. It must be tempered by the capacity factor. That is the ratio of the theoretical capacity of a device to the actual output from the device. The capacity of solar panels is found by exposing the panel to a set amount of light. It is used to compare panels and is only part of calculating the actual output of the panel.
Correct. Comparing different generation technologies by peak production capacity is like trying to compare the range of cars by looking only at the size of their gas tank. You must take into account fuel efficiency to get an accurate range estimate. LIkewise, capacity factor is analogous to the "efficiency" with which the power source can convert its potential capacity into actual energy.
he capacity factor of PVs in the US is anywhere from 13% to 33%.
Capacity factor for static PV installations in the U.S. is 10%-19%. The contiguous 48 states averages about 14%-14.5%.
33% is the max capacity factor for concentrated solar power - where you have reflectors tracking the sun all day and the panels/thermal salt bath mounted atop a high tower to minimize oblique incident sunlight angles throughout the day.
Then there is the fact the coal power is dispatchable while solar is not.
Coal is used mostly for base load. It's pretty slow to ramp up or down in respond to demand - once you shovel in a certain amount of coal to start it burning, you cannot stop it from burning. Nuclear is like that too.
Most peaking plants (supply electricity as demand peaks) are gas, oil, and hydro. You can shut those off within about a minute of demand dropping.
Forget the energy cost of transport. The energy cost of using this device exceeds the energy it can produce. The summary and the first TFA completely misrepresent what the researchers are proposing. They are not saying we can "harvest energy" from the CO2.
You can do the exact same thing by boiling water. When water boils, it expands into a more voluminous gas. The energy from that volume change can be harnessed to do work. Free energy! Right? Well as we all know (or should know), that energy isn't free. You have to put in that energy when you boil the water. The phase change from liquid to gas takes a lot more energy than merely heating up the liquid. Exactly as much energy as needed to cause the volume change as it expands into gas (net zero energy gain). Except the engine extracting energy from the volume change (aka steam engine) is never 100% efficienct, so you end up putting more energy into it than you get out.
All they've done is replaced boiling water with sublimating solid CO2. The thermodynamic and energy principles behind it are the same. And thus this will never produce as much energy as you put into it. The only exception is when you have waste heat (e.g. a generator running outside). Then, like any heat engine, you could use this to convert some of that waste heat into usable energy (the energy you're "putting in" to it is energy that you would've lost anyway). But it's never gonna be usable as a primary energy source, because it's not an energy source.
The summary and first TFA have heralded this as some new energy source on Mars. It's not. If you read the direct words from the authors in the last TFA, they're merely proposing this as an alternative to water and steam engines. See, water is exceedingly rare on Mars. It's only popular here on Earth to convert heat energy into mechanical energy (via a steam engine, like in nuclear plants) because of its abundance. We can just slurp some up from a local river or ocean, run it through the steam cycle, and dump the steam back into the environment. The ecosystem will take care of converting it back into liquid water for us, and returning it to the river or ocean for future reuse.
Not so on Mars. There's precious little water, and you'd be a fool to dump waste steam into the environment when your colonists need it to survive. What these researchers have proposed is a "CO2 engine" which uses sublimating CO2 to convert (not extract) heat energy from another energy source into mechanical energy for doing work.
For the same reason, this won't work in space. You lose the CO2 gas to space, and your engine stops working. Just like if you used a steam engine in space and vented out the resulting steam. You either need a constant supply of new, solid CO2 (like on Mars). Or you need the whole thing to operate in a closed loop (where you also handling the cooling phase which converts the coolant back into a liquid or solid), in which case water or ammonia (freezes at -78 C) is probably a better choice because closed loops work a lot better with a liquid heat exchange medium.
Physical security is still an important aspect of overall security.
Not when the reason it's supposed to be hosted on a government server is to keep it secure from you the user tampering with it. This isn't the fox breaking into the henhouse, or even the fox guarding the henhouse. It's putting the hens in the fox's henhouse. Who cares if the fox's henhouse is physically secure?
Apple could be working on a more powerful tablet, something that could compete with Microsoft's Surface Pro line.
What, really? Apple is designing a table that is only ever seen on Hawaii Five-0?
Having used computers since the 1980s, I've seen my share of market reversals. Apple dominated the early home PC market, but got steamrolled by the IBM PC. IBM thought it could control the PC and keep it proprietary, until Compaq blew the market wide open by reverse engineering the IBM BIOS. After releasing the Mac, Apple dominated the early GUI OS market, but Windows slowly took it over relegating the Mac to the 5% it has today. WordPerfect and Lotus 123 dominated office productivity apps, but missed the switch to Windows and were eclipsed by Office (actually there's a good argument that can be made that Microsoft duped them into prioritizing OS/2 development). Netscape and Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer and Firefox+Chrome. 3dFX and nVidia. Yahoo and Google. Palm to Windows CE to the Blackberry to the iPhone to Android.
History is littered with the corpses of companies which, like you, assumed the upstart could never dethrone them from the market they dominated. If you rest on your laurels, you tend to get passed up like you're standing still. Because that's exactly what you're doing. If Apple is approaching their tablet redesigns as if the Surface Pro were the dominant player, they're doing absolutely the right thing to stay ahead.
The problem with these "never going to buy from [company] again" stances is that they might seem appropriate when you're young. But if you stick to your guns, by the time you're around 40 you realize there are very few companies left which you can still buy from without compromising your principles. Can't buy from Sony because of the rootkit scandal. Can't buy from Asus because they're sexist. Can't buy from Dell because of the bulging capacitors. Can't buy from HP because they overcharge for ink. Can't buy from Acer because of their crappy PC build quality in the 1990s. Can't buy from Apple because of product lock-in. Can't buy from Toshiba because they sold advanced milling technology to the Soviet Navy. (You may laugh at that one, bit it's not really much different than anyone in their teens today - the Sony rootkit scandal happened long before they even started to use computers extensively.)
