As the AC said, this sounds like a turbine-electric motor, much like the diesel-electric commonly used in trains. If you look at the power to weight ratio for a train, it ends up being about equivalent to an SUV with a 5 hp engine. All the electric motor (and batteries) need to do is store enough power to quickly accelerate the truck. Once it's at highway speed, the turbine alone can provide sufficient power to keep it rolling; no batteries needed. (In the case of an electric train, no batteries are needed because you can take a long time getting up to speed. All the electric motor does is allow a single motor to span the huge range between slow high torque to fast speed without requiring a transmission as big as the locomotive.
While true, trucks also allow point delivery to a specific business, instead of to a railyard. Basically, the bigger trade routes (e.g. between New York and and Chicago) should be serviced by rail, with trucks picking up the products from the local railyard to deliver it to the final destination. Most of the engineering work to make this happen has already been done - truck-sized containers are loaded onto cargo ships for overseas transport.
The overhead of loading/unloading each container (not the contents) does cause some counter-intuitive results. e.g. Driving the container entirely by truck from Las Vegas to Los Angeles may be more cost-effective than loading everything on a train car, then unloading. But at longer distances, the lower cost of rail will override the extra cost of loading/unloading (as long as the trucks aren't being subsidized by automobile fuel taxes).
As for why we don't just switch to rail immediately, unfortunately the creation of the Interstate Highway System and its uneven fuel taxes led to the creation of a multi-hundred billion dollar trucking industry. You cannot simply correct the fuel taxes. Doing so would put millions of truckers out of work and render several trillion dollars of their infrastructure obsolete overnight. Any change needs to be done slowly and gradually, to give the truckers time to recoup their investment in equipment, and time to retrain for a different job.
However there's no reason to suppose that any given equilibrium arising from any given set of constraints and feedbacks will be optimal for whatever outcome you're looking for, be it quality of life, GDP per capita, or whatever. The "laissez faire capitalism is implied by self-organisation" argument tends to assume without evidence that the best equilibrium is the one you fall into with the set of feedbacks and constraints that the proponent's flavour of laissez faire capitalism favours. However it's important to remember that there's no reason to assume that the equilibrium produced by the current set of rules is optimal, either.
That's actually one of the strengths of laissez faire capitalism. It aggressively seeks out to find new equilibria, increasing the chances you'll find one that's more optimal for the outcome you're looking for. Overregulated and completely managed economies are limited by the imagination and biases of the regulators, and tend to fall behind technologically and economically after a few decades for this reason.
The reality is that there is no one single best formula. In one case a certain blend of business operations work best. In another case, a different blend works best. While regulation definitely has a place in warding us away from known pitfalls, too much regulation can stifle exploration and experimentation with different blends, potentially cutting off access to a new equilibrium which could better achieve the very outcomes the regulators think they're promoting by prohibiting that experimentation. (And this is before we even try to get into deciding what singular set of outcomes best defines what we as a society want to achieve - something those who believe man is a free-willed spirit and not a cog in a machine would find abhorrent.)
You broke the law because if you'd told the courts you'd be breaking an NDA with the company?
They didn't break the law. TFS is written in a way that makes the reader presuppose the use of these devices is illegal without a warrant. From TFA:
The government has long asserted that it doesn't need to obtain a probable-cause warrant to use the devices because they don't collect the content of phone calls and text messages but rather operate like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information.
They did not want to obtain a search warrant to enter the apartment âoebecause they did not want to reveal information [to a judge] about the technology they used to track the cell phone signal, the appellate judges note.
"[Wh]en police use invasive surveillance equipment to surreptitiously sweep up information about the locations and communications of large numbers of people, court oversight and public debate are essential,â the [ACLU] noted in its post.
So the current state of affairs is that there is no law (yet) concerning use of these devices, and some in the government are arguing that no law is needed. There being no law, law enforcement did not want to rock the boat by revealing the devices to the courts so that there might be a new law made (either through legislation or court precedent). The ACLU is arguing that there should be a law prohibiting their use without a warrant.
TFS is written as if the ACLU stance is the current state of affairs, and law enforcement sought to work around it. In fact it's the other way around. Use of these devices is currently legal, and law enforcement sought to keep it that way by not revealing them to the courts so that no ruling on their use would be made. The ACLU is trying to argue for a law requiring a warrant to use these devices.
That is another failure with under-regulated markets. In those markets, people's time is expected to be worthless. Every person is expected to spend lots of time reading up on all sorts of stuff that is irrelevant in a well-regulated market.
But that is how markets improve. Someone reading up on all that stuff finds something everyone else thought was irrelevant but turns out to make a difference, regardless of whether the market is well-regulated or unregulated. Just because you want to be lazy and have someone else (whether a government regulator or an investment broker) do all that reading for you doesn't make this aspect of the market go away.
