down all the poles and line, but the cost-effective thing to do would be to sell the poles and lines to the new maintenance company. (Same thing happens when you build property on leased land, like what happens with trailer park homes.)
Some utility agreements make the distinction even clearer. For example, where I used to live, you could pick from among hundreds of different companies to provide your natural gas service. The Gas Company had the maintenance contract for the gas lines, but were prohibited from actually selling gas directly. They had to sell it through a subsidiary (Sempra Energy), competing with hundreds of other different providers who also sold gas. The Gas Company's cut showed up in my bill as a transmission charge, at a rate regulated by the Public Utilities Commission, and they were required to charge the same rate to all natural gas providers. (Of course as a commodity, gas is gas. The gas you got probably didn't actually come from the company you bought it from. But as long as the numbers all add up - you pay for x cubic ft of gas from XYZ gas company, and XYZ gas company pumps x cubic ft of gas into the distribution pipes on your behalf - the accounting all works out in the end.)
Slashdot Mirror
Same reason a weather service calls itself the Weather Underground.
People have an individual and sometimes odd sense of humor. If they put out a good product, I'm more than willing to overlook their idiosyncrasies.
The chances are pretty good actually. And that's just the first page of Google hits (ignore the one fake video).
The near misses are happening frequently enough that there will eventually be a hit, likely several. Do you really want to stick your head in the sand and pretend there's no problem until there's loss of life? Aviation regulatory agencies like the FAA are frequently criticized for being too reactionary - not addressing problems until after there's been loss of life. They are attempting to be proactive in this case, and they're getting criticized for that too.
I used to do the accounting at a company which used day laborers. I did my job honestly and paid exactly what each employee's time card said they worked. The biggest problem we had was actually people getting their friend to punch in their time card for them before they'd actually arrived for work, and people hanging around before clocking out to pad the amount of time they'd worked.
We let the latter abuse slide because it was usually done to round off 7.98 hours worked to 8 hours (the employees we knew didn't do this just got bigger end of year bonuses instead). The former abuse got serious enough we actually considered switching to a fingerprint-based time card. In the end we decided doing so would send a "we don't trust you" message to all our employees, when it was only a few employees who did it. Instead we opted to put the time clock in a more public location, and have the managers sit down with any of their employees we knew did this and give them a talk stressing that having a friend punch in for them was not allowed.
What was really fun was when I needed a statement from 3 years back that I had lost in a move to resolve a dispute with a creditor who claimed I hadn't paid a bill. No problem, my bank keeps all those online, or so I thought. I logged in, found the statement, clicked to download the PDF and... "This statement is not currently available. Please wait up to 2 weeks while we retrieve it from our records." WTF? 1TB HDDs were $100 (at the time), and they're archiving records onto tape after just 2 years?
Since then, I download PDFs of all my bank statements at the end of the year, sort them, and store them on my own file server. I don't trust the banks to keep them, much less find them. I hear you about it taking too many clicks though. You'd think they'd have a "download all of this year's statements with one click!" button.
His math is right. The bulk of the energy release when creating CO2 is from the step going from atomic carbon and atomic oxygen (dG = 0).to CO2 (dG = -394.4 kJ/mol), not the decomposition of for example CH4 (methane, dG = -50.8 kJ/mol). In fact it would take more energy to go from CO2 to atomic carbon and oxygen, than was originally released when you burned the CH4.
Basically, this process amounts to you taking the exhaust and soot from someone else burning a tree, then you burn 2-3 trees to generate enough energy to convert that soot and CO2 back into its atomic constitutents, then you convert it into a battery. So yeah batteries don't grow on trees, but it would take less energy to make the battery starting with the tree than what these guys are doing.
CO2 and H2O aren't just byproducts of chemical reactions which can be converted into C, H2, and O2 if you "just" knock the atoms apart. They sit very far down the energy potential well. All the energy that you get when you burn fossil fuels comes from lowering the C, H, and O down the energy potential well (creating CO2 and H2O in the process). Decomposing them back into their constituent atoms (knocking the atoms apart) requires pumping an equivalent amount of energy back into them.
Factor in inefficiencies and you're usually looking at having to put 2-3x as much energy in as you originally got out when you burned the fossil fuel. At that point you're better off just using that energy directly as electricity to power society - prevent the fossil fuel from being burned in the first place, instead of trying to uncreate the CO2 that was formed from burning the fossil fuel.
I've always felt an advocate should be more critical of the cause he is advocating than the average lay person. Presumably he is more knowledgeable about whatever it is he is advocating, and thus able to see more of the flaws, problems, and drawbacks than the average lay person. If someone only posts in favor of what they are advocating while only critical of alternatives, they are merely advocating their bias, not the cause.
