Most laptop AC adapters put out 19 V DC, though some of the ultralights use 12 V DC adapters. Current is voltage / resistance. The resistance of your body from your finger to your feet, and the low voltage limits the current that'll flow through your body. You're as likely to feel this as you are if you held both contacts on a 12 V battery (which is to say, not at all). The 9V battery on your tongue has a much lower resistance to deal with (both an electrolyte bath and a much shorter distance to travel), so generates enough current to create a tingle in your tongue.
POTS phone lines run power at 5 V DC, but the ring signal is generated by increasing the voltage. The spec is to bump the voltage up to 20 or 30 V DC (it's been a while since I worked with these). But many systems would exceed spec and crank it up to 60 V or more. Those would give you a nasty shock if you were working on the line when someone made a call. Not enough to injure you, but enough to leave your hand and arm tingling for a few seconds.
But yeah, you're not gonna electrocute yourself by touching the two DC leads coming from an AC adapter.
Dell, HP, Alienware and other company will do anything in their power to not comply with this standard. This means less chance to get money out of customers pockets.
Actually, for laptops, I suspect it has less to do about profits, and more to do with simplifying the engineering design specs by having a single, known power source which puts out a specific voltage profile as you increase the amps drawn. We're not talking about a phone which draws a couple Watts at most and can be simultaneously charged and powered via a USB cable, so you can effectively use the battery as a power sink to even out the voltage variances. We're talking about devices whose power draw can range from about 5-10 Watts all the way up to 100 Watts. And not all AC adapters are equal at generating a clean DC current.
The US should do what Europe has done and basically fully embrace diesel fueled vehicles for their efficiency.
The U.S. has embraced diesel. Nearly all of its trucks (which account for about half the country's petroleum consumption for transportation) run on diesel.
See, when you refine a barrel of petroleum, you get a certain amount of diesel, and a certain amount of gasoline. You can tweak the refining process to get more gasoline, or more diesel, but it becomes more expensive. The most cost-effective refining yields about equal amounts of diesel and gasoline. If you tried to convert all vehicles to use diesel, the refining requirements and market demand would make diesel extremely expensive, while gasoline became dirt cheap.
So the most cost-effective way to use these fuels is to have a healthy mix of both gasoline and diesel vehicles. In the U.S., most of the transport trucks use diesel while most of the passenger cars use gasoline. This is a natural fit for both types of fuels. Diesel engines tend to produce most of their power at a lower RPM, so are suitable for operating at long periods at close to their max capacity - which is what trucks do. Gasoline engines tend to produce most of their power at higher RPM, so are suitable for operating at long periods at a fraction of their max capacity, but have that extra power on tap for passing and emergency maneuvers - which is what people look for when buying a car. To make a diesel engine more car-like (i.e. gasoline engine-like), you have to couple it with a turbocharger or a supercharger to spread out the power band and give it more high-end oomph.
The prevalence of diesel cars in Europe is mostly an artifact of the high fuel taxes there. Typically, diesel is taxed less because it's used mostly by trucks, and they don't want to drive up the cost of goods by way of a high fuel tax. Under this artificial price structure, diesel cars suddenly make economic sense.
Economically, the case is even worse. The whole process of producing ethanol is both labor and capital expensive. It is obviously more expensive as a motor fuel. Then when you consider what has happened to food prices as corn (a base part of much of what we eat as well as feed for animals we use for food) prices have gone up.
It made sense economically the way it was first implemented. See, the U.S. overproduces food. Ever since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and its widespread food shortages, the U.S. has implemented subsidies and programs to insure there is always an oversupply of food. That's why we pay farmers not to plant anything on their land - we want that excess farming capacity ready and available should, say, a drought wipe out a part of the Spring crop.
All that excess food means food prices crash to where farmers can't make a living anymore. So the U.S. government buys all the subsidized food (mostly corn) at a set price, then resells it to the market. But since there's an oversupply, there's always extra food left over. We give some of it away as foreign aid, a lot of it becomes cattle feed to satiate our appetite for beef, some enterprising chemists figured out a way to turn some of it into high fructose corn syrup.
And during the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, someone had the bright idea of turning it into ethanol as fuel for our cars. The economics of the cost to grow corn didn't matter - that was a sunk cost. The corn had already been produced and paid for. Any use you could find for it was better than letting it rot and become rat food in silos. Under those circumstances, corn ethanol makes sense.
Then the corn lobby got their paws on it. They took a program which made economic sense because it converted excess food into fuel, and morphed it into a program which makes no economic sense because it grows food for the sole purpose of turning it into fuel. If you're going to grow a food crop to convert into ethanol, sugar cane and sugar beets make the most sense. Corn is down at like #15 on the list. The only reason corn was chosen for ethanol production was because we had a lot of excess corn sitting around in 1973.
While I agree with you, Disney was actually one of the few (only?) studios which did it right and would replace your broken DVDs for a nominal materials and processing fee. They had a similar program for VHS tapes as well. It was probably due to all the parents complaining when junior microwaved the tape/disc.
It's just Simpson's paradox. The really rich Republicans tend to live near urban centers. Urban centers tend to vote Democrat. By arbitrarily dividing the population among state lines, you are incorrectly assigning the taxes paid by the rich Republicans living in Democrat-voting states to the D column.