New economic growth comes from people trying new things, go figure. If everyone divorces themselves from that, the market stops growing.
At some point, automakers settled on a standard stereo plug for their cars, meaning you could install any aftermarket stereo into any car. The same thing needs to happen to car nav and entertainment systems. A standard plug should allow access to the car's GPS antenna, radio antennas, power, speakers, climate control, rear back-up camera, etc. Then you can plug in whatever you want to control these functions, be it an iPad, an Android tablet, a Garmin tablet, or some new doohickey which hasn't been invented yet. For bonus points they can have the car transmit various sensor readings through the plug, allowing the device to display things like fuel consumption, engine maintenance logs, hybrid battery charge state, etc.
It has nothing to do with the moisture. It has to do with pressure. A dam represents a boundary layer between high pressure (behind the dam) and low pressure (air in front of the dam. An intact dam's structure distributes those stresses evenly throughout its structure, and transfers them into the mountains/hills at the sides of the dam. A crack shifts the stresses which would've been borne by the cracked section to the uncracked sections, and particularly at the corners of the cracks. The high stresses at the corners cause the crack to grow. Eventually the crack grows large enough that the stresses are more than the uncracked section can withstand, and the dam fails.
That's what the engineer noticed. The dam was bulging because the uncracked section was holding back so much more stress than its design load that it physically deformed. 65 feet is a damn big crack (no pun intended). That engineer deserves a ticker tape parade in his honor.
You joke, but the worst power generation-related accident in history was the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. About 30x more deaths than estimated by the UN and WHO to have been caused by Chernobyl.
I don't mean to say coal and oil are safer - they kill far more when used as intended. But the fact that the fuel needs to be delivered to a combustion chamber means you can usually cut off the energy source, limiting the scope of a single accident. That's not the case with hydro - once the water gets moving, there's pretty much nothing anything man-made can do to stop it. All that energy is gonna be released. Likewise, nuclear rates high in risk because the energy density of the fuel is so high - a million times higher than petroleum. Solar and wind would appear to be low-risk, but that's an illusion generated by their low energy density. When you normalize for how many solar panels or wind turbines need to be installed and maintained to generate 1 GWh of electricity, they end up killing more people than nuclear.
Everything has risk. The question isn't how much risk there is per disaster. It's how much risk there is per unit of energy generated.
The problem is that any projection of a map onto a flat surface is distorted. There are no un-distorted maps. A map contains serveral classes of important data on a map, and projections mainly affect distances, areas and angles. It is mathematically impossible to have a plane projection of the Earth's surface which correctly displays distances, but you can have a map that preserves angles and a map that preserves areas. You can't have a preservation of both area and angle in the same map though. But both angle-preserving and area-preserving maps are absolutely bad at displaying distances, so most projections in use today try to compromise between areas and angles and still have not too large distortions of distances.
While that's true for maps of large areas of the Earth, the distortions become near-zero for small swaths like the UK. All you need to do is pick a viewpoint directly overhead and at a sufficient distance, which is what the Scottish Independence group is advocating.
This whole thing probably stems from the geometry of geostationary weather satellites. To always generate the same viewpoint from orbit, the satellites have to be located over the equator at 35,786 km in altitude. That means countries further north in latitude are distorted in the weather photos. From the 1960s to 1990s, this was just the way it was. You couldn't do anything about it. So everyone who lived in extreme northern (or southern) latitudes had to live with distorted satellite weather photos of their country.
Starting around the mid 1990s, computers became fast enough to correct this distortion in photos in a reasonable amount of time. You could now generate undistorted weather maps of reasonably small countries like the UK. But over the previous 3 decades, people had gotten used to the distorted view from geostationary satellites. When you see a flat undistorted map of your country with weather on it, you think "Oh, that's just a graphic someone drew." When you see a distorted map of your country with weather on it, you think "Oh, that's satellite imagery."
People innately trust satellite imagery more. It's a picture, taken from space. No manipulation, no airburshing (photoshopping for those of you too young to know what airbrushing is), right? Of course not; you can manipulate satellite photos as easily as you can manipulate photos from your phone camera. But that's not people's instinctive reaction. It's a satellite picture, so that must be what the weather really looks like from space. I think that's what the BBC was trying to go for with their perspective-foreshortened view of the UK for their weather forecasts. It gives it a greater sense of authenticity.
Eventually, as people lose this pro-satellite viewpoint bias, the overhead viewpoint maps are going to become the norm. But for the time being, it's a quick and silent way to tell the viewer "this is satellite imagery" vs "this is radar or an animated graphic."
This is much. much older than that. Once upon a time, probably soon after paper and writing were invented, someone invented the bulletin board. Initially people used it to post messages. Then someone posted an advertisement for their apple wagon just up the street. Then someone else changed the location in the ad to the location of their apple wagon just down the street.
