There's another reason. There are a lot more hybrid, diesel, and efficient trucks and SUVs becoming available. Most Americans' sense of the fuel efficiency of vehicles is distorted because it's measured in MPG. MPG is actually the inverse of fuel economy. Consequently the amount of fuel saved by vehicles like the Prius is exaggerated.
Here are the EPA figures for a 2004 3L 4WD Toyota Highlander, a 2015 3L 4WD Toyota Highlander Hybrid, and a 2015 Prius. Say you'd previously owned the 2004 Highlander and were looking to replace it. If you looked only at MPG, you'd think the Prius saves you a lot more gas than the Highlander Hybrid. The Prius gets 31 more MPG while the Highlander Hybrid only gets 9 more MPG.
But MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Scroll down to "Annual Fuel Cost". The 2004 Highlander is estimated to cost $1900/yr in fuel. The Highlander Hybrid $1300/yr. The Prius $700/yr. In other words, switching to the Highlander Hybrid saves you $600/yr. Switching to the Prius saves you $1200/yr. The Highlander Hybrid gives you 50% the fuel savings of a Prius despite "only" getting a 9 MPG improvement vs 31 MPG improvement. How can this be? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Every time you double MPG, you save half the fuel you did in the previous doubling.
A lot of people laughed when hybrid trucks and SUVs first came out. If you want to save gas with a hybrid, why are you buying a big truck instead of an econobox like the Prius? But they were being deceived by MPG being the inverse of fuel consumption. If we as a country want to reduce fuel consumption, it's actually the low MPG vehicles like trucks and SUVs whose fuel economy you want to improve first by hybrid-izing them. They're the ones burning a disproportionately large amount of fuel, so improving their mileage first will save more fuel. Economy cars already burn so little fuel that making them a hybrid gets you little improvement. e.g. Dropping a hybrid in a 35 MPG economy car to get 50 MPG only saves you $350/yr by EPA estimates. While dropping the hybrid in a 19 MPG SUV to get 28 MPG saves you $600/yr. In other words, each SUV-buyer you can convince to buy a hybrid SUV instead saves nearly twice as much fuel as each environmentalist you convince to switch from their already-efficient car to a Prius.
If we really want to save gas, we should be concentrating on ways to improve the mileage of pickup trucks, SUVs, minivans, and tractor trailers (actually most of their cargo should be shifted to trains, but that's another argument). The rest of the world uses liters/100 km to avoid this misconception about fuel economy.
The SUV loophole was that 'light sport utility vehicles' were exempt from the fleet average calculation, so the manufacturers sold the hell out of them.
SUVs aren't exempt. They're classified as light trucks by CAFE, instead of as cars. The 2011 CAFE standard was 24.1 MPG for light trucks, 30.2 MPG for cars. (Which if you search for another post I'm about to make, isn't as big a difference as you'd think.)
If you eliminated SUVs, most people who really want SUVs would probably just buy minivans or pickup trucks. They're classified as light trucks too. And there'd be no overall reduction in fuel consumption despite your social engineering. If people want to buy a big car that gets crappy gas mileage, they're going to figure out a way to buy one.
Slashdot has covered a bunch of new PCI Express SSDs over the past month, and for good reason. The latest crop offers much higher sequential and random I/O rates than predecessors based on old-school Serial ATA interfaces.
That's just it. Their speeds are not "much higher." They're only slightly faster. The speed increase is mostly an illusion created by measuring these things in MB/s. Our perception of disk speed is not MB/s, which is what you'd want to use if you only had x seconds of computing time and wanted to know how many MB of data you could read.
Our perception of disk speed is wait time, or sec/MB. If I have y MB of data I need read, how many seconds will it take? This is the inverse of MB/s. Consequently, the bigger MB/s figures actually represent progressively smaller reductions in wait times. I posted the explanation a few months ago, the same one I post to multiple tech sites. And oddly enough Slashdot was the only site where it was ridiculed.
If you measure these disks in terms of wait time to read 1 GB, and define the change in wait time from a 100 MB/s HDD to a 2 GB/s NVMe SSD as 100%, then:
A 100 MB/s HDD has a 10 sec wait time.
A 250 MB/s SATA2 SSD gives you 63% of the reduction in wait time (6 sec).
A 500 MB/s SATA3 SSD gives you 84% of the reduction in wait time (8 sec).
A 1 GB/s PCIe SSD gives you 95% of the reduction in wait time (9 sec).
The 2 GB/s NVMe SSD gives you 100% of the reduction in wait time (9.5 sec).
Or put another way:
The first 150 MB/s speedup results in a 6 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 250 MB/s speedup results in an extra 2 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 500 MB/s speedup results in an extra 1 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 1000 MB/s speedup results in an extra 0.5 sec reduction in wait time.
Each doubling of MB/s results in half the reduction in wait time of the previous step. Manufacturers love waving around huge MB/s figures, but the bigger those numbers get the less difference it makes in terms of wait times.
(The same problem crops up with car gas mileage. MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption. So those high MPG vehicles like the Prius actually make very little difference despite the impressively large MPG figures. Most of the rest of the world measures fuel economy in liters/100 km for this reason. If we weren't so misguidedly obsessed with achieving high MPG, we'd be correctly attempting to reduce fuel consumption by making changes where it matters the most - by first improving the efficiency of low-MPG vehicles like trucks and SUVs even though this results in tiny improvements in MPG.)