Rather than an absolute "never buy from evil companies" philosophy, perhaps a "buy from the less evil companies" philosophy might be more reasonable. I try to apply the golden rule. Do I occasionally make bad decision? Hell yes. Do I want others to give me a second chance after I've tried to reform? Hell yes. So when other people at these companies make terrible decisions, I kinda feel obliged to give them a second chance if I'm sufficiently satisfied that they've tried to reform. You can only earn a spot on my perma-ban list if you've shown you are incorrigible and not interested in reforming (e.g. RIAA).
That's something I always wondered about with MH370. It used to be that the procedures after smoke in the cabin prioritized trying to locate the source of the smoke and extinguish the fire in-flight. Recently, it's been shifting more towards getting the plane on the ground ASAP (page 33 of PDF).
Except none of the reporters covering this story seem to be capable of actually researching a story. The obvious question to ask when considering the fire hypothesis is, "what were Malaysia Airlines' in-flight fire procedures?" How did they train their aircrew to react in case of a fire? Did the procedures the crew were supposed to follow still prioritize trying to locate and fight the fire? In which case the Wired article seems implausible. Or were they newer procedures which emphasized landing the plane ASAP? In which case the Wired article might be spot on.
Still, the biggest flaw in the fire hypothesis IMHO is that the airliner continued to fly for ~7 hours after the "incident". Fires devastating enough to debilitate the crew typically do not go out by themselves. They burn enough equipment to make the aircraft unflyable, or compromise the structural integrity of the aircraft leading to in-flight break-up with passengers and cargo falling out the bottom.
I don't know what an "appropriate" punishment is for illegally downloading or distributing someone's content, but ten years sounds incredibly excessive unless you're running a vast, far-reaching network, distributing content to a million people and charging them for the convenience or something like that.
That is precisely whom these heavy fines in Copyright law were intended to punish. Someone running a bootleg CD or DVD operation could stand to make thousands if not millions of dollars in profit. So the punishment had to be severe enough to discourage them. Otherwise they could just use a fraction of the profits to pay the fine as a cost of doing business.
The problem is, Hollywood has been abusing the law given to them to combat these cases, by applying it to "home use" filesharers. And the courts have been negligent in failing to toss that argument out the window. Proof? Just look at their argument in court. When they claim Jammie Thomas-Rasset "made available" songs for other people to download, exactly what are they saying?
By definition, the number of downloads of a fileshared song equals the number of copies uploaded. If 1000 people are filesharing a song, then they each want a single copy of the song, and a total of 1000 copies are made. If you can wrap your head around this amazingly difficult math, that works out to each single person being responsible for one illegal copy.
But in court the RIAA has been arguing that the one person is somehow responsible for the thousand copies made in total. What exactly does that mean? If you accept their argument, then that one person is responsible for the thousand copies so the other 999 people are not responsible. That is exactly the reasoning you'd use against someone running a commercial bootleg CDs operation. He sells 1000 copies of a CD. The 1000 people who bought CDs from him paid for them, so you can't really consider them guilty. Instead you make him solely responsible for all 1000 copies. That's what the law is designed to punish.
But this argument doesn't work against a single-use downloader. If the courts convict one person claiming she is responsible for the thousand copies made, then they convict the next person and claim he's also responsible for the same thousand copies made, and so on until they've convicted all 1000 people, what exactly has happened? In total they've convicted 1000 people of making 1 million copies of a song. But there were only 1000 copies of the song ever made! The math doesn't add up because the making available argument is wrong! It is fundamentally flawed. It is logically erroneous.
The courts should've spotted this flaw in the RIAA's "making available" arguments, but they haven't. Or they have and have failed to slap it down for the silliness it is. The legislatures badly need to revise copyright law to distinguish between commercial copyright infringement, and single-use home filesharing. What going on now is akin to the EPA abusing laws meant to punish companies illegally dumping toxic waste with millions of dollars in fines, and applying the same punishment to someone who fails to recycle a CFL light bulb (they release a tiny amount of mercury into the landfill when you throw them away in the trash).
The thing is, the Internet has, and will continue to change, how media can be distributed and consumed. The old model of ticket and physical media sales just doesn't seem viable anymore. I think the media companies are going to need to find other ways to pick up revenue.
Wedding photographers already went down this route. They used to shoot your wedding for a nominal fee, or even for free. Then they'd charge you for prints of the photos. If you wanted extra prints, they'd charge you extra. Then scanners came way down in price and people started just scanning and printing co
Exactly this. I'm a US citizen who worked for a few years in Canada. Don't listen to OP - the tax issues are monumentally major.
Most countries tax based on residency. You earned money in your country of citizenship, you pay taxes there. You earned money in another country, you work out the taxes over there. Your native country doesn't get involved. This is why Canadians working in the U.S. for part of the year have to be able to document the number of days they stayed there. If they're in the U.S. for more than 183 days, they're considered a U.S. resident and don't owe Canadian taxes.
The U.S. taxes based on residency and citizenship. You earn money anywhere in the world, the IRS expects you to pay U.S. taxes on it if you're a citizen. If your kids become U.S. citizens, ignore the U.S. tax filing obligations for 20 years because they're living in Sweden or wherever, then when they're in their 30s and married and have kids they decide to visit the U.S., the moment they try to step foot into the U.S. the IRS will nail them for back taxes on everything they earned for the last 20 years. (Ok, there's probably a statute of limitations, but you get the idea.)
A lot of Americans living abroad work their butt off trying to renounce their U.S. citizenship just so they don't have to deal with this tax hassle. Do not subject your kids to it unless they intend to live in the U.S. (Some U.S. states do the same thing. California is notorious for it. If you were living in California prior to taking a job in the U.K., California still considers you a "resident" since you didn't move to another U.S. state, and expects you to pay California taxes on everything you earned in the U.K. Even California kids who go to college out of state and don't formally establish their residency in that state have gotten nailed for it when they work a part-time job while at school.)
