While the planetary alignment was convenient, it isn't exactly necessary on RTG-powered spacecraft. Pioneer 11 visited Jupiter, then flew to almost the opposite side of the solar system to visit Saturn. Longer travel time (and greater chance of equipment failure during that time) is the only drawback.
Another factor working against a Pluto encounter was the lack of sunlight that far out. During Voyager 2's encounter with Neptune (which was slightly further away from the sun than Pluto at the time), sunlight was so dim that NASA had to reprogram the cameras to take longer exposures than they were originally designed. Then someone calculated that Voyager 2 would be moving so fast that the photos of Neptune would be blurred just by the changing parallax between the spacecraft and Neptune. So they programmed the spacecraft and cameras to rotate slightly during the exposures, effectively panning the camera to cancel out the changing parallax.
All this happened so quickly they got just one shot at it, and they had to do it blind. By the time the first near photos reached Earth, if they had turned out to be blurred, any correcting instructions sent to Voyager 2 would have arrived after the spacecraft had passed Neptune. So NASA wasn't even sure if the closest Neptune and Triton photos would even be aimed correctly. Heck, they weren't even sure they were going to make it to Triton (Voyager 2 flew less than 5000 km over Neptune's North pole to get to Triton). But as it was the last major destination and they'd recently discovered an atmosphere on Triton, they figured what the heck and rolled the dice. As it turned out, they got everything right, and Voyager returned some spectacular Neptune and Triton photos.
A Pluto encounter would've run into the same problem. Except Pluto is a much smaller target than Neptune, whose mass (and therefore gravity) is much less accurately known so properly aiming the camera is even trickier. Even New Horizons (with newer, more sensitive cameras) is going to have to use the same panning trick Voyager 2 used at Neptune. New Horizons is moving fast enough it could cover the distance from the Earth to the Moon in less than 8 hours, so all the close-up photos and measurements of Pluto are going to be over in a matter of hours. And it's basically guiding itself - providing the most accurate measurements we have of Pluto's mass so we can fine-tune its trajectory as it approaches Pluto.
This seems like one of those cases where the FCC rules limiting frequency interference take a back seat for the greater good. Put noise generator aboard the firefighting planes which jams the control frequencies commonly used by hobby drones and RC aircraft (any drones used by the firefighters can be adapted to use a different frequency - probably military). After these idiots lose control of their precious drone and watch it fall into the fire, they'll learn pretty quickly not to fly them around firefighting equipment.
The security team says that SSDs are the only solution, but the org won't approve SSD purchases. It seems most disk scanning could take place after hours and/or under a lower CPU priority, but the security team doesn't care about optimization, summarily blaming sluggishness on lack of SSDs. Are they blowing smoke?
The security team is right. SSDs are the single biggest performance improvement you can add to a computer (even an old computer). If your company is upgrading computers after they get 5-7 years old, but refusing to buy SSDs, they're wasting money. In particular, if they're upgrading management's high-end machines while the low-end machines are still being used by the rank and file, they're doing it completely backwards.
The problem is most people focus on the high-end numbers. How many GHz does the CPU run at? How many MHz does the DDR3 memory run at? Improving the high end doesn't help as much to improve productivity. It's already fast, meaning you're waiting a very small time for it to finish. Making it twice as fast just means the very small wait period shrank a tiny amount and is now twice as small.
If you're serious about improving performance, you get the biggest return by upgrading the slowest components. The slowest part of a modern PC is the HDD. When reading small files (not sequential reads, which really come into play only when copying large media files from one drive to another), they max out at about 1 MB/s. In contrast, the next slowest component - system RAM - is currently on the order of 10 GB/s. In other words, in terms of wait times a 1% improvement in HDD speed will have the same impact as a 100x increase in RAM speed. Now, consider than a SSD will get you at least a 30x improvement in read speeds for small files (about 30 MB/s seems to be average) and there is absolutely nothing you can do with the RAM or CPU which comes anywhere close to the amount of time you'll save by replacing the HDD with a SSD.
If you've got old computers, you should be upgrading them with a SSD instead of replacing them with new computers (with a HDD). Continue to use the old computers + SSD for a few more years, then upgrade them and transfer the SSDs to the new computers. The only exception is if the computer is so old you can't install enough RAM to run modern applications. (Another rare exception would be Northwood and Prescott-era P4 CPUs, which burn so much electricity you'll actually make back the cost of upgrading them via lower electricity bills in a couple years.)
On top of that, SSDs can actually look up small files faster than the computer can request them. So if you've got a virus scan running on a SSD, you can continue using the computer like normal with almost no impact on performance. In fact I usually run my weekly virus and two malware deep scans simultaneously on my SSD laptop, and I can still use it for web browsing or office tasks. When a virus scan runs on a HDD, the HDD has to spend all its time reading files the scan is requesting. As a result anything you try to do with the computer which requests data off the HDD will bog down.
I think it's legit. Net neutrality is one of those least common denominator things where everyone has to do it, or it doesn't work. If Charter had decided to honor net neutrality, while Comcast, TW, Verizon, etc. were being double-paid for traffic by their customers and by websites like Netflix, then Charter would've had to charge their customers higher prices in relation to the other cable companies just to provide the same level of service. That would've put them at a competitive disadvantage. Not directly due to the local franchise monopolies used in this country, but when time came to renew that franchise contract, another company could've waltzed in and said "we can offer the same level of service at a lower price for your customers." The higher real price of their service having been shifted instead into higher prices for services like Netflix (which customers are still paying for).
So as long as some companies were allowed to be evil, all the other companies would've felt compelled to follow along just to remain competitive. Just like hard drives used to be labeled 1 MB = 2^20 bytes. Until one company (Maxtor?) decided to label their drives with 1 MB = 10^6 bytes. At which point all the other companies had to switch to the new definition of MB, lest they lose customers who were being fooled into thinking they were getting a better deal with the mislabeled drives.
