According to TFA, the initial turbine has a 2 MW capacity. Offshore wind has about a 0.3-0.4 capacity factor. Nuclear has a 0.9 capacity factor. So to replace the 4696 MW the Fukushima nuclear plant could generate, you'd need (4696*0.9) / (2*0.35) = 6038 of these 2 MW turbines. Even if you go with the larger 7 MW turbines they're planning as a follow-up, you'd need 1725 of those.
Considering they've set aside $222 million to build and operate these three turbines for 5 years, a full replacement for the nuclear plant's generating capacity would cost $167.5 billion. Realistically I expect that price would come down if they did roll it out on that scale. But even land-based wind turbines are about $1.8 million per MW of capacity. So the 12000 MW of turbines you'd need to replace the Fukushima nuclear plant would have a baseline cost of $22 billion before you added the floating platforms and adapted them to survive in a saltwater environment and lay down power cables to bring the electricity back to shore.
For those who don't know why Ford Pintos are supposed to explode. It's a meme which spread via TV in the 1970s that has carried over to the Internet. The problem with the car wasn't as bad as alleged. Similar to the brouhaha over Tesla fires, the incident rate wasn't statistically elevated over other cars. But once the TV comedies got on board and began making jokes about Pintos exploding when rear-ended, it was all over. That's what Tesla really has to worry about - that the car could get an undeserved reputation for catching on fire simply because of bad publicity.
Also bear in mind that even that chart is skewed to show more hurricanes in recent years. Satellites and aircraft flying into hurricanes are fairly recent inventions. So any storms which were hurricanes at sea but diminished to tropical storms by the time they hit land during the first half of the 20th century wouldn't be included in that chart, simply because nobody knew they existed.
Don't collect the data on your own. Have your users collect it for you, then secretly take it from their phones. That way if the government has a problem with it, you can just say, "We didn't collect any data, all these people did. They just agreed to share it with us by clicking on an OK button."
Most people don't realize, but wood-burning is the sleeping giant of renewable energy. It's the largest form of renewable energy consumption in the U.S. If you look at the EIA's energy source breakdown, wood falls under biomass. It comprises about half the total renewable energy we produce, and accounts for nearly twice as much energy as hydroelectric (the next largest renewable). Even for electricity generation which isn't wood's forte (heating is), wood is third after hydro and wind, and far ahead of PV solar.
I'm all for cleaner wood-burning stoves. But it has to be done in a cost-effective manner, lest you drive people to dirtier options like coal or oil.
I guess most of you weren't around when Skylab fell back to Earth. Skylab was a much bigger satellite, but its equatorial orbit somewhat narrowed down the possible landing site locations. Everyone said it would probably fall into the sea. When pressed why, they'd admit they had no idea where it would come down. It was just that the majority of the surface area of the swath of the earth covered by Skylab's orbital inclination was ocean.
Nowadays they try to maintain enough propellant to steer the satellite into a forced re-entry over the ocean. From what I gather, GOCE only had an ion engine so this wasn't an option.
Have you actually had to work with a health inspector? When I worked at a hotel/restaurant, we did. Our health inspector seemed to be on a power trip. She would ask us to do all sorts of strange things, like put sneeze guards on the ends of our self-serving tables (which are designed to abut end-to-end so you can't serve yourself food from the ends). When we couldn't find any for sale through our regular channels, we called the manufacturer about it. They told us they sell these serving tables throughout the country, and they had never heard of any locale's health regulations requiring sneeze guards on the ends. We eventually had our maintenance crew buy some clear PVC and hand-craft it.
Another time she told us we needed flashing (metal sheeting) above our walk-in refrigerators which extended all the way to the ceiling, to block access to the top of the refrigerator. We did so at the cost of a few thousand dollars. When we got our annual fire inspection, the fire marshal told us it was a fire code violation. The tops are supposed to be open so the smoke from any electrical fire is immediately obvious.
