The Peter Principle is a concept in management theory in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in his or her current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."
The solution (assuming you're already in a state with incompetent managers) is to allow incompetent managers to be demoted back into a position they're competent in. Unfortunately, society has a huge bias against workplace demotion.
Android is a walled garden too - just with different types of walls. There are countless Android devices that are locked by the manufacturer to older versions of Android, loaded with crapware which cannot be removed and otherwise effectively turned into a walled garden. Google does little to prevent this from happening and in fact largely facilitates this abuse of users via indifference.
Aside from Amazon devices (which use a forked version of Android), pretty much all Android devices are not a walled garden. Yes many are locked to a carrier, or have preinstalled apps you can't delete. But on the vast majority of them you can simply go to the settings, check the option to "allow installation from unknown sources," and you are outside the walls.
Breaking up the cable companies probably wouldn't do much without a new technology introduction. Break up of AT&T worked in retrospect because of advances in cell phone transmission, a leapfrog technology. Otherwise the Baby Bells would have still owned the local cable (like Fairpoint in New England).
Cell phones had nothing to do with helping the breakup of AT&T. The breakup was about long distance phone service. Bell Systems owned the termination points (the switching equipment directing calls over "last mile" wires to people's phones) so could effectively shut out competing long distance carriers who came up with technologies to bypass Bell's long distance wires. That's what MCI was - Microwave Communications Incorporated. They bypassed Bell's long distance wires by transmitting long distance phone calls via microwave towers. You called a local MCI number, they forwarded your call via microwave to a local phone in the area code you were calling, and that phone called the phone number you wished to reach. Bell handled the two local legs, MCI handled the long distance leg. When Bell tried to shut them down by refusing to connect their microwave calls to the phone number being called, they sued and precipitated what ended up with the Bell breakup.
The Baby Bells still own the local cable. Bell chose to satisfy the U.S. government's anti-trust investigation by spinning off the local phone companies as separate entities. Bell (now AT&T) would remain a long distance carrier (back then long distance phone charges were the most profitable part of the phone business). This eliminated the conflict of interest when terminating calls from competing long distance carriers. Verizon is a Baby Bell. SBC (now AT&T) is a Baby Bell. BellSouth (now AT&T) is a Baby Bell. Qwest (now CenturyLink) is a Baby Bell. The breakup worked because local service became independent of long distance service (and the local services are regulated as utilities so cannot discriminate against any particular long distance service - basically what net neutrality seeks to do).
The Bell breakup is really a perfect model for Internet service. It makes sense to only have one set of wires for the "last mile". So the DSL/cable/fiber company can be a monopoly, but should be regulated as a utility. The internet service itself should be wide open to competition. Anyone who wishes to start an ISP company (analogous to long distance carriers) should be allowed to, and they can pay the local DSL/cable/fiber utility (analogous to a Baby Bell) a fixed rate for "leasing" that last mile. Network packets get sent over that last mile from the home to the ISP. If the customer chooses a different ISP, the packets just get routed via a different ISP.
The *only* reason to offer some sort of price promotion later instead of just giving you the discount up front and making you sign a contract (even for three months of service) is so that they can roll the dice on customers signing up after being enticed by the promotion, and then not claiming the promotion. Rebates work the same way. Why is it that we can pass a thousand consumer protection laws about credit card interest rates and privacy disclosures, but can't just ban the blatant rip-off of rebate promotions?.
Actually, rebates serve two different purposes. It allows the manufacturer to pass along a price cut to the final buyer without affecting its contract pricing with distributors and retailers. And it allows manufacturers to make price cuts (sometimes rather large ones) without having all of the product bought up by middlemen - e.g. eBay resellers who quickly snap up all of the available inventory at the lower price and list it on eBay at close to the original price (rebates are typically limited to a certain number per household address).