Now that the FCC has firmly established that everyone has to abide by net neutrality, that sets a level playing field. Not at the level Comcast, TW, Verizon had wanted, but still level. Companies are now free to set their pricing with net neutrality built in, knowing that other companies will not be able to undercut them by not honoring net neutrality. (This is why I said an alternate solution to net neutrality if the FCC hadn't acted was for Netflix to charge Comcast, TW, and Verizon companies a higher monthly fee - exactly offsetting the bandwidth charges the cable companies were collecting. All they had to do was prominently label it "Verizon bandwidth surcharge" on their monthly Netflix bill, so the customer would know exactly why they were being charged for it.)
You're aware the Tesla S weighs as much as a SUV? 4647 lbs, vs 3655-4028 lbs for a Jeep Cherokee, 4432-4882 lbs for a Ford Explorer, 3358-3624 lbs for a Honda CR-V. The Tesla's high weight is primarily due to the 1200 lb battery pack - a full tank of fuel in these vehicles only weighs about 100 lbs by comparison.
Any weight they can shave off the battery pack will result in noticeable improvements in range, handling, and longevity (due to reduced wear and tear on the suspension).
The bigger deal IMHO is going to be in boats and ships. Unlike cars which can change gears based on their speed, boats are effectively stuck with a fixed prop pitch regardless of the speed they travel at. Consequently, a prop which is efficient at high speed is not very efficient at low speed, and vice versa even if you design/gear the engine to operate efficiently at both those speeds. An electric motor for pushing the boat at lower speeds combined with using the gas/diesel motor at high speeds is a good solution, but the weight of even Li-ion batteries has been a huge impediment. Any fuel you save at lower speeds is lost by the additional fuel burn caused by the extra weight at high speed. Lighter batteries could be a game changer for marine applications.
Instead of quibbling about a flag that some people find offensive, why don't we work to fight actual racism.
That's what baffles me about the hubub over this. I can't believe how many people I know who firmly supported burning of the U.S. flag because "they have their right to freedom of expression," and "it's just a symbol, a piece of cloth, not the country itself" have suddenly flip flopped and now believe people shouldn't have the right to express their opinion with a flag, and that a flag is suddenly more than a mere piece of cloth and should now be the focal point of an issue.
If you truly believe the flag (whether it be the U.S. or Confederate) is just a symbol, then what happens to the physical flag is meaningless. Displaying it or burning it is merely a form of expression. If you ban the Confederate flag without addressing the underlying problems which cause it to be offensive, that is literally the same thing as sticking your head in the sand - you're pretending the problem doesn't exist because you can't see it anymore.
1. Start your own computer consulting business.
2. Charge $50-$150 per hr, and collect all of it, rather than the paltry $20/hr or so equivalent you'd get as an employee with the employer skimming the rest.
As long as people want to take the "easy" way out and just be an employee so they don't have to deal with administrative tasks, there will be an excess supply of employees, and employers can get away with paying low wages and demanding excessive overtime. Finding clients on your own and doing your own accounting is a PITA, but the increase in your compensation far, far exceeds the pain.
Just be sure not to call yourself a computer consultant. Form your own corporation with at least one additional employee (spouse as secretary or buddy who also wants to do computer consulting), or work another job as an employee. Along with screwing computer professionals over with FLSA, Congress also screwed them over by making it impossible for them to work as independent consultants. You have to do it working for a company with 2+ employees, or do it part-time as a second job.
Re:The problem is that landfills are too cheap
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Recycling Is Dying
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The problem is that landfills are too cheap. Every waste disposal stream has costs. The choice is what we're willing to pay to deal with it.
No, landfills being cheap is only a factor if recyclables have negative value (i.e. you had to pay recyclers to take your recyclables, just as you pay them to take your trash). If that's what you believe, then it's tantamount to admitting we shouldn't be recycling.
The premise behind recycling has always been that it's cheaper to harvest raw materials from recyclables than it is to mine/manufacture new ones. That is, recyclables have positive value, and it's higher than for mined raw materials. If this isn't true, then our best strategy is actually either (A) stop recycling and give up on the idea, or (B) to separate out recyclables and dump them into a parallel landfill. In the future when mining/refining raw materials becomes more expensive, it will then become cost-effective to mine those recyclables landfills.
If you want to shortcut this process, then start charging a deposit for recyclable materials. This is already done in many places for cans and bottles - you pay a little extra when purchasing the new can or bottle, and you get the money back when you turn it in for recycling. Although in that case it's mostly done to prevent these items from ending up as trash on the streets.
Also standing in the way are many plastics (thermosets) and rubber (tires) not being easy to recycle. And goods being produced from certain recyclables like paper being inferior to new (even the Sierra Club prints its calendars on non-recycled paper because it's whiter), thus its market being much smaller than the original market - mostly cardboard and egg cartons. Incentives and regulations to encourage manufactured materials to be more recyclable, and R&D into better means of recycling helps here.
Completely different. Uzi Nissan owned nissan.com. Nissan (the car company) owned the Nissan trademark (though it didn't begin using it in the U.S. until well after Uzi Nissan bought the nissan.com domain).
Neither Matthew Lush nor Lush Cosmetics owns www.youtube.com/lush. It's owned by YouTube (aka Google). And Google is allowed to do anything they want with the youtube.com domain. If one of YouTube's VPs has a last name Lush and wants that URL for his daughter's YouTube channel, he can take it away from these guys and there's nothing either of them can do.
If you passed out marketing materials with someone else's domain as "your" URL, it's your own damn fault if something like this happens. Spend the $10/yr to register your own domain and $20/yr for minimal hosting, and set up a 1-line redirect script so www.yourdomain.com forwards to www.youtube.com/lush (or whatever). Some domain registrars will even let you set up forwarding without you having to buy a hosting plan. TFA is like setting your blanket in a choice spot on someone else's private property to watch July 4th fireworks, then getting upset when the property owner moves your blanket and gives the spot to someone else.
"and in your BEST case scenario, end up hurting actual people"
Is this somehow worse than hurting actual rhinos? Is there some reason to class humans as a super species that have a greater right to exist than any others other than anthropomorphic arrogance?