The U.S. has tax treaties with most developed nations, where taxes paid in those countries on earned income (i.e. wages) can be applied as credit to taxes the IRS says you owe. Since most countries have a higher tax rate than the U.S. Federal taxes (U.S. Federal + State ends up being about the same), this usually means you won't owe the IRS any taxes on earned income. But they still expect you to file a tax return every year. And if you've got unearned income (e.g. interest on a savings account, stocks), you're probably gonna end up double-taxed on that (in both your country of residence, and by the U.S.).
Unless your kids are going to live in the U.S., don't do it.
Good luck convincing a court that someone owes you money after you refused their cash.
Why would they owe you money? You never gave them the goods because you couldn't be sure their cash wasn't counterfeit. If anyone is going to have to convince a court, it's they who are going to have to argue that I did something illegal by refusing to accept their funny money.
Actually, I wonder how much of this is actual racism, and how much is ingrained biases based on color. People like white because it's reminiscent of day - light, transparent, revealing. People dislike black because it's reminiscent of night - dark, hidden, obscuring. I'm curious how the experiment would've turned out if they'd run it with a colored inanimate object. e.g. Subjects get a chance to retrieve a woman's white purse vs. a black purse during a robbery.
For the study, the team analyzed information on 58,020 people, ages 18 to 96, from Detroit, Michigan, who underwent standard exercise stress tests between 1991 and 2009 for evaluation of chest pain, shortness of breath, fainting or dizziness. The researchers then tracked how many of the participants within each fitness level died from any cause over the next decade.
So it wasn't a random sample. It was people who had visited the doctor/hospital with complaints of chest pain, shortness of breath, fainting or dizziness. Well right there, you'd think the ones who were further along in a disease causing those symptoms when they first visited a doctor would score worse at the treadmill test. And they'd have a greater risk of death in the next few years since they were further along the illness.
If you're upset that a die in a casino rolled a 1 when you really needed something other than a 1, and you go back through previous video of the die being rolled and compile all the shots of it rolling a 1 together as "proof" that it's weighted to roll 1s, that's selection bias. Casino security will be on the floor laughing at you as they throw you out.
The most dangerous place I see this happening is in politics. No, I don't mean what politicians do. I mean when you and I think of our own politics. We have a very strong tendency to immediately accept any corroborating incidents as proof our political views being correct, without questioning if there could've been other explanations for why things happened that way. And we have a very strong tendency to grasp at the first explanation which seems to excuse why an incident seemed to contradict our political views. We let our predetermined views narrate what we observe happening in the world, rather than the letting our observations determine our views.
The £90 figure compares favorably with the £92.50 price for power from the planned Hinkley nuclear station, especially as the lagoon is designed to last 120 years -- at a much lower risk than nuclear.
Nuclear is the safest power generation technology we've invented. Nearly an order of magnitude safer than solar, 2-4x safer than wind and hydro. If they're claiming to have come up with a technology which has "much lower risk," count me skeptical until they've proved it. Too often the people claiming such things look only at exotic outlier events like big accidents, while ignoring the more mundane events like maintenance accidents. The thing is, nuclear is so safe that per unit of energy generated, casualties from maintenance accidents from other power sources outnumber casualties from exotic nuclear accidents. And it's such a concentrated power source under such high scrutiny by regulators that nuclear maintenance accidents are also lower per unit of energy generated.
The problems in the region pre-date U.S. involvement, and attempts by people to try to blame everything on the U.S. really hurt a long-term resolution to the problems there. The problems stem back to WWI, which saw the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. (If you don't remember your history, they were on the losing side with Germany in WWI.) Historically, the Empire covered most of the region we now call the Middle East, as well as North Africa, and part of the Balkans. But it had shrunk considerably by the time WWI rolled out. Still, immediately prior to the war, the Empire spanned a large part of the areas which are now some of the most problematic in the Middle East.
After WWI, the European powers that won the war carved the region up along borders which mostly satisfied their administrative needs, not along lines representing the ethnic and cultural makeup of the inhabitants. That's why the countries there lack cohesiveness and seem to constantly be at risk of civil war. They're not really countries, they're arbitrary lines drawn by some bureaucrats in Europe who didn't know anything about the region. That instability is what allows dictators like Assad, Hussein, and groups like ISIS to gain power there. The region would be a lot more stable if we were able to wipe the map and redraw it (including parts of Turkey) into regions more representative of the ethno-religious makeup of the inhabitants. The Kurds in particular represent a huge portion of the population there, but have no country.
Terrorism builds on fear, but when one leaves out emotion and rationally looks at numbers, daily traffic is still far deadlier than these nincompoops. So any fear built has to be irrational for terrorism to work. Without fear, they have no power.
Normally groups resort to terrorism because they lack sufficient manpower and/or resources to represent any real military threat to an established nation-state. If they're just below that threshold they usually resort to guerrilla hit-and-run style military tactics. But if they're far below it, they start resorting to terrorism to try to accomplish emotionally within the populace what they cannot militarily - some form of socio-political change.
ISIS is a real military power thus far able to stand toe-to-toe with the military of existing nation-states in the region. Two countries have already lost large swaths of territory to them, and a third could as well. They only do things we normally associate with terrorism because they're assholes who are more than willing to rule a populace using fear (Saddam Hussein was similar). Don't make the mistake of thinking that means they're an ignorable problem like most terrorists are - they are a real military threat. If they hadn't gotten media attention, there wouldn't have been Western airstrikes against them, and they would've continued steamrolling over Syria and Iraq.
After you replace the laborer, what's going to happen to his standard of living ?
You're assuming an oversimplified, ideal world, where if there were no robots manufacturing in China, everything would continue as it has been.
That's not what's going to happen. As China has developed, wages have increased. They now have a burgeoning middle class. But the higher wages means their factories powered by manual labor are no longer cost-competitive with other third world countries. Already, a good chunk of manufacturing is being shifted to places like Vietnam.