This being so, it seems only logical to employ TEPCO management as decommisioning operators. It's not like they were good for whatever their existing job descriptions are, and we can safely value their radiation exposure as unimportant, or even a benefit.
Actually I'm a pro-nuclear advocate, and I think this idea seriously would be helpful. The scale of the accident could have been greatly diminished to around an INES level 4 if the manager at Fukushima had decided to dump seawater into the reactor sooner. Cooling off the zirconium cladding around the fuel rods with seawater before they melted would've contained the mess they're currently dealing with. All these radionuclides from the fuel wouldn't have been released into the reactor core and subsequently the environment.
The only reason they didn't dump in seawater until it was too late was because they were hoping to still save the reactor for future commercial use. Once you dump in salt water, the reactor is unsafe to operate and dead for commercial purposes. The manager didn't want to be the guy responsible for killing a $1 billion dollar reactor, and his stalling unwittingly precipitated a $15 billion disaster. Managers at other nuclear reactors have to be taught that this is what's at stake. The opportunity cost is not $1 billion for killing the reactor vs. nothing if you can save it. It's $1 billion for killing the reactor vs. $15 billion if you can't save it.
The $1 billion figure is enough to overwhelm anyone trying to make a rational decision, so the people who may have to make that very decision in the future need to be taught that there's something even bigger at stake. And what better way to teach them than putting them on the front line of the cleanup.
Here's a random cross section from the site linked to in TFA. Lead concentrations average about 25-30 pmol/kg. Which if I've done my math right (1 kg of water = about 55 moles of H2O) is about 0.5 parts per trillion.
While I don't disagree with the notion that leaded gasoline is a major contributor to lead in the environment, I was a little curious how much naturally-occuring lead there is.
Uranium has a 4.5 billion year half-life, and the end-product of its decay chain is lead. Since the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, you should expect to find about equal amounts of uranium and lead in the environment overall (I'm not an expert on how minute quantities of these elements act in seawater). The trace uranium in seawater is about 3.33 parts per billion.
According to TFA (which didn't give exact numbers), "the lead concentrations are roughly equivalent to what youâ(TM)d get if you dissolved a small spoonful of frozen orange juice in 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools". An Olympic-sized swimming pool is about 2.5 million liters. According to Google, 1 teaspoon in 2.5 million liters is about 2 parts per billion.
So the amounts of lead they're detecting are about 0.01 parts per billion, or two orders of magnitude less than the amount of naturally-ocurring uranium in seawater. The charts linked in TFA bear this out. Clicking through random charts, lead concentrations are around 25 pmol/kg, while uranium concentrations are around 3 nmol/kg (3000 pmol/kg).
So (1) for whatever reason uranium dissolves in seawater much more readily than lead, and (2) the amounts of lead they're detecting are minuscule even by "trace elements" standards.
Wearing a short skirt is something that you do to yourself
Filming is what you do to other people
Going out to a public location is something you do to yourself
If you want privacy, request a private room or booth. Or talk to the bar owner about making a "no videos/photos policy" at his establishment. Expecting other members of the public in an area not belonging to you to to change their behavior to conform to your wishes is selfish and asinine.
This whole thing is really simple:
If you're in a private location, people are not allowed to film you without your consent.
If you're in a public location, anyone is free to record you whether you like it or not.
If you're in a semi-public location (a privately owned location open to the public, like a bar), the policy is set by the owner. As a visitor, you do not get to act as if you have a right to privacy there just because you want there to be
Obligatory link for those who don't know what the phrase means. I used Snopes instead of Wikipedia because they actually have a video snippet of the MASH episode in.
Most people have a very distorted view of how close the Earth and Moon are relative to their size. A picture of the two to scale makes it pretty obvious that the Moon can't really intercept or attract many objects which might hit the Earth.
The proliferation of unnecessary apps on tablets and phones. There are maybe 2-3 dozen businesses and sites I interact with enough each year to warrant their own app. The rest I interact with infrequently or they're not a high enough priority (e.g. Slashdot) that I need to be constantly updated to their latest offering and features (e.g. Beta).
The web browser model works really well for these low-priority interactions. I install an app on my computer for the important stuff (financial management, photo editing, code development, word processor, etc). But for all the not-so-important stuff, I install one app - a web browser. The browser then lets me make bookmarks to all those different low-priority sites.
But in their zeal to monetize and get a hold of your data, most companies have crippled or entirely eschewed the mobile browsing experience in favor of their own custom app. Many sites detect my browser is on Android and redirect me to crippled or dysfunctional mobile versions of their sites, when my phone is more than capable of using their full site. The result is whereas I have about 40 programs installed on my laptop and about a thousand bookmarks, I have over 250 apps installed on my phone and only a dozen bookmarks. Management of those apps is starting to become unwieldy as every day a half dozen of them report that they need to be updated.