If you eliminate the arbitrary divisions (states) and base it purely on individuals, Republicans tend to have higher income so pay higher taxes than Democrats.
I'm not from the US, so I never understood why poor people vote conservative? All the red states seem to be poorer yet these are the people that would benefit most from a "socialist" left govt.
Poor people don't vote conservative. You're falling for something called Simpson's paradox. When you divide a population along arbitrary lines, the outcome per group can run counter to the outcome overall. The most famous example was the 2000 election where Gore won the popular election, but Bush won the electoral votes and thus the Presidency. Even though Gore won more votes, by dividing his votes among state lines, Bush ended up carrying more states (weighted by population) to win the Presidency. Another example is when in the 1980s, Southwest airlines won the award for best on-time flight ranking for the nation, even though at every airport they serviced they finished no higher than 2nd.
The same thing is going on here. Democrats on average tend to have lower income than Republicans. It's just that the really wealthy Republicans tend to live in or near urban areas, which vote heavily Democratic, so they end up living in states which vote Democrat. Thus if you try to analyze this on the basis of "poor states" and "rich states", you incorrectly assign those rich Republicans' income to the Democrat column because the state happens to vote Democrat. (This is also the flawed reasoning behind the common misbelief that because blue states are net contributors of federal funds and red states net receivers, that Liberals fund the government and Conservatives take from it. It's just the arbitrary state lines which create Simpson's paradox making it seem that way. In reality the opposite is true - Conservatives tend to have higher income so pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes.)
The red states tend to have a greater proportion of their population in rural areas, and rural people tend to vote Republican, urban people Democrat.
I'm going to have to say that's a result that's unique to Switzerland. There's a direct correlation between homicide rates and assault rates (a failed homicide being classified as an assault). For your hypothesis to be correct, the overall assault rate in Switzerland has to have remained the same or climbed, while the homicide rate decreased. Indeed Switzerland has one of the highest assault rates among OECD countries (4.0%), but one of the lowest homicide rates (0.7 per 100,000).
But since most of this criticism is directed at the U.S., how do the two rates compare in the U.S.? The U.S. has one of the highest homicide rates among OECD countries (4.8 per 100,000 - more than double the OECD average of 2.2), but one of the lowest assault rates (1.5%, only Canada and Japan are lower, less than half the OECD average of 4.0%). (The interface is terrible - you have to hover your mouse over the little bars in the graph to see the number for each country, and the bars are inverted so a tall bar is a low number.) So while Americans kill each other a lot more, Europeans attack each other a lot more. This would appear to bear out the adage that "an armed society is a polite society." If the U.S. were to ban gun ownership, the homicide rate could decline to Canadian levels as you posit, or the assault rate could rise by 2.7x to the OECD average, or some combination of both. It's impossible to say which would be the outcome given the data.
I've been following this debate a long time, and followed with much interest what happened in Australia when they disarmed in 1997 (homicides are down, but assaults and sexual assaults are up, and robberies fluctuated a lot and are currently unchanged). I don't like nor own a gun, but I also dislike making decision purely on gut feeling rather than sound statistical data. The only conclusion I've arrived at is that the cultural norms for a country matter a whole lot more than whether or not you ban guns. Guns are mostly illegal in both Canada and Mexico, but widely available due to proximity to the U.S. Yet Canada is one of the safest OECD countries while Mexico is one of the most dangerous.
As an aside, it's interesting that the data on that site ranks the U.S. as the 3rd safest country against assault. The data was from a Gallup poll asking residents of those countries if they'd been assaulted in the past year. Other measurements of assault rate I'd seen ranked the U.S. about average among OECD countries. But those were based on police reports of assaults per 100,000. So either Americans are lying about whether they've been assaulted, or people in other OECD countries are not bothering to report assaults to the police, or police in other OECD countries are lying about how many assaults are reported to them. And no the high homicide rate in the U.S. does not affect the assault rate significantly. If all 4.8 out of 100,000 homicides failed and were classified as assaults, it would increase the assault rate by just 0.005%.
The PC market is not shrinking. What's happening is people and companies are going longer between upgrades, meaning the fewer PCs are sold in a given year. That combined with market share reports in percent (instead of raw numbers) gives the illusion that the PC market is shrinking. If you look at the raw number of PCs in use at any given time, you can see the PC market is still growing. There's a slight slowdown over the last year due to tablets, but the overall trend is still positive.
I'll post this again since it's relevant. A hospital worker in Israel exposed himself to a cobalt-60 radiation source for 1-2 minutes while trying to fix a sterilizer. The IAEA report of the incident is pretty detailed, including photos and x-rays documenting his injuries and eventual demise a month later.
During the Cold War, the Soviets had vastly more tanks than NATO. So one of the common hypothetical scenarios was an unstoppable Soviet invasion led by their tanks. The NATO response plan included detonating airburst nukes over the advancing army. While these would directly kill only a few near the hypocenter, soldiers in a much larger area would receive a lethal dose of radiation. These so-called walking dead would survive to fight a few more days or weeks before succumbing to their injuries. I suspect this scenario and particularly the term "walking dead" played some part in the genesis of the modern zombie movie. The movie widely credited with creating the zombie horde theme (Night of the Living Dead) was filmed in the late 1960s during the height of the Cold War.