You can try to spin it however you want. The vast majority of the people on earth do in fact see humans as having a greater right to exist than other animals. If a rhino and person were caught on a see-saw contraption on a cliff where the process of saving one would condemn the other to death, 99% of people would choose to save the person.
In that context, you lose the moral high ground if you begin poisoning horns. The poachers are only hurting animals. You are hurting people. Therefore, you will be the worse criminal in most people's minds.
It wasn't "invented" two centuries ago. It may have been given a name two centuries ago, but it taps into a deep and primal part of how our brains work. Go to a public swimming pool. Pee into a bucket. Take an eye dropper and put one drop of the pee into the pool. Everyone will rush out of the water, and you'll probably be arrested.
Our brains are wired so that the loosest association with something disgusting continues to disgust us no matter how diluted. People are grossed out at astronauts "drinking recycled pee," even though the reverse osmosis system used generates water cleaner than you can get from any natural spring. And if a minute quantity of something bad is disgusting, then it's not that far a leap to start thinking that a minute quantity of something good can be helpful.
They're starting to address this. I was shopping for a parabolic wifi antenna recently. Amazon lumps the reviews for 4 different types (different dBi) with 2 different connectors together even though they're all very different products. If you scroll down to the reviews, you'll see above each review is what specific product the reviewer purchased - dBi and connector type.
This is why we have to turn them into public utilities and abolish all exclusive franchising.
Dear god no. Lots of different companies all trying different things is exactly what you want amidst technological uncertainty. They thoroughly search the solution space, with the companies that find the better solutions becoming more successful. Cellular data is a perfect example. If the U.S. had fallen in line with the EU in mandating the formed-by-committee GSM standard, then CDMA would've been stillborn and we would still be stuck on 56 kbps data speeds. (CDMA automatically divides bandwidth between all users who are actually using data at that moment. GSM is time-slotted, and each device gets a timeslice whether or not they actually use it to transmit data.) Nearly all 3G GSM data implementations used wideband CDMA (which is why you could talk and use data at the same time on a GSM phone - they had to have two different radios for voice and data, while CDMA phones did both with a single radio). 4G LTE uses bandwidth-sharing technology very similar to CDMA (orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes), and its development would've taken several years longer without CDMA to lay down the groundwork, if people had even believed it was viable without real-life trials among millions of users.
Public utilities are good when the technology has pretty much peaked and is stable - the best solution has been found, and there aren't any improvements on the horizon. Long distance electrical transmission initially had people advocating both AC and DC as superior. It turned out high voltage AC as the most effective way to transmit power over long distances, so that standard won out. Nothing better has been found in a century so that's a good service to turn into a utility - the optimal solution has probably been found. Likewise, cable TV/Internet is getting to that point. Initially there was lots of uncertainty about how best to hook up houses and subnet the network, so lots of different cable companies tried different things. But now pretty much everyone is using the same solution (it's even been standardized as DOCSIS), and the only looming future improvement is fiber to the home. So the Cable industry should probably be turned into a public utility soon.
But Cellular is still a rapidly developing industry with lots of technological innovations still being made. Turning it into a public utility would be the worst thing you could do to it.
If you want to fix Cellular, prohibit vertical integration. A company can own towers but can't provide service. A company can provide service but they can't own towers or make phones. A company can make phones but can't own towers or provide service. Then make it so you can buy any phone and subscribe to any service provider (as long as the phone supports their technology). The service providers would lease time on different tower networks. If a manufacturer made a good phone, people would buy it without regard for whether or not a carrier sold it. If a tower company put together a good network, lots of service providers would contract with them. And if a carrier had good plans, people would subscribe to them. None of the current BS where a carrier basically leverages their advantage in tower network into restrictions on phone interoperability and plan selection.
Because medallions create an artificial scarcity of taxis. And in any market, artificial scarcity creates cartels, which reduce competition and benefit no one but a tiny, well-connected minority of owners (and their paid-off politicians) at the expense of pretty much everyone else, including the consumers as well as the labor.
Medallions done properly create a scarcity of taxis in proportion to the scarcity of roads. There is insufficient roadage to support everyone who could potentially want to drive a taxi to make a little extra money on the side. You end up with gridlock, which counteracts any productivity gains that might be generated by having more taxis. So yes the scarcity is artificial, but it's done because it's the lesser of two evils. The other problems that arise out of the medallions, you try to address via other means.
Individuals are effectively taxed on profit via deductions and graduated income tax. A certain amount of income is assumed to be dedicated to necessary expenses like food, shelter, and clothing (at least in some states). Since the requirements for each person to live are pretty much the same, the same standard deduction works for every person. Further reductions in income taxes are made based on how many dependents (children) you're supporting.
The same method doesn't work for businesses because they vary so much in expenses they incur to operate. But why should you even tax a business? Businesses don't consume or produce anything - the people working at them do. A business is just a paper shell representing a group of people. If you tax the business, the money just comes from the employees (lower wages) and customers (higher prices).
Taxing businesses creates a contradiction if you believe in "no taxation without representation." Either you can tax businesses and therefore businesses deserve representation in government. Or you recognize that a business is just a group of people working together, and those people are already taxed and can vote, so it doesn't make sense to tax them more just because they've decided to work together, and therefore a businesses does not deserve representation in government.
(Some business taxes make sense. But these are generally taxes to recoup regulatory costs like excise taxes on vehicles, or to encourage/discourage certain behaviors like pollution taxes.)
Because it used to be Google didn't have a Korean keyboard for Android, and rather than direct customers in their home country to download a 3rd party one from the Play store, they decided to make one themselves that they trusted. That was one of the early advantages of Android over iOS - you could replace the keyboard if you didn't like the default one. Eventually they began adding extra features and keys to support features that were only in their phones.
That's how innovation happens. It's not exclusive to the lab of a single company whose only claim to fame is that they own the OS. Everyone in the world comes up with different ideas, and the better ones get borrowed/stolen by everyone else including the company who owns the OS. Most manufacturers and carriers licensed or came up with their own version of Swype long before Google added it to Android.
