As someone who learned photography "the old way" (film, darkroom, nasty chemicals), there is something to what both of you have to say. My rate of "keepers" in the film days was about 1 shot per roll (1 in 36). My rate of "keepers" in digital is about 1 in 100. So clearly I'm not being as careful to compose the shot perfectly. And I'm definitely taking multiple shots on many occasions with the hope that one will be good.
But my rate of "keepers" per trip has skyrocketed. With film I'd be happy if I managed just 2-3 keepers from a trip. With digital I expect 5+ and am disappointed if I don't get 10. This is because I shoot a lot more pictures with digital than I ever shot with film. The cost of the professional film I used + developing meant I was paying $0.50-$1 per shot. That put a serious damper on photography. I think the most film I ever shot on a trip was 12 rolls (432 pictures) over 4 weeks, or an average of 15 shots a day. With digital I'll take 2000-3000 shots on a similar trip, or 70-110 shots a day.
FWIW, the rate of keepers seems to be consistent (between 1 in 50 to 1 in 100) among both amateurs and professionals. i.e. The pro photographers aren't getting those great shots by snapping a few pictures. National Geographic did an article on how they make articles. The photographer shot over 5000 photos (on film!) to arrive at the 8 photos used in the article.
Which approach is better? Hard to tell. Though truth be told, equipment actually doesn't matter. National Geographic photographers have intentionally gone on trips equipped with nothing more than an iPhone and still take stunning photos using nothing more than the default camera app.
Equipment does matter. Photography isn't just a matter of seeing something cool and snapping a picture of it. Wide-angles can give you unusual perspectives. Better equipment gives you access to different capabilities. Telephotos allow you to compress perspective, as well as pick out distant subjects without having to run all over. A wider aperture lens can blur the backgrounds more in portraits. Flash exposure compensation can allow you to use a flash, but make the picture look like it was shot without a flash. Zooming during the exposure followed by a flash can create an impressionistic effect which emphasizes the subject. etc.
I recently drove some European friends to San Francisco. Unfortunately we arrived right around dusk, and they weren't able to get a decent shot of themselves with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. I simply borrowed one of their DSLRs, mounted it on a tripod, put it in aperture priority mode, turned the flash on with FEC dialed to about -1.0, and told them to stand perfectly still for a few seconds. When you do that, the DSLR automatically adjusts the exposure time for the background, but exposes the foreground by modulating the flash. The result was a perfect image of the bridge and city lights in the background, with my friends perfectly exposed in the foreground.
That was GP's point - that better equipment gives you access to more options and different things you can do to take different and better pictures. While it's certainly possible to take good photos with a smartphone, the number of different types of good photos you can take is considerably less than with a DSLR and good lenses. OP misinterpreted GP's post as a film vs digital thing.
Yeah, the DC-10's fatal accident rate isn't appreciably different from other planes of its era. It's a safe aircraft. It only picked up the reputation of being unsafe because of a grouping of accidents (two of which were MD's fault because of the cargo door problem), which sealed public opinion against it. Kinda like Malaysia Airlines' reputation has taken a permanent hit after the enormous publicity surrounding the loss of two of its airliners within 4 months of each other.
(Note that when you get into incidents which occur this infrequently, the margin of error starts to become huge relative to the actual incident rate. So you can calculate the rate to as many decimal places as you want, but it's pretty meaningless. The above are statistically indistinguishable - (bad) luck played a larger role than the airworthiness of any aircraft type.)
Good plane, killed by the same stupid management that killed US Auto industry too. At least in the case of US auto they were actively aided and abetted by the unions. But McDonnel-Douglas was just self inflicted wounds. The third player Lockheed (L-1011 tristar) survived on military cargo plane contracts.
I had a brief internship at Lockheed where I worked under one of the managers who worked on the L-1011 project. According to him, both the DC-10 and L-1011 were good planes (though of course the L-1011 was better). The problem was that when both companies had decided to build the planes, they'd done their market analysis based on the assumption that their plane was the only one servicing the widebody-but-smaller-than-747 market. i.e. $x profit per plane * number of planes sold > design costs.
When both planes rolled out almost simultaneously, they split the market in half. Both manufacturer ended up selling about half as many planes as expected, and neither made much if any money. That's why Lockheed abandoned the commercial aircraft industry after a long and storied history - a decision by upper management that military contracts which were guaranteed to pay were safer than a commercial venture which went south not because of anything under their control, but because a competitor rolled out an almost-identical plane at the same time.
That said, what would really make it tough for them is a lack of opposition. Their tactics tend to be very self defeating when the larger powers don't overreact and get drawn into conflict with them.
Normally that'd be the case. Their policies cripple their own society while competing societies flourish, until they eventually consign themselves to irrelevance.
However, they're simply executing anyone who opposes them. For their tactic to be self-defeating, there has to be a competing society in the first place. People in the West tend to assume that the only way to "win" (in the democratic sense) is to convince people of the merits of your philosophy and get them to support you until you have a political majority. However, there's another way - simply exterminate those who oppose you, which is what ISIS is doing. Both strategies result in you having the support of the majority of the (remaining) population.
Not opposing them now is going to mean the overwhelming majority of survivors in the region will subscribe to their philosophy. Even if you defeat them later and install a democracy, they're just going to vote for something close to ISIS again because everyone who would've voted differently is dead.. This is one of those cases where failing to stop them quickly is going to result in decades if not a century or more of problems down the road.