That's why I'll often ask people arguing for something to do their best to argue against it, or vice versa. That'll quickly reveal if the person has a good handle on all the pros and cons of both sides of the issue, indicating that they've made an honest attempt to research it before arriving at a conclusion. Or if they've come to a conclusion first and have just memorized only facts and arguments which support their position.
As best as I can tell, mdsolar has never met a solar installation he didn't like. I'm not sure "troll" is the proper classification, but it's pretty close. If you are seeking a messenger to deliver unbiased and even-handed facts and figures, he is not it. If you genuinely want an even-handed overview of the different energy sources, their advantages, and their drawbacks, I'd recommend David MacKay's web book. I should warn you though, it actually requires you to read, comprehend, and think about the trade-offs. There are no "X is good, Y is bad" one-liners.
That's a bad angle to see the phenomenon. I had the (mis)fortune of getting a perfect side view of it while at a restaurant in Amsterdam. A heron took off and its motion caught my eye. My first thought when I looked at it was that it had about a 1 meter piece of yarn tied to its leg. Then the "yarn" started falling and lengthening, and I realized it was actually a bird dropping. I watched it go splat right on top of a bunch of parked bicycles.
"Streamer" is a very apt term for what it looks like
You want a good case which burns away irrelevant fluff and centers the issue solely on the principles at stake. If you pick a bad case, the court could decide against you based on that fluff, inadvertently setting a precedent which influences the balance of those principles. The principles at stake in this case (or what people are hoping this case will be about) are an individual's right to privacy and a company's right of self-determination against government coercion, vs. the government's duty to keep society safe. Here are the flaws I can see with this case:
All the points I listed above can be used to refute that argument. That's why this is a bad case. Heck, even the recent New York case (defendant is a drug dealer, but he is the phone's owner, and he didn't kill anyone) is a better case.
WinCE became Windows Mobile (this was back in the PDA days when Palm was the main competitor), which became the starting point for Windows Phone.
Windows RT was a port of the Windows API from x86 and AMD64 to ARM. People erroneously refer to it as a flop. Yes it was a flop in the market, but it succeeded at what it was intended to do - to allow Microsoft to hedge their bets.
Back when Microsoft began working on Win RT, mobile devices had just become the fastest growing computing sector. Nobody knew what the future held - if Intel/AMD desktop and laptop processors would continue to dominate, or if ARM processors were going to erode away their market share until ARM became the dominant player. Despite Microsoft's long relationship with Intel, they were a software company so didn't really have a horse in the race. Consequently they hedged their bets. The created both Windows 8 and Windows RT. Developers could then write their programs to a single API. Regardless of which processor architecture won, they would just be one recompile away from having a functioning Windows program that would run on contemporary computing devices.
Basically Microsoft threw Intel in the way of the ARM bus, telling Intel that if they wanted to continue to be the CPU that Windows ran on, they'd be solely responsible for making their CPUs competitive with ARM processors. That's a large part of the reason Intel has been concentrating so heavily on Atom and ultra low voltage Core processors lately - so they could compete with ARM in power consumption, and prevent ARM processors from spreading beyond the phone/tablet market into the laptop and eventually desktop market..
Intel was mostly successful, so Win 8 became dominant and Win RT was tossed into the dust bin. If Intel had failed, Win RT would've become dominant and Win 8 would've been put into the dust bin. Microsoft made both knowing one of them would fail. They just didn't know which one ahead of time.
Small flaw in your argument. If "your" phone is being monitored, it's not really your phone. It belongs to someone else, they are lending it to you, and it's their right to know what you're doing with their stuff. If you ask for features which the phone owner objects to, Apple is going to listen to the guy paying them for the phone, not the guy using the phone for free.
If you're that worried about other people monitoring your phone use, buy your own phone. If work requires you to carry their phone around 24/7 and you're worried about cam/mic/GPS tracking, just give them your personal phone number and turn your work phone off. Tell them if they need to contact you, to text you at your personal number, and you'll turn the work phone on long enough to communicate with them.
Not really dwarfed.
1.1 GW * 0.903 capacity factor = 0.99 GW actual production by nuclear
9.5 GW * 0.145 capacity factor = 1.38 GW actual production by solar
6.8 GW * 0.25 capacity factor = 1.7 GW actual production by wind
I mean we get it, renewables = good. But comparing based on installed capacity is like comparing farmland based solely on land area, not how much of that land is actually arable.