Radiation "suits" aren't really a thing. There are some out there, but the only one's I've seen are similar to EOD suits. You're probably thinking of Level A HazMat suits which are chemical protective suits. People toss around NBC or CBRNE, but not all the words really go together, it's more about grouping together a bunch of very rare - yet very dangerous - threats.
Chemical and Biological can be paired up pretty easily because a lot of the protective equipment can be used for either.
Certain radiation hazards can be paired up with chemical and biological. The hazmat suits will block all alpha particles, and provide some protection against beta particles, no protection against gamma radiation. But the more important thing is that they keep any radioactive particles on the outside. In a hypothetical dirty bomb scenario or even a real radioactive leak like at Fukushima, you're not just dealing with radioactive chunks which were flung around. You're also dealing with vaporized and atomized radioactive particles. Without the hazmat suit, these particles will lodge in the crevices in your skin and hair and you'll be exposed to their radiation for days before it washes off. You'll also breathe them in and potentially be exposed to it for life (this is regarded as the most dangerous form of plutonium contamination).
The hazmat suit prevents this. After you leave the contaminated area, you simply wash off the outside of the suit, take it off, and you're free from radiation contamination beyond any dose you received during the cleanup.
It always irked me when you install an Android app it often produces a big long list of the things the app can access, some of which you don't want it to, but you can't pick'n'choose the access permissions, it''s all or nothing.
That's just plain wrong.
There's nothing at all wrong about that. You are proposing one extreme where the user gets to control everything software can do on his phone. Apple does the other extreme where the developer controls everything and Apple provides oversight.
Google is trying their best to split the difference. A developer creates an app and distributes it on his terms. e.g. He might give it away for free but have it play ads to generate some revenue for him. You have no right to take his copyrighted app and use it in violation of the terms he's released it under. This is the fundamental tenet which makes Open Source work - most of their licenses require you to share any code modifications you make as the price you pay to use the software. It is wrong to take someone else's work and use it in violation of the terms under which they've decided to allow you to use it.
But it is also wrong for the software to purport to do one thing, then secretly do all sorts of things behind the user's back. So Google forces apps to disclose what info and services they will have access to. Google sets up the open, level playing field. The developers provide their apps, Google makes sure the user gets a concise summary of what the app does, and it's up to the user to decide whether or not to use the app.
Speaking both as an Android user and a developer, I think it's about the perfect balance between developers' rights and users' rights. The only flaw I've seen abused is that an app which needs network and account info for one purpose may abuse it for different purposes. e.g. The Amazon app needs network access to contact the Amazon app store, and it needs to verify your account info to enable you to make purchases. But according to my logs their app is trying to ID my phone every time I start any app, like it's trying to track what apps I use and how often.
Also, I have always left my phone on in flights. It doesn't get a signal at altitude, and definitely not over the middle of the ocean.
Most airlines have or are adding Internet service to their planes, and some are contemplating using it to provide a cellular microcell (acts like a tower and connects to your cellular provider over Internet). I think the plans right now are to set it up as a third party cell and you'd get charged roaming rates on it if you used it. But it's not difficult to conceive a future where the roaming rates have been scaled back to a few cents/min or eliminated altogether from the cellular carriers competing (hah!) and deciding to just pay the airlines to provide their service.
Yeah, commercial on-peak hours where I am (Southern California) are 10 am to 6 pm.
TFAs also only mention the money saved ($4883) by reducing on-peak electrical usage. They do not mention the money spent by increasing off-peak electrical usage (to charge the vehicles. So the actual annualized savings is going to be only a fraction of that. e.g. If peak rates are twice off-peak, then the net savings is only $2441.50. If it's 50% higher, then it's $1611.
Also, I don't know how much electricity an office building uses. But I used to work at a hotel with ~100 rooms with about 30% occupancy. The monthly power bill was $3k-$5k. I would imagine businesses with actual power-consuming equipment have a much larger bill. While it's an interesting proof of concept, I don't see it being of much practical use until a significant fraction of workers drive EVs.
I guess the next step in this array of bullshit is for random folks to dress up like cops, secret service, airport authorities or any other scheme that fits the area, and detain people randomly and take their stuff.
We already did that in the 1980s with drug forfeiture laws. It wasn't abused widely on land, but was a fact of life at sea. The standard introductory shtick given aboard all the charter fishing boats I rode on included "no illegal drugs aboard, because the Coast Guard could seize the entire boat if they found them, even if they were belonged to a customer and were brought aboard without the boat owner's knowledge."
the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain satellites nations and their citizens for the entire "Papers, please!" nonsense
I completely agree the U.S. was actually better off when it was up against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and our government actually had to make an attempt to be more open and free to form a contrast with Communism.
However, "papers, please!" refers to restrictions on travel within the country by its own citizens. The incident here is about entry into the country at the border by a foreigner.
First off, it wasn't bogus - which is why micron lost. I'm no lover of RAMBUS but they absolutely had valid patents, and they did sell product. They lost the battle because their product was ultimately inferior and more expensive, but that doesn't change the fact the core technology behind DDR memory infringed on their ideas.