Now, iPhone / Apple fans aren't going to care that Apple marketers took this liberty with the images - they are going to buy it regardless.
Only those who want to find fault with Apple, for whatever reason, give a rat's ass that Apple might engage as something so underhanded as to photoshop out the "bulge" to clarify their marketing point.
What IS more interesting is how much attention Android fans are giving to something which they claim no interest in owning.
Personally, I don't care about it. The only issue I have with it is that in the past, Apple fans have criticized my Android phone for having a protruding camera lens. Now when the iPhone has the same, suddenly it doesn't matter to them?
See, that's the difference. You think it's about the device. It's not. It's about consistency, honesty, and hypocrisy. Same reason people were upset Apple photoshopped images of the Galaxy Tab to make it more like an iPad in the German court documents.
The closest analogy I can think of is Xerox. For a time during the 1980s, people would tell you "xerox it" instead of photocopy it. In both Xerox's and Google's cases, the company's name was being used as a generic verb for something their product did, but not as a generic description for a similar product by another company. And in both cases, the companies retained their trademark.
While there's been much ballyhoo made about the error which caused the demise of Mars Climate Orbiter, at its root it wasn't an english-metric foulup. The real cause was that somebody didn't write down the units on a number, and somebody else assumed what the units were without verifying. If the original number had been written in kilonewton-seconds and been entered as newton-seconds, the end result would have been just as disastrous even though everything was in metric.
The first thing that was driven into me over and over my freshman year as an engineering student was to always write down the units. If you did all the math right on a homework problem and forgot to write down the units, it was marked wrong. Because it is wrong. Without units, the number is a dimensionless number (which have their own uses), and not the expected answer.
Back in the 1920s-1940s as cars became more popular, more people started dying in car crashes. In response, the auto manufacturers did the obvious thing and started making the cars stronger and stronger. And people kept dying.
It wasn't until the 1950s when the first controlled crash tests were done, that they discovered that the stronger car bodies were the worst possible thing you could do. They did nothing to reduce the kinetic energy of the occupants before impact. The car would hit, the strong body would stop moving almost instantly, and the occupants would keep flying forward at full speed until they hit the front of the car. This is what led to the crumple zones we have today - where the car body deliberately flexes and deforms to absorb crash energy, lessening the impact forces on the occupants.
I think phones are going to go the same way. Rather than build the bodies and faces stronger and stronger to try to make them survive drops, they're going to be replaced with flexible screens once those come down in price and become commonplace. Bend and flex to absorb the impact energy, not try to stiffly resist it until something shatters. Scratches can be handled by a disposable plastic protector (I go through about one a year, so it's not at all inconvenient).
Sure, Apple is all about marketing, and they loved to give that "2nd hardest material after diamond" pitch when introducing their watch
Actually it's not. Moissanite (silicon carbide) is harder. 9.5 on the Mohs scale, vs 9 for sapphire/corundum, 10 for diamond. Its structure is the same as diamond, except it alternates between silicon and carbon atoms, the silicon-carbon bond being nearly as strong as a carbon-carbon bond. I first ran across it (as an opaque conglomerate of smaller crystals) as guides for fishing rods - the hardness prevents braided lines from gouging a groove in the guide. There are a bunch of other materials harder than corundum, but I believe moissanite is the only transparent one.
Remember what your momma taught you - never trust a salesman.
I know Hollywood has brainwashed everyone into thinking it's illegal to distribute any kind of video or music online. But Frontline and PBS are publicly funded It's ok to watch it online.
Frequency comes in the fact that the driver makes one trip while Uber drivers make several. The more the driver is on the road the bigger chance of an accident.
There's no difference in frequency. If the Uber driver were not there, the person needing a ride would just get it some other way (i.e. from a cab). They'd still be on the road the same amount of time, and thus there's still the same bigger chance of an accident.
The way you're analyzing frequency, the only thing that's changed is that the accident risk which would've been concentrated upon a single Uber vehicle is now distributed among multiple cabs. The cumulative total risk is the same for both cases. In fact, if the cabs are roaming the streets looking for people waving them down the traditional way, they represent a higher accident risk than a service where you key in a request in your phone and the nearest available stationary car is notified to go pick you up. If you think about it, that's really all Uber and Lyft are - a way to increase the radius at which a cab driver can "see" people waving them down, so they don't have to constantly drive around empty while distractedly looking for people waving them down on the side of the street. The stuff about cab medallions and regulation are just operational minutiae that don't really add or detract from the increased productivity offered by this aspect of the service.
The fact that people aren't in the position to audit their books and look to see that they're in compliance with reasonable safety standards.
That's really California's fault though. When I took my car in for a bi-annual smog check in Massachusetts, they also tested a whole slew of things including my wipers and headlight aim. When I take my car in for a bi-annual smog check in California, all they do is check the emissions.
You cannot cite compliance with safety standards as a reason to ban a certain type of activity, while you are simultaneously ignoring enforcing those same standards in the general case. Well, actually you can, but that would be hypocritical. Which I guess is pretty normal when it comes to California law. There are numerous other nonsensical inconsistencies I've noticed over the years.
Screwdrivers can be used for many constructive commercial purposes. They can also be used to break into a house. Do you ban the sale and use of screwdrivers out of fear of house break-ins? Ideally the answer should be based on the net difference in productivity gains from constructive uses minus losses from break-ins. Unfortunately that's not what I'm seeing. Drones are being banned out of paranoia with no consideration for the positive ways they can contribute to the economy and our lives.