Cost to launch a payload into low earth orbit is currently around $3000/kg for the smaller rockets, $10,000/kg for the larger ones. About $20,000 - $30,000/kg for geosynchronous orbit. So yeah this is a really big deal.
For those who don't grok just how atrocious Concorde's fuel economy was, just look at the right-most column of these charts (liters per 100 km per seat). Concorde was 16.7 L/100 km per seat.
It's a stepping stone. The long-term hope is for hypersonic transports which reduce the energy cost by "flying" above the atmosphere (sub-orbital ballistic trajectory) for a good portion of the trip. But to do that, you have to go through the supersonic regime.
And aerospace has always been heavily subsidized by the government. The physics in these high-speed / high-altitude / high-temperature environments is frequently not well understood. It makes little sense for every aerospace company out there to do duplicate research into it. So the government pays for that research that all companies have access to, and the companies pay for whatever designs they think will work best based on that research.
It's important to understand that the cost advantage of operating an electric car is only slightly due to improved energy efficiency. The vast majority of the price differential is due to the extremely low price of coal and natural gas relative to gasoline.
An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).
Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.
Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
So really not that big a difference. If battery discharge efficiency is also 80%, then the EV is basically identical to an ICE in overall energy efficiency. Yes if solar and wind come down in price to match or beat coal, then you can drop the 50% at the front. But wind is still about 1.5x-2x the price of coal, and solar about 5x-7x the price.
Now look at the fuel price side.
Coal costs about $50/ton, and contains about 24 GJ/ton. That's $2.08 per GJ.
Gasoline costs about $2/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's $16.67 per GJ. Almost an order of magnitude more.
So there you have it. EVs are only 1.1x-1.3x more energy efficient than ICE cars. But their fuel source is 8x cheaper. That's why EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles.
Incidentally, if you're wondering why we're burning gasoline in our cars instead of cheap coal, the two obvious reasons are emissions and a liquid fuel being easier to manage than a solid fuel. But the biggest reason is energy density. At 24 GJ/ton, coal has 24 MJ/kg. Gasoline is 44 MJ/kg. So you only need to carry around half as much fuel (by weight) if you use gasoline instead of coal.
Unlike digital data and software, physical hardware has a cost of distribution. He is offering a 3D printing service to people without a 3D printer. The sale price pays for the time his printer is occupied, materials, and his time maintaining the system. In contrast, the designs only have a cost associated with initial production. Once that cost has been paid, the cost to store, maintain, and distribute the design is virtually nil.
This is the same silliness as the court decision which shut down Aereo. A group of people who are giving the software away for free decide that renting out your hardware to use that software is illegal, and that anyone wishing to use the software must do so using their own hardware.
I wouldn't recommend this. I've tried using it for a while and it's very finicky. For one, it needs to be maintained within a tight temperature range of between about 35-42 C. Allow it to drift outside that range even for a few minutes and you're looking at total loss of the hardware and neural net. It has some built-in temperature regulating capability, but still needs supplemental insulation and heating at cooler temperatures, and active cooling at higher temps. Blocking the air vent results in system hibernation in less than a minute, and total loss of the system within 5-10 minutes.
Also, you don't immediately get a fully functional system. It takes a long time - a couple decades - before it reaches stability. Granted most of that time is spent priming the neural net. But the neural net is slow too. It seems to function based on creating new physical connections which take time to grow, instead of virtual ones which can be made or destroyed instantly. In contrast, a silicon-based system can be up and running in a few months, with priming the neural net taking about a year, quicker if you can dump in the data from a previous iteration (also something you can't do with these biological systems).
It does have some nifty self-repair mechanisms though, allowing it to last many decades with little to no maintenance. The silicon-based hardware I've tried only lasts a few years to a decade, with the longest-lived example only making it to 2 decades because it was barely used. But the ability to quickly copy data from previous hardware makes this a moot point.
The biological neural net has some strange quirks too. After about a decade and half of priming, it starts spending more of its time trying to spread its blueprints and base code around, instead of solving the problems I assign it. I mean sure, when it succeeds it results in more neural nets which increases the overall computational capability of my systems. But as I said, each one takes over a decade to prime, so that represents a lot of time and resources you have to dump into a new system before you see any return on investment.
The 4th amendment is actually irrelevant in this case. The phone belongs to the San Bernardino County government. It was a work phone assigned to the shooter, not the shooter's personal phone.
That's a crucial fact which keeps being omitted from this debate. Apple's argument holds no water if this software can only be used at the device owner's request. It's not the government coercing them to hack an iPhone that they fear. It's Johnny's mom and dad coercing them to hack Johnny's iPhone they fear (times a couple dozen million parents). They don't want the bad PR of having the capability to hack Johnny's iPhone, but having to explain to parents why they won't do it for them.