The rebate companies hired by manufacturers to run the rebate programs work as you say. They get paid a lump sum by the manufacturer, and get to keep anything left over after paying out the rebates. So they have an incentive to stall, lose, and deny your rebates. But the reason rebates exist are legitimate and have nothing to do with ripping off consumers. In fact the second reason actually helps consumers (by cutting out flippers who drive up the price).
There is no safe minimum dose once it is in your body, slowly disintegrating, radiating into your organs and cells.
Cesium accumulates in your body because it's chemically similar to potassium, which your body needs for nerves to function (among other things). So it can accumulate no more than potassium does.
Potassium has a naturally occurring radioactive isoltope, K-40, which like Cesium undergoes both beta and gamma decay. The amount of K-40 in the typical human body contributes 4000-5000 becquerel to your natural radiation dose. So your contention that there is "no safe minimum dose once it is in your body" is clearly wrong. Everyone who has ever lived has been exposed to a relative "huge" amount of radiation from K-40 throughout their entire lives, and our species is still here.
The team found a high of just 8 becquerels of radiation per cubic meter in ocean samples off the coast.
A becquerel is the radioactive decay of a single atom per second. Your body has 4400 becquerels of radiation due to a naturally-occurring radioactive isotope of Potassium. If you drank a liter of seawater that would mean Fukushima has increased your radiation dose by 0.008 becquerel - less than a 0.0002% increase in radiation internally in your body. This is literally less than a drop in a bucket. The salt is far more likely to kill you than the radiation.
Politics aside, how is it that republicans want to fuck over everyone but the privileged and corporate, yet get such widespread support from the people who will suffer most from their policies?
Because the Republican stance is more nuanced than the "Republicans are evil and want to eat your babies" crowd portrays.
Why don't other countries have a net neutrality problem? Because they have competition among their ISPs. If an ISP tries to deliberately slow down a popular website to extort the site for extra payments, it doesn't put pressure on the website to pay. Instead it puts pressure on the ISP's customers to switch to another ISP. In most of the rest of the world, any ISP trying to pull this stunt puts itself out of business.
It only works in the U.S. because these ISPs have government-granted monopolies over the local customer base. The customer can't flee to a different ISP because there is none - the local government has made it illegal for there to be a competitor. Essentially, net neutrality is more government regulation to solve a problem caused by government regulation.
That's not to say it can't work (it can - if you convert Internet service into a utility). But the Republican position isn't that the goal of net neutrality is wrong. It's that net neutrality is the wrong way to go about achieving that goal - layering on more government regulation to try to fix a problem entirely caused by government regulation in the first place.
2) I still believe population is generally the key factor. Although it will never happen, without population control the hole in the bottom of the energy bucket will just keep getting wider and wider.
Why do you think population control is necessary? It already happens on its own. There's a very strong inverse correlation between a country's economic development and population growth. Most developed countries are at or close to zero population growth. A few like Japan and Germany are even shrinking in population. The vast majority of the world's population growth is in Africa, South and Central America, and the Middle East. (Also, about half the "population growth" in the U.S. and EU is from immigration, not from people making babies.)
Something about living in a modern, developed economy makes people have fewer kids; probably the high cost of rearing and educating said kids in such an economy. There's no need for population controls - we just have to work at modernizing the rest of the world and people will control their population on their own.
A price drop on an item isn't deflation. Deflation is a general drop in price across all goods, indicating your currency is becoming worth more. When your currency starts increasing in value, people stop trying to spend it and start shoving it under the mattress to wait for it to become worth more. That is bad.
More precisely, they tend to do less productive work while trying to live more off of the appreciating value of the currency. Since the economy is based on people being productive, this behavior tends to tank the economy. Like trying to save gas by shutting off the engine of a car when it hits a downhill grade. If the engine can be restarted instantly the moment the downhill is over, it can be a good strategy. But the "engine" that is the world economy can take months or years to "restart" and "rev up" back to speed. Nowhere near fast enough to respond effectively, and you end up with a stalled car at the bottom of the hill. So in the long-term, deflation is bad.