We've even got the default state wrong. Absent a clear Constitutional rationale for banning drones, they are (or at least should be) legal to use and operate. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
(Disclaimer: A friend needed overhead pictures of his rural commercial property at higher-than Google Maps resolution, and asked me to take the pictures. We had to rent a helicopter at $750/hr. Due to the cost, we had to rush and the pictures though usable weren't as ideal as we'd have liked. For the approx $1200 we paid, we could've bought our own drone and tried this as many times as we liked until the pictures were perfect. So the beneficial uses of drones are pretty damn obvious to me.)
Remember, you can't bypass thermodynamics. Water is the end-product of burning hydrogen. So any energy released when you convert hydrogen to water, is also energy you must put back to convert water back into hydrogen. You can't get something for nothing. Otherwise you create a perpetual motion machine where you burn hydrogen for energy, convert the water back into hydrogen, then burn the hydrogen again for more energy, repeat.
Electrolysis is just a way of putting that energy back into water to convert it into hydrogen. It's about 33% efficient, though I read that they've been able to get the efficiency up to 67% in the lab. In that respect, hydrogen generated by electrolysis is just a battery. You're storing the energy from the electricity by converting water to hydrogen. Then releasing that energy when you convert the hydrogen back into water.
am interpreting your first question as "Is the expense of electrolysis the main inhibitor of a hydrogen-fuel economy?" I believe the answer is "sorta, but not really." The cheapest way to get hydrogen is from natural gas. The problem is that the whole reason to move to a hydrogen economy is to become carbon-neutral. If you use natural gas mines, you defeated the purpose.
Not really. Natural gas is methane - CH4. It's about 35-85x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. If you're converting methane to hydrogen, then converting that to CO2, you're not reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but you're still helping reduce the greenhouse effect.
All this is of course contingent on what would have happened to the methane if you weren't using it as fuel. Methane is primarily a byproduct of oil drilling. Until recently energy prices were low enough that it wasn't cost-effective to capture it, so oil companies just burned it as it came up the wells (those fires you see on top of long poles at oil fields). So since it was going to be converted to CO2 anyway, converting it to hydrogen to be used in fuel cells is actually carbon neutral. If oil production drops enough that we need to drill for methane specifically to keep up production, then it starts being carbon positive.
Sure they are customers. They are paying with their personal data, which Google hords and then sells to third parties.
Well Google is paying for your patronage with their email service, where you hoard emails you use to contact third parties for added value and profit. Therefore Google is the customer and you are the vendor.
See what happens when you redefine "payment" to include things other than cash?
Lot of "owners" think they have such far reaching power over works of art, think they get to dictate what others may and may not do.
The power to dictate what others may or may not do with a work of art doesn't come from the copyright. It comes from the license/purchase agreement the buyer agrees to when purchasing the artwork. Artists are able to get people to agree to those terms because they have copyright and thus exclusive control over sale and distribution. But dictating how buyers use the artwork comes form the terms of the license/purchase agreement itself. The buyer always has the choice to reject the license/contract and not buy the artwork.
There was a case where an artist was commissioned to build a sculpture to fill a courtyard between some buildings. He ended up building a long metal wall which divided the courtyard diagonally. People who worked in the buildings complained that they had to walk around the sculpture, whereas before they could walk straight through the courtyard. So the owners made plans to cut a hole in the middle of the sculpture to allow people to walk through the middle again. The artist sued on the grounds that his contract stipulated the artwork couldn't be significantly modified without his consent. And the court agreed with him. (I can't find the sculpture on Google, so maybe someone else remembers and can provide a reference. I believe the owners ended up removing the sculpture, since their contract with the artist was basically take it or leave it.)
This is also why you have to be very careful when you license or contract something, rather than outright buying it. With a straight sale, the item is yours to do with as you please. Whereas a license or contract may contain terms limiting what you can do with the item even though you may consider it to be "yours". Read the fine print carefully before signing off.
And was very impressed. It was a new 4-drive system I'd put together to operate as both a NAS/fileserver and a host for virtual machines. I had originally intended to use RAID 5, but decided to give ZFS a try after reading about it. My initial config had it booting Ubuntu (maybe Mint? I don't recall), with ZFS for Linux installed as the main non-boot filesystem with one-drive redundancy. I had all sorts of problems with drives dropping out of the array, which I eventually tracked down to the motherboard shipping with bad SATA cables. ZFS handled this admirably. At first I didn't notice one of the drives had dropped, and continued using the system for about a day. When I got the drive working again, as I understand it RAID 5 would have had to do a complete array rebuild because of the changed files. ZFS noticed most of my old data was on the "new" drive and simply validated the checksums as still accurate, then noticed I had written new files and automatically created new redundancy files for them on the "new" drive. The entire "rebuild" only took a little over an hour instead of the 20+ hours I was expecting (how long it takes me to backup the data over eSATA).
If you're wondering why ZFS trusts the checksums on the "new" drive instead of reading the entire file, it will read the entire file and compare it to the checksum every time you access it. Once a month by default, it runs a "scrub" where it reads every file and verifies they haven't suffered bit rot and still match the checksums. Apparently the strategy after a dropped drive is to get the redundant filesystem up and running again ASAP, then do the file integrity scrub afterwards at its leisure. (You can manually force this check at any time with a zfs scrub.)