You're badly misunderstanding people's gripe with this whole thing. Of course the patents were valid. The whole point of the consortium was to come up with a non-patented standard, so when Rambus went behind everyone's back and patented the whole shebang of course there was no prior art. The other memory makers had gone out of their way not to patent it.
And FYI, JEDEC won against Rambus in their lawsuit - Rambus was guilty of patenting stuff which was being discussed in secret at JEDEC. The problem was Rambus was only guilty of violating the terms of membership for JEDEC. The lawyers who drafted the membership agreement neglected to put in any penalties for patenting stuff behind everyone else's back, and as a result the only recourse JEDEC had was to kick Rambus out. There were no federal or criminal charges because they didn't break government law, they broke JEDEC's rules. The patents were still valid though, even though Rambus effectively stole them, because the there was no prior art and the USPTO decided it was patent-worthy.
Speaking of which, do you really think DDR is worthy of a patent? Counting a clock tick not just when the voltage goes up, but also when the voltage goes down? That should be obvious to a 5-year old.
You're missing AC's point. Current nuclear fission tech only releases about 2% of the energy available in the uranium. We call it "waste" when it still contains 98% of the energy it could potentially provide. The primary reason for this is non-proliferation. Extracting most of the remaining energy requires reprocessing - a byproduct of which is weapons-grade plutonium. So rather than deal with making sure that plutonium doesn't fall into the wrong hands, we simply choose not to reprocess (at least the U.S. does not, outside of a couple military reactors). That is the only reason the technology is non-existent. It's not a technical or a financial hurdle, it's purely political.
So if you assume the current 2% efficiency of nuclear fuel use, then yes proven uranium reserves are about 200 years worth. OTOH if you assume we all learn to get along and get past the reprocessing taboo, and use the full uranium fuel cycle, then AC is correct that proven uranium reserves are closer to 10,000 years worth.
They shouldn't get paid a single red cent of MY money to spy on me. They should be thrown in prison for treason for a year at the bottom and life at the top.
Hopefully your sentiments are the same for the elected officials who told NSA to do this. From what I've read, this wasn't some rogue NSA operation. It was fully endorsed by Congress and the White House (both Bush and Obama). Now that it's gone public and sentiment is decidedly against it, the politicians are in full CYA-mode, dumping all the fallout from this squarely on the NSA when it was in fact the elected officials who initiated it. As much as I detest Feinstein's support for this surveillance program, at least she's being honest and up front about her support for it. Not hiding and pretending not to have had any part in it in the hopes that the public won't notice their role come next election.
These guys are amateurs compared to the Mexican scrappers who sold hospital equipment containing 6,000 pellets of cobalt-60 for scrap. The machinery was then processed into rebar which was in turn was used in god knows how many homes in Mexico and the USA as well as metal furniture that ended ups as far away as Canada. [...] One person died of bone cancer, another 4 were injured and least 10 individuals received significant exposures and some scrapyard workers became sterile. There is also a good chance that many more people either will, or already have, developed cancer since it took about a year to discover this snafu and even longer to track down all the contaminated material already in use. This story made me think about how US Homeland security worries about 'dirty bombs'.
Thus the truism, never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity or circumstance. While the threat of terrorism is real, it is so small compared to random acts of stupidity that it's hardly worth getting all worked up over it like we have.
That's a rather overgeneralized mischaracterization of the ethic amongst those working in the Defense industry. You pre-suppose that what they are doing is wrong.
Here's the way I see it. Show me a largish country on this planet which does not have a military to defend itself, and I will consider your hypothesis that defense engineers are not needed. The fact of the matter is that countries which subscribe to the total pacifist code of ethics simply cease to exist because they're invaded and taken over by other countries. So if the choice is between nonexistence, and designing stuff to help protect and keep alive what I think is a pretty decent socio-political system, hell yeah I'll help design the weapons.
Reagan & Thatcher opposed "sanctions". They didn't support apartheid.
They supported the apartheid government, which is the same thing. It's like saying you support the German government in 1939, but you don't support Nazis.
The Nazis were democratically elected into power. If you supported democracy, you had to support the Nazis in 1939 (prior to their invasion of Poland in September). I opposed the younger Bush and voted against him both times, but I supported his government because he fairly won a democratic election.
There's this baffling tendency for people to try to oversimplify other people's actions and motivations to one single factor. That's almost never the case. Support or opposition is usually based on a myriad of factors, and quite often one's support can be a borderline thing chosen only because it's the lesser of two evils. It's very possible to oppose apartheid, yet support the (then) current government of South Africa because you feared if they lost power the government which replaced it would be much worse than apartheid.
If all choices were easy, politics wouldn't exist. Politics is all about having to decide between difficult (and often unpalatable) choices. Armchair quarterbacking is all about criticizing those making those difficult choices, by pretending that the negative consequences of the other choices don't exist.
There was a human fatality from a medical cobalt-60 source in 1990. A worker at a hospital trying to fix an irradiating sterilizer accidentally exposed himself to the source for 1-2 minutes. He died about a month later. The IAEA report on the incident is pretty thorough, including first-person details of the exposure (he felt a burning sensation in his eyes and a pounding in his head), photos, and x-rays documenting the effect of the exposure.