We tried challenging her, asking her to show us where in the health safety codes it says we needed to do this stuff. She docked us down a grade the next inspection for a bunch of trivial things like a cap being left of a jar, the counter not being angled sufficiently so every drop of water didn't drain into the sink. So we just stoked her ego and played along. It was less hassle that way - this is a person who has the power to put you out of business. (And if you're curious, we worked hard to maintain an A rating; she would dock us down to B for these perceived slights to her authority.)
In theory health inspections are a checklist. You cross-reference the code of health and safety regulations against the actual state of the restaurant, and give it a score based on the number of violations. In reality, because the code is so large, it's impossible to use it as a checklist. The inspector just walks around and looks for any violations. Failures can be both on the part of the restaurant or in the inspector's memory of the health codes. The smarter jurisdictions have realized that the inspectors are fallible to, and have switched to a simpler pass/fail system rather than giving a grade. As long as your restaurant is reasonably clean, it's unlikely that a harsh or incompetent inspector can find enough trivial violations to fail you. Whereas with a grade system, the multiple levels of cleanliness opens up a lot of room for interpretation and abuse. Knowing what I know now, when I drive through sections of Los Angeles and see restaurants with nothing but C ratings, my first though isn't that those restaurants must be dirty. It's that the inspector for that area must be a hard-ass.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese were intent on being the world leaders in HDTV. They poured the equivalent of billions of dollars (which was a lot more money back then) into R&D of HDTV broadcast standards and transmission and display technologies. They showcased their impressive work at expos and technology conferences around the world. So what happened? Why aren't we all using Japanese HDTV standards?
Like standard definition TV, the system they developed was analog. Around the 1990s, digital signal processors came down in price enough that you could affordably do real-time analog-to-digital conversion, compress the digital stream for transmission, then do decompression at the receiver end. This resulted in an order of magnitude bandwidth savings over purely analog systems. At a certain threshold price point, all that Japanese R&D was rendered obsolete.
Not betting on the wrong horse is just as important as betting on the right horse. PV solar still isn't cost-competitive with other energy sources (if you want to bet on a green energy source right now, wind is the closest to economic parity with coal). Betting heavily on solar now is high-risk. The smart money is on further R&D. Who knows, it could very much end up a repeat of HDTV, with some new photovoltaic chemistry coming out of some little lab which renders all previous PV technologies obsolete.
The reason is pretty simple. It's because if you add up all the costs, every study done by someone other than an environmental wacko group says PV solar is 2-5x more expensive per kWh generated than other energy sources. I wish it weren't so, but PV solar is very much a technology which needs further R&D before widescale adoption. There are a few locations (e.g. desert southwest U.S.) where the abundance of sunlight makes it more feasible (though still not advantageous). But in general, outside of a few niche applications (e.g. off-grid, like generating electricity on sailboats), and certain locations where geography already makes the price of electricity naturally high (e.g. Hawaii), it's not economically effective yet.
Stepping back from the min/max recordkeeping for a bit, the size of the storm also makes a huge difference in the amount of damage it causes. Even if a storm is powerful, its impact may be minimal if it's small in size. From what I can tell from news reports, Haiyan is about half the diameter of the largest and strongest typhoon on record - Typhoon Tip. About 2200 km vs about 1200 km.
The diameter (extent of tropical storm-force winds) of hurricane Katrina was about 600 km, which is rather large for a storm. Hurricane Sandy (largest on record in the Atlantic) was about 1500 km across. I have to remind my European friends about this when they comment about the long recovery time from these storms for a "so-called" first-world nation. These storms were as large or larger than entire European countries - recovery efforts in an area that large are going to be slow even in a first-world country.
The rate of travel and rainfall amounts matter too. Hurricane Mitch was only a category 1 when it made landfall and a tropical storm or tropical depression most of its time over land, but it's the second deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record because it lingered for almost two weeks dropping torrential rain causing massive flooding and landslides.
Katrina and Rita grew to such enormous strength and size due to freakishly warm water in the Gulf of Mexico that year. So it's not impossible for powerful storms to hit the U.S. (the 1935 labor day hurricane was measured at 892 mbar at landfall).