The other main advantage I'd say is that it's incredibly flexible when you're putting together redundant arrays. RAID 5 normally requires 3+ drives or partitions of the same size. ZFS lets you mix together drives, partitions, files (yes, one of your ZFS "drives" can be a file on another filesystem), other devices like SAS drives, etc. You can even put the 3+ "drives" needed for redundancy onto a single drive if you just want to play around with it for testing.
The only problem I ran into was with deduplication. Dedup was part of the reason I decided to try ZFS, and is one of the features frequently mentioned by ZFS advocates. While dedup does work, it is an incredible memory and performance hog. Writes to the ZFS array went from 65+ MB/s (bunch of mixed random files) down to about 8 MB/s with dedup turned on, and memory use climbed to where I ordered more RAM to bump the system up to 16 GB. In the end I decided the approx 2% disk space I was saving with dedup wasn't worth it and disabled it.
I eventually switch to FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD, which has a native port of ZFS) because it was annoying having to reinstall ZFS for Linux after an Ubuntu/Mint update, and I couldn't see myself doing that after every new release because I wanted features which were added to the core OS. (And if you're wondering, dedup performance is just as bad under FreeNAS.)
Netflix ran into the same issue with their app for Android. If their explanation is correct, then you can blame Hollywood. Supposedly the studios require a separate validation and certification on every different hardware platform. They want verification that the video stream has been tested to be secured via encryption so that it cannot be captured. Otherwise they withhold copyright permission to stream to that app. So the app producers have to create a whitelist of which hardware devices have been tested and certified, and only those devices are allowed to download and run the app.
"Federal funding for biomedical research has declined by more than 20 percent in the past decade."
Way to cherry pick the data. Bush was responsible for the biggest increase in federal R&D funding for science in 30 years (the biggest increase prior to that was under the elder Bush). The vast majority of that increase was for biomedical research. So it's not at all surprising their funding has dropped a bit in the last decade. Their funding was more than doubled (in nominal dollars) between 2000-2004. The federal government has been concentrating on shoring up other scientific fields in the decade since then.
While you're mostly correct, voice is more latency-sensitive than regular data. The voice channels used when you make a phone call are designed to minimize that latency, whereas generic data channels do not. Eventually data service will improve to the point this doesn't matter (arguably, LTE already meets that standard). But you can't just broadly say that voice is just data.
Speaking of which, why is this suddenly a big deal now that Apple has announced their new phone has VoLTE? Android handsets supporting it have been available for years (Galaxy S3, S4, S5, Note 3 among them). It's the carriers who have been dragging their feet enabling it. T-mobile is the only one who has openly embraced it. The other carriers have been tepidly testing it out. All it usually takes is a software update.
The problem is the U.S. uses MPG to measure fuel efficiency. MPG is not a measure of fuel efficiency. It's the inverse of fuel efficiency. Consequently, the bigger MPG gets, the less it matters. Consider a truck, SUV, sedan, econobox, hybrid, and research vehicle which have to drive 100 miles:
5 MPG truck = 20 gallons used
15 MPG SUV = 6.7 gallons used (10 MPG better, 13.3 gallons less than the truck)
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons used (10 MPG better, 2.7 gallons less than the small SUV)
35 MPG econobox = 2.9 gallons used (10 MPG better, 1.1 gallons less than the sedan)
50 MPG hybrid = 2 gallons used (15 MPG better, 1 gallon less than the econobox)
100 MPG research vehicle = 1 gallon used (50 MPG better, 1 gallon less than the hybrid
See how there's a non-linear relationship between the MPG improvement and gallons saved? That's because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Passenger sedans and econoboxes may gain the most MPG from fuel-saving technologies like hybrid engines, but that's just an illusion created by MPG being the inverse of fuel economy. They're actually the worst place to be using these technologies. If we were really serious about saving fuel, we'd be working on putting hybrids into trucks and SUVs first. Basically every SUV you can turn into a hybrid is worth 2 econoboxes turned into a hybrid.
All this becomes crystal clear if you look at the first figure - gallons used per 100 miles - which is the proper units for fuel economy:
Truck = 20 gal/100 mi
SUV = 6.7 gal/100 mi
Sedan = 4 gal/100 mi
Econobox = 2.9 gal/100 mi
Hybrid = 2 gal/100 mi
Research vehicle = 1 gal/100 mi
You can see how once you reach about sedan-sized, you rapidly enter the point of diminishing returns, where even a tech which cuts fuel use in half saves very little fuel per 100 miles traveled. (Yes there are a lot more cars on the road than trucks. But if you developed a tech which cut fuel use in half, why outfit a million sedans with it, when you could outfit just 200,000 trucks or 250,000 buses with it and achieve the same fuel savings? Yes eventually you want to outfit all vehicles with it. But you should start by outfitting the vehicles where it will give you the most bang for the buck - the vehicles which use the most fuel per year.)
The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km, and so doesn't have this misperception that's prevalent in the U.S. Consequently, they've been working on improving cargo truck efficiency, instead of hybridizing tiny passenger vehicles so marketers can advertise a meaningless big number for MPG.
The problem is the manpower to operate it just doesn't scale well to something as small as a ship. The reactor itself scales just fine and performed admirably (used about 163 pounds of uranium or a hair over one gallon, instead of 29 million gallons of fuel oil during its 10 years of operation). But the additional manpower and training needed to operate and maintain a nuclear reactor instead of a diesel engine killed its cost-effectiveness at transporting cargo. You're basically using the same amount of trained staff as needed to operate a reactor to power a small city (a few hundred MW), except you're only powering a ship (74 MW).