And a fine example of yellow journalism, at that. I read an earlier, more balanced new source that said the truck was a nice cargo truck, one with a crane, and it was stolen at a truck stop. Everybody thinks they wanted the truck and had no idea what it was carrying. The hysterics about terrorism in the summary are unfounded.
While the terrorism danger is overstated, the danger of the material in the hands of the unsuspecting or ignorant is pretty much the same. Someone already posted a link to the GoiÃnia accident so I won't repeat it. The folks who got their hands on a similar medical radioactive source there had absolutely no idea what it was. But it had a pretty blue glow, so they were determined to get the material out. After much effort they cracked open the housing, and spread the cobalt-60 around creating a disaster ranked level 5 on the INES scale (same as Three Mile Island).
While there was no terrorist intent, the result was effectively the same as a dirty bomb. 4 people killed, over 200 contaminated, over $100 million to clean up, numerous structures razed, they even had to scrape up the topsoil from the most contaminated sites. The cobalt-60 was so widely disseminated that about 15% of it was never recovered. Some of it ended up at a recycling scrapyard who melted down the container, contaminating the resulting metal ingots. And they were fortunate - the woman who suspected the substance was dangerous brought it to the hospital in a plastic bag, and the doctor was smart enough not to open the bag. If the hospital had been contaminated, the outcome could have been much, much worse.
Equally, for micro/mini USB, have you ever tried plugging in your phone in the dark, when it's yelling at you about needing to be charged?
They got it right with the micro USB cables. If you feel both sides of the tip with your finger, one side has two raised triangular pieces of metal which will scratch your finger. Once you know to feel for the, you will never plug it in backwards in the dark.
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Most laptop AC adapters put out 19 V DC, though some of the ultralights use 12 V DC adapters. Current is voltage / resistance. The resistance of your body from your finger to your feet, and the low voltage limits the current that'll flow through your body. You're as likely to feel this as you are if you held both contacts on a 12 V battery (which is to say, not at all). The 9V battery on your tongue has a much lower resistance to deal with (both an electrolyte bath and a much shorter distance to travel), so generates enough current to create a tingle in your tongue.
POTS phone lines run power at 5 V DC, but the ring signal is generated by increasing the voltage. The spec is to bump the voltage up to 20 or 30 V DC (it's been a while since I worked with these). But many systems would exceed spec and crank it up to 60 V or more. Those would give you a nasty shock if you were working on the line when someone made a call. Not enough to injure you, but enough to leave your hand and arm tingling for a few seconds.
But yeah, you're not gonna electrocute yourself by touching the two DC leads coming from an AC adapter.
Actually, for laptops, I suspect it has less to do about profits, and more to do with simplifying the engineering design specs by having a single, known power source which puts out a specific voltage profile as you increase the amps drawn. We're not talking about a phone which draws a couple Watts at most and can be simultaneously charged and powered via a USB cable, so you can effectively use the battery as a power sink to even out the voltage variances. We're talking about devices whose power draw can range from about 5-10 Watts all the way up to 100 Watts. And not all AC adapters are equal at generating a clean DC current.
The U.S. has embraced diesel. Nearly all of its trucks (which account for about half the country's petroleum consumption for transportation) run on diesel.
See, when you refine a barrel of petroleum, you get a certain amount of diesel, and a certain amount of gasoline. You can tweak the refining process to get more gasoline, or more diesel, but it becomes more expensive. The most cost-effective refining yields about equal amounts of diesel and gasoline. If you tried to convert all vehicles to use diesel, the refining requirements and market demand would make diesel extremely expensive, while gasoline became dirt cheap.
So the most cost-effective way to use these fuels is to have a healthy mix of both gasoline and diesel vehicles. In the U.S., most of the transport trucks use diesel while most of the passenger cars use gasoline. This is a natural fit for both types of fuels. Diesel engines tend to produce most of their power at a lower RPM, so are suitable for operating at long periods at close to their max capacity - which is what trucks do. Gasoline engines tend to produce most of their power at higher RPM, so are suitable for operating at long periods at a fraction of their max capacity, but have that extra power on tap for passing and emergency maneuvers - which is what people look for when buying a car. To make a diesel engine more car-like (i.e. gasoline engine-like), you have to couple it with a turbocharger or a supercharger to spread out the power band and give it more high-end oomph.
The prevalence of diesel cars in Europe is mostly an artifact of the high fuel taxes there. Typically, diesel is taxed less because it's used mostly by trucks, and they don't want to drive up the cost of goods by way of a high fuel tax. Under this artificial price structure, diesel cars suddenly make economic sense.
It made sense economically the way it was first implemented. See, the U.S. overproduces food. Ever since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and its widespread food shortages, the U.S. has implemented subsidies and programs to insure there is always an oversupply of food. That's why we pay farmers not to plant anything on their land - we want that excess farming capacity ready and available should, say, a drought wipe out a part of the Spring crop.
All that excess food means food prices crash to where farmers can't make a living anymore. So the U.S. government buys all the subsidized food (mostly corn) at a set price, then resells it to the market. But since there's an oversupply, there's always extra food left over. We give some of it away as foreign aid, a lot of it becomes cattle feed to satiate our appetite for beef, some enterprising chemists figured out a way to turn some of it into high fructose corn syrup.