Yeah $900,000 per unit is pretty steep nationally, but it's average for the area.
No it's not. In areas where real estate is priced sky-high, most of the cost is for the land. Since he already owns the land, it sounds like the $900,000 per residence is purely construction costs, which is an insanely huge amount. Location doesn't matter as much for construction costs since you can just ship in materials and labor if they're overpriced in an area. A typical home costs about $100/sqft to build. So $900k per unit is enough to build a 9000 sqft mansion.
Unless he's planning to use this as a tax deduction and the $200 million cost of the "project" includes estimated value of the land, the numbers just don't add up for low-income housing.
But, the macho men and the big kids were still crushing their empty cans to demonstrate how many muscles they had between their ears.
The can-crushing scene from Jaws was actually a fairly significant event in the relationship between Quint and Hooper when the movie came out (only strong men could crush steel beer cans with one hand, and Hooper is showing he's not intimidated by Quint's physical strength). To modern audiences who've lived with nothing but aluminum cans, it seems pointless and almost comical.
Most of the major genocides aside from the Holocaust happened in states where the media was and still is tightly controlled by the state. The Holodomor under Stalin (U.S.S.R.), the Killing Fields under the Pol Pot (Cambodia), and the Cultural Revolution under Mao (mainland China) all happened under Communist regimes which had no interest in publicizing the deaths then, and still resist efforts to shed light on them today.
The well-publicized nature of the Holocaust is nothing more than a consequence of Democracy and the concept of the free press being the winner in that particular conflict. Had the Nazis won, it would've been buried in history as well.
But germans on average just use a tenth of the power an american uses, so bottom line we pay less than you.
The average German uses a bit more than half the electricity of the average American. So your power bill is on average roughly 1.5x that of an American. That cost may not be entirely in your electricity bill. It could be hidden in the cost of goods which require electricity to produce.
Also note that as a percentage, Germany's energy production (not just electricity generated) is skewed more towards oil than the U.S (roughly 1/3 vs 1/4). That energy for home heating has to come from somewhere. In raw joules (or kWh), it's still less than the average American though. Germans are notoriously efficient in their energy use (nearly 1/4th that of the typical American - this includes industrial use, not just residential). Living in a relatively cold climate with few natural energy resources and high energy prices forces you to be efficient. The Japanese are in a similar position and use less than half the energy per capita of Germans.
The carrier itself was clearly "hot" when it went down and and it was packed full of fresh fission products and other radiological waste at the time it sank. The Independence was scuttled in what is now the Gulf of the Farallones sanctuary, a haven for wildlife, from white sharks to elephant seals and whales.
Better tell the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to flee their homes. Those locations were also exposed to fresh fission products and other radiological waste just like this carrier.
The referenced source from the wiki lists all the countries by their forested area (in thousand hectares), and in a handy spreadsheet no less. Add in the square km of the countries and you can calculate the percentages:
Country - percent - forested - total
Canada - 31.1% - 3,101,340 - 9,984,670
United States - 33.1% - 3,030,890 - 9,147,593
EU - 36.0% - 1,577,190 - 4,381,376
The EU's percentage is skewed up by the Scandinavian, Baltic, and Slovakian countries. Though Germany, Spain, Portugul, Italy, and Austria are right around the EU average. Anyway, can we just drop this stupid penis measuring contest? It's close enough to call it a tie.
microsoft is eternal evil , it always does wrong, and google is eternal good, it can never do wrong
this might have made sense 15 years ago, but google has immense power ripe for abuse
While I agree Google has immense power ripe for abuse, they are nothing like Microsoft was. If Microsoft in the 1990s were behaving like Google is today:
They would've released Windows as open source. If you wanted to roll your own version of Windows that competed with Microsoft, you could. The only restriction would've been that Office would only run on Microsoft's version of Windows.
Windows would be free. So would Office. They'd make money by charging Windows program developers, and selling information to marketers about how Windows and Office were being used.
When you first tried to run a web browser, it would list every web browser in existence in order of popularity for you to choose. Internet Explorer may or may not have been placed near the top of that list regardless of its true popularity.
Same for every Windows program made by Microsoft. Office, Publisher, etc.
If you had your data in the format for Microsoft programs, and decided to switch to a competitor, you could use the Microsoft-provided tools to convert your data into a generic format which could easily be imported into the 3rd party app.
They would've made subtle changes to Windows to make sure DR-DOS couldn't run it, like Google is making it hard for Bing to index YouTube. Oh wait, Microsoft did do that.
When an internal audit revealed that they had accidentally collected user information beyond what their user agreement allowed, they would've reported themselves to the regulatory agencies for the privaacy violation.
Maybe you weren't using computers back when Microsoft was pulling their shenanigans in the 1990s. Those of us who were see Google as good because despite a few problems here and there, they've been behaving a helluva lot better than just about any predecessor who was in similar positions of market power.
Stiction and hysteresis are well-known terms in engineering and physics. I think that's part of the allure of Musk. He's not some MBA CEO who has no clue about the minutia of what his company does. He's a scientist/engineer at heart who could with a little training reasonably step in at any grunt-level position at his companies.
If you post something and later find out it's wrong, the responsible thing to do is to either correct it, or retract it. AFAIK Twitter does not allow you to edit a tweet, so the only responsible choice is to delete it. Leaving it up just allows the wrong info to continue spreading with the air of authority.