It's probably the median. Mean is skewed by grossly disproportionate pay at the high end, so median is in fact the correct figure you want to be using for this comparison. Mean however is the correct figure to use when evaluating how much money is going to CEOs instead of regular workers. From some quick googling, the $177k figure does include benefits and stock options.
Median is what you want to use to see how much pay the [average CEO] makes.
Mean is what you want to use to see how much [the average pay] of a CEO is.
Subtle but important difference.
Step 1: Make it extraordinarily difficult to media-shift the movies you buy from disc to your media server.
Step 2: Put a required component to play legitimate discs on a single point of failure on the Internet.
Step 3: Watch the masses buy the movies on disc.
Or at least that's what Hollywood thinks step 3 is. What's really gonna happen is
Step 3: Watch every script kiddie in the world DDoS the encryption key servers, causing legitimate discs to become impossible to watch and UHD-BD players to become useless at viewing protected discs. Then watch the masses who own the movie on disc go to pirate sites to download the movie, and do so guilt-free because they already paid for it when they bought it on disc.
Seriously, I cannot think of a better way to turn all the honest movie buyers out there into pirate downloaders, and simultaneously make them feel they're justified in pirating.
I'm Asian and I keep having to emphasize this with my Caucasian friends. Standards of behavior are arbitrary. Just because you're used to one standard doesn't mean you should expect other people elsewhere in the world to adhere to the same standard.
The Western standard is that you don't directly steal things someone is trying to keep secret. You pass a few laws making the behavior illegal, and that's it. Anyone who breaks the law and steals your secret is a "shithead" (to quote another comment), and should be tried and jailed. You can infer the secret from afar, based on secondary information which leaks out, but stealing it directly is a no-no.
The Eastern standard is that if you want to keep something secret, you'd better do everything you can to keep it secret. If someone manages to hack you and steal your secrets, it's your own damn fault for not protecting yourself. Corporate and state-sponsored espionage isn't just encouraged, it's expected. You can be fired if you refuse your company's orders to spy on a competing company. Just don't get caught doing it. That'll result in you being fired in order for the company to save face - everyone pretends they respect each others' secrets, even while they're secretly trying to steal them.
The Hainan Island incident is a good example. The U.S. felt justified spying because they flew the EP-3 just outside Chinese territorial waters. They weren't breaking any laws, so by Western standards the behavior was OK. By Eastern standards, the behavior became unacceptable the moment it was clear they were spying. If the U.S. had been spying secretly, it'd be OK. But doing it overtly and openly by flying the EP-3 in plain sight just outside the Chinese border was a faux pas.
Because of this difference in standards of behavior, I read about all the joint technology deals Western companies make with China, and just shake my head in disbelief. Like the German company agreeing to manufacture high speed trains in China, instead of manufacturing them in Germany and shipping them to China. After a couple years, the Chinese told them they didn't need their help anymore, and didn't renew the contract. Obviously what happened was the Chinese went over every inch of the production facilities during off-hours to glean every nugget of information they could about manufacturing these trains. And after a couple years when they felt they had a good enough handle on how it all worked, they ditched the German company and started manufacturing the trains themselves. The Germans expected the Western standard of behavior - that the Chinese would "respect" the sanctity of their production secrets and not try to copy them. (Kawasaki did the same thing to my surprise, since they knew going in that this would happen.)
So don't expect the Chinese hacking and spying to stop. As long as there's plausible deniability, they're going to keep at it. The onus is on Western companies and governments to protect themselves as best they can, because the Eastern standard wins in a race to the bottom.
You can't use H1Bs to replace existing workers, at least not in theory. Heck, legally you can't even use them in place of a new domestic hiree. For a business to get a H1B hire approved, they first have to advertise the exact same job for x weeks (I don't recall how long - yes our company went through this process). And only if no qualified and suitable American workers apply for the job, then can the H1B be approved.
/. posted that they happened to meet nearly all of the requirements for one such job ad, went out of their way to get the obscure unrelated certification they were missing, and applied for the job. And were still declined for an interview.