This is pretty much the same situation that U.S. manufacturing faced in the 1970s and 1980s. Automakers tried to make manufacturing more efficient by bringing in automation. Unions rebelled and forced automakers to stick with mostly manual assembly. That made it a lot more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., which caused assembly line jobs to move to places like Mexico, Korea, and China.
i.e. It wasn't automation which threatened those union jobs. It was economic uncompetitiveness. Manual assembly of cars under the prevailing wages in a developed nation is too expensive compared to the alternatives - be it automation or off-shoring and shipping the finished product back to the U.S. At that point the population has to adapt or die. Either shift its workforce to higher-level jobs while automated robots take care of the menial grunt work, or watch all those menial jobs leave the country to places where the prevailing wages are a lot lower.
Under pressure from the unions in the 1980s, the U.S. chose the latter. And what followed was a massive exodus of manufacturing to countries where labor was a lot cheaper (which BTW is how the market eliminates areas with lower wages - it moves jobs to them causing wages there to rise). China is finding itself in the same situation as the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, and the owner of Foxconn at least has read up on his history. He's not going to let Vietnam do to China what China did to the U.S. He's going the automation route to keep his manufacturing factories in China. At least that way some jobs will remain instead of the entire factory being shuttered and replaced with a one in Vietnam.
Yes menial workers will lose their assembly line jobs. But (most) people can be retrained for higher-level jobs which pay more, monitoring and repairing the robots which do the assembly. And frankly, I find your assumption - that an assembly line worker is mentally incapable of doing nothing more than connecting part A to part B over and over all day so they will be unable to find a new job if factories automate - to be quite insulting. The vast majority of people are capable of much more than that. It's just that until technology advanced to the point where you could have machines do the grunt work assembly, there was a lot more demand for these low-end manual assembly jobs than the higher level jobs.
We need jumpers or physical switches that prevent firmware stored in flash (whether it be GPU firmware, BIOS, HDD firmware, network card firmware or whatever) from being overwritten unless you specifically flip that switch.
I've wondered why we don't do the same thing for HDD data. I bought an early SATA-USB 3.0 adapter which turned out to be a forensic tool for law enforcement. There's a jumper on it which can make the HDD read-only.
What if you could set up your website, physically move a jumper to make the HDD containing the web server and website read-only (log files and database writes should be going onto another drive on another system anyway to prevent tampering). If someone manages to get in via a vulnerability, there's no way to change the web server's configuration to give you full root. You can only access what the vulnerability allows you to access, which is usually just a small bit of memory.
Real website updates would become a lot harder. You couldn't just login to tweak a few things. You'd have to move to a more regimented model like software releases, where you put a bunch of updates and bugfixes together, test the crap out of them, then authorize it for release. Then maybe you'd send someone over to the hosting company with a flash drive with the changes to perform an update (and physically move the HDD's jumper while doing so). Yeah it's a PITA, but if there's one thing I've learned, good security and easy to use are usually mutually exclusive.
I'll let you in on a little secret. I own lots of Blu-ray discs, but I don't actually own a Blu-ray player. I buy the disc (whatever my thoughts on Copyright, it is the law and the content producers do deserve to be paid), then I download a Blu-ray rip of the movie from a torrent site. Toss the file on my media server, and call it a day. They get their money, I don't have to deal with their forced previews and FBI warnings. I really have to wonder what they're thinking. First they complain about piracy, then they respond by making their products worse for legit customers than for pirates.
Anyone know a good petition site we could place a petition on? Maybe try and collect some opposition signatures, get some tech media coverage and -gulp- resist?
You already missed your chance to give your opinion on generic TLDs. If you were opposed to them, you should've said something 3 years ago. Not that ICANN bothered listening with the prospect of millions of dollars of free revenue weighing down the other side of the scale.
I think their application for.dev to be Google-only highlights a major problem with a company like this having control over any TLDs:
No, it highlights the major problem with turning generic words into a TLD ownable by any single entity. I mean the whole idea of making a generic word a TLD was pretty stupid to begin with. But then selling it off for $100,000 or the highest bidder? That was nothing but pure greed on ICANN's part.
Given Google's history (e.g. Android is FOSS), I actually consider them less likely to abuse this than most other companies. In fact I suspect the primary reason they snapped up a lot of these TLDs was to prevent them from falling into the hands of someone they thought might abuse them. Same reason they participated in the wireless spectrum auction - even though they didn't win any spectrum, they did get the FCC to require that the winners not discriminate in the type of traffic sent over that spectrum. A provision which nailed Verizon when they tried to block tethering apps.
This dress thing is actually a simplified version of a really powerful and freaky illusion which unfortunately only works in a darkened room. You take a quilt with different color squares. You can verify in white light that the different colors span the rainbow.
On top of this quilt, you lay a black piece of cardboard which has a cutout allowing you to only see one color patch. Say it's a greenish patch. In the darkened room with the single white light, you can confirm that this single visible patch is green.
Then you put colored filters in front of the light until the patch appears to be red/orange. The light is red/orange, so the green patch now appears red/orange. Makes sense right?
Then you remove the black cardboard so you can see all the color patches. And suddenly that red/orange patch appears green again. Cover it up with the black cardboard again and it'll appear red/orange. Remove the cardboard and it appears green.
What's going on (and also what's going on in the dress photo) is that your brain is using the information of surrounding objects (in the dress pic, it's the background visible to the right) to gauge the amount of light and the color of the light. It then corrects for the color of the light to white balance what you see, and for the brightness to compensate for over/under exposure. So the colors and intensity your eyes see remain the same, just how your brain interprets them changes.
I've been doing white balancing and level adjustments on my photos for over 20 years now. The dress as shown in the photo is white/gold (actually more of a light-blue/gold). You can confirm this with eyedropper measurements in Photoshop.
However, if you look at the sliver of background which appears to the right, you can tell the photo is badly overexposed. If your eye spotted this and your brain compensated for it by interpreting the pic as what might see if you stepped out into bright sunlight after being in a darkened room, the dress will appear blue/black.