It's U.S.-centric, but it also includes data for a lot of major non-U.S. cities. Instead of having to guess how much power your solar panels will generate, the site uses latitude and historical weather data to estimate how much your panels will generate. Northern parts of central Europe (like Germany) tends to have pathetic ROI on solar (capacity factor around 0.10). But for lower latitudes in Central Europe you should be able to hit close to 0.15 - about the average for the continental U.S.
Least-effort solution (minimum number of seat position changes) is for the person who uses the toilet to move it into the configuration they need it in, then leave it.
Least-agony solution (minimum number of gross incidents) is to always lower the seat after use. However, the fact that "men won't follow" this solution is merely coincidence - this solution happens to coincide with the configuration women always use so they can never be guilty of transgressing it. When I was living alone I had a dog who liked to drink out of the toilet. Consequently, I always told guests to lower the lid of the toilet after using it. My female guests always left the lid up. About half the men would lower it (probably due to being scolded about it by women all too often).
Yeah. Screwup by the fisheries officer. If he had secured the box with some sort of official "evidence" tape to make it tamperproof, this never would have gotten to this point. Seal the box, get the signature of the accused testifying that they have the sealed box, and it's ok to leave it in their possession until they get to shore. (Most of these fisheries enforcement officers work in small/medium high-speed power boats, so it would be impractical for them to take aboard all the illegal fish they find for safekeeping as evidence.)
However, in this case they have the testimony of the crew that the captain ordered them to throw out the (purportedly) undersized fish. So I think the Feds are still going to win based on that. It's not solely the officer's word that a crime was committed.
However, in 1990, the DoD decreased the accuracy of the system - before the start of the First Gulf War.
That was the original plan. But during the first Gulf War so many soldiers were relying on commercial GPS units (military ones being in short supply) that they just turned off selective availability for the duration of the war.
This chip has a base clock speed of 1.2GHz, but is burstable through Turbo up to 2.9GHz.
If it's like their first M processor, the turbo boost mode only works when using a single core. i.e. You can run one core at 2.9 GHz, or you can run both cores at 1.2 GHz. That's the price you pay for the extremely low TDP. In contrast, an i5-4250U has a base clock of 1.3 GHz, can turbo boost to 2.3 GHz on two cores, and 2.6 GHz on a single core.
The concept that it's "underhanded" to use espionage to steal secrets from your competitors (be they people, companies, or countries) is very Western. In the East, it's considered fair play and expected behavior, and your own damn fault for not protecting your secrets if they get stolen. Employees are frequently fired if they have an opportunity to steal secrets from a competitor, are ordered to do so, and refuse.
Oddly, the concept gets reversed if the espionage is overt. If you're doing it openly like the U.S. was when it flew EP-3s just off the coast of China in International waters to collect electronic intel, the East considers that to be dishonorable, while the West considers it playing by the rules.
I don't know where the poster got their numbers from, but an average coal plant is around 500 megawatts not 1000. This would imply that you only need 500 of the hammerfest machines to equal a powerplant.
That thought crossed my mind too. But a 1 MW tidal generator is not going to generate 1 MW. On average it's going to generate closer to 0.64 MW (2/pi if you do the integral of a sinusoudal current flowrate) before taking into account biological fouling, maintenance, etc. So TFS is still correct that it's about a 1000:1 ratio.
Without changing anything about products themselves, statistically significant numbers of people will select the more advertised one more often.
Marketing is social poison.
You're conflating marketing with poor decision making. Marketing in itself is an essential part of a functioning economy. If you invented the wheel but nobody else knew about it, nobody would ask you to make wheels for them, nobody would copy them, and the idea would die when you did. Likewise, even if you don't change anything about the products themselves, if marketing informs people of a real advantage of one product over the others, it can cause statistically significant changes in people's purchasing decisions - for legitimate reasons. That is, marketing can cause the effect you describe simply because more advertising means more people are informed of one product's real advantages over the other.
Marketing becomes a poison when it's used to make people choose a product because the ad made them feel better about it. Not because marketing is bad per se, but because it's being used to leverage people's penchant for making poor decisions when an appeal is made to their emotions.