Maybe molten salt reactors or some other tech will be easy enough to maintain that nuclear could supplant diesel for cargo ships. But it isn't going to happen with light water reactors. Even the U.S. Navy sees this lower limit, and uses diesel or gas turbine engines in anything as small as a cruiser (the previous Virginia-class cruisers were nuclear, but the current Ticonderoga-class uses gas turbine engines).
Dedicated left turn lanes are incredibly important to traffic flow. The lack of left turn lanes was the most frustrating thing as a driver when I moved to Vancouver for a job. Most of the larger roads there were only two lanes wide and very few intersections had left turn lanes. So the road basically lost half its capacity any time someone had to make a left turn. I swear Vancouver's rush hour traffic would improve if they followed UPS and prohibited left turns, forcing drivers to instead make three right turns. (Traffic circles would work too, but tend to slow down long straightaways.)
What say the managers and officers running the BBC open up all their finances for the public to see. What? You don't want to? Well then you must be embezzling.
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But my rate of "keepers" per trip has skyrocketed. With film I'd be happy if I managed just 2-3 keepers from a trip. With digital I expect 5+ and am disappointed if I don't get 10. This is because I shoot a lot more pictures with digital than I ever shot with film. The cost of the professional film I used + developing meant I was paying $0.50-$1 per shot. That put a serious damper on photography. I think the most film I ever shot on a trip was 12 rolls (432 pictures) over 4 weeks, or an average of 15 shots a day. With digital I'll take 2000-3000 shots on a similar trip, or 70-110 shots a day.
FWIW, the rate of keepers seems to be consistent (between 1 in 50 to 1 in 100) among both amateurs and professionals. i.e. The pro photographers aren't getting those great shots by snapping a few pictures. National Geographic did an article on how they make articles. The photographer shot over 5000 photos (on film!) to arrive at the 8 photos used in the article.
Equipment does matter. Photography isn't just a matter of seeing something cool and snapping a picture of it. Wide-angles can give you unusual perspectives. Better equipment gives you access to different capabilities. Telephotos allow you to compress perspective, as well as pick out distant subjects without having to run all over. A wider aperture lens can blur the backgrounds more in portraits. Flash exposure compensation can allow you to use a flash, but make the picture look like it was shot without a flash. Zooming during the exposure followed by a flash can create an impressionistic effect which emphasizes the subject. etc.
I recently drove some European friends to San Francisco. Unfortunately we arrived right around dusk, and they weren't able to get a decent shot of themselves with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. I simply borrowed one of their DSLRs, mounted it on a tripod, put it in aperture priority mode, turned the flash on with FEC dialed to about -1.0, and told them to stand perfectly still for a few seconds. When you do that, the DSLR automatically adjusts the exposure time for the background, but exposes the foreground by modulating the flash. The result was a perfect image of the bridge and city lights in the background, with my friends perfectly exposed in the foreground.
That was GP's point - that better equipment gives you access to more options and different things you can do to take different and better pictures. While it's certainly possible to take good photos with a smartphone, the number of different types of good photos you can take is considerably less than with a DSLR and good lenses. OP misinterpreted GP's post as a film vs digital thing.
Yeah, the DC-10's fatal accident rate isn't appreciably different from other planes of its era. It's a safe aircraft. It only picked up the reputation of being unsafe because of a grouping of accidents (two of which were MD's fault because of the cargo door problem), which sealed public opinion against it. Kinda like Malaysia Airlines' reputation has taken a permanent hit after the enormous publicity surrounding the loss of two of its airliners within 4 months of each other.
A300 = 0.61 fatal accidents per million flights
727 = 0.5
737-100/200 = 0.61
747-100/200/300 = 1.02
DC-9 = 0.56
DC-10 = 0.65
L-1011 = 0.48
(Note that when you get into incidents which occur this infrequently, the margin of error starts to become huge relative to the actual incident rate. So you can calculate the rate to as many decimal places as you want, but it's pretty meaningless. The above are statistically indistinguishable - (bad) luck played a larger role than the airworthiness of any aircraft type.)
I had a brief internship at Lockheed where I worked under one of the managers who worked on the L-1011 project. According to him, both the DC-10 and L-1011 were good planes (though of course the L-1011 was better). The problem was that when both companies had decided to build the planes, they'd done their market analysis based on the assumption that their plane was the only one servicing the widebody-but-smaller-than-747 market. i.e. $x profit per plane * number of planes sold > design costs.
When both planes rolled out almost simultaneously, they split the market in half. Both manufacturer ended up selling about half as many planes as expected, and neither made much if any money. That's why Lockheed abandoned the commercial aircraft industry after a long and storied history - a decision by upper management that military contracts which were guaranteed to pay were safer than a commercial venture which went south not because of anything under their control, but because a competitor rolled out an almost-identical plane at the same time.
Normally that'd be the case. Their policies cripple their own society while competing societies flourish, until they eventually consign themselves to irrelevance.
However, they're simply executing anyone who opposes them. For their tactic to be self-defeating, there has to be a competing society in the first place. People in the West tend to assume that the only way to "win" (in the democratic sense) is to convince people of the merits of your philosophy and get them to support you until you have a political majority. However, there's another way - simply exterminate those who oppose you, which is what ISIS is doing. Both strategies result in you having the support of the majority of the (remaining) population.