This actually was tested with a pilot project. They distributed the iPads to a few schools so they could collect data on how well the devices worked, before approving the deal.
Unfortunately, as you say, they made no attempt to be scientific or statistically rigorous about it. The feedback basically amounted to, "The teachers and students seemed to like it." No measurements to test if student comprehension or information retention improved, or if teachers were able to get through more material in a week. I'm still debating if that was due to incompetence (people who like Apple hardware tend to go ga-ga over the Apple logo, not what the device actually does), or if the whole pilot was just to rubber-stamp the deal. That's probably what the FBI is trying to figure out.
When someone says "open platform" they're usually referring to the software. The hardware specs for the IBM PC were open - anyone could make PC hardware without getting a license from IBM. Whoop dee doo. The software was locked down with the IBM BIOS, so nobody could sell a PC-compatible because they needed the IBM BIOS to run any software developed for that open hardware platform. And the BIOS had a great big "Copyright IBM" at the beginning without which DOS (and thus any PC software) wouldn't work. That is, if you wanted to sell a PC-compatible, you needed to get a license from IBM. And IBM wasn't selling licenses.
Compaq opened up the platform by reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS in a clean room (i.e. engineers who only had access to the IBM PC BIOS chip in a black box, and they deduced everything in the BIOS by sending in signals and seeing what came out). That's what allowed PC-compatibles and turned the PC into the open software platform it is today.
Apple locks down their Macs with the software license on OS X - you are (aside from OS X server in a VM) only allowed to run it on Apple-sold Mac hardware. The plethora of Hackintosh guides out there demonstrate that hardware compatibility is for the most part not a problem. Thus far the license agreement for OS X has been legally bulletproof. Unlike the copyright protection on the IBM BIOS.
The computer is a lot easier to audit. You can have it run a million drawings in a few seconds, burn the output to a blank CD (since you don't want to be inserting flash drives into it), then have another computer audit those million drawing results for similar randomness.
Auditing a physical random drawing machine means weighing and measuring each part to be sure its still within specs, and making sure there aren't other possible vectors for cheating, like smooth vs rough balls. In one lottery where the balls were drawn by blindfolded kids, they've even heated or chilled the balls which were supposed to be drawn. Which cannot be detected in an audit after the fact.
Theoretically, affirmative action can accelerate the speed at which you reach a new equilibrium. In terms of a harmonic oscillator, the regular behavior of the system in response to a change in base state (from 1 to 0 in the picture) is overdamped and it can take a long time for the system to reach the new base state. Affirmative action reduces the dampening to an underdamped state, causing the system to arrive at the new equilibrium state (0) much more quickly. i.e. It is sexism, but applied correctly it can speed up the transition to a new steady state equilibrium.
But an underdamped system will overshoot (drops past 0 in the picture). Since we're talking about law here and not a true harmonic oscillator, this can be avoided by putting in guidelines which trigger the end of affirmative action once the new equilibrium state is achieved. In terms of the picture, we raise the dampening back to normal the moment the system reaches 0. There will be a bit of overshoot, but it should quickly settle down.
Unfortunately, I have never seen any affirmative action laws actual specify at what point the affirmative action should cease. So the system will remain underdamped and will overshoot. If it were implemented fairly, at some point it would overshoot so far that affirmative action would call for more hiring of white males, and we'd end up with the oscillations you see in the picture. But I suspect the powers behind it would never allow that to happen, resulting in a permanent skew in hiring practices. Institutionalized sexism and racism - against white males.
This is like the other bad science assumption often tossed around by deniers: " Well if there is more water vapor then there will be more clouds and so the world will cool down!". No, it doesn't work like that.
Actually, it does work like that. Warmer temperatures increase cloud cover which increases albedo, helping mitigate the temperature change.
It doesn't offset the change entirely though (else the temperature would never change). Water vapor is on a negative (stabilizing) feedback loop with temperature. But just because you've got a negative feedback loop in place doesn't mean the system is immune to state changes. It'll slow down the rate of change, as well as dampen the degree of change before the system reaches a new equilibrium. But (with very rare exceptions) it cannot prevent the change.
We've got climate change deniers ignoring scientific data to substantiate their position. And we've got climate change proponents ignoring basic control systems engineering and Laplace transform math to substantiate their position.
With prices generally ranging from $400 to $3,000 for typical desktop 3D printers, they are not cheap, and with budgets within many school districts running dry, both in the United States and overseas, the unfortunate fact is that many schools simply canâ(TM)t afford them
The problem is schools are top-heavy and administrators suck up most of that money, then create an artificial financial crisis every time a budget cut is threatened. This gets teachers and the teachers' union to claim we aren't spending enough on education, when we're already spending way more than we should be.
Yes I'm aware that first link I gave says administration is only $843 per student per year. That's because the administrators have gamed the stats to hide how much money they're sucking up. If you drill down into the numbers (p.56), you find that "In 2008-09, salary and employee benefits for school staff amounted to $8,797 per student." Subtract $843 for administration and that leaves $7954 per student supposedly going to instructional teachers.
For 2010, the average student to teacher ratio was 16.0 (this includes substitutes and assistants). Ask yourself, is the average teacher making ($7954 * 16) = $127,264 per year in salary and benefits? Of course not. The figure is inflated because the administrators have misclassified most of their salary and benefits as "instructional" instead of "administration" to hide how much money their draining from our educational system.