Some flight sim software I worked on in the 1990s was going to be used on the USAF's F-16 simulators for training. I got to visit their setup at Wright Patterson AFB. The simulators (full-size realistic cockpits with multifaceted hemispherical projection displays) were housed inside a large room completely encased in metal + lead. The conductive metal to form a faraday cage, and the lead in case there was anything left over trying to find its way out. There were no windows, and the door had to be closed before they'd power any of the equipment on.
In the long term the idea is to create substitute natural gas (SNG) from excess energy that would otherwise go to waste using hydrogen and CO2 for example with the Sabatier reaction.
Chemical energy storage has a pretty terrible efficiency. Electrolysis of water has about 65% efficiency at best in the lab, and is closer to 33% in industrial applications (i.e. when you need it done in large quantities). Then you have to take into account efficiency when converting it back to energy. Fuel cells can hit about 90% in the lab, but 70% is rather high commercially. This is what kills the hydrogen powered car - 33% * 70% = 23% which is right about the same efficiency as an ICE. It's only practical in places like the ISS and Mars missions because the desired amounts are small, and the high launch costs makes it cost-effective to use extremely expensive equipment. Under those conditions, a super-expensive 60% efficient electrolyser or 90% efficient fuel cell become cost-effective since the higher efficiency means less equipment to be launched. And the extremely slow rate of operation of the equipment is not a hindrance because the amounts needed are small.
Totally different story for nation-wide industrial applications. Pumped water storage (pumping water uphill and storing it in a dam to generate electricity later) is already about 70%-80% efficient full-cycle, with some research processes claiming close to 90% efficient. The only place for chemical energy storage is if you don't have access to water, a hill, and a dam; or if you specifically need hydrogen or methane as a fuel. (It still has a place in mobile applications where you have to carry the energy around with you, like fuel for cars and planes. Alcohol-based fuels are nearly as good as gasoline or diesel and have much higher energy density than batteries. We just need to figure out a good way to convert all that energy locked up in plant matter into alcohol so they do all the conversion work for us, and we only have to deal with the efficiency losses for half the cycle. Unfortunately this line of research has been pretty much been subverted by the corn ethanol industry; corn is a terrible crop for producing ethanol.)
It is not a peering problem. Netflix provides streaming servers to ISPs for free so they can stream Netflix videos locally, and completely avoid the bandwidth bottleneck of going through their peering networks. Comcast, Verizon, et al refused to accept these free servers, to artificially degrade Netflix's quality specifically so they could extort money from Netflix.
It is a monopoly problem, plain and simple. If Comcast, Verizon, et al had had competition, this tactic would've caused them to hemorrhage customers who would've fled to an ISP which actually provided decent service. But because they have a monopoly, their customers have nowhere to flee, and this extortion tactic works
When they seized the assets of drug dealers, I did not speak out because I was not a drug dealer.
When they seized the assets of the drug users, I did not speak out because I was not a drug user.
When they seized boats from boat owners, I did not speak out because I was not a boat owner.
etc...
It was a violation of the Constitution in the 1980s when boat owners were complaining about losing their boats because (unbeknownst to them) a passenger had a joint in their pocket. But the public was more interested in hearing that a pothead had been caught and punished, before turning the channel so they could watch the season finale of Dallas. As with all things, government expands until it feels pushback from the public, and we're only just getting to that point.
It is an object lesson on why laws must be judged based on the principles they follow, not on the type of people that are being targeted. Why before they're convincted we should treat terrorist suspects as if they're innocent.
I've been an advocate for tablets and PDAs long before the iPad or iPhone came out. After using computers for 3 decades, it's pretty obvious what's happening. First the computer you used was the size of a desk. Then the size of a suitcase, Then the size of what we call a desktop computer. Then the size of a 2" laptop. Then the size of a 1" notebook. Now they're a 0.5" ultrabook.