Re:Excellent. Now how about High Fructose Corn Syr
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FDA Bans Trans Fat
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It's not. it's what, 55% fructose, 45% sucrose -- whereas table sugar is a 50/50 split?
Where did you get the idea that you can take a food, completely ignore the body's metabolism, list its component molecules, and declare parity? It's a complete stretch, and so it's completely wrong. This is 1982-era reasoning.
The ratio of fructose and glucose in HFCS is similar to a lot of fruits. Grapes are probably the closest, at 54% fructose, 46% glucose; and honey at 56% fructose, 44% glucose. So if HFCS is bad for you, then so are grapes and honey. And if you're trying to paint fructose as the bad guy, then you should be horrified to know that apples, pears, and watermelon have an even higher fraction of fructose.
The problem isn't HFCS per se. It's that we eat too much damn sugar (in all forms).
Are you sure its radiation hasn't killed anyone? I've seen several "news" articles that claim a death toll of over 10,000 spread across the pacific, including thousands in California.
Part of the problem is that a large segment of the public thinks we live in a radiation-free environment and so incorrectly attribute all new cancers to nuclear accidents. The reality is that outside of about a hundred km of Fukushima, the vast majority of your radiation dose is from natural sources. In fact the people who fled Japan because they feared radiation from Fukushima in most cases subjected themselves to an even greater radiation dose during their airline flight.
If the DJ pays a fee, that should cover all music the DJ plays. The restaurant wouldn't logically have to pay another fee.
Generally it's the venue which pays the fee. The DJ pays to cover his own ass - if he plays the music at a venue which hasn't paid the fees, he can't be sued for his personal copyright infringement. It doesn't shield the venue.
The fee is actually pretty reasonable. For most restaurants it's just a few hundred dollars per year. Though I suppose one could argue that they priced it that low so that restaurants would just pay it rather than raise a fuss about it in court.
20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair spaced 1 arc-minute apart, or two pixels per arc-minute. 210 degrees is 12600 minutes, so this thing would have to be 25200 pixels across a 210 degree field of view in order to be good enough so you can't see the pixels. We're about 1/5th the way there (measured as linear resolution). In terms of apparent pixel size, this thing (24.4 pixels per degree) is roughly equivalent to viewing a 50" 1080p TV from 24 inches away.
Incidentally, this is why I don't mind the increases in phone screen resolution, and why I don't think graphics cards are fast enough yet. Yes the resolution is excessive for use on a phone. But manufacturers are using it as an excuse to fund R&D into higher res screens which will one day be useful for VR overlay displays built into things like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens. And we're going to need low-power graphics cards to drive those high-resolution screens with virtual 3D images, so there's still a ways to go in improving those as well.
And for those of you saying you're not interested in a VR headset, the biggest impediment to the miniaturization of mobile computers right now is the screen. If you've ever taken apart a tablet or a phone, the electronics mostly fit into a thin PCB about the size of a ball point pen. People want a bigger-than phablet screen on their phones, but they don't want to carry something that big around in their pockets or purses. The obvious solution is to move the screen closer to the eye, like Glass or HoloLens. Then the display can cover the same angular field of view as a HDTV viewed a few feet away, but be much smaller in linear size than even a smartwatch. Moving the screen closer to your eye also increases the effective brightness, reducing the lighting requirement thus allowing you to use it all day with a smaller battery. My guess is this screen size problem will be solved either with VR-style glasses displays, or flexible screens which can roll up into something the size of a pen when not in use.
You choose to live in a place with no water. You have the fifth largest economy in the world. You bail yourselves out of your current self-inflicted disaster - And then yes, you maintain that solution for next time.
To be fair, most of the California infrastructure was built at a time when Colorado River water use by other states was low enough that even though California got what was left over, it was more than enough. What's happened is that (1) other states closer to the source of the Colorado have increased their water use and (2) California's population and water use has increased as well. So no it's not entirely a self-inflicted disaster. Merely a predictable one where population growth outstripped a static amount of water supply, and California just happens to be at the spigot furthest from the source.
As for desalination, reverse osmosis is the cheapest in terms of overall energy cost. But most of desalination's energy requirement is electrical (to power the pressurization pumps). Other desalination methods have thermal energy as the bulk of their energy cost. Well, thermal energy is usually considered a waste product and so is basically free. I've always wondered why we don't kill two birds with one stone. Turn nuclear and fossil fuel power plants into co-generation plants which use seawater for cooling, and divert the resulting steam to heat exchangers which condense it back into fresh water while heating up more seawater.
did the engineers mixed up their metric and standard formulas again?
Technically, Mars Climate Observer wasn't lost due to a metric / imperical foulup. It was lost because someone didn't write down the units on a set of numbers, and someone else assumed (incorrectly) what the units were when they read the numbers. The spacecraft would've been lost just the same if the figures had been written in kilonewtons, and someone had else assumed they were newtons.
This was one of the most basic things drilled into me during my first engineering courses. Always write down your units. A number without units is meaningless (unless it's a dimensionless number). It's actually pretty shameful that not writing down the units for a number was a common enough occurrence with Lockheed/JPL that people would just assume what the units were instead of calling/emailing to confirm.
The capacity factor definition uses 24 hour day. So for day time power generation without storage you would rate PV at 0.29 immediately. Further instead of averaging it over the entire day, you average it over just peak six hours of generation. The number is 0.58, not too far off from coal.
Coal's capacity factor during peak hours is close to 1.0. It only drops down to 0.6 because they shut down the furnaces during the night when demand is low. That's why nuclear's capacity factor is so high - the power generation shuts down too slowly for it to be scaled back every night. So they keep the reactors running 24/7, shutting down only for maintenance.
And if you do the math for angle of the sun (integral of sine from 45 degrees to 135 degrees is sqrt(2/2), or 70.7%), the effective capacity factor for PV solar during the peak 6 generating hours is 0.41, not 0.58. ((.41)*(6 hours) +.(17)*(6 hours) ) / 12 hours = 0.29. 0.58 is what you would get if the entirety of PV solar's power generation throughout the day happened in 6 hours.
Power generated does not equal installed capacity. Power generated = (installed capacity) * (capacity factor).