I yearn for the days when all the less important stuff was just a bookmark in my browser. The browser was like a hub, and the connections between me and these less-important sites were like spokes. The hub-spoke model vastly decreased the number of spokes at my end. But by favoring or requiring dedicated apps in mobile space, these companies/sites have increased my workload and overhead by forcing me to maintain a lot more direct routes to their business/site.
Yup. This stuff wasn't required when I was in high school, and I only picked it up on my own because I'm good at math. After working as general manager for a company and talking with most of the employees on an individual basis during lunch about their personal finances, it became pretty clear this desperately needs to be part of the high school curriculum. As best as I could tell, about half the employees never bothered tracking their expenses or balancing a checkbook. They'd just deposit their paycheck, then spend money until the ATM told them they had no more money. If this happened and they still had a few days til their next paycheck, they'd do whatever they could (beg, borrow, buy on credit) to bridge the gap.
Until I learned this, it was incomprehensible to me why anybody would take a payday loan except during an emergency. Now it makes perfect sense. We have an entire industry collecting unconscionable interest by taking advantage of the financial ignorance of a substantial portion of the population. If you're opposed to teaching this stuff because there could be some ideological overtones taught, you're condemning these people to perpetual poverty in the name of political neutrality. The vast majority of it is just straight applied math.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is its own separate Department with its own separate budget. It does not fall into Social Security, which too is a separate Agency with a separate budget. Funding for the two do not mix as you're implying.
Each stolen phone that they make the victim pay to replace or make them eat the remaining contract with no phone. that gets hooked back up to their network should gain them a fine and jail time for participating in the laundering of stolen goods.
That's exactly what's going on -- they are dragging ass because they profit, knowingly and deliberately, from participating in this cycle
Your reasoning seems to be based on tracking a single phone and limiting the scope of the consequences of its theft only to the original owner. If you look at it from the perspective of the entire population (the carrier's perspective), I think you'll quickly realize why you're wrong:
- A phone is stolen. The original owner has to buy a new phone. The thief does not have to buy a new phone.
Net sales increase to the carrier? One.
- No phone is stolen. The original owner keeps his old phone. The would-be thief buys a new phone instead.
Net sales increase to the carrier? One.
- A phone is stolen and remotely bricked. The original owner has to buy a new phone. The thief buys a new phone instead.
Net sales increase to the carrier? Two.
Phone theft does not increase sales of new phones for the carrier above a baseline where there is no theft. All it does is reassign who has to pay for the new phone. The victim pays for two phones, instead of the would-be victim paying for one and the would-be thief paying for the other.
Bricking phones OTOH does exactly what you're deriding, and makes more money for the carrier. The victim pays twice, and thief pays once.
This isn't quite the same net neutrality issue here. Netflix isn't paying to stop service degradation or increase priority of their traffic -- they're basically just switching service providers and paying Comcast to host their servers. It may even end up cheaper for Netflix.
It is the same thing. You're just being confused because of where the zero level lies. The net effect is the same.
In a competitive environment, Netflix has to do nothing to get Comcast to host their servers on Comcast's local network. Comcast would be tripping over themselves to host the servers so their customers would not flee to a competitor which offered better Netflix service. Heck, Comcast would be paying Netflix to provide them with a local copy of their streamed videos.
So in both cases, the net effect is that Comcast makes more money than it should, Netflix pays more money than it should.
Actually either approach would work. We could treat Internet access as a utility, with pricing being regulated by a government body. Or we could open it up to competition and allow any ISP to compete for your business (so that an ISP slowing down Netflix would be shooting themselves in the foot). The latter is the way most of the rest of world does it.
Instead what we have is some bastardized combination of the worst of both worlds. We have the government granting service monopolies instead of looking out for the best interest of the customers. And we have the companies operating under the self-interest which drives capitalism, but unhindered by competition which is what normally lowers prices and forces improvements.
It's really simple. The only way to install a Metro app is through Microsoft's Store. There are exceptions for developers and corporate in-house software. But for the traditional business model where Party A makes the software, Party B buys it and uses it, you can only do it by selling the software in the Store.
If you sell through the Store, Microsoft takes a 30% cut of all revenue.
That's what this is all about. Microsoft wants 30% of Adobe's, Intuit's, SAP's, Oracle's, etc's revenue. Their plan to make this happen is to get all users (including corporate ones) to use Metro apps. If the users accept it, then the developers will be forced to make Metro apps and sell it through the Store. And Microsoft gets a 30% cut. Of everything.
That's why they're forcing Metro down users' throats. That's why the "Start" button isn't really a start button but dumps you straight into Metro - it's a one-button access to where the Store is. That's why your Windows Server pushes Metro apps. It's all to get you to buy and use Metro apps, so developers will start selling Metro apps.