Extrapolate and it's pretty obvious the PC you use for everyday computing tasks is going to become small enough to fit in a tablet, then in your phone, then in a watch, then in a ring. At first these smaller devices are considered toys (just as laptops were once considered toys unsuitable for real work), but eventually they'll become mainstream. The last "desktop" I bought for a business had a desktop-sized case; but inside was a half-height slim PSU, and micro-ATX motherboard which was mostly empty (a lot of green on the PCB) except CPU and memory and 3 expansion slots. It looked more like the inside of a laptop than it did a desktop, but they put it into a huge desktop case because that's what businesses expect to buy.
The main impediment to shrinking computers has been input and display. The keyboard input limit went away with touchscreens and wireless keyboards (and eventually voice recognition). The display size limit will probably go away with short-range wireless displays. Use your 5" phone screen every day. If you're going on vacation, pack a 11"-15" wireless screen (and wireless keyboard/mouse), pair it with your phone, and you've got your "laptop".
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The solution (assuming you're already in a state with incompetent managers) is to allow incompetent managers to be demoted back into a position they're competent in. Unfortunately, society has a huge bias against workplace demotion.
Aside from Amazon devices (which use a forked version of Android), pretty much all Android devices are not a walled garden. Yes many are locked to a carrier, or have preinstalled apps you can't delete. But on the vast majority of them you can simply go to the settings, check the option to "allow installation from unknown sources," and you are outside the walls.
Cell phones had nothing to do with helping the breakup of AT&T. The breakup was about long distance phone service. Bell Systems owned the termination points (the switching equipment directing calls over "last mile" wires to people's phones) so could effectively shut out competing long distance carriers who came up with technologies to bypass Bell's long distance wires. That's what MCI was - Microwave Communications Incorporated. They bypassed Bell's long distance wires by transmitting long distance phone calls via microwave towers. You called a local MCI number, they forwarded your call via microwave to a local phone in the area code you were calling, and that phone called the phone number you wished to reach. Bell handled the two local legs, MCI handled the long distance leg. When Bell tried to shut them down by refusing to connect their microwave calls to the phone number being called, they sued and precipitated what ended up with the Bell breakup.
The Baby Bells still own the local cable. Bell chose to satisfy the U.S. government's anti-trust investigation by spinning off the local phone companies as separate entities. Bell (now AT&T) would remain a long distance carrier (back then long distance phone charges were the most profitable part of the phone business). This eliminated the conflict of interest when terminating calls from competing long distance carriers. Verizon is a Baby Bell. SBC (now AT&T) is a Baby Bell. BellSouth (now AT&T) is a Baby Bell. Qwest (now CenturyLink) is a Baby Bell. The breakup worked because local service became independent of long distance service (and the local services are regulated as utilities so cannot discriminate against any particular long distance service - basically what net neutrality seeks to do).
The Bell breakup is really a perfect model for Internet service. It makes sense to only have one set of wires for the "last mile". So the DSL/cable/fiber company can be a monopoly, but should be regulated as a utility. The internet service itself should be wide open to competition. Anyone who wishes to start an ISP company (analogous to long distance carriers) should be allowed to, and they can pay the local DSL/cable/fiber utility (analogous to a Baby Bell) a fixed rate for "leasing" that last mile. Network packets get sent over that last mile from the home to the ISP. If the customer chooses a different ISP, the packets just get routed via a different ISP.
Actually, rebates serve two different purposes. It allows the manufacturer to pass along a price cut to the final buyer without affecting its contract pricing with distributors and retailers. And it allows manufacturers to make price cuts (sometimes rather large ones) without having all of the product bought up by middlemen - e.g. eBay resellers who quickly snap up all of the available inventory at the lower price and list it on eBay at close to the original price (rebates are typically limited to a certain number per household address).
The rebate companies hired by manufacturers to run the rebate programs work as you say. They get paid a lump sum by the manufacturer, and get to keep anything left over after paying out the rebates. So they have an incentive to stall, lose, and deny your rebates. But the reason rebates exist are legitimate and have nothing to do with ripping off consumers. In fact the second reason actually helps consumers (by cutting out flippers who drive up the price).