That's socialism!! I signed my pledge not to raise taxes etc
The problem isn't socialism nor capitalism. The problem is industry collusion with the politicians calling the shots. The agricultural industry in California has deep political ties stemming back nearly two centuries. Consequently, we've got the opposite of socialism (government regulation for the betterment of society). We've got corruption.
Water is sold to agriculture for a bit over $100 per acre-foot. Looking at my latest residential water bill, the lowest price tier (enough for a family of 4 at 55 gal/person-day) is $3.41 per 100 cubic feet. Which is $1488.47 per acre-foot.
All of California's water problems would disappear if agriculture had to pay the market rate for water. Instead you've got this corrupt pricing scheme where the group using 80% of the water has pushed the vast majority of the water cost onto the other 20%. That regulatory price distortion is what leads to ridiculous situations like alfalfa farmers flooding their fields with water while residential homeowners are told to let their lawns die in order to conserve water.
Ivanpah is CSP - concentrated solar power. Basically big mirrors which track the sun and focus it on a heating element (usually a salt bath), which turns water to steam, which drives a turbine to generate power. CSP usually has a capacity factor around 30%, and is a viable (efficient) power source albeit roughly double the cost of coal/nuclear/wind per kWh.
OP was referring to photovoltaic solar. PV solar panels have a capacity factor around 14% (18% in the desert southwest). And their unsubsidized cost per kWh is still about 3-5x that of coal/nuclear/wind.
CSP would actually work for desalination. Reverse osmosis is the most energy efficient method of desalination. The problem with RO is that nearly all of that energy needed is electrical. And with CSP you're converting sunlight to thermal energy, which is converted into mechanical energy to drive a generator, which converts it to electrical energy, which is sent to the RO plant, where it's converted back to mechanical energy in motors used to drive pumps, whose pressure forces the water through the RO filters. All those energy conversions are murder on your overall efficiency.
Thermal energy is usually abundant as a byproduct of other energy production or consumption, so can be obtained much more cheaply than electrical energy. So in terms of cost, thermal desalination can actually be competitive with RO even though its overall energy use is higher. If that thermal energy was just going to be vented into the environment anyway as waste heat, then it's essentially free. CSP solar would be much better than PV solar in that respect since it can produce thermal energy directly. The problem being the best source for water to be desalinated is the ocean, while the best location for CSP is the desert. Moving the CSP plant to the ocean shore is probably not the best idea since the shoreline tends to be clouded over every morning til almost noon. And piping corrosive seawater to the desert would make the Keystone pipeline seem like child's play.
Why wouldn't we use the single most abundant energy source on the planet to power something that is energy intensive? Oh and said energy source has no fuel costs?
Because it's stupid to collect solar energy with PV cells, which convert it to electricity, which gets stored chemically in a battery, which gets converted back to electricity, which gets converted to rotational mechanical energy in a motor, which gets converted to linear mechanical energy in pumps which, which gets converted to pressure mechanical energy for the desalination reverse osmosis filters to operate. All those energy conversions absolutely kill your efficiency. Why bother with all those conversions if you can come up with a way for sunlight to directly drive your desalination?
Sorting the reviews by "most helpful" helps a lot. In fact that seems to be the default sort of the review samples which show up on the right side at Amazon. Often you'll find a product with 4+ stars, but a significant fraction of the "helpful" reviews give it 1-2 stars. The helpful reviews also usually contain a lot of details about the product which are of interest to the prospective buyer (e.g. speed benchmarks for USB flash drives).
If Ocean water is moves from alkaline to neutral to below 7 on the scale, which is what tehy are saying is/will happen, then it is becoming acidic. It is currently at an 8.1 out of a 14 point scale.
It's usually not referred to that way because the chemistry works differently at pH below 7 than it does above. It's not like a meter stick where you've arbitrarily chosen a center point, and any upward movement regardless of location on that scale is "becoming higher".
It's more like a bowl, with the center (base of the bowl) at 7. As you move away from the center (towards 1 or 14), the environment becomes more extreme, albeit for chemically different reasons. "Becoming acidic" specifically refers to drops below a pH of 7. The correct term for being at pH 8.1 and moving towards 7 is "becoming neutral" (or becoming less alkaline). Which obviously doesn't sound as threatening, which is probably why TFS chose to use the incorrect term.
OTOH, the term "ocean acidification" refers to the process which lowers the ocean's pH. Iif I remember my chemistry right the process should still function below pH 7, so "acidification" is the correct term. That is, "becoming acidic" or "becoming neutral" refers to a change in the state. "Acidification" refers to the process causing the state change.
Any âoestandard-essential patentsâ should be public domain (or as close as possible, as Elon Musk did with the Tesla battery circuitry), or they should not be included in the standards. Period.
and from TFS:
If Apple wins, the understanding of what fees are RAND may decrease by at least an order of magnitude.
Are both the wishful thinking version of how things will play out.
If RAND fees drop by an order of magnitude or are eliminated, the outcome is simple: Nobody will submit patents of any value for approval under RAND anymore.
Those patents will be more valuable if kept proprietary and licensed out in a case-by-case basis. Remember, Apple wanted Samsung to pay them roughly $40 per device for 5 of Apple's proprietary patents, while refusing to pay Google (Motorola) and Samsung more than $1 per device for their portfolio 16 and 103 standards-essential patents respectively. If you go by those numbers, then on a per-patent basis a proprietary patent is worth roughly 300x more than a RAND patent. In other words, for it to make economic sense to submit a patent under RAND, you have to feel RAND will increase the number of devices using your patent by at least 300x.