(And yes I realize this is Apple's walled garden model with iOS. I don't really have as much problem with it there because iOS devices are generally not productivity devices so most apps are priced $0 to $10. Not $100 to over $1000 like many Windows productivity apps. And no this is not Google's model. Yes Google takes a 30% cut of apps sold in the Play store, but they don't restrict where you get your apps from. It's easiest to get them from the Play store, but you can get them from any other store, or side-load them via microSD or USB or even directly from a website. Basically the current state of Windows software is like the Android environment where an optional store charges 30%, and Microsoft is trying to transition it to be like the iOS environment where the only store charges 30%.)
A $60 game (which is way too expensive to begin with)
Eh, not really. A game cartridge for the Atari 2600 was about $25 in 1981. Adjusting for inflation, that works out to $64.33 in 2014 dollars. Game prices have been remarkably consistent over the years. Don't make the mistake of comparing game prices you saw as a kid with modern prices. You always need to adjust for inflation.
Also the Atari games were usually made by a couple of programmers with a few months of work (stuff you can buy for $0.99 on your phone now). Your 2014 game has a production crew as big as a movie's and takes 1-2 years of development. You're getting a helluva lot more gaming value for your $60 than I got as a kid.
Slashdot Mirror
As the AC said, this sounds like a turbine-electric motor, much like the diesel-electric commonly used in trains. If you look at the power to weight ratio for a train, it ends up being about equivalent to an SUV with a 5 hp engine. All the electric motor (and batteries) need to do is store enough power to quickly accelerate the truck. Once it's at highway speed, the turbine alone can provide sufficient power to keep it rolling; no batteries needed. (In the case of an electric train, no batteries are needed because you can take a long time getting up to speed. All the electric motor does is allow a single motor to span the huge range between slow high torque to fast speed without requiring a transmission as big as the locomotive.
While true, trucks also allow point delivery to a specific business, instead of to a railyard. Basically, the bigger trade routes (e.g. between New York and and Chicago) should be serviced by rail, with trucks picking up the products from the local railyard to deliver it to the final destination. Most of the engineering work to make this happen has already been done - truck-sized containers are loaded onto cargo ships for overseas transport.
The overhead of loading/unloading each container (not the contents) does cause some counter-intuitive results. e.g. Driving the container entirely by truck from Las Vegas to Los Angeles may be more cost-effective than loading everything on a train car, then unloading. But at longer distances, the lower cost of rail will override the extra cost of loading/unloading (as long as the trucks aren't being subsidized by automobile fuel taxes).
As for why we don't just switch to rail immediately, unfortunately the creation of the Interstate Highway System and its uneven fuel taxes led to the creation of a multi-hundred billion dollar trucking industry. You cannot simply correct the fuel taxes. Doing so would put millions of truckers out of work and render several trillion dollars of their infrastructure obsolete overnight. Any change needs to be done slowly and gradually, to give the truckers time to recoup their investment in equipment, and time to retrain for a different job.
That's actually one of the strengths of laissez faire capitalism. It aggressively seeks out to find new equilibria, increasing the chances you'll find one that's more optimal for the outcome you're looking for. Overregulated and completely managed economies are limited by the imagination and biases of the regulators, and tend to fall behind technologically and economically after a few decades for this reason.
The reality is that there is no one single best formula. In one case a certain blend of business operations work best. In another case, a different blend works best. While regulation definitely has a place in warding us away from known pitfalls, too much regulation can stifle exploration and experimentation with different blends, potentially cutting off access to a new equilibrium which could better achieve the very outcomes the regulators think they're promoting by prohibiting that experimentation. (And this is before we even try to get into deciding what singular set of outcomes best defines what we as a society want to achieve - something those who believe man is a free-willed spirit and not a cog in a machine would find abhorrent.)
They didn't break the law. TFS is written in a way that makes the reader presuppose the use of these devices is illegal without a warrant. From TFA:
So the current state of affairs is that there is no law (yet) concerning use of these devices, and some in the government are arguing that no law is needed. There being no law, law enforcement did not want to rock the boat by revealing the devices to the courts so that there might be a new law made (either through legislation or court precedent). The ACLU is arguing that there should be a law prohibiting their use without a warrant.
TFS is written as if the ACLU stance is the current state of affairs, and law enforcement sought to work around it. In fact it's the other way around. Use of these devices is currently legal, and law enforcement sought to keep it that way by not revealing them to the courts so that no ruling on their use would be made. The ACLU is trying to argue for a law requiring a warrant to use these devices.
But that is how markets improve. Someone reading up on all that stuff finds something everyone else thought was irrelevant but turns out to make a difference, regardless of whether the market is well-regulated or unregulated. Just because you want to be lazy and have someone else (whether a government regulator or an investment broker) do all that reading for you doesn't make this aspect of the market go away.