Cesium accumulates in your body because it's chemically similar to potassium, which your body needs for nerves to function (among other things). So it can accumulate no more than potassium does.
Potassium has a naturally occurring radioactive isoltope, K-40, which like Cesium undergoes both beta and gamma decay. The amount of K-40 in the typical human body contributes 4000-5000 becquerel to your natural radiation dose. So your contention that there is "no safe minimum dose once it is in your body" is clearly wrong. Everyone who has ever lived has been exposed to a relative "huge" amount of radiation from K-40 throughout their entire lives, and our species is still here.
A becquerel is the radioactive decay of a single atom per second. Your body has 4400 becquerels of radiation due to a naturally-occurring radioactive isotope of Potassium. If you drank a liter of seawater that would mean Fukushima has increased your radiation dose by 0.008 becquerel - less than a 0.0002% increase in radiation internally in your body. This is literally less than a drop in a bucket. The salt is far more likely to kill you than the radiation.
Because the Republican stance is more nuanced than the "Republicans are evil and want to eat your babies" crowd portrays.
Why don't other countries have a net neutrality problem? Because they have competition among their ISPs. If an ISP tries to deliberately slow down a popular website to extort the site for extra payments, it doesn't put pressure on the website to pay. Instead it puts pressure on the ISP's customers to switch to another ISP. In most of the rest of the world, any ISP trying to pull this stunt puts itself out of business.
It only works in the U.S. because these ISPs have government-granted monopolies over the local customer base. The customer can't flee to a different ISP because there is none - the local government has made it illegal for there to be a competitor. Essentially, net neutrality is more government regulation to solve a problem caused by government regulation.
That's not to say it can't work (it can - if you convert Internet service into a utility). But the Republican position isn't that the goal of net neutrality is wrong. It's that net neutrality is the wrong way to go about achieving that goal - layering on more government regulation to try to fix a problem entirely caused by government regulation in the first place.
Japan is much the same, they are just much better at hiding it.
Why do you think population control is necessary? It already happens on its own. There's a very strong inverse correlation between a country's economic development and population growth. Most developed countries are at or close to zero population growth. A few like Japan and Germany are even shrinking in population. The vast majority of the world's population growth is in Africa, South and Central America, and the Middle East. (Also, about half the "population growth" in the U.S. and EU is from immigration, not from people making babies.)
Something about living in a modern, developed economy makes people have fewer kids; probably the high cost of rearing and educating said kids in such an economy. There's no need for population controls - we just have to work at modernizing the rest of the world and people will control their population on their own.
A price drop on an item isn't deflation. Deflation is a general drop in price across all goods, indicating your currency is becoming worth more. When your currency starts increasing in value, people stop trying to spend it and start shoving it under the mattress to wait for it to become worth more. That is bad.
More precisely, they tend to do less productive work while trying to live more off of the appreciating value of the currency. Since the economy is based on people being productive, this behavior tends to tank the economy. Like trying to save gas by shutting off the engine of a car when it hits a downhill grade. If the engine can be restarted instantly the moment the downhill is over, it can be a good strategy. But the "engine" that is the world economy can take months or years to "restart" and "rev up" back to speed. Nowhere near fast enough to respond effectively, and you end up with a stalled car at the bottom of the hill. So in the long-term, deflation is bad.
http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/
It's U.S.-centric, but it also includes data for a lot of major non-U.S. cities. Instead of having to guess how much power your solar panels will generate, the site uses latitude and historical weather data to estimate how much your panels will generate. Northern parts of central Europe (like Germany) tends to have pathetic ROI on solar (capacity factor around 0.10). But for lower latitudes in Central Europe you should be able to hit close to 0.15 - about the average for the continental U.S.
Least-effort solution (minimum number of seat position changes) is for the person who uses the toilet to move it into the configuration they need it in, then leave it.