Not opposing them now is going to mean the overwhelming majority of survivors in the region will subscribe to their philosophy. Even if you defeat them later and install a democracy, they're just going to vote for something close to ISIS again because everyone who would've voted differently is dead.. This is one of those cases where failing to stop them quickly is going to result in decades if not a century or more of problems down the road.
Personally, I don't care about it. The only issue I have with it is that in the past, Apple fans have criticized my Android phone for having a protruding camera lens. Now when the iPhone has the same, suddenly it doesn't matter to them?
See, that's the difference. You think it's about the device. It's not. It's about consistency, honesty, and hypocrisy. Same reason people were upset Apple photoshopped images of the Galaxy Tab to make it more like an iPad in the German court documents.
The closest analogy I can think of is Xerox. For a time during the 1980s, people would tell you "xerox it" instead of photocopy it. In both Xerox's and Google's cases, the company's name was being used as a generic verb for something their product did, but not as a generic description for a similar product by another company. And in both cases, the companies retained their trademark.
While there's been much ballyhoo made about the error which caused the demise of Mars Climate Orbiter, at its root it wasn't an english-metric foulup. The real cause was that somebody didn't write down the units on a number, and somebody else assumed what the units were without verifying. If the original number had been written in kilonewton-seconds and been entered as newton-seconds, the end result would have been just as disastrous even though everything was in metric.
The first thing that was driven into me over and over my freshman year as an engineering student was to always write down the units. If you did all the math right on a homework problem and forgot to write down the units, it was marked wrong. Because it is wrong. Without units, the number is a dimensionless number (which have their own uses), and not the expected answer.
Back in the 1920s-1940s as cars became more popular, more people started dying in car crashes. In response, the auto manufacturers did the obvious thing and started making the cars stronger and stronger. And people kept dying.
It wasn't until the 1950s when the first controlled crash tests were done, that they discovered that the stronger car bodies were the worst possible thing you could do. They did nothing to reduce the kinetic energy of the occupants before impact. The car would hit, the strong body would stop moving almost instantly, and the occupants would keep flying forward at full speed until they hit the front of the car. This is what led to the crumple zones we have today - where the car body deliberately flexes and deforms to absorb crash energy, lessening the impact forces on the occupants.
I think phones are going to go the same way. Rather than build the bodies and faces stronger and stronger to try to make them survive drops, they're going to be replaced with flexible screens once those come down in price and become commonplace. Bend and flex to absorb the impact energy, not try to stiffly resist it until something shatters. Scratches can be handled by a disposable plastic protector (I go through about one a year, so it's not at all inconvenient).
Actually it's not. Moissanite (silicon carbide) is harder. 9.5 on the Mohs scale, vs 9 for sapphire/corundum, 10 for diamond. Its structure is the same as diamond, except it alternates between silicon and carbon atoms, the silicon-carbon bond being nearly as strong as a carbon-carbon bond. I first ran across it (as an opaque conglomerate of smaller crystals) as guides for fishing rods - the hardness prevents braided lines from gouging a groove in the guide. There are a bunch of other materials harder than corundum, but I believe moissanite is the only transparent one.
Remember what your momma taught you - never trust a salesman.
I know Hollywood has brainwashed everyone into thinking it's illegal to distribute any kind of video or music online. But Frontline and PBS are publicly funded It's ok to watch it online.
There's no difference in frequency. If the Uber driver were not there, the person needing a ride would just get it some other way (i.e. from a cab). They'd still be on the road the same amount of time, and thus there's still the same bigger chance of an accident.
The way you're analyzing frequency, the only thing that's changed is that the accident risk which would've been concentrated upon a single Uber vehicle is now distributed among multiple cabs. The cumulative total risk is the same for both cases. In fact, if the cabs are roaming the streets looking for people waving them down the traditional way, they represent a higher accident risk than a service where you key in a request in your phone and the nearest available stationary car is notified to go pick you up. If you think about it, that's really all Uber and Lyft are - a way to increase the radius at which a cab driver can "see" people waving them down, so they don't have to constantly drive around empty while distractedly looking for people waving them down on the side of the street. The stuff about cab medallions and regulation are just operational minutiae that don't really add or detract from the increased productivity offered by this aspect of the service.
That's really California's fault though. When I took my car in for a bi-annual smog check in Massachusetts, they also tested a whole slew of things including my wipers and headlight aim. When I take my car in for a bi-annual smog check in California, all they do is check the emissions.
You cannot cite compliance with safety standards as a reason to ban a certain type of activity, while you are simultaneously ignoring enforcing those same standards in the general case. Well, actually you can, but that would be hypocritical. Which I guess is pretty normal when it comes to California law. There are numerous other nonsensical inconsistencies I've noticed over the years.
Screwdrivers can be used for many constructive commercial purposes. They can also be used to break into a house. Do you ban the sale and use of screwdrivers out of fear of house break-ins? Ideally the answer should be based on the net difference in productivity gains from constructive uses minus losses from break-ins. Unfortunately that's not what I'm seeing. Drones are being banned out of paranoia with no consideration for the positive ways they can contribute to the economy and our lives.
We've even got the default state wrong. Absent a clear Constitutional rationale for banning drones, they are (or at least should be) legal to use and operate. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
(Disclaimer: A friend needed overhead pictures of his rural commercial property at higher-than Google Maps resolution, and asked me to take the pictures. We had to rent a helicopter at $750/hr. Due to the cost, we had to rush and the pictures though usable weren't as ideal as we'd have liked. For the approx $1200 we paid, we could've bought our own drone and tried this as many times as we liked until the pictures were perfect. So the beneficial uses of drones are pretty damn obvious to me.)