And during the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, someone had the bright idea of turning it into ethanol as fuel for our cars. The economics of the cost to grow corn didn't matter - that was a sunk cost. The corn had already been produced and paid for. Any use you could find for it was better than letting it rot and become rat food in silos. Under those circumstances, corn ethanol makes sense.
Then the corn lobby got their paws on it. They took a program which made economic sense because it converted excess food into fuel, and morphed it into a program which makes no economic sense because it grows food for the sole purpose of turning it into fuel. If you're going to grow a food crop to convert into ethanol, sugar cane and sugar beets make the most sense. Corn is down at like #15 on the list. The only reason corn was chosen for ethanol production was because we had a lot of excess corn sitting around in 1973.
While I agree with you, Disney was actually one of the few (only?) studios which did it right and would replace your broken DVDs for a nominal materials and processing fee. They had a similar program for VHS tapes as well. It was probably due to all the parents complaining when junior microwaved the tape/disc.
It's just Simpson's paradox. The really rich Republicans tend to live near urban centers. Urban centers tend to vote Democrat. By arbitrarily dividing the population among state lines, you are incorrectly assigning the taxes paid by the rich Republicans living in Democrat-voting states to the D column.
If you eliminate the arbitrary divisions (states) and base it purely on individuals, Republicans tend to have higher income so pay higher taxes than Democrats.
Poor people don't vote conservative. You're falling for something called Simpson's paradox. When you divide a population along arbitrary lines, the outcome per group can run counter to the outcome overall. The most famous example was the 2000 election where Gore won the popular election, but Bush won the electoral votes and thus the Presidency. Even though Gore won more votes, by dividing his votes among state lines, Bush ended up carrying more states (weighted by population) to win the Presidency. Another example is when in the 1980s, Southwest airlines won the award for best on-time flight ranking for the nation, even though at every airport they serviced they finished no higher than 2nd.
The same thing is going on here. Democrats on average tend to have lower income than Republicans. It's just that the really wealthy Republicans tend to live in or near urban areas, which vote heavily Democratic, so they end up living in states which vote Democrat. Thus if you try to analyze this on the basis of "poor states" and "rich states", you incorrectly assign those rich Republicans' income to the Democrat column because the state happens to vote Democrat. (This is also the flawed reasoning behind the common misbelief that because blue states are net contributors of federal funds and red states net receivers, that Liberals fund the government and Conservatives take from it. It's just the arbitrary state lines which create Simpson's paradox making it seem that way. In reality the opposite is true - Conservatives tend to have higher income so pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes.)
The red states tend to have a greater proportion of their population in rural areas, and rural people tend to vote Republican, urban people Democrat.
I'm going to have to say that's a result that's unique to Switzerland. There's a direct correlation between homicide rates and assault rates (a failed homicide being classified as an assault). For your hypothesis to be correct, the overall assault rate in Switzerland has to have remained the same or climbed, while the homicide rate decreased. Indeed Switzerland has one of the highest assault rates among OECD countries (4.0%), but one of the lowest homicide rates (0.7 per 100,000).
But since most of this criticism is directed at the U.S., how do the two rates compare in the U.S.? The U.S. has one of the highest homicide rates among OECD countries (4.8 per 100,000 - more than double the OECD average of 2.2), but one of the lowest assault rates (1.5%, only Canada and Japan are lower, less than half the OECD average of 4.0%). (The interface is terrible - you have to hover your mouse over the little bars in the graph to see the number for each country, and the bars are inverted so a tall bar is a low number.) So while Americans kill each other a lot more, Europeans attack each other a lot more. This would appear to bear out the adage that "an armed society is a polite society." If the U.S. were to ban gun ownership, the homicide rate could decline to Canadian levels as you posit, or the assault rate could rise by 2.7x to the OECD average, or some combination of both. It's impossible to say which would be the outcome given the data.
I've been following this debate a long time, and followed with much interest what happened in Australia when they disarmed in 1997 (homicides are down, but assaults and sexual assaults are up, and robberies fluctuated a lot and are currently unchanged). I don't like nor own a gun, but I also dislike making decision purely on gut feeling rather than sound statistical data. The only conclusion I've arrived at is that the cultural norms for a country matter a whole lot more than whether or not you ban guns. Guns are mostly illegal in both Canada and Mexico, but widely available due to proximity to the U.S. Yet Canada is one of the safest OECD countries while Mexico is one of the most dangerous.
As an aside, it's interesting that the data on that site ranks the U.S. as the 3rd safest country against assault. The data was from a Gallup poll asking residents of those countries if they'd been assaulted in the past year. Other measurements of assault rate I'd seen ranked the U.S. about average among OECD countries. But those were based on police reports of assaults per 100,000. So either Americans are lying about whether they've been assaulted, or people in other OECD countries are not bothering to report assaults to the police, or police in other OECD countries are lying about how many assaults are reported to them. And no the high homicide rate in the U.S. does not affect the assault rate significantly. If all 4.8 out of 100,000 homicides failed and were classified as assaults, it would increase the assault rate by just 0.005%.
The PC market is not shrinking. What's happening is people and companies are going longer between upgrades, meaning the fewer PCs are sold in a given year. That combined with market share reports in percent (instead of raw numbers) gives the illusion that the PC market is shrinking. If you look at the raw number of PCs in use at any given time, you can see the PC market is still growing. There's a slight slowdown over the last year due to tablets, but the overall trend is still positive.