So any company with more than 0.3% market share will have no economic incentive to submit any of their patents worth a damn to RAND under that pricing structure. All the good patented ideas will not be submitted under RAND, and we will end up with every product using proprietary implementations. The RAND "official" standards will suck compared to the proprietary versions (unless they were created via government research). And wasteful "standards wars" like HD-DVD vs Blu-ray will become the norm instead of the exception.
Slashdot Mirror
There's another reason. There are a lot more hybrid, diesel, and efficient trucks and SUVs becoming available. Most Americans' sense of the fuel efficiency of vehicles is distorted because it's measured in MPG. MPG is actually the inverse of fuel economy. Consequently the amount of fuel saved by vehicles like the Prius is exaggerated.
Here are the EPA figures for a 2004 3L 4WD Toyota Highlander, a 2015 3L 4WD Toyota Highlander Hybrid, and a 2015 Prius. Say you'd previously owned the 2004 Highlander and were looking to replace it. If you looked only at MPG, you'd think the Prius saves you a lot more gas than the Highlander Hybrid. The Prius gets 31 more MPG while the Highlander Hybrid only gets 9 more MPG.
But MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Scroll down to "Annual Fuel Cost". The 2004 Highlander is estimated to cost $1900/yr in fuel. The Highlander Hybrid $1300/yr. The Prius $700/yr. In other words, switching to the Highlander Hybrid saves you $600/yr. Switching to the Prius saves you $1200/yr. The Highlander Hybrid gives you 50% the fuel savings of a Prius despite "only" getting a 9 MPG improvement vs 31 MPG improvement. How can this be? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Every time you double MPG, you save half the fuel you did in the previous doubling.
A lot of people laughed when hybrid trucks and SUVs first came out. If you want to save gas with a hybrid, why are you buying a big truck instead of an econobox like the Prius? But they were being deceived by MPG being the inverse of fuel consumption. If we as a country want to reduce fuel consumption, it's actually the low MPG vehicles like trucks and SUVs whose fuel economy you want to improve first by hybrid-izing them. They're the ones burning a disproportionately large amount of fuel, so improving their mileage first will save more fuel. Economy cars already burn so little fuel that making them a hybrid gets you little improvement. e.g. Dropping a hybrid in a 35 MPG economy car to get 50 MPG only saves you $350/yr by EPA estimates. While dropping the hybrid in a 19 MPG SUV to get 28 MPG saves you $600/yr. In other words, each SUV-buyer you can convince to buy a hybrid SUV instead saves nearly twice as much fuel as each environmentalist you convince to switch from their already-efficient car to a Prius.
If we really want to save gas, we should be concentrating on ways to improve the mileage of pickup trucks, SUVs, minivans, and tractor trailers (actually most of their cargo should be shifted to trains, but that's another argument). The rest of the world uses liters/100 km to avoid this misconception about fuel economy.
SUVs aren't exempt. They're classified as light trucks by CAFE, instead of as cars. The 2011 CAFE standard was 24.1 MPG for light trucks, 30.2 MPG for cars. (Which if you search for another post I'm about to make, isn't as big a difference as you'd think.)
If you eliminated SUVs, most people who really want SUVs would probably just buy minivans or pickup trucks. They're classified as light trucks too. And there'd be no overall reduction in fuel consumption despite your social engineering. If people want to buy a big car that gets crappy gas mileage, they're going to figure out a way to buy one.
That's just it. Their speeds are not "much higher." They're only slightly faster. The speed increase is mostly an illusion created by measuring these things in MB/s. Our perception of disk speed is not MB/s, which is what you'd want to use if you only had x seconds of computing time and wanted to know how many MB of data you could read.
Our perception of disk speed is wait time, or sec/MB. If I have y MB of data I need read, how many seconds will it take? This is the inverse of MB/s. Consequently, the bigger MB/s figures actually represent progressively smaller reductions in wait times. I posted the explanation a few months ago, the same one I post to multiple tech sites. And oddly enough Slashdot was the only site where it was ridiculed.
If you measure these disks in terms of wait time to read 1 GB, and define the change in wait time from a 100 MB/s HDD to a 2 GB/s NVMe SSD as 100%, then:
A 100 MB/s HDD has a 10 sec wait time.
A 250 MB/s SATA2 SSD gives you 63% of the reduction in wait time (6 sec).
A 500 MB/s SATA3 SSD gives you 84% of the reduction in wait time (8 sec).
A 1 GB/s PCIe SSD gives you 95% of the reduction in wait time (9 sec).
The 2 GB/s NVMe SSD gives you 100% of the reduction in wait time (9.5 sec).
Or put another way:
The first 150 MB/s speedup results in a 6 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 250 MB/s speedup results in an extra 2 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 500 MB/s speedup results in an extra 1 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 1000 MB/s speedup results in an extra 0.5 sec reduction in wait time.
Each doubling of MB/s results in half the reduction in wait time of the previous step. Manufacturers love waving around huge MB/s figures, but the bigger those numbers get the less difference it makes in terms of wait times.