Remember, you can't bypass thermodynamics. Water is the end-product of burning hydrogen. So any energy released when you convert hydrogen to water, is also energy you must put back to convert water back into hydrogen. You can't get something for nothing. Otherwise you create a perpetual motion machine where you burn hydrogen for energy, convert the water back into hydrogen, then burn the hydrogen again for more energy, repeat.
Electrolysis is just a way of putting that energy back into water to convert it into hydrogen. It's about 33% efficient, though I read that they've been able to get the efficiency up to 67% in the lab. In that respect, hydrogen generated by electrolysis is just a battery. You're storing the energy from the electricity by converting water to hydrogen. Then releasing that energy when you convert the hydrogen back into water.
Not really. Natural gas is methane - CH4. It's about 35-85x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. If you're converting methane to hydrogen, then converting that to CO2, you're not reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but you're still helping reduce the greenhouse effect.
All this is of course contingent on what would have happened to the methane if you weren't using it as fuel. Methane is primarily a byproduct of oil drilling. Until recently energy prices were low enough that it wasn't cost-effective to capture it, so oil companies just burned it as it came up the wells (those fires you see on top of long poles at oil fields). So since it was going to be converted to CO2 anyway, converting it to hydrogen to be used in fuel cells is actually carbon neutral. If oil production drops enough that we need to drill for methane specifically to keep up production, then it starts being carbon positive.
Well Google is paying for your patronage with their email service, where you hoard emails you use to contact third parties for added value and profit. Therefore Google is the customer and you are the vendor.
See what happens when you redefine "payment" to include things other than cash?
The power to dictate what others may or may not do with a work of art doesn't come from the copyright. It comes from the license/purchase agreement the buyer agrees to when purchasing the artwork. Artists are able to get people to agree to those terms because they have copyright and thus exclusive control over sale and distribution. But dictating how buyers use the artwork comes form the terms of the license/purchase agreement itself. The buyer always has the choice to reject the license/contract and not buy the artwork.
There was a case where an artist was commissioned to build a sculpture to fill a courtyard between some buildings. He ended up building a long metal wall which divided the courtyard diagonally. People who worked in the buildings complained that they had to walk around the sculpture, whereas before they could walk straight through the courtyard. So the owners made plans to cut a hole in the middle of the sculpture to allow people to walk through the middle again. The artist sued on the grounds that his contract stipulated the artwork couldn't be significantly modified without his consent. And the court agreed with him. (I can't find the sculpture on Google, so maybe someone else remembers and can provide a reference. I believe the owners ended up removing the sculpture, since their contract with the artist was basically take it or leave it.)
This is also why you have to be very careful when you license or contract something, rather than outright buying it. With a straight sale, the item is yours to do with as you please. Whereas a license or contract may contain terms limiting what you can do with the item even though you may consider it to be "yours". Read the fine print carefully before signing off.
And was very impressed. It was a new 4-drive system I'd put together to operate as both a NAS/fileserver and a host for virtual machines. I had originally intended to use RAID 5, but decided to give ZFS a try after reading about it. My initial config had it booting Ubuntu (maybe Mint? I don't recall), with ZFS for Linux installed as the main non-boot filesystem with one-drive redundancy. I had all sorts of problems with drives dropping out of the array, which I eventually tracked down to the motherboard shipping with bad SATA cables. ZFS handled this admirably. At first I didn't notice one of the drives had dropped, and continued using the system for about a day. When I got the drive working again, as I understand it RAID 5 would have had to do a complete array rebuild because of the changed files. ZFS noticed most of my old data was on the "new" drive and simply validated the checksums as still accurate, then noticed I had written new files and automatically created new redundancy files for them on the "new" drive. The entire "rebuild" only took a little over an hour instead of the 20+ hours I was expecting (how long it takes me to backup the data over eSATA).
If you're wondering why ZFS trusts the checksums on the "new" drive instead of reading the entire file, it will read the entire file and compare it to the checksum every time you access it. Once a month by default, it runs a "scrub" where it reads every file and verifies they haven't suffered bit rot and still match the checksums. Apparently the strategy after a dropped drive is to get the redundant filesystem up and running again ASAP, then do the file integrity scrub afterwards at its leisure. (You can manually force this check at any time with a zfs scrub.)
The other main advantage I'd say is that it's incredibly flexible when you're putting together redundant arrays. RAID 5 normally requires 3+ drives or partitions of the same size. ZFS lets you mix together drives, partitions, files (yes, one of your ZFS "drives" can be a file on another filesystem), other devices like SAS drives, etc. You can even put the 3+ "drives" needed for redundancy onto a single drive if you just want to play around with it for testing.
The only problem I ran into was with deduplication. Dedup was part of the reason I decided to try ZFS, and is one of the features frequently mentioned by ZFS advocates. While dedup does work, it is an incredible memory and performance hog. Writes to the ZFS array went from 65+ MB/s (bunch of mixed random files) down to about 8 MB/s with dedup turned on, and memory use climbed to where I ordered more RAM to bump the system up to 16 GB. In the end I decided the approx 2% disk space I was saving with dedup wasn't worth it and disabled it.
I eventually switch to FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD, which has a native port of ZFS) because it was annoying having to reinstall ZFS for Linux after an Ubuntu/Mint update, and I couldn't see myself doing that after every new release because I wanted features which were added to the core OS. (And if you're wondering, dedup performance is just as bad under FreeNAS.)