There are a series of "craters" in the U.S. as well, though much older. The Carolina bays are elliptical depressions located along the Atlantic seaboard of unknown origin. Theories of the origins being geologic or extraterrestrial impacts have come in and out of favor. Nobody really knows. (And before you say that impact craters are round regardless of the angle of impact, that's true until you get to very shallow impact angles. Then the craters end up being oval.)
The alternative is asking for bankruptcy. Running communications lines is about the most expensive part of any telecommunications / power infrastructure. This is one area where doing the minimum possible is the only financially sound move.
Why are you assuming they'd have to run additional communications lines to gain reliability? All they had to do was put half the lines in one pipe, and the other half in another pipe buried parallel to but (say) 3 feet away. Yes it would've been more expensive, but only slightly. It wasn't just vandalism that was a risk. The failure could've been precipitated by corrosion, a fire, a mouse getting in and chewing cables, etc. All of which make a case for splitting the cables among multiple pipes.
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Correct. Comparing different generation technologies by peak production capacity is like trying to compare the range of cars by looking only at the size of their gas tank. You must take into account fuel efficiency to get an accurate range estimate. LIkewise, capacity factor is analogous to the "efficiency" with which the power source can convert its potential capacity into actual energy.
Capacity factor for static PV installations in the U.S. is 10%-19%. The contiguous 48 states averages about 14%-14.5%.
33% is the max capacity factor for concentrated solar power - where you have reflectors tracking the sun all day and the panels/thermal salt bath mounted atop a high tower to minimize oblique incident sunlight angles throughout the day.
Coal is used mostly for base load. It's pretty slow to ramp up or down in respond to demand - once you shovel in a certain amount of coal to start it burning, you cannot stop it from burning. Nuclear is like that too.
Most peaking plants (supply electricity as demand peaks) are gas, oil, and hydro. You can shut those off within about a minute of demand dropping.
Forget the energy cost of transport. The energy cost of using this device exceeds the energy it can produce. The summary and the first TFA completely misrepresent what the researchers are proposing. They are not saying we can "harvest energy" from the CO2.
You can do the exact same thing by boiling water. When water boils, it expands into a more voluminous gas. The energy from that volume change can be harnessed to do work. Free energy! Right? Well as we all know (or should know), that energy isn't free. You have to put in that energy when you boil the water. The phase change from liquid to gas takes a lot more energy than merely heating up the liquid. Exactly as much energy as needed to cause the volume change as it expands into gas (net zero energy gain). Except the engine extracting energy from the volume change (aka steam engine) is never 100% efficienct, so you end up putting more energy into it than you get out.
All they've done is replaced boiling water with sublimating solid CO2. The thermodynamic and energy principles behind it are the same. And thus this will never produce as much energy as you put into it. The only exception is when you have waste heat (e.g. a generator running outside). Then, like any heat engine, you could use this to convert some of that waste heat into usable energy (the energy you're "putting in" to it is energy that you would've lost anyway). But it's never gonna be usable as a primary energy source, because it's not an energy source.
The summary and first TFA have heralded this as some new energy source on Mars. It's not. If you read the direct words from the authors in the last TFA, they're merely proposing this as an alternative to water and steam engines. See, water is exceedingly rare on Mars. It's only popular here on Earth to convert heat energy into mechanical energy (via a steam engine, like in nuclear plants) because of its abundance. We can just slurp some up from a local river or ocean, run it through the steam cycle, and dump the steam back into the environment. The ecosystem will take care of converting it back into liquid water for us, and returning it to the river or ocean for future reuse.
Not so on Mars. There's precious little water, and you'd be a fool to dump waste steam into the environment when your colonists need it to survive. What these researchers have proposed is a "CO2 engine" which uses sublimating CO2 to convert (not extract) heat energy from another energy source into mechanical energy for doing work.
For the same reason, this won't work in space. You lose the CO2 gas to space, and your engine stops working. Just like if you used a steam engine in space and vented out the resulting steam. You either need a constant supply of new, solid CO2 (like on Mars). Or you need the whole thing to operate in a closed loop (where you also handling the cooling phase which converts the coolant back into a liquid or solid), in which case water or ammonia (freezes at -78 C) is probably a better choice because closed loops work a lot better with a liquid heat exchange medium.
Not when the reason it's supposed to be hosted on a government server is to keep it secure from you the user tampering with it. This isn't the fox breaking into the henhouse, or even the fox guarding the henhouse. It's putting the hens in the fox's henhouse. Who cares if the fox's henhouse is physically secure?
Having used computers since the 1980s, I've seen my share of market reversals. Apple dominated the early home PC market, but got steamrolled by the IBM PC. IBM thought it could control the PC and keep it proprietary, until Compaq blew the market wide open by reverse engineering the IBM BIOS. After releasing the Mac, Apple dominated the early GUI OS market, but Windows slowly took it over relegating the Mac to the 5% it has today. WordPerfect and Lotus 123 dominated office productivity apps, but missed the switch to Windows and were eclipsed by Office (actually there's a good argument that can be made that Microsoft duped them into prioritizing OS/2 development). Netscape and Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer and Firefox+Chrome. 3dFX and nVidia. Yahoo and Google. Palm to Windows CE to the Blackberry to the iPhone to Android.
History is littered with the corpses of companies which, like you, assumed the upstart could never dethrone them from the market they dominated. If you rest on your laurels, you tend to get passed up like you're standing still. Because that's exactly what you're doing. If Apple is approaching their tablet redesigns as if the Surface Pro were the dominant player, they're doing absolutely the right thing to stay ahead.
The problem with these "never going to buy from [company] again" stances is that they might seem appropriate when you're young. But if you stick to your guns, by the time you're around 40 you realize there are very few companies left which you can still buy from without compromising your principles. Can't buy from Sony because of the rootkit scandal. Can't buy from Asus because they're sexist. Can't buy from Dell because of the bulging capacitors. Can't buy from HP because they overcharge for ink. Can't buy from Acer because of their crappy PC build quality in the 1990s. Can't buy from Apple because of product lock-in. Can't buy from Toshiba because they sold advanced milling technology to the Soviet Navy. (You may laugh at that one, bit it's not really much different than anyone in their teens today - the Sony rootkit scandal happened long before they even started to use computers extensively.)