For the U.S.:
PV solar's capacity factor is about 0.145 for the country overall. In the desert southwest (where most of the solar installations probably are) it's about 0.18.
Onshore wind's capacity factor is about 0.20-0.25.
Coal's capacity factor is about 0.6.
Nuclear's capacity factor is about 0.9.
So solar has to have about 40% more installed capacity than wind to generate as much power. It needs almost 4x as much installed capacity as coal to generate a comparable amount of power. And it needs 5.5x as much capacity as nuclear to be comparable. Comparing power generation based on installed capacity is like trying to compare how much food people eat based on the size of their refrigerators.
Even if the insurance companies weren't in cahoots with government, they'd make more money off the transition.
Insurance is the art of predicting the total cost of all accidents, and charging slightly more than that in premiums. When things are stable, you can refine your prediction, do year over year comparisons, and whittle down the margin you're charging in premiums to become more competitive.
When things are in transition, there's greater uncertainty and thus greater risk. You're now trying to hit a moving target, and can't be sure if your estimate was accurate because it was a good estimate, or because you got lucky. So you play it safe and charge more than the worst case scenario you can imagine in terms of payouts. That means the spread between premiums and payouts will increase, not decrease as TFS assumes.
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While the planetary alignment was convenient, it isn't exactly necessary on RTG-powered spacecraft. Pioneer 11 visited Jupiter, then flew to almost the opposite side of the solar system to visit Saturn. Longer travel time (and greater chance of equipment failure during that time) is the only drawback.
Another factor working against a Pluto encounter was the lack of sunlight that far out. During Voyager 2's encounter with Neptune (which was slightly further away from the sun than Pluto at the time), sunlight was so dim that NASA had to reprogram the cameras to take longer exposures than they were originally designed. Then someone calculated that Voyager 2 would be moving so fast that the photos of Neptune would be blurred just by the changing parallax between the spacecraft and Neptune. So they programmed the spacecraft and cameras to rotate slightly during the exposures, effectively panning the camera to cancel out the changing parallax.
All this happened so quickly they got just one shot at it, and they had to do it blind. By the time the first near photos reached Earth, if they had turned out to be blurred, any correcting instructions sent to Voyager 2 would have arrived after the spacecraft had passed Neptune. So NASA wasn't even sure if the closest Neptune and Triton photos would even be aimed correctly. Heck, they weren't even sure they were going to make it to Triton (Voyager 2 flew less than 5000 km over Neptune's North pole to get to Triton). But as it was the last major destination and they'd recently discovered an atmosphere on Triton, they figured what the heck and rolled the dice. As it turned out, they got everything right, and Voyager returned some spectacular Neptune and Triton photos.
A Pluto encounter would've run into the same problem. Except Pluto is a much smaller target than Neptune, whose mass (and therefore gravity) is much less accurately known so properly aiming the camera is even trickier. Even New Horizons (with newer, more sensitive cameras) is going to have to use the same panning trick Voyager 2 used at Neptune. New Horizons is moving fast enough it could cover the distance from the Earth to the Moon in less than 8 hours, so all the close-up photos and measurements of Pluto are going to be over in a matter of hours. And it's basically guiding itself - providing the most accurate measurements we have of Pluto's mass so we can fine-tune its trajectory as it approaches Pluto.
This seems like one of those cases where the FCC rules limiting frequency interference take a back seat for the greater good. Put noise generator aboard the firefighting planes which jams the control frequencies commonly used by hobby drones and RC aircraft (any drones used by the firefighters can be adapted to use a different frequency - probably military). After these idiots lose control of their precious drone and watch it fall into the fire, they'll learn pretty quickly not to fly them around firefighting equipment.
The security team is right. SSDs are the single biggest performance improvement you can add to a computer (even an old computer). If your company is upgrading computers after they get 5-7 years old, but refusing to buy SSDs, they're wasting money. In particular, if they're upgrading management's high-end machines while the low-end machines are still being used by the rank and file, they're doing it completely backwards.
The problem is most people focus on the high-end numbers. How many GHz does the CPU run at? How many MHz does the DDR3 memory run at? Improving the high end doesn't help as much to improve productivity. It's already fast, meaning you're waiting a very small time for it to finish. Making it twice as fast just means the very small wait period shrank a tiny amount and is now twice as small.
If you're serious about improving performance, you get the biggest return by upgrading the slowest components. The slowest part of a modern PC is the HDD. When reading small files (not sequential reads, which really come into play only when copying large media files from one drive to another), they max out at about 1 MB/s. In contrast, the next slowest component - system RAM - is currently on the order of 10 GB/s. In other words, in terms of wait times a 1% improvement in HDD speed will have the same impact as a 100x increase in RAM speed. Now, consider than a SSD will get you at least a 30x improvement in read speeds for small files (about 30 MB/s seems to be average) and there is absolutely nothing you can do with the RAM or CPU which comes anywhere close to the amount of time you'll save by replacing the HDD with a SSD.
If you've got old computers, you should be upgrading them with a SSD instead of replacing them with new computers (with a HDD). Continue to use the old computers + SSD for a few more years, then upgrade them and transfer the SSDs to the new computers. The only exception is if the computer is so old you can't install enough RAM to run modern applications. (Another rare exception would be Northwood and Prescott-era P4 CPUs, which burn so much electricity you'll actually make back the cost of upgrading them via lower electricity bills in a couple years.)
On top of that, SSDs can actually look up small files faster than the computer can request them. So if you've got a virus scan running on a SSD, you can continue using the computer like normal with almost no impact on performance. In fact I usually run my weekly virus and two malware deep scans simultaneously on my SSD laptop, and I can still use it for web browsing or office tasks. When a virus scan runs on a HDD, the HDD has to spend all its time reading files the scan is requesting. As a result anything you try to do with the computer which requests data off the HDD will bog down.