Unfortunately, the process is badly abused. You've probably seen those wanted ads which combine a very peculiar and specific set of requirements. Like Ph.D, 8 years experience with one skill, and 4 years experience with a totally unrelated different skill, and some obscure certification which doesn't relate to what the job is about. That's a H1B ad - designed so that no individual on earth qualifies except for the foreign worker they've already picked out and are trying to get a H1B visa for. A few years back someone on
As for TFS, IT and software development are totally different. Not to insult IT workers, but IT is more a maintenance job you can pick up as you work, while development is more creative with higher formal education requirements. I can totally believe that there's a shortage of domestic software developers, but an excess of domestic IT workers. That both types of jobs can be filled with H1B workers does not mean those jobs are comparable. H1Bs cover a huge range of jobs, from software development to accounting to statisticians to pharmacists. Just because they're helping in one job field doesn't mean they aren't being abused in another.
If the government wants to fix H1Bs, I'd suggest a standard job description. The company sponsoring the H1B can add one or two specific requirements peculiar to what they're doing, but the rest of the qualifications should be based on a uniform standard for expected skill set.
I know everyone has seen the example where two waves meet up and their amplitudes add up, creating a huge peak. While the arithmetic of that is correct, the actual dynamic behavior of waves is a lot more complex. What you see as a wave is only a partial instantaneous manifestation of an energy pulse in the water. Waves do not propagate in isolation like you learned in high school. As with coupled pendulums, there is energy transference between individual waves.
So instead of taking the arithmetic approach - measuring every wave, and trying to predict when a rogue wave will happen - they're measuring wave train profiles and analyzing how they'll combine and interact. The calculations are a lot more complex, but you need a lot fewer measurements and calculations.
That's just it. The vast majority of people have called their representative, senator, Governor, or President that or worse at one time or another. The moment most politicians get in front of the cameras, they're walking on eggshells being careful not to offend anyone. They carefully vet their political stances with trial balloons, surveys, and marketing research before actually proclaiming it as their stance.
Trump doesn't do that. He calls important people a pussy on national TV as easily as the common man does it at the bar or the office cooler. That's what's driving his popularity - he's an anti-politicians. He acts like regular people act, with none of the pretense politicians wear, none of the false gratuity they give off. Given how fed up the electorate is with politicians (Congress' approval rating was just 11% in the latest poll), it's a strategy which may actually work.
I don't particularly like Trump, but I think it's good that we're finally getting a candidate who's doing what he's doing. For too long now, people have expected their politicians to be perfect little angels with no blemish on their record, no skeletons in their closet. Nobody is perfect. Everyone has done something considered "wrong" in their past (whether it be smoking pot or shoplifting or mooning the school principal). Everyone has skeletons in their closet. If you demand a perfectly clean record from political candidates, the only people who can succeed at politics are pathological liars who are great at covering up their flaws.
See, the reason you say he needs an attitude adjustment isn't because he called the Governor a pussy. If that's your standard, then 3/4ths of the country needs an attitude adjustment. The reason is because he said it on national TV, and for some arbitrary reason we just expect people to behave better on TV than they do in real life. Look at all the open mic gaffes, where politicians have been caught saying what they really think instead of what they say in front of the cameras. That's the disconnect people expect between what politicians say, and what they actually think. Would you rather have a candidate who actually says what he thinks? Or a candidate who thinks one thing, but says another in front of the cameras?
Utilities generally only have a maintenance contract to build and maintain transmission equipment along public easements (that's a swath of land that crosses private property for placing transmission conduits the greater good, like electrical and telephone lines, gas lines, sewer lines, etc.). So while technically AT&T owns the poles, they do not get to decide what gets put on them. The poles are only allowed to exist because of the easement, and the local government controls the easement. Unless the utility agreement is extremely unusual, AT&T's contract would be to maintain the poles and lines for anyone the city decides to give access. If they tried to play hardball, the city could simply not renew AT&T's contract and hire someone else to maintain the lines. AT&T would then have to remove all its poles and lines from the easement. They could in theory throw a tantrum and tear down all the poles and line, but the cost-effective thing to do would be to sell the poles and lines to the new maintenance company. (Same thing happens when you build property on leased land, like what happens with trailer park homes.)
Some utility agreements make the distinction even clearer. For example, where I used to live, you could pick from among hundreds of different companies to provide your natural gas service. The Gas Company had the maintenance contract for the gas lines, but were prohibited from actually selling gas directly. They had to sell it through a subsidiary (Sempra Energy), competing with hundreds of other different providers who also sold gas. The Gas Company's cut showed up in my bill as a transmission charge, at a rate regulated by the Public Utilities Commission, and they were required to charge the same rate to all natural gas providers. (Of course as a commodity, gas is gas. The gas you got probably didn't actually come from the company you bought it from. But as long as the numbers all add up - you pay for x cubic ft of gas from XYZ gas company, and XYZ gas company pumps x cubic ft of gas into the distribution pipes on your behalf - the accounting all works out in the end.)