Rather than an absolute "never buy from evil companies" philosophy, perhaps a "buy from the less evil companies" philosophy might be more reasonable. I try to apply the golden rule. Do I occasionally make bad decision? Hell yes. Do I want others to give me a second chance after I've tried to reform? Hell yes. So when other people at these companies make terrible decisions, I kinda feel obliged to give them a second chance if I'm sufficiently satisfied that they've tried to reform. You can only earn a spot on my perma-ban list if you've shown you are incorrigible and not interested in reforming (e.g. RIAA).
That's something I always wondered about with MH370. It used to be that the procedures after smoke in the cabin prioritized trying to locate the source of the smoke and extinguish the fire in-flight. Recently, it's been shifting more towards getting the plane on the ground ASAP (page 33 of PDF).
Except none of the reporters covering this story seem to be capable of actually researching a story. The obvious question to ask when considering the fire hypothesis is, "what were Malaysia Airlines' in-flight fire procedures?" How did they train their aircrew to react in case of a fire? Did the procedures the crew were supposed to follow still prioritize trying to locate and fight the fire? In which case the Wired article seems implausible. Or were they newer procedures which emphasized landing the plane ASAP? In which case the Wired article might be spot on.
Still, the biggest flaw in the fire hypothesis IMHO is that the airliner continued to fly for ~7 hours after the "incident". Fires devastating enough to debilitate the crew typically do not go out by themselves. They burn enough equipment to make the aircraft unflyable, or compromise the structural integrity of the aircraft leading to in-flight break-up with passengers and cargo falling out the bottom.
That is precisely whom these heavy fines in Copyright law were intended to punish. Someone running a bootleg CD or DVD operation could stand to make thousands if not millions of dollars in profit. So the punishment had to be severe enough to discourage them. Otherwise they could just use a fraction of the profits to pay the fine as a cost of doing business.
The problem is, Hollywood has been abusing the law given to them to combat these cases, by applying it to "home use" filesharers. And the courts have been negligent in failing to toss that argument out the window. Proof? Just look at their argument in court. When they claim Jammie Thomas-Rasset "made available" songs for other people to download, exactly what are they saying?
By definition, the number of downloads of a fileshared song equals the number of copies uploaded. If 1000 people are filesharing a song, then they each want a single copy of the song, and a total of 1000 copies are made. If you can wrap your head around this amazingly difficult math, that works out to each single person being responsible for one illegal copy.
But in court the RIAA has been arguing that the one person is somehow responsible for the thousand copies made in total. What exactly does that mean? If you accept their argument, then that one person is responsible for the thousand copies so the other 999 people are not responsible. That is exactly the reasoning you'd use against someone running a commercial bootleg CDs operation. He sells 1000 copies of a CD. The 1000 people who bought CDs from him paid for them, so you can't really consider them guilty. Instead you make him solely responsible for all 1000 copies. That's what the law is designed to punish.
But this argument doesn't work against a single-use downloader. If the courts convict one person claiming she is responsible for the thousand copies made, then they convict the next person and claim he's also responsible for the same thousand copies made, and so on until they've convicted all 1000 people, what exactly has happened? In total they've convicted 1000 people of making 1 million copies of a song. But there were only 1000 copies of the song ever made! The math doesn't add up because the making available argument is wrong! It is fundamentally flawed. It is logically erroneous.
The courts should've spotted this flaw in the RIAA's "making available" arguments, but they haven't. Or they have and have failed to slap it down for the silliness it is. The legislatures badly need to revise copyright law to distinguish between commercial copyright infringement, and single-use home filesharing. What going on now is akin to the EPA abusing laws meant to punish companies illegally dumping toxic waste with millions of dollars in fines, and applying the same punishment to someone who fails to recycle a CFL light bulb (they release a tiny amount of mercury into the landfill when you throw them away in the trash).
Wedding photographers already went down this route. They used to shoot your wedding for a nominal fee, or even for free. Then they'd charge you for prints of the photos. If you wanted extra prints, they'd charge you extra. Then scanners came way down in price and people started just scanning and printing co
Some quick links I found covering the issue.
Americans Living Abroad Becoming Trapped by Citizenship Based Tax Rules
Mayor Of London Boris Johnson Announces He'll Renounce U.S. Citizenship
When American Expats Donâ(TM)t Want Their Kids to Have U.S. Citizenship
Meet the 'accidental American' with a big tax bill
PwC suggests a check to see if you're an 'accidental American'
âAccidentalâ(TM) Americans Still Owe Income Tax
Exactly this. I'm a US citizen who worked for a few years in Canada. Don't listen to OP - the tax issues are monumentally major.
Most countries tax based on residency. You earned money in your country of citizenship, you pay taxes there. You earned money in another country, you work out the taxes over there. Your native country doesn't get involved. This is why Canadians working in the U.S. for part of the year have to be able to document the number of days they stayed there. If they're in the U.S. for more than 183 days, they're considered a U.S. resident and don't owe Canadian taxes.
The U.S. taxes based on residency and citizenship. You earn money anywhere in the world, the IRS expects you to pay U.S. taxes on it if you're a citizen. If your kids become U.S. citizens, ignore the U.S. tax filing obligations for 20 years because they're living in Sweden or wherever, then when they're in their 30s and married and have kids they decide to visit the U.S., the moment they try to step foot into the U.S. the IRS will nail them for back taxes on everything they earned for the last 20 years. (Ok, there's probably a statute of limitations, but you get the idea.)