I think it's legit. Net neutrality is one of those least common denominator things where everyone has to do it, or it doesn't work. If Charter had decided to honor net neutrality, while Comcast, TW, Verizon, etc. were being double-paid for traffic by their customers and by websites like Netflix, then Charter would've had to charge their customers higher prices in relation to the other cable companies just to provide the same level of service. That would've put them at a competitive disadvantage. Not directly due to the local franchise monopolies used in this country, but when time came to renew that franchise contract, another company could've waltzed in and said "we can offer the same level of service at a lower price for your customers." The higher real price of their service having been shifted instead into higher prices for services like Netflix (which customers are still paying for).
So as long as some companies were allowed to be evil, all the other companies would've felt compelled to follow along just to remain competitive. Just like hard drives used to be labeled 1 MB = 2^20 bytes. Until one company (Maxtor?) decided to label their drives with 1 MB = 10^6 bytes. At which point all the other companies had to switch to the new definition of MB, lest they lose customers who were being fooled into thinking they were getting a better deal with the mislabeled drives.
Now that the FCC has firmly established that everyone has to abide by net neutrality, that sets a level playing field. Not at the level Comcast, TW, Verizon had wanted, but still level. Companies are now free to set their pricing with net neutrality built in, knowing that other companies will not be able to undercut them by not honoring net neutrality. (This is why I said an alternate solution to net neutrality if the FCC hadn't acted was for Netflix to charge Comcast, TW, and Verizon companies a higher monthly fee - exactly offsetting the bandwidth charges the cable companies were collecting. All they had to do was prominently label it "Verizon bandwidth surcharge" on their monthly Netflix bill, so the customer would know exactly why they were being charged for it.)
You're aware the Tesla S weighs as much as a SUV? 4647 lbs, vs 3655-4028 lbs for a Jeep Cherokee, 4432-4882 lbs for a Ford Explorer, 3358-3624 lbs for a Honda CR-V. The Tesla's high weight is primarily due to the 1200 lb battery pack - a full tank of fuel in these vehicles only weighs about 100 lbs by comparison.
Any weight they can shave off the battery pack will result in noticeable improvements in range, handling, and longevity (due to reduced wear and tear on the suspension).
The bigger deal IMHO is going to be in boats and ships. Unlike cars which can change gears based on their speed, boats are effectively stuck with a fixed prop pitch regardless of the speed they travel at. Consequently, a prop which is efficient at high speed is not very efficient at low speed, and vice versa even if you design/gear the engine to operate efficiently at both those speeds. An electric motor for pushing the boat at lower speeds combined with using the gas/diesel motor at high speeds is a good solution, but the weight of even Li-ion batteries has been a huge impediment. Any fuel you save at lower speeds is lost by the additional fuel burn caused by the extra weight at high speed. Lighter batteries could be a game changer for marine applications.
That's what baffles me about the hubub over this. I can't believe how many people I know who firmly supported burning of the U.S. flag because "they have their right to freedom of expression," and "it's just a symbol, a piece of cloth, not the country itself" have suddenly flip flopped and now believe people shouldn't have the right to express their opinion with a flag, and that a flag is suddenly more than a mere piece of cloth and should now be the focal point of an issue.
If you truly believe the flag (whether it be the U.S. or Confederate) is just a symbol, then what happens to the physical flag is meaningless. Displaying it or burning it is merely a form of expression. If you ban the Confederate flag without addressing the underlying problems which cause it to be offensive, that is literally the same thing as sticking your head in the sand - you're pretending the problem doesn't exist because you can't see it anymore.
1. Start your own computer consulting business.
2. Charge $50-$150 per hr, and collect all of it, rather than the paltry $20/hr or so equivalent you'd get as an employee with the employer skimming the rest.
As long as people want to take the "easy" way out and just be an employee so they don't have to deal with administrative tasks, there will be an excess supply of employees, and employers can get away with paying low wages and demanding excessive overtime. Finding clients on your own and doing your own accounting is a PITA, but the increase in your compensation far, far exceeds the pain.
Just be sure not to call yourself a computer consultant. Form your own corporation with at least one additional employee (spouse as secretary or buddy who also wants to do computer consulting), or work another job as an employee. Along with screwing computer professionals over with FLSA, Congress also screwed them over by making it impossible for them to work as independent consultants. You have to do it working for a company with 2+ employees, or do it part-time as a second job.
No, landfills being cheap is only a factor if recyclables have negative value (i.e. you had to pay recyclers to take your recyclables, just as you pay them to take your trash). If that's what you believe, then it's tantamount to admitting we shouldn't be recycling.
The premise behind recycling has always been that it's cheaper to harvest raw materials from recyclables than it is to mine/manufacture new ones. That is, recyclables have positive value, and it's higher than for mined raw materials. If this isn't true, then our best strategy is actually either (A) stop recycling and give up on the idea, or (B) to separate out recyclables and dump them into a parallel landfill. In the future when mining/refining raw materials becomes more expensive, it will then become cost-effective to mine those recyclables landfills.
If you want to shortcut this process, then start charging a deposit for recyclable materials. This is already done in many places for cans and bottles - you pay a little extra when purchasing the new can or bottle, and you get the money back when you turn it in for recycling. Although in that case it's mostly done to prevent these items from ending up as trash on the streets.
Also standing in the way are many plastics (thermosets) and rubber (tires) not being easy to recycle. And goods being produced from certain recyclables like paper being inferior to new (even the Sierra Club prints its calendars on non-recycled paper because it's whiter), thus its market being much smaller than the original market - mostly cardboard and egg cartons. Incentives and regulations to encourage manufactured materials to be more recyclable, and R&D into better means of recycling helps here.
Completely different. Uzi Nissan owned nissan.com. Nissan (the car company) owned the Nissan trademark (though it didn't begin using it in the U.S. until well after Uzi Nissan bought the nissan.com domain).
Neither Matthew Lush nor Lush Cosmetics owns www.youtube.com/lush. It's owned by YouTube (aka Google). And Google is allowed to do anything they want with the youtube.com domain. If one of YouTube's VPs has a last name Lush and wants that URL for his daughter's YouTube channel, he can take it away from these guys and there's nothing either of them can do.