Netflix ran into the same issue with their app for Android. If their explanation is correct, then you can blame Hollywood. Supposedly the studios require a separate validation and certification on every different hardware platform. They want verification that the video stream has been tested to be secured via encryption so that it cannot be captured. Otherwise they withhold copyright permission to stream to that app. So the app producers have to create a whitelist of which hardware devices have been tested and certified, and only those devices are allowed to download and run the app.
Way to cherry pick the data. Bush was responsible for the biggest increase in federal R&D funding for science in 30 years (the biggest increase prior to that was under the elder Bush). The vast majority of that increase was for biomedical research. So it's not at all surprising their funding has dropped a bit in the last decade. Their funding was more than doubled (in nominal dollars) between 2000-2004. The federal government has been concentrating on shoring up other scientific fields in the decade since then.
While you're mostly correct, voice is more latency-sensitive than regular data. The voice channels used when you make a phone call are designed to minimize that latency, whereas generic data channels do not. Eventually data service will improve to the point this doesn't matter (arguably, LTE already meets that standard). But you can't just broadly say that voice is just data.
Speaking of which, why is this suddenly a big deal now that Apple has announced their new phone has VoLTE? Android handsets supporting it have been available for years (Galaxy S3, S4, S5, Note 3 among them). It's the carriers who have been dragging their feet enabling it. T-mobile is the only one who has openly embraced it. The other carriers have been tepidly testing it out. All it usually takes is a software update.
The problem is the U.S. uses MPG to measure fuel efficiency. MPG is not a measure of fuel efficiency. It's the inverse of fuel efficiency. Consequently, the bigger MPG gets, the less it matters. Consider a truck, SUV, sedan, econobox, hybrid, and research vehicle which have to drive 100 miles:
5 MPG truck = 20 gallons used
15 MPG SUV = 6.7 gallons used (10 MPG better, 13.3 gallons less than the truck)
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons used (10 MPG better, 2.7 gallons less than the small SUV)
35 MPG econobox = 2.9 gallons used (10 MPG better, 1.1 gallons less than the sedan)
50 MPG hybrid = 2 gallons used (15 MPG better, 1 gallon less than the econobox)
100 MPG research vehicle = 1 gallon used (50 MPG better, 1 gallon less than the hybrid
See how there's a non-linear relationship between the MPG improvement and gallons saved? That's because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Passenger sedans and econoboxes may gain the most MPG from fuel-saving technologies like hybrid engines, but that's just an illusion created by MPG being the inverse of fuel economy. They're actually the worst place to be using these technologies. If we were really serious about saving fuel, we'd be working on putting hybrids into trucks and SUVs first. Basically every SUV you can turn into a hybrid is worth 2 econoboxes turned into a hybrid.
All this becomes crystal clear if you look at the first figure - gallons used per 100 miles - which is the proper units for fuel economy:
Truck = 20 gal/100 mi
SUV = 6.7 gal/100 mi
Sedan = 4 gal/100 mi
Econobox = 2.9 gal/100 mi
Hybrid = 2 gal/100 mi
Research vehicle = 1 gal/100 mi
You can see how once you reach about sedan-sized, you rapidly enter the point of diminishing returns, where even a tech which cuts fuel use in half saves very little fuel per 100 miles traveled. (Yes there are a lot more cars on the road than trucks. But if you developed a tech which cut fuel use in half, why outfit a million sedans with it, when you could outfit just 200,000 trucks or 250,000 buses with it and achieve the same fuel savings? Yes eventually you want to outfit all vehicles with it. But you should start by outfitting the vehicles where it will give you the most bang for the buck - the vehicles which use the most fuel per year.)
The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km, and so doesn't have this misperception that's prevalent in the U.S. Consequently, they've been working on improving cargo truck efficiency, instead of hybridizing tiny passenger vehicles so marketers can advertise a meaningless big number for MPG.
Nuclear power has already been tried on a merchant ship.
The problem is the manpower to operate it just doesn't scale well to something as small as a ship. The reactor itself scales just fine and performed admirably (used about 163 pounds of uranium or a hair over one gallon, instead of 29 million gallons of fuel oil during its 10 years of operation). But the additional manpower and training needed to operate and maintain a nuclear reactor instead of a diesel engine killed its cost-effectiveness at transporting cargo. You're basically using the same amount of trained staff as needed to operate a reactor to power a small city (a few hundred MW), except you're only powering a ship (74 MW).
Maybe molten salt reactors or some other tech will be easy enough to maintain that nuclear could supplant diesel for cargo ships. But it isn't going to happen with light water reactors. Even the U.S. Navy sees this lower limit, and uses diesel or gas turbine engines in anything as small as a cruiser (the previous Virginia-class cruisers were nuclear, but the current Ticonderoga-class uses gas turbine engines).
Dedicated left turn lanes are incredibly important to traffic flow. The lack of left turn lanes was the most frustrating thing as a driver when I moved to Vancouver for a job. Most of the larger roads there were only two lanes wide and very few intersections had left turn lanes. So the road basically lost half its capacity any time someone had to make a left turn. I swear Vancouver's rush hour traffic would improve if they followed UPS and prohibited left turns, forcing drivers to instead make three right turns. (Traffic circles would work too, but tend to slow down long straightaways.)
What say the managers and officers running the BBC open up all their finances for the public to see. What? You don't want to? Well then you must be embezzling.