A lot of Americans living abroad work their butt off trying to renounce their U.S. citizenship just so they don't have to deal with this tax hassle. Do not subject your kids to it unless they intend to live in the U.S. (Some U.S. states do the same thing. California is notorious for it. If you were living in California prior to taking a job in the U.K., California still considers you a "resident" since you didn't move to another U.S. state, and expects you to pay California taxes on everything you earned in the U.K. Even California kids who go to college out of state and don't formally establish their residency in that state have gotten nailed for it when they work a part-time job while at school.)
The U.S. has tax treaties with most developed nations, where taxes paid in those countries on earned income (i.e. wages) can be applied as credit to taxes the IRS says you owe. Since most countries have a higher tax rate than the U.S. Federal taxes (U.S. Federal + State ends up being about the same), this usually means you won't owe the IRS any taxes on earned income. But they still expect you to file a tax return every year. And if you've got unearned income (e.g. interest on a savings account, stocks), you're probably gonna end up double-taxed on that (in both your country of residence, and by the U.S.).
Unless your kids are going to live in the U.S., don't do it.
Why would they owe you money? You never gave them the goods because you couldn't be sure their cash wasn't counterfeit. If anyone is going to have to convince a court, it's they who are going to have to argue that I did something illegal by refusing to accept their funny money.
Actually, I wonder how much of this is actual racism, and how much is ingrained biases based on color. People like white because it's reminiscent of day - light, transparent, revealing. People dislike black because it's reminiscent of night - dark, hidden, obscuring. I'm curious how the experiment would've turned out if they'd run it with a colored inanimate object. e.g. Subjects get a chance to retrieve a woman's white purse vs. a black purse during a robbery.
So it wasn't a random sample. It was people who had visited the doctor/hospital with complaints of chest pain, shortness of breath, fainting or dizziness. Well right there, you'd think the ones who were further along in a disease causing those symptoms when they first visited a doctor would score worse at the treadmill test. And they'd have a greater risk of death in the next few years since they were further along the illness.
If you're upset that a die in a casino rolled a 1 when you really needed something other than a 1, and you go back through previous video of the die being rolled and compile all the shots of it rolling a 1 together as "proof" that it's weighted to roll 1s, that's selection bias. Casino security will be on the floor laughing at you as they throw you out.
The most dangerous place I see this happening is in politics. No, I don't mean what politicians do. I mean when you and I think of our own politics. We have a very strong tendency to immediately accept any corroborating incidents as proof our political views being correct, without questioning if there could've been other explanations for why things happened that way. And we have a very strong tendency to grasp at the first explanation which seems to excuse why an incident seemed to contradict our political views. We let our predetermined views narrate what we observe happening in the world, rather than the letting our observations determine our views.
Nuclear is the safest power generation technology we've invented. Nearly an order of magnitude safer than solar, 2-4x safer than wind and hydro. If they're claiming to have come up with a technology which has "much lower risk," count me skeptical until they've proved it. Too often the people claiming such things look only at exotic outlier events like big accidents, while ignoring the more mundane events like maintenance accidents. The thing is, nuclear is so safe that per unit of energy generated, casualties from maintenance accidents from other power sources outnumber casualties from exotic nuclear accidents. And it's such a concentrated power source under such high scrutiny by regulators that nuclear maintenance accidents are also lower per unit of energy generated.
The problems in the region pre-date U.S. involvement, and attempts by people to try to blame everything on the U.S. really hurt a long-term resolution to the problems there. The problems stem back to WWI, which saw the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. (If you don't remember your history, they were on the losing side with Germany in WWI.) Historically, the Empire covered most of the region we now call the Middle East, as well as North Africa, and part of the Balkans. But it had shrunk considerably by the time WWI rolled out. Still, immediately prior to the war, the Empire spanned a large part of the areas which are now some of the most problematic in the Middle East.
After WWI, the European powers that won the war carved the region up along borders which mostly satisfied their administrative needs, not along lines representing the ethnic and cultural makeup of the inhabitants. That's why the countries there lack cohesiveness and seem to constantly be at risk of civil war. They're not really countries, they're arbitrary lines drawn by some bureaucrats in Europe who didn't know anything about the region. That instability is what allows dictators like Assad, Hussein, and groups like ISIS to gain power there. The region would be a lot more stable if we were able to wipe the map and redraw it (including parts of Turkey) into regions more representative of the ethno-religious makeup of the inhabitants. The Kurds in particular represent a huge portion of the population there, but have no country.
Normally groups resort to terrorism because they lack sufficient manpower and/or resources to represent any real military threat to an established nation-state. If they're just below that threshold they usually resort to guerrilla hit-and-run style military tactics. But if they're far below it, they start resorting to terrorism to try to accomplish emotionally within the populace what they cannot militarily - some form of socio-political change.
ISIS is a real military power thus far able to stand toe-to-toe with the military of existing nation-states in the region. Two countries have already lost large swaths of territory to them, and a third could as well. They only do things we normally associate with terrorism because they're assholes who are more than willing to rule a populace using fear (Saddam Hussein was similar). Don't make the mistake of thinking that means they're an ignorable problem like most terrorists are - they are a real military threat. If they hadn't gotten media attention, there wouldn't have been Western airstrikes against them, and they would've continued steamrolling over Syria and Iraq.
You're assuming an oversimplified, ideal world, where if there were no robots manufacturing in China, everything would continue as it has been.
That's not what's going to happen. As China has developed, wages have increased. They now have a burgeoning middle class. But the higher wages means their factories powered by manual labor are no longer cost-competitive with other third world countries. Already, a good chunk of manufacturing is being shifted to places like Vietnam.
This is pretty much the same situation that U.S. manufacturing faced in the 1970s and 1980s. Automakers tried to make manufacturing more efficient by bringing in automation. Unions rebelled and forced automakers to stick with mostly manual assembly. That made it a lot more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., which caused assembly line jobs to move to places like Mexico, Korea, and China.
i.e. It wasn't automation which threatened those union jobs. It was economic uncompetitiveness. Manual assembly of cars under the prevailing wages in a developed nation is too expensive compared to the alternatives - be it automation or off-shoring and shipping the finished product back to the U.S. At that point the population has to adapt or die. Either shift its workforce to higher-level jobs while automated robots take care of the menial grunt work, or watch all those menial jobs leave the country to places where the prevailing wages are a lot lower.