I'll post this again since it's relevant. A hospital worker in Israel exposed himself to a cobalt-60 radiation source for 1-2 minutes while trying to fix a sterilizer. The IAEA report of the incident is pretty detailed, including photos and x-rays documenting his injuries and eventual demise a month later.
During the Cold War, the Soviets had vastly more tanks than NATO. So one of the common hypothetical scenarios was an unstoppable Soviet invasion led by their tanks. The NATO response plan included detonating airburst nukes over the advancing army. While these would directly kill only a few near the hypocenter, soldiers in a much larger area would receive a lethal dose of radiation. These so-called walking dead would survive to fight a few more days or weeks before succumbing to their injuries. I suspect this scenario and particularly the term "walking dead" played some part in the genesis of the modern zombie movie. The movie widely credited with creating the zombie horde theme (Night of the Living Dead) was filmed in the late 1960s during the height of the Cold War.
Certain radiation hazards can be paired up with chemical and biological. The hazmat suits will block all alpha particles, and provide some protection against beta particles, no protection against gamma radiation. But the more important thing is that they keep any radioactive particles on the outside. In a hypothetical dirty bomb scenario or even a real radioactive leak like at Fukushima, you're not just dealing with radioactive chunks which were flung around. You're also dealing with vaporized and atomized radioactive particles. Without the hazmat suit, these particles will lodge in the crevices in your skin and hair and you'll be exposed to their radiation for days before it washes off. You'll also breathe them in and potentially be exposed to it for life (this is regarded as the most dangerous form of plutonium contamination).
The hazmat suit prevents this. After you leave the contaminated area, you simply wash off the outside of the suit, take it off, and you're free from radiation contamination beyond any dose you received during the cleanup.
There's nothing at all wrong about that. You are proposing one extreme where the user gets to control everything software can do on his phone. Apple does the other extreme where the developer controls everything and Apple provides oversight.
Google is trying their best to split the difference. A developer creates an app and distributes it on his terms. e.g. He might give it away for free but have it play ads to generate some revenue for him. You have no right to take his copyrighted app and use it in violation of the terms he's released it under. This is the fundamental tenet which makes Open Source work - most of their licenses require you to share any code modifications you make as the price you pay to use the software. It is wrong to take someone else's work and use it in violation of the terms under which they've decided to allow you to use it.
But it is also wrong for the software to purport to do one thing, then secretly do all sorts of things behind the user's back. So Google forces apps to disclose what info and services they will have access to. Google sets up the open, level playing field. The developers provide their apps, Google makes sure the user gets a concise summary of what the app does, and it's up to the user to decide whether or not to use the app.
Speaking both as an Android user and a developer, I think it's about the perfect balance between developers' rights and users' rights. The only flaw I've seen abused is that an app which needs network and account info for one purpose may abuse it for different purposes. e.g. The Amazon app needs network access to contact the Amazon app store, and it needs to verify your account info to enable you to make purchases. But according to my logs their app is trying to ID my phone every time I start any app, like it's trying to track what apps I use and how often.
Most airlines have or are adding Internet service to their planes, and some are contemplating using it to provide a cellular microcell (acts like a tower and connects to your cellular provider over Internet). I think the plans right now are to set it up as a third party cell and you'd get charged roaming rates on it if you used it. But it's not difficult to conceive a future where the roaming rates have been scaled back to a few cents/min or eliminated altogether from the cellular carriers competing (hah!) and deciding to just pay the airlines to provide their service.
Yeah, commercial on-peak hours where I am (Southern California) are 10 am to 6 pm.
TFAs also only mention the money saved ($4883) by reducing on-peak electrical usage. They do not mention the money spent by increasing off-peak electrical usage (to charge the vehicles. So the actual annualized savings is going to be only a fraction of that. e.g. If peak rates are twice off-peak, then the net savings is only $2441.50. If it's 50% higher, then it's $1611.
Also, I don't know how much electricity an office building uses. But I used to work at a hotel with ~100 rooms with about 30% occupancy. The monthly power bill was $3k-$5k. I would imagine businesses with actual power-consuming equipment have a much larger bill. While it's an interesting proof of concept, I don't see it being of much practical use until a significant fraction of workers drive EVs.
We already did that in the 1980s with drug forfeiture laws. It wasn't abused widely on land, but was a fact of life at sea. The standard introductory shtick given aboard all the charter fishing boats I rode on included "no illegal drugs aboard, because the Coast Guard could seize the entire boat if they found them, even if they were belonged to a customer and were brought aboard without the boat owner's knowledge."
I completely agree the U.S. was actually better off when it was up against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and our government actually had to make an attempt to be more open and free to form a contrast with Communism.
However, "papers, please!" refers to restrictions on travel within the country by its own citizens. The incident here is about entry into the country at the border by a foreigner.
You're badly misunderstanding people's gripe with this whole thing. Of course the patents were valid. The whole point of the consortium was to come up with a non-patented standard, so when Rambus went behind everyone's back and patented the whole shebang of course there was no prior art. The other memory makers had gone out of their way not to patent it.