(The same problem crops up with car gas mileage. MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption. So those high MPG vehicles like the Prius actually make very little difference despite the impressively large MPG figures. Most of the rest of the world measures fuel economy in liters/100 km for this reason. If we weren't so misguidedly obsessed with achieving high MPG, we'd be correctly attempting to reduce fuel consumption by making changes where it matters the most - by first improving the efficiency of low-MPG vehicles like trucks and SUVs even though this results in tiny improvements in MPG.)
No it's not. In areas where real estate is priced sky-high, most of the cost is for the land. Since he already owns the land, it sounds like the $900,000 per residence is purely construction costs, which is an insanely huge amount. Location doesn't matter as much for construction costs since you can just ship in materials and labor if they're overpriced in an area. A typical home costs about $100/sqft to build. So $900k per unit is enough to build a 9000 sqft mansion.
Unless he's planning to use this as a tax deduction and the $200 million cost of the "project" includes estimated value of the land, the numbers just don't add up for low-income housing.
The can-crushing scene from Jaws was actually a fairly significant event in the relationship between Quint and Hooper when the movie came out (only strong men could crush steel beer cans with one hand, and Hooper is showing he's not intimidated by Quint's physical strength). To modern audiences who've lived with nothing but aluminum cans, it seems pointless and almost comical.
Most of the major genocides aside from the Holocaust happened in states where the media was and still is tightly controlled by the state. The Holodomor under Stalin (U.S.S.R.), the Killing Fields under the Pol Pot (Cambodia), and the Cultural Revolution under Mao (mainland China) all happened under Communist regimes which had no interest in publicizing the deaths then, and still resist efforts to shed light on them today.
The well-publicized nature of the Holocaust is nothing more than a consequence of Democracy and the concept of the free press being the winner in that particular conflict. Had the Nazis won, it would've been buried in history as well.
The average German uses a bit more than half the electricity of the average American. So your power bill is on average roughly 1.5x that of an American. That cost may not be entirely in your electricity bill. It could be hidden in the cost of goods which require electricity to produce.
Also note that as a percentage, Germany's energy production (not just electricity generated) is skewed more towards oil than the U.S (roughly 1/3 vs 1/4). That energy for home heating has to come from somewhere. In raw joules (or kWh), it's still less than the average American though. Germans are notoriously efficient in their energy use (nearly 1/4th that of the typical American - this includes industrial use, not just residential). Living in a relatively cold climate with few natural energy resources and high energy prices forces you to be efficient. The Japanese are in a similar position and use less than half the energy per capita of Germans.
Better tell the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to flee their homes. Those locations were also exposed to fresh fission products and other radiological waste just like this carrier.
The referenced source from the wiki lists all the countries by their forested area (in thousand hectares), and in a handy spreadsheet no less. Add in the square km of the countries and you can calculate the percentages:
Country - percent - forested - total
Canada - 31.1% - 3,101,340 - 9,984,670
United States - 33.1% - 3,030,890 - 9,147,593
EU - 36.0% - 1,577,190 - 4,381,376
Austria - 46.1% - 38,620 - 83,855
Belgium - 21.8% - 6,670 - 30,528
Bulgaria - 32.7% - 36,250 - 110,994
Croatia - 37.7% - 21,350 - 56,594
Cyprus - 18.8% - 1,740 - 9,251
Czech Rep - 33.6% - 26,480 - 78,866
Denmark - 11.6% - 5,000 - 43,075
Estonia - 50.5% - 22,840 - 45,227
Finland - 66.5% - 225,000 - 338,424
France - 23.0% - 155,540 - 674,843
Germany - 31.0% - 110,760 - 357,021
Greece - 28.4% - 37,520 - 131,990
Hungary - 21.2% - 19,760 - 93,030
Ireland - 9.5% - 6,690 - 70,273
Italy - 33.1% - 99,790 - 301,338
Latvia - 45.5% - 29,410 - 64,589
Lithuania - 32.2% - 20,990 - 65,200 -
Luxembourg - 33.6% - 870 - 2,586
Malta - 0% - 0 - 316
Netherlands - 8.8% - 3,650 - 41,543
Poland - 29.4% - 91,920 - 312,685
Portugal - 40.9% - 37,830 - 92,390
Romania - 26.7% - 63,700 - 238,391
Slovakia - 39.3% - 19,290 - 49,035
Slovenia - 62.3% - 12,640 - 20,273
Spain - 35.5% - 179,150 - 504,030
Sweden - 61.2% - 275,280 - 449,964
United Kingdom - 11.7% - 28,450 - 243,610
The EU's percentage is skewed up by the Scandinavian, Baltic, and Slovakian countries. Though Germany, Spain, Portugul, Italy, and Austria are right around the EU average. Anyway, can we just drop this stupid penis measuring contest? It's close enough to call it a tie.
While I agree Google has immense power ripe for abuse, they are nothing like Microsoft was. If Microsoft in the 1990s were behaving like Google is today:
Maybe you weren't using computers back when Microsoft was pulling their shenanigans in the 1990s. Those of us who were see Google as good because despite a few problems here and there, they've been behaving a helluva lot better than just about any predecessor who was in similar positions of market power.
Stiction and hysteresis are well-known terms in engineering and physics. I think that's part of the allure of Musk. He's not some MBA CEO who has no clue about the minutia of what his company does. He's a scientist/engineer at heart who could with a little training reasonably step in at any grunt-level position at his companies.
If you post something and later find out it's wrong, the responsible thing to do is to either correct it, or retract it. AFAIK Twitter does not allow you to edit a tweet, so the only responsible choice is to delete it. Leaving it up just allows the wrong info to continue spreading with the air of authority.