Under pressure from the unions in the 1980s, the U.S. chose the latter. And what followed was a massive exodus of manufacturing to countries where labor was a lot cheaper (which BTW is how the market eliminates areas with lower wages - it moves jobs to them causing wages there to rise). China is finding itself in the same situation as the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, and the owner of Foxconn at least has read up on his history. He's not going to let Vietnam do to China what China did to the U.S. He's going the automation route to keep his manufacturing factories in China. At least that way some jobs will remain instead of the entire factory being shuttered and replaced with a one in Vietnam.
Yes menial workers will lose their assembly line jobs. But (most) people can be retrained for higher-level jobs which pay more, monitoring and repairing the robots which do the assembly. And frankly, I find your assumption - that an assembly line worker is mentally incapable of doing nothing more than connecting part A to part B over and over all day so they will be unable to find a new job if factories automate - to be quite insulting. The vast majority of people are capable of much more than that. It's just that until technology advanced to the point where you could have machines do the grunt work assembly, there was a lot more demand for these low-end manual assembly jobs than the higher level jobs.
I've wondered why we don't do the same thing for HDD data. I bought an early SATA-USB 3.0 adapter which turned out to be a forensic tool for law enforcement. There's a jumper on it which can make the HDD read-only.
What if you could set up your website, physically move a jumper to make the HDD containing the web server and website read-only (log files and database writes should be going onto another drive on another system anyway to prevent tampering). If someone manages to get in via a vulnerability, there's no way to change the web server's configuration to give you full root. You can only access what the vulnerability allows you to access, which is usually just a small bit of memory.
Real website updates would become a lot harder. You couldn't just login to tweak a few things. You'd have to move to a more regimented model like software releases, where you put a bunch of updates and bugfixes together, test the crap out of them, then authorize it for release. Then maybe you'd send someone over to the hosting company with a flash drive with the changes to perform an update (and physically move the HDD's jumper while doing so). Yeah it's a PITA, but if there's one thing I've learned, good security and easy to use are usually mutually exclusive.
I'll let you in on a little secret. I own lots of Blu-ray discs, but I don't actually own a Blu-ray player. I buy the disc (whatever my thoughts on Copyright, it is the law and the content producers do deserve to be paid), then I download a Blu-ray rip of the movie from a torrent site. Toss the file on my media server, and call it a day. They get their money, I don't have to deal with their forced previews and FBI warnings. I really have to wonder what they're thinking. First they complain about piracy, then they respond by making their products worse for legit customers than for pirates.
You already missed your chance to give your opinion on generic TLDs. If you were opposed to them, you should've said something 3 years ago. Not that ICANN bothered listening with the prospect of millions of dollars of free revenue weighing down the other side of the scale.
No, it highlights the major problem with turning generic words into a TLD ownable by any single entity. I mean the whole idea of making a generic word a TLD was pretty stupid to begin with. But then selling it off for $100,000 or the highest bidder? That was nothing but pure greed on ICANN's part.
Given Google's history (e.g. Android is FOSS), I actually consider them less likely to abuse this than most other companies. In fact I suspect the primary reason they snapped up a lot of these TLDs was to prevent them from falling into the hands of someone they thought might abuse them. Same reason they participated in the wireless spectrum auction - even though they didn't win any spectrum, they did get the FCC to require that the winners not discriminate in the type of traffic sent over that spectrum. A provision which nailed Verizon when they tried to block tethering apps.
This dress thing is actually a simplified version of a really powerful and freaky illusion which unfortunately only works in a darkened room. You take a quilt with different color squares. You can verify in white light that the different colors span the rainbow.
On top of this quilt, you lay a black piece of cardboard which has a cutout allowing you to only see one color patch. Say it's a greenish patch. In the darkened room with the single white light, you can confirm that this single visible patch is green.
Then you put colored filters in front of the light until the patch appears to be red/orange. The light is red/orange, so the green patch now appears red/orange. Makes sense right?
Then you remove the black cardboard so you can see all the color patches. And suddenly that red/orange patch appears green again. Cover it up with the black cardboard again and it'll appear red/orange. Remove the cardboard and it appears green.
What's going on (and also what's going on in the dress photo) is that your brain is using the information of surrounding objects (in the dress pic, it's the background visible to the right) to gauge the amount of light and the color of the light. It then corrects for the color of the light to white balance what you see, and for the brightness to compensate for over/under exposure. So the colors and intensity your eyes see remain the same, just how your brain interprets them changes.
I've been doing white balancing and level adjustments on my photos for over 20 years now. The dress as shown in the photo is white/gold (actually more of a light-blue/gold). You can confirm this with eyedropper measurements in Photoshop.
However, if you look at the sliver of background which appears to the right, you can tell the photo is badly overexposed. If your eye spotted this and your brain compensated for it by interpreting the pic as what might see if you stepped out into bright sunlight after being in a darkened room, the dress will appear blue/black.
There are a series of "craters" in the U.S. as well, though much older. The Carolina bays are elliptical depressions located along the Atlantic seaboard of unknown origin. Theories of the origins being geologic or extraterrestrial impacts have come in and out of favor. Nobody really knows. (And before you say that impact craters are round regardless of the angle of impact, that's true until you get to very shallow impact angles. Then the craters end up being oval.)
Why are you assuming they'd have to run additional communications lines to gain reliability? All they had to do was put half the lines in one pipe, and the other half in another pipe buried parallel to but (say) 3 feet away. Yes it would've been more expensive, but only slightly. It wasn't just vandalism that was a risk. The failure could've been precipitated by corrosion, a fire, a mouse getting in and chewing cables, etc. All of which make a case for splitting the cables among multiple pipes.