If you passed out marketing materials with someone else's domain as "your" URL, it's your own damn fault if something like this happens. Spend the $10/yr to register your own domain and $20/yr for minimal hosting, and set up a 1-line redirect script so www.yourdomain.com forwards to www.youtube.com/lush (or whatever). Some domain registrars will even let you set up forwarding without you having to buy a hosting plan. TFA is like setting your blanket in a choice spot on someone else's private property to watch July 4th fireworks, then getting upset when the property owner moves your blanket and gives the spot to someone else.
You can try to spin it however you want. The vast majority of the people on earth do in fact see humans as having a greater right to exist than other animals. If a rhino and person were caught on a see-saw contraption on a cliff where the process of saving one would condemn the other to death, 99% of people would choose to save the person.
In that context, you lose the moral high ground if you begin poisoning horns. The poachers are only hurting animals. You are hurting people. Therefore, you will be the worse criminal in most people's minds.
It wasn't "invented" two centuries ago. It may have been given a name two centuries ago, but it taps into a deep and primal part of how our brains work. Go to a public swimming pool. Pee into a bucket. Take an eye dropper and put one drop of the pee into the pool. Everyone will rush out of the water, and you'll probably be arrested.
Our brains are wired so that the loosest association with something disgusting continues to disgust us no matter how diluted. People are grossed out at astronauts "drinking recycled pee," even though the reverse osmosis system used generates water cleaner than you can get from any natural spring. And if a minute quantity of something bad is disgusting, then it's not that far a leap to start thinking that a minute quantity of something good can be helpful.
They're starting to address this. I was shopping for a parabolic wifi antenna recently. Amazon lumps the reviews for 4 different types (different dBi) with 2 different connectors together even though they're all very different products. If you scroll down to the reviews, you'll see above each review is what specific product the reviewer purchased - dBi and connector type.
Dear god no. Lots of different companies all trying different things is exactly what you want amidst technological uncertainty. They thoroughly search the solution space, with the companies that find the better solutions becoming more successful. Cellular data is a perfect example. If the U.S. had fallen in line with the EU in mandating the formed-by-committee GSM standard, then CDMA would've been stillborn and we would still be stuck on 56 kbps data speeds. (CDMA automatically divides bandwidth between all users who are actually using data at that moment. GSM is time-slotted, and each device gets a timeslice whether or not they actually use it to transmit data.) Nearly all 3G GSM data implementations used wideband CDMA (which is why you could talk and use data at the same time on a GSM phone - they had to have two different radios for voice and data, while CDMA phones did both with a single radio). 4G LTE uses bandwidth-sharing technology very similar to CDMA (orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes), and its development would've taken several years longer without CDMA to lay down the groundwork, if people had even believed it was viable without real-life trials among millions of users.
Public utilities are good when the technology has pretty much peaked and is stable - the best solution has been found, and there aren't any improvements on the horizon. Long distance electrical transmission initially had people advocating both AC and DC as superior. It turned out high voltage AC as the most effective way to transmit power over long distances, so that standard won out. Nothing better has been found in a century so that's a good service to turn into a utility - the optimal solution has probably been found. Likewise, cable TV/Internet is getting to that point. Initially there was lots of uncertainty about how best to hook up houses and subnet the network, so lots of different cable companies tried different things. But now pretty much everyone is using the same solution (it's even been standardized as DOCSIS), and the only looming future improvement is fiber to the home. So the Cable industry should probably be turned into a public utility soon.
But Cellular is still a rapidly developing industry with lots of technological innovations still being made. Turning it into a public utility would be the worst thing you could do to it.
If you want to fix Cellular, prohibit vertical integration. A company can own towers but can't provide service. A company can provide service but they can't own towers or make phones. A company can make phones but can't own towers or provide service. Then make it so you can buy any phone and subscribe to any service provider (as long as the phone supports their technology). The service providers would lease time on different tower networks. If a manufacturer made a good phone, people would buy it without regard for whether or not a carrier sold it. If a tower company put together a good network, lots of service providers would contract with them. And if a carrier had good plans, people would subscribe to them. None of the current BS where a carrier basically leverages their advantage in tower network into restrictions on phone interoperability and plan selection.
Medallions done properly create a scarcity of taxis in proportion to the scarcity of roads. There is insufficient roadage to support everyone who could potentially want to drive a taxi to make a little extra money on the side. You end up with gridlock, which counteracts any productivity gains that might be generated by having more taxis. So yes the scarcity is artificial, but it's done because it's the lesser of two evils. The other problems that arise out of the medallions, you try to address via other means.
Individuals are effectively taxed on profit via deductions and graduated income tax. A certain amount of income is assumed to be dedicated to necessary expenses like food, shelter, and clothing (at least in some states). Since the requirements for each person to live are pretty much the same, the same standard deduction works for every person. Further reductions in income taxes are made based on how many dependents (children) you're supporting.
The same method doesn't work for businesses because they vary so much in expenses they incur to operate. But why should you even tax a business? Businesses don't consume or produce anything - the people working at them do. A business is just a paper shell representing a group of people. If you tax the business, the money just comes from the employees (lower wages) and customers (higher prices).
Taxing businesses creates a contradiction if you believe in "no taxation without representation." Either you can tax businesses and therefore businesses deserve representation in government. Or you recognize that a business is just a group of people working together, and those people are already taxed and can vote, so it doesn't make sense to tax them more just because they've decided to work together, and therefore a businesses does not deserve representation in government.
(Some business taxes make sense. But these are generally taxes to recoup regulatory costs like excise taxes on vehicles, or to encourage/discourage certain behaviors like pollution taxes.)
Because it used to be Google didn't have a Korean keyboard for Android, and rather than direct customers in their home country to download a 3rd party one from the Play store, they decided to make one themselves that they trusted. That was one of the early advantages of Android over iOS - you could replace the keyboard if you didn't like the default one. Eventually they began adding extra features and keys to support features that were only in their phones.
That's how innovation happens. It's not exclusive to the lab of a single company whose only claim to fame is that they own the OS. Everyone in the world comes up with different ideas, and the better ones get borrowed/stolen by everyone else including the company who owns the OS. Most manufacturers and carriers licensed or came up with their own version of Swype long before Google added it to Android.