Least-agony solution (minimum number of gross incidents) is to always lower the seat after use. However, the fact that "men won't follow" this solution is merely coincidence - this solution happens to coincide with the configuration women always use so they can never be guilty of transgressing it. When I was living alone I had a dog who liked to drink out of the toilet. Consequently, I always told guests to lower the lid of the toilet after using it. My female guests always left the lid up. About half the men would lower it (probably due to being scolded about it by women all too often).
Yeah. Screwup by the fisheries officer. If he had secured the box with some sort of official "evidence" tape to make it tamperproof, this never would have gotten to this point. Seal the box, get the signature of the accused testifying that they have the sealed box, and it's ok to leave it in their possession until they get to shore. (Most of these fisheries enforcement officers work in small/medium high-speed power boats, so it would be impractical for them to take aboard all the illegal fish they find for safekeeping as evidence.)
However, in this case they have the testimony of the crew that the captain ordered them to throw out the (purportedly) undersized fish. So I think the Feds are still going to win based on that. It's not solely the officer's word that a crime was committed.
That was the original plan. But during the first Gulf War so many soldiers were relying on commercial GPS units (military ones being in short supply) that they just turned off selective availability for the duration of the war.
If it's like their first M processor, the turbo boost mode only works when using a single core. i.e. You can run one core at 2.9 GHz, or you can run both cores at 1.2 GHz. That's the price you pay for the extremely low TDP. In contrast, an i5-4250U has a base clock of 1.3 GHz, can turbo boost to 2.3 GHz on two cores, and 2.6 GHz on a single core.
The concept that it's "underhanded" to use espionage to steal secrets from your competitors (be they people, companies, or countries) is very Western. In the East, it's considered fair play and expected behavior, and your own damn fault for not protecting your secrets if they get stolen. Employees are frequently fired if they have an opportunity to steal secrets from a competitor, are ordered to do so, and refuse.
Oddly, the concept gets reversed if the espionage is overt. If you're doing it openly like the U.S. was when it flew EP-3s just off the coast of China in International waters to collect electronic intel, the East considers that to be dishonorable, while the West considers it playing by the rules.
That thought crossed my mind too. But a 1 MW tidal generator is not going to generate 1 MW. On average it's going to generate closer to 0.64 MW (2/pi if you do the integral of a sinusoudal current flowrate) before taking into account biological fouling, maintenance, etc. So TFS is still correct that it's about a 1000:1 ratio.
You're conflating marketing with poor decision making. Marketing in itself is an essential part of a functioning economy. If you invented the wheel but nobody else knew about it, nobody would ask you to make wheels for them, nobody would copy them, and the idea would die when you did. Likewise, even if you don't change anything about the products themselves, if marketing informs people of a real advantage of one product over the others, it can cause statistically significant changes in people's purchasing decisions - for legitimate reasons. That is, marketing can cause the effect you describe simply because more advertising means more people are informed of one product's real advantages over the other.
Marketing becomes a poison when it's used to make people choose a product because the ad made them feel better about it. Not because marketing is bad per se, but because it's being used to leverage people's penchant for making poor decisions when an appeal is made to their emotions.
"Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world."
One of my favorite quotes, from Mary Shafer, SR-71 Flying Qualities Lead Engineer at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center.
Funny how two countries can take the exact same situation and arrive at completely opposite decisions.
Some flight sim software I worked on in the 1990s was going to be used on the USAF's F-16 simulators for training. I got to visit their setup at Wright Patterson AFB. The simulators (full-size realistic cockpits with multifaceted hemispherical projection displays) were housed inside a large room completely encased in metal + lead. The conductive metal to form a faraday cage, and the lead in case there was anything left over trying to find its way out. There were no windows, and the door had to be closed before they'd power any of the equipment on.