New economic growth comes from people trying new things, go figure. If everyone divorces themselves from that, the market stops growing.
At some point, automakers settled on a standard stereo plug for their cars, meaning you could install any aftermarket stereo into any car. The same thing needs to happen to car nav and entertainment systems. A standard plug should allow access to the car's GPS antenna, radio antennas, power, speakers, climate control, rear back-up camera, etc. Then you can plug in whatever you want to control these functions, be it an iPad, an Android tablet, a Garmin tablet, or some new doohickey which hasn't been invented yet. For bonus points they can have the car transmit various sensor readings through the plug, allowing the device to display things like fuel consumption, engine maintenance logs, hybrid battery charge state, etc.
Blackberry owns QNX - one of the oldest and most-respected real time operating systems in production. It's got a rock solid reputation for reliability and stability in embedded applications. Ford made a good choice going with them.
It has nothing to do with the moisture. It has to do with pressure. A dam represents a boundary layer between high pressure (behind the dam) and low pressure (air in front of the dam. An intact dam's structure distributes those stresses evenly throughout its structure, and transfers them into the mountains/hills at the sides of the dam. A crack shifts the stresses which would've been borne by the cracked section to the uncracked sections, and particularly at the corners of the cracks. The high stresses at the corners cause the crack to grow. Eventually the crack grows large enough that the stresses are more than the uncracked section can withstand, and the dam fails.
That's what the engineer noticed. The dam was bulging because the uncracked section was holding back so much more stress than its design load that it physically deformed. 65 feet is a damn big crack (no pun intended). That engineer deserves a ticker tape parade in his honor.
You joke, but the worst power generation-related accident in history was the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. About 30x more deaths than estimated by the UN and WHO to have been caused by Chernobyl.
I don't mean to say coal and oil are safer - they kill far more when used as intended. But the fact that the fuel needs to be delivered to a combustion chamber means you can usually cut off the energy source, limiting the scope of a single accident. That's not the case with hydro - once the water gets moving, there's pretty much nothing anything man-made can do to stop it. All that energy is gonna be released. Likewise, nuclear rates high in risk because the energy density of the fuel is so high - a million times higher than petroleum. Solar and wind would appear to be low-risk, but that's an illusion generated by their low energy density. When you normalize for how many solar panels or wind turbines need to be installed and maintained to generate 1 GWh of electricity, they end up killing more people than nuclear.
Everything has risk. The question isn't how much risk there is per disaster. It's how much risk there is per unit of energy generated.
While that's true for maps of large areas of the Earth, the distortions become near-zero for small swaths like the UK. All you need to do is pick a viewpoint directly overhead and at a sufficient distance, which is what the Scottish Independence group is advocating.
This whole thing probably stems from the geometry of geostationary weather satellites. To always generate the same viewpoint from orbit, the satellites have to be located over the equator at 35,786 km in altitude. That means countries further north in latitude are distorted in the weather photos. From the 1960s to 1990s, this was just the way it was. You couldn't do anything about it. So everyone who lived in extreme northern (or southern) latitudes had to live with distorted satellite weather photos of their country.
Starting around the mid 1990s, computers became fast enough to correct this distortion in photos in a reasonable amount of time. You could now generate undistorted weather maps of reasonably small countries like the UK. But over the previous 3 decades, people had gotten used to the distorted view from geostationary satellites. When you see a flat undistorted map of your country with weather on it, you think "Oh, that's just a graphic someone drew." When you see a distorted map of your country with weather on it, you think "Oh, that's satellite imagery."
People innately trust satellite imagery more. It's a picture, taken from space. No manipulation, no airburshing (photoshopping for those of you too young to know what airbrushing is), right? Of course not; you can manipulate satellite photos as easily as you can manipulate photos from your phone camera. But that's not people's instinctive reaction. It's a satellite picture, so that must be what the weather really looks like from space. I think that's what the BBC was trying to go for with their perspective-foreshortened view of the UK for their weather forecasts. It gives it a greater sense of authenticity.
Eventually, as people lose this pro-satellite viewpoint bias, the overhead viewpoint maps are going to become the norm. But for the time being, it's a quick and silent way to tell the viewer "this is satellite imagery" vs "this is radar or an animated graphic."
This is much. much older than that. Once upon a time, probably soon after paper and writing were invented, someone invented the bulletin board. Initially people used it to post messages. Then someone posted an advertisement for their apple wagon just up the street. Then someone else changed the location in the ad to the location of their apple wagon just down the street.