The ratio of fructose and glucose in HFCS is similar to a lot of fruits. Grapes are probably the closest, at 54% fructose, 46% glucose; and honey at 56% fructose, 44% glucose. So if HFCS is bad for you, then so are grapes and honey. And if you're trying to paint fructose as the bad guy, then you should be horrified to know that apples, pears, and watermelon have an even higher fraction of fructose.
The problem isn't HFCS per se. It's that we eat too much damn sugar (in all forms).
Part of the problem is that a large segment of the public thinks we live in a radiation-free environment and so incorrectly attribute all new cancers to nuclear accidents. The reality is that outside of about a hundred km of Fukushima, the vast majority of your radiation dose is from natural sources. In fact the people who fled Japan because they feared radiation from Fukushima in most cases subjected themselves to an even greater radiation dose during their airline flight.
Generally it's the venue which pays the fee. The DJ pays to cover his own ass - if he plays the music at a venue which hasn't paid the fees, he can't be sued for his personal copyright infringement. It doesn't shield the venue.
The fee is actually pretty reasonable. For most restaurants it's just a few hundred dollars per year. Though I suppose one could argue that they priced it that low so that restaurants would just pay it rather than raise a fuss about it in court.
20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair spaced 1 arc-minute apart, or two pixels per arc-minute. 210 degrees is 12600 minutes, so this thing would have to be 25200 pixels across a 210 degree field of view in order to be good enough so you can't see the pixels. We're about 1/5th the way there (measured as linear resolution). In terms of apparent pixel size, this thing (24.4 pixels per degree) is roughly equivalent to viewing a 50" 1080p TV from 24 inches away.
Incidentally, this is why I don't mind the increases in phone screen resolution, and why I don't think graphics cards are fast enough yet. Yes the resolution is excessive for use on a phone. But manufacturers are using it as an excuse to fund R&D into higher res screens which will one day be useful for VR overlay displays built into things like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens. And we're going to need low-power graphics cards to drive those high-resolution screens with virtual 3D images, so there's still a ways to go in improving those as well.
And for those of you saying you're not interested in a VR headset, the biggest impediment to the miniaturization of mobile computers right now is the screen. If you've ever taken apart a tablet or a phone, the electronics mostly fit into a thin PCB about the size of a ball point pen. People want a bigger-than phablet screen on their phones, but they don't want to carry something that big around in their pockets or purses. The obvious solution is to move the screen closer to the eye, like Glass or HoloLens. Then the display can cover the same angular field of view as a HDTV viewed a few feet away, but be much smaller in linear size than even a smartwatch. Moving the screen closer to your eye also increases the effective brightness, reducing the lighting requirement thus allowing you to use it all day with a smaller battery. My guess is this screen size problem will be solved either with VR-style glasses displays, or flexible screens which can roll up into something the size of a pen when not in use.
To be fair, most of the California infrastructure was built at a time when Colorado River water use by other states was low enough that even though California got what was left over, it was more than enough. What's happened is that (1) other states closer to the source of the Colorado have increased their water use and (2) California's population and water use has increased as well. So no it's not entirely a self-inflicted disaster. Merely a predictable one where population growth outstripped a static amount of water supply, and California just happens to be at the spigot furthest from the source.
As for desalination, reverse osmosis is the cheapest in terms of overall energy cost. But most of desalination's energy requirement is electrical (to power the pressurization pumps). Other desalination methods have thermal energy as the bulk of their energy cost. Well, thermal energy is usually considered a waste product and so is basically free. I've always wondered why we don't kill two birds with one stone. Turn nuclear and fossil fuel power plants into co-generation plants which use seawater for cooling, and divert the resulting steam to heat exchangers which condense it back into fresh water while heating up more seawater.
Technically, Mars Climate Observer wasn't lost due to a metric / imperical foulup. It was lost because someone didn't write down the units on a set of numbers, and someone else assumed (incorrectly) what the units were when they read the numbers. The spacecraft would've been lost just the same if the figures had been written in kilonewtons, and someone had else assumed they were newtons.
This was one of the most basic things drilled into me during my first engineering courses. Always write down your units. A number without units is meaningless (unless it's a dimensionless number). It's actually pretty shameful that not writing down the units for a number was a common enough occurrence with Lockheed/JPL that people would just assume what the units were instead of calling/emailing to confirm.
Coal's capacity factor during peak hours is close to 1.0. It only drops down to 0.6 because they shut down the furnaces during the night when demand is low. That's why nuclear's capacity factor is so high - the power generation shuts down too slowly for it to be scaled back every night. So they keep the reactors running 24/7, shutting down only for maintenance.
.(17)*(6 hours) ) / 12 hours = 0.29. 0.58 is what you would get if the entirety of PV solar's power generation throughout the day happened in 6 hours.
And if you do the math for angle of the sun (integral of sine from 45 degrees to 135 degrees is sqrt(2/2), or 70.7%), the effective capacity factor for PV solar during the peak 6 generating hours is 0.41, not 0.58. ((.41)*(6 hours) +
For the U.S.:
So solar has to have about 40% more installed capacity than wind to generate as much power. It needs almost 4x as much installed capacity as coal to generate a comparable amount of power. And it needs 5.5x as much capacity as nuclear to be comparable. Comparing power generation based on installed capacity is like trying to compare how much food people eat based on the size of their refrigerators.
Even if the insurance companies weren't in cahoots with government, they'd make more money off the transition.
Insurance is the art of predicting the total cost of all accidents, and charging slightly more than that in premiums. When things are stable, you can refine your prediction, do year over year comparisons, and whittle down the margin you're charging in premiums to become more competitive.
When things are in transition, there's greater uncertainty and thus greater risk. You're now trying to hit a moving target, and can't be sure if your estimate was accurate because it was a good estimate, or because you got lucky. So you play it safe and charge more than the worst case scenario you can imagine in terms of payouts. That means the spread between premiums and payouts will increase, not decrease as TFS assumes.