Chemical energy storage has a pretty terrible efficiency. Electrolysis of water has about 65% efficiency at best in the lab, and is closer to 33% in industrial applications (i.e. when you need it done in large quantities). Then you have to take into account efficiency when converting it back to energy. Fuel cells can hit about 90% in the lab, but 70% is rather high commercially. This is what kills the hydrogen powered car - 33% * 70% = 23% which is right about the same efficiency as an ICE. It's only practical in places like the ISS and Mars missions because the desired amounts are small, and the high launch costs makes it cost-effective to use extremely expensive equipment. Under those conditions, a super-expensive 60% efficient electrolyser or 90% efficient fuel cell become cost-effective since the higher efficiency means less equipment to be launched. And the extremely slow rate of operation of the equipment is not a hindrance because the amounts needed are small.
Totally different story for nation-wide industrial applications. Pumped water storage (pumping water uphill and storing it in a dam to generate electricity later) is already about 70%-80% efficient full-cycle, with some research processes claiming close to 90% efficient. The only place for chemical energy storage is if you don't have access to water, a hill, and a dam; or if you specifically need hydrogen or methane as a fuel. (It still has a place in mobile applications where you have to carry the energy around with you, like fuel for cars and planes. Alcohol-based fuels are nearly as good as gasoline or diesel and have much higher energy density than batteries. We just need to figure out a good way to convert all that energy locked up in plant matter into alcohol so they do all the conversion work for us, and we only have to deal with the efficiency losses for half the cycle. Unfortunately this line of research has been pretty much been subverted by the corn ethanol industry; corn is a terrible crop for producing ethanol.)
It is not a peering problem. Netflix provides streaming servers to ISPs for free so they can stream Netflix videos locally, and completely avoid the bandwidth bottleneck of going through their peering networks. Comcast, Verizon, et al refused to accept these free servers, to artificially degrade Netflix's quality specifically so they could extort money from Netflix.
It is a monopoly problem, plain and simple. If Comcast, Verizon, et al had had competition, this tactic would've caused them to hemorrhage customers who would've fled to an ISP which actually provided decent service. But because they have a monopoly, their customers have nowhere to flee, and this extortion tactic works
When they seized the assets of drug dealers, I did not speak out because I was not a drug dealer.
When they seized the assets of the drug users, I did not speak out because I was not a drug user.
When they seized boats from boat owners, I did not speak out because I was not a boat owner.
etc...
It was a violation of the Constitution in the 1980s when boat owners were complaining about losing their boats because (unbeknownst to them) a passenger had a joint in their pocket. But the public was more interested in hearing that a pothead had been caught and punished, before turning the channel so they could watch the season finale of Dallas. As with all things, government expands until it feels pushback from the public, and we're only just getting to that point.
It is an object lesson on why laws must be judged based on the principles they follow, not on the type of people that are being targeted. Why before they're convincted we should treat terrorist suspects as if they're innocent.
I've been an advocate for tablets and PDAs long before the iPad or iPhone came out. After using computers for 3 decades, it's pretty obvious what's happening. First the computer you used was the size of a desk. Then the size of a suitcase, Then the size of what we call a desktop computer. Then the size of a 2" laptop. Then the size of a 1" notebook. Now they're a 0.5" ultrabook.
Extrapolate and it's pretty obvious the PC you use for everyday computing tasks is going to become small enough to fit in a tablet, then in your phone, then in a watch, then in a ring. At first these smaller devices are considered toys (just as laptops were once considered toys unsuitable for real work), but eventually they'll become mainstream. The last "desktop" I bought for a business had a desktop-sized case; but inside was a half-height slim PSU, and micro-ATX motherboard which was mostly empty (a lot of green on the PCB) except CPU and memory and 3 expansion slots. It looked more like the inside of a laptop than it did a desktop, but they put it into a huge desktop case because that's what businesses expect to buy.
The main impediment to shrinking computers has been input and display. The keyboard input limit went away with touchscreens and wireless keyboards (and eventually voice recognition). The display size limit will probably go away with short-range wireless displays. Use your 5" phone screen every day. If you're going on vacation, pack a 11"-15" wireless screen (and wireless keyboard/mouse), pair it with your phone, and you've got your "laptop".