Actually I'm a pro-nuclear advocate, and I think this idea seriously would be helpful. The scale of the accident could have been greatly diminished to around an INES level 4 if the manager at Fukushima had decided to dump seawater into the reactor sooner. Cooling off the zirconium cladding around the fuel rods with seawater before they melted would've contained the mess they're currently dealing with. All these radionuclides from the fuel wouldn't have been released into the reactor core and subsequently the environment.
The only reason they didn't dump in seawater until it was too late was because they were hoping to still save the reactor for future commercial use. Once you dump in salt water, the reactor is unsafe to operate and dead for commercial purposes. The manager didn't want to be the guy responsible for killing a $1 billion dollar reactor, and his stalling unwittingly precipitated a $15 billion disaster. Managers at other nuclear reactors have to be taught that this is what's at stake. The opportunity cost is not $1 billion for killing the reactor vs. nothing if you can save it. It's $1 billion for killing the reactor vs. $15 billion if you can't save it.
The $1 billion figure is enough to overwhelm anyone trying to make a rational decision, so the people who may have to make that very decision in the future need to be taught that there's something even bigger at stake. And what better way to teach them than putting them on the front line of the cleanup.
Here's a random cross section from the site linked to in TFA. Lead concentrations average about 25-30 pmol/kg. Which if I've done my math right (1 kg of water = about 55 moles of H2O) is about 0.5 parts per trillion.
While I don't disagree with the notion that leaded gasoline is a major contributor to lead in the environment, I was a little curious how much naturally-occuring lead there is.
Uranium has a 4.5 billion year half-life, and the end-product of its decay chain is lead. Since the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, you should expect to find about equal amounts of uranium and lead in the environment overall (I'm not an expert on how minute quantities of these elements act in seawater). The trace uranium in seawater is about 3.33 parts per billion.
According to TFA (which didn't give exact numbers), "the lead concentrations are roughly equivalent to what youâ(TM)d get if you dissolved a small spoonful of frozen orange juice in 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools". An Olympic-sized swimming pool is about 2.5 million liters. According to Google, 1 teaspoon in 2.5 million liters is about 2 parts per billion.
So the amounts of lead they're detecting are about 0.01 parts per billion, or two orders of magnitude less than the amount of naturally-ocurring uranium in seawater. The charts linked in TFA bear this out. Clicking through random charts, lead concentrations are around 25 pmol/kg, while uranium concentrations are around 3 nmol/kg (3000 pmol/kg).
So (1) for whatever reason uranium dissolves in seawater much more readily than lead, and (2) the amounts of lead they're detecting are minuscule even by "trace elements" standards.
Going out to a public location is something you do to yourself
If you want privacy, request a private room or booth. Or talk to the bar owner about making a "no videos/photos policy" at his establishment. Expecting other members of the public in an area not belonging to you to to change their behavior to conform to your wishes is selfish and asinine.
This whole thing is really simple:
Obligatory link for those who don't know what the phrase means. I used Snopes instead of Wikipedia because they actually have a video snippet of the MASH episode in.
Most people have a very distorted view of how close the Earth and Moon are relative to their size. A picture of the two to scale makes it pretty obvious that the Moon can't really intercept or attract many objects which might hit the Earth.
The proliferation of unnecessary apps on tablets and phones. There are maybe 2-3 dozen businesses and sites I interact with enough each year to warrant their own app. The rest I interact with infrequently or they're not a high enough priority (e.g. Slashdot) that I need to be constantly updated to their latest offering and features (e.g. Beta).
The web browser model works really well for these low-priority interactions. I install an app on my computer for the important stuff (financial management, photo editing, code development, word processor, etc). But for all the not-so-important stuff, I install one app - a web browser. The browser then lets me make bookmarks to all those different low-priority sites.
But in their zeal to monetize and get a hold of your data, most companies have crippled or entirely eschewed the mobile browsing experience in favor of their own custom app. Many sites detect my browser is on Android and redirect me to crippled or dysfunctional mobile versions of their sites, when my phone is more than capable of using their full site. The result is whereas I have about 40 programs installed on my laptop and about a thousand bookmarks, I have over 250 apps installed on my phone and only a dozen bookmarks. Management of those apps is starting to become unwieldy as every day a half dozen of them report that they need to be updated.
I yearn for the days when all the less important stuff was just a bookmark in my browser. The browser was like a hub, and the connections between me and these less-important sites were like spokes. The hub-spoke model vastly decreased the number of spokes at my end. But by favoring or requiring dedicated apps in mobile space, these companies/sites have increased my workload and overhead by forcing me to maintain a lot more direct routes to their business/site.
Yup. This stuff wasn't required when I was in high school, and I only picked it up on my own because I'm good at math. After working as general manager for a company and talking with most of the employees on an individual basis during lunch about their personal finances, it became pretty clear this desperately needs to be part of the high school curriculum. As best as I could tell, about half the employees never bothered tracking their expenses or balancing a checkbook. They'd just deposit their paycheck, then spend money until the ATM told them they had no more money. If this happened and they still had a few days til their next paycheck, they'd do whatever they could (beg, borrow, buy on credit) to bridge the gap.