This actually was tested with a pilot project. They distributed the iPads to a few schools so they could collect data on how well the devices worked, before approving the deal.
Unfortunately, as you say, they made no attempt to be scientific or statistically rigorous about it. The feedback basically amounted to, "The teachers and students seemed to like it." No measurements to test if student comprehension or information retention improved, or if teachers were able to get through more material in a week. I'm still debating if that was due to incompetence (people who like Apple hardware tend to go ga-ga over the Apple logo, not what the device actually does), or if the whole pilot was just to rubber-stamp the deal. That's probably what the FBI is trying to figure out.
When someone says "open platform" they're usually referring to the software. The hardware specs for the IBM PC were open - anyone could make PC hardware without getting a license from IBM. Whoop dee doo. The software was locked down with the IBM BIOS, so nobody could sell a PC-compatible because they needed the IBM BIOS to run any software developed for that open hardware platform. And the BIOS had a great big "Copyright IBM" at the beginning without which DOS (and thus any PC software) wouldn't work. That is, if you wanted to sell a PC-compatible, you needed to get a license from IBM. And IBM wasn't selling licenses.
Compaq opened up the platform by reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS in a clean room (i.e. engineers who only had access to the IBM PC BIOS chip in a black box, and they deduced everything in the BIOS by sending in signals and seeing what came out). That's what allowed PC-compatibles and turned the PC into the open software platform it is today.
Apple locks down their Macs with the software license on OS X - you are (aside from OS X server in a VM) only allowed to run it on Apple-sold Mac hardware. The plethora of Hackintosh guides out there demonstrate that hardware compatibility is for the most part not a problem. Thus far the license agreement for OS X has been legally bulletproof. Unlike the copyright protection on the IBM BIOS.
The computer is a lot easier to audit. You can have it run a million drawings in a few seconds, burn the output to a blank CD (since you don't want to be inserting flash drives into it), then have another computer audit those million drawing results for similar randomness.
Auditing a physical random drawing machine means weighing and measuring each part to be sure its still within specs, and making sure there aren't other possible vectors for cheating, like smooth vs rough balls. In one lottery where the balls were drawn by blindfolded kids, they've even heated or chilled the balls which were supposed to be drawn. Which cannot be detected in an audit after the fact.
Theoretically, affirmative action can accelerate the speed at which you reach a new equilibrium. In terms of a harmonic oscillator, the regular behavior of the system in response to a change in base state (from 1 to 0 in the picture) is overdamped and it can take a long time for the system to reach the new base state. Affirmative action reduces the dampening to an underdamped state, causing the system to arrive at the new equilibrium state (0) much more quickly. i.e. It is sexism, but applied correctly it can speed up the transition to a new steady state equilibrium.
But an underdamped system will overshoot (drops past 0 in the picture). Since we're talking about law here and not a true harmonic oscillator, this can be avoided by putting in guidelines which trigger the end of affirmative action once the new equilibrium state is achieved. In terms of the picture, we raise the dampening back to normal the moment the system reaches 0. There will be a bit of overshoot, but it should quickly settle down.
Unfortunately, I have never seen any affirmative action laws actual specify at what point the affirmative action should cease. So the system will remain underdamped and will overshoot. If it were implemented fairly, at some point it would overshoot so far that affirmative action would call for more hiring of white males, and we'd end up with the oscillations you see in the picture. But I suspect the powers behind it would never allow that to happen, resulting in a permanent skew in hiring practices. Institutionalized sexism and racism - against white males.
Actually, it does work like that. Warmer temperatures increase cloud cover which increases albedo, helping mitigate the temperature change.
It doesn't offset the change entirely though (else the temperature would never change). Water vapor is on a negative (stabilizing) feedback loop with temperature. But just because you've got a negative feedback loop in place doesn't mean the system is immune to state changes. It'll slow down the rate of change, as well as dampen the degree of change before the system reaches a new equilibrium. But (with very rare exceptions) it cannot prevent the change.
We've got climate change deniers ignoring scientific data to substantiate their position. And we've got climate change proponents ignoring basic control systems engineering and Laplace transform math to substantiate their position.
That's a myth. The U.S. spends more than a quarter of a million dollars per K-12 classroom every year (average 20-23.4 students per class). We could easily afford one 3D printer per school. Heck, we could afford one per classroom.
The problem is schools are top-heavy and administrators suck up most of that money, then create an artificial financial crisis every time a budget cut is threatened. This gets teachers and the teachers' union to claim we aren't spending enough on education, when we're already spending way more than we should be.
Yes I'm aware that first link I gave says administration is only $843 per student per year. That's because the administrators have gamed the stats to hide how much money they're sucking up. If you drill down into the numbers (p.56), you find that "In 2008-09, salary and employee benefits for school staff amounted to $8,797 per student." Subtract $843 for administration and that leaves $7954 per student supposedly going to instructional teachers.
For 2010, the average student to teacher ratio was 16.0 (this includes substitutes and assistants). Ask yourself, is the average teacher making ($7954 * 16) = $127,264 per year in salary and benefits? Of course not. The figure is inflated because the administrators have misclassified most of their salary and benefits as "instructional" instead of "administration" to hide how much money their draining from our educational system.
I always been a proponent of Libraries of Congress as a unit of volume. But the bibliophiles have thwarted me at every turn.