And FYI, JEDEC won against Rambus in their lawsuit - Rambus was guilty of patenting stuff which was being discussed in secret at JEDEC. The problem was Rambus was only guilty of violating the terms of membership for JEDEC. The lawyers who drafted the membership agreement neglected to put in any penalties for patenting stuff behind everyone else's back, and as a result the only recourse JEDEC had was to kick Rambus out. There were no federal or criminal charges because they didn't break government law, they broke JEDEC's rules. The patents were still valid though, even though Rambus effectively stole them, because the there was no prior art and the USPTO decided it was patent-worthy.
Speaking of which, do you really think DDR is worthy of a patent? Counting a clock tick not just when the voltage goes up, but also when the voltage goes down? That should be obvious to a 5-year old.
You're missing AC's point. Current nuclear fission tech only releases about 2% of the energy available in the uranium. We call it "waste" when it still contains 98% of the energy it could potentially provide. The primary reason for this is non-proliferation. Extracting most of the remaining energy requires reprocessing - a byproduct of which is weapons-grade plutonium. So rather than deal with making sure that plutonium doesn't fall into the wrong hands, we simply choose not to reprocess (at least the U.S. does not, outside of a couple military reactors). That is the only reason the technology is non-existent. It's not a technical or a financial hurdle, it's purely political.
So if you assume the current 2% efficiency of nuclear fuel use, then yes proven uranium reserves are about 200 years worth. OTOH if you assume we all learn to get along and get past the reprocessing taboo, and use the full uranium fuel cycle, then AC is correct that proven uranium reserves are closer to 10,000 years worth.
Hopefully your sentiments are the same for the elected officials who told NSA to do this. From what I've read, this wasn't some rogue NSA operation. It was fully endorsed by Congress and the White House (both Bush and Obama). Now that it's gone public and sentiment is decidedly against it, the politicians are in full CYA-mode, dumping all the fallout from this squarely on the NSA when it was in fact the elected officials who initiated it. As much as I detest Feinstein's support for this surveillance program, at least she's being honest and up front about her support for it. Not hiding and pretending not to have had any part in it in the hopes that the public won't notice their role come next election.
Thus the truism, never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity or circumstance. While the threat of terrorism is real, it is so small compared to random acts of stupidity that it's hardly worth getting all worked up over it like we have.
That's a rather overgeneralized mischaracterization of the ethic amongst those working in the Defense industry. You pre-suppose that what they are doing is wrong.
Here's the way I see it. Show me a largish country on this planet which does not have a military to defend itself, and I will consider your hypothesis that defense engineers are not needed. The fact of the matter is that countries which subscribe to the total pacifist code of ethics simply cease to exist because they're invaded and taken over by other countries. So if the choice is between nonexistence, and designing stuff to help protect and keep alive what I think is a pretty decent socio-political system, hell yeah I'll help design the weapons.
The Nazis were democratically elected into power. If you supported democracy, you had to support the Nazis in 1939 (prior to their invasion of Poland in September). I opposed the younger Bush and voted against him both times, but I supported his government because he fairly won a democratic election.
There's this baffling tendency for people to try to oversimplify other people's actions and motivations to one single factor. That's almost never the case. Support or opposition is usually based on a myriad of factors, and quite often one's support can be a borderline thing chosen only because it's the lesser of two evils. It's very possible to oppose apartheid, yet support the (then) current government of South Africa because you feared if they lost power the government which replaced it would be much worse than apartheid.
If all choices were easy, politics wouldn't exist. Politics is all about having to decide between difficult (and often unpalatable) choices. Armchair quarterbacking is all about criticizing those making those difficult choices, by pretending that the negative consequences of the other choices don't exist.
There was a human fatality from a medical cobalt-60 source in 1990. A worker at a hospital trying to fix an irradiating sterilizer accidentally exposed himself to the source for 1-2 minutes. He died about a month later. The IAEA report on the incident is pretty thorough, including first-person details of the exposure (he felt a burning sensation in his eyes and a pounding in his head), photos, and x-rays documenting the effect of the exposure.
While the terrorism danger is overstated, the danger of the material in the hands of the unsuspecting or ignorant is pretty much the same. Someone already posted a link to the GoiÃnia accident so I won't repeat it. The folks who got their hands on a similar medical radioactive source there had absolutely no idea what it was. But it had a pretty blue glow, so they were determined to get the material out. After much effort they cracked open the housing, and spread the cobalt-60 around creating a disaster ranked level 5 on the INES scale (same as Three Mile Island).
While there was no terrorist intent, the result was effectively the same as a dirty bomb. 4 people killed, over 200 contaminated, over $100 million to clean up, numerous structures razed, they even had to scrape up the topsoil from the most contaminated sites. The cobalt-60 was so widely disseminated that about 15% of it was never recovered. Some of it ended up at a recycling scrapyard who melted down the container, contaminating the resulting metal ingots. And they were fortunate - the woman who suspected the substance was dangerous brought it to the hospital in a plastic bag, and the doctor was smart enough not to open the bag. If the hospital had been contaminated, the outcome could have been much, much worse.
They got it right with the micro USB cables. If you feel both sides of the tip with your finger, one side has two raised triangular pieces of metal which will scratch your finger. Once you know to feel for the, you will never plug it in backwards in the dark.