Until I learned this, it was incomprehensible to me why anybody would take a payday loan except during an emergency. Now it makes perfect sense. We have an entire industry collecting unconscionable interest by taking advantage of the financial ignorance of a substantial portion of the population. If you're opposed to teaching this stuff because there could be some ideological overtones taught, you're condemning these people to perpetual poverty in the name of political neutrality. The vast majority of it is just straight applied math.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is its own separate Department with its own separate budget. It does not fall into Social Security, which too is a separate Agency with a separate budget. Funding for the two do not mix as you're implying.
Your reasoning seems to be based on tracking a single phone and limiting the scope of the consequences of its theft only to the original owner. If you look at it from the perspective of the entire population (the carrier's perspective), I think you'll quickly realize why you're wrong:
- A phone is stolen. The original owner has to buy a new phone. The thief does not have to buy a new phone.
Net sales increase to the carrier? One.
- No phone is stolen. The original owner keeps his old phone. The would-be thief buys a new phone instead.
Net sales increase to the carrier? One.
- A phone is stolen and remotely bricked. The original owner has to buy a new phone. The thief buys a new phone instead.
Net sales increase to the carrier? Two.
Phone theft does not increase sales of new phones for the carrier above a baseline where there is no theft. All it does is reassign who has to pay for the new phone. The victim pays for two phones, instead of the would-be victim paying for one and the would-be thief paying for the other.
Bricking phones OTOH does exactly what you're deriding, and makes more money for the carrier. The victim pays twice, and thief pays once.
It is the same thing. You're just being confused because of where the zero level lies. The net effect is the same.
In a competitive environment, Netflix has to do nothing to get Comcast to host their servers on Comcast's local network. Comcast would be tripping over themselves to host the servers so their customers would not flee to a competitor which offered better Netflix service. Heck, Comcast would be paying Netflix to provide them with a local copy of their streamed videos.
So in both cases, the net effect is that Comcast makes more money than it should, Netflix pays more money than it should.
Actually either approach would work. We could treat Internet access as a utility, with pricing being regulated by a government body. Or we could open it up to competition and allow any ISP to compete for your business (so that an ISP slowing down Netflix would be shooting themselves in the foot). The latter is the way most of the rest of world does it.
Instead what we have is some bastardized combination of the worst of both worlds. We have the government granting service monopolies instead of looking out for the best interest of the customers. And we have the companies operating under the self-interest which drives capitalism, but unhindered by competition which is what normally lowers prices and forces improvements.
It's really simple. The only way to install a Metro app is through Microsoft's Store. There are exceptions for developers and corporate in-house software. But for the traditional business model where Party A makes the software, Party B buys it and uses it, you can only do it by selling the software in the Store.
If you sell through the Store, Microsoft takes a 30% cut of all revenue.
That's what this is all about. Microsoft wants 30% of Adobe's, Intuit's, SAP's, Oracle's, etc's revenue. Their plan to make this happen is to get all users (including corporate ones) to use Metro apps. If the users accept it, then the developers will be forced to make Metro apps and sell it through the Store. And Microsoft gets a 30% cut. Of everything.
That's why they're forcing Metro down users' throats. That's why the "Start" button isn't really a start button but dumps you straight into Metro - it's a one-button access to where the Store is. That's why your Windows Server pushes Metro apps. It's all to get you to buy and use Metro apps, so developers will start selling Metro apps.
(And yes I realize this is Apple's walled garden model with iOS. I don't really have as much problem with it there because iOS devices are generally not productivity devices so most apps are priced $0 to $10. Not $100 to over $1000 like many Windows productivity apps. And no this is not Google's model. Yes Google takes a 30% cut of apps sold in the Play store, but they don't restrict where you get your apps from. It's easiest to get them from the Play store, but you can get them from any other store, or side-load them via microSD or USB or even directly from a website. Basically the current state of Windows software is like the Android environment where an optional store charges 30%, and Microsoft is trying to transition it to be like the iOS environment where the only store charges 30%.)
Eh, not really. A game cartridge for the Atari 2600 was about $25 in 1981. Adjusting for inflation, that works out to $64.33 in 2014 dollars. Game prices have been remarkably consistent over the years. Don't make the mistake of comparing game prices you saw as a kid with modern prices. You always need to adjust for inflation.
Also the Atari games were usually made by a couple of programmers with a few months of work (stuff you can buy for $0.99 on your phone now). Your 2014 game has a production crew as big as a movie's and takes 1-2 years of development. You're getting a helluva lot more gaming value for your $60 than I got as a kid.