The problem isn't socialism nor capitalism. The problem is industry collusion with the politicians calling the shots. The agricultural industry in California has deep political ties stemming back nearly two centuries. Consequently, we've got the opposite of socialism (government regulation for the betterment of society). We've got corruption.
Water is sold to agriculture for a bit over $100 per acre-foot. Looking at my latest residential water bill, the lowest price tier (enough for a family of 4 at 55 gal/person-day) is $3.41 per 100 cubic feet. Which is $1488.47 per acre-foot.
All of California's water problems would disappear if agriculture had to pay the market rate for water. Instead you've got this corrupt pricing scheme where the group using 80% of the water has pushed the vast majority of the water cost onto the other 20%. That regulatory price distortion is what leads to ridiculous situations like alfalfa farmers flooding their fields with water while residential homeowners are told to let their lawns die in order to conserve water.
Ivanpah is CSP - concentrated solar power. Basically big mirrors which track the sun and focus it on a heating element (usually a salt bath), which turns water to steam, which drives a turbine to generate power. CSP usually has a capacity factor around 30%, and is a viable (efficient) power source albeit roughly double the cost of coal/nuclear/wind per kWh.
OP was referring to photovoltaic solar. PV solar panels have a capacity factor around 14% (18% in the desert southwest). And their unsubsidized cost per kWh is still about 3-5x that of coal/nuclear/wind.
CSP would actually work for desalination. Reverse osmosis is the most energy efficient method of desalination. The problem with RO is that nearly all of that energy needed is electrical. And with CSP you're converting sunlight to thermal energy, which is converted into mechanical energy to drive a generator, which converts it to electrical energy, which is sent to the RO plant, where it's converted back to mechanical energy in motors used to drive pumps, whose pressure forces the water through the RO filters. All those energy conversions are murder on your overall efficiency.
Thermal energy is usually abundant as a byproduct of other energy production or consumption, so can be obtained much more cheaply than electrical energy. So in terms of cost, thermal desalination can actually be competitive with RO even though its overall energy use is higher. If that thermal energy was just going to be vented into the environment anyway as waste heat, then it's essentially free. CSP solar would be much better than PV solar in that respect since it can produce thermal energy directly. The problem being the best source for water to be desalinated is the ocean, while the best location for CSP is the desert. Moving the CSP plant to the ocean shore is probably not the best idea since the shoreline tends to be clouded over every morning til almost noon. And piping corrosive seawater to the desert would make the Keystone pipeline seem like child's play.
Because it's stupid to collect solar energy with PV cells, which convert it to electricity, which gets stored chemically in a battery, which gets converted back to electricity, which gets converted to rotational mechanical energy in a motor, which gets converted to linear mechanical energy in pumps which, which gets converted to pressure mechanical energy for the desalination reverse osmosis filters to operate. All those energy conversions absolutely kill your efficiency. Why bother with all those conversions if you can come up with a way for sunlight to directly drive your desalination?
Sorting the reviews by "most helpful" helps a lot. In fact that seems to be the default sort of the review samples which show up on the right side at Amazon. Often you'll find a product with 4+ stars, but a significant fraction of the "helpful" reviews give it 1-2 stars. The helpful reviews also usually contain a lot of details about the product which are of interest to the prospective buyer (e.g. speed benchmarks for USB flash drives).
It's usually not referred to that way because the chemistry works differently at pH below 7 than it does above. It's not like a meter stick where you've arbitrarily chosen a center point, and any upward movement regardless of location on that scale is "becoming higher".
It's more like a bowl, with the center (base of the bowl) at 7. As you move away from the center (towards 1 or 14), the environment becomes more extreme, albeit for chemically different reasons. "Becoming acidic" specifically refers to drops below a pH of 7. The correct term for being at pH 8.1 and moving towards 7 is "becoming neutral" (or becoming less alkaline). Which obviously doesn't sound as threatening, which is probably why TFS chose to use the incorrect term.
OTOH, the term "ocean acidification" refers to the process which lowers the ocean's pH. Iif I remember my chemistry right the process should still function below pH 7, so "acidification" is the correct term. That is, "becoming acidic" or "becoming neutral" refers to a change in the state. "Acidification" refers to the process causing the state change.
and from TFS:
Are both the wishful thinking version of how things will play out.
If RAND fees drop by an order of magnitude or are eliminated, the outcome is simple: Nobody will submit patents of any value for approval under RAND anymore.
Those patents will be more valuable if kept proprietary and licensed out in a case-by-case basis. Remember, Apple wanted Samsung to pay them roughly $40 per device for 5 of Apple's proprietary patents, while refusing to pay Google (Motorola) and Samsung more than $1 per device for their portfolio 16 and 103 standards-essential patents respectively. If you go by those numbers, then on a per-patent basis a proprietary patent is worth roughly 300x more than a RAND patent. In other words, for it to make economic sense to submit a patent under RAND, you have to feel RAND will increase the number of devices using your patent by at least 300x.
So any company with more than 0.3% market share will have no economic incentive to submit any of their patents worth a damn to RAND under that pricing structure. All the good patented ideas will not be submitted under RAND, and we will end up with every product using proprietary implementations. The RAND "official" standards will suck compared to the proprietary versions (unless they were created via government research). And wasteful "standards wars" like HD-DVD vs Blu-ray will become the norm instead of the exception.