It may seem harmless at first glance. But this is analogous to the problem we're having with cable TV - where the company which owns the delivery hardware is also the company which is selling you the content.
For this to work properly, the delivery infrastructure has to remain separate from the product being delivered. That's what we do with electricity and gas. For efficiency purposes, one company owns the power lines or the gas pipes. But they're not allowed to discriminate against electricity and gas suppliers, and anyone is allowed to sell those products through their lines/pipes.
Without this separation, there's a huge conflict of interest. A company with an inferior product can force its acceptance through its dominance of the delivery system (e.g. cable companies and their "packages" where you're forced to pay for lots of channels you haven't the slightest interest in watching). Or a company with an inferior delivery system can force its acceptance through dominance in a popular product (e.g. game consoles which sign an exclusive deal for a certain game).
In a nutshell, you shouldn't be allowed to use dominance in one market as leverage to gain dominance in a different, orthogonal market.
The prisoners dilemma demonstrates that if everyone does what is strictly in their own best interests, everybody loses.
The prisoner's dilemma is one specific set of circumstances. If you tweak the numbers in the grid, everyone acting in their own best interests results in everyone winning. In fact, for most situations this is true (which is why capitalism tends to work so well), and the prisoner's dilemma is the minority case.
So most of the time capitalism works. Some of the time it doesn't. The prisoner's dilemma (and tragedy of the commons) aren't a blanket condemnation of capitalism. They identify specific cases where capitalism fails and we need government management (specifically, those with externalized costs). But just as they demonstrate that unfettered capitalism doesn't work in some situations, they likewise demonstrate that government oversight is unnecessary in most cases.
Right up until capitalism leads to its own form or totalitarianism, as corporations and cartels control pretty much everything and we all become serfs again.
Capitalism claims to be benign and benevolent, but since everyone tries to gain an unfair advantage and cheat the system, it just leads to a different form of losing your freedoms.
Capitalism doesn't claim to be benign or benevolent. It just claims to be better at finding more efficient solutions than systems which are (over)managed.
The key to making capitalism work though is competition. The more eyeballs you have looking at a problem and trying to solve it, the more quickly you can arrive at an optimal solution (vs. a single set of eyeballs in the managed solution). Evolution is capitalism. The totalitarianism and serfdom you complain about is the antithesis of capitalism. If you corrupt the system so all parties can no longer compete freely, by definition it's no longer pure capitalism.
The one area where capitalism does fail is in externalized costs. Where one actor gains the benefits of their decision while the other actor is stuck with the costs. Pollution and overfishing are primary examples of this. The technical nomenclature is the prisoner's dilemma (one actor shifts the costs of their decision onto another actor) and the tragedy of the commons (one actor divides the cost among all actors). So it's not a case of capitalism being a panacea or a complete failure. In these types of situations, capitalism fails and you need management. Outside of these situations, it's the most efficient solution (that we've been able to find) and management is usually just an opportunity to introduce corruption. Both sides of this debate are right, we just need to clarify the situations when one side is right and when the other side is right.
Energy goes as velocity squared, so a bird strike at 600 mph has 16x the energy of a strike at a 150 mph takeoff speed where most bird strikes occur. At these higher impact velocities and without the metal airframe surrounding the entire windshield like on an airliner, the only way the canopy can survive an impact is by deforming enough to spread out the impact over time, but not so much that it hits the pilot's head.
There's a beautiful film of a high-speed bird strike test on a F16 canopy that I saw in a 1980s or 1990s documentary. Unfortunately the only version I could find on youtube has the gamma set too low so you can't really see the detail. The canopy bubbles underneath as it deflects the bird up, then snaps back to its original shape. You can kinda see at 6-7 seconds when the bird remains disappear from view due to the canopy bouncing back to its original shape. This video shows a similar test from the side and you can see the impressive amount of deformation. The canopy bends enough to smash the HUD, but bounces back into shape. This video is tests of road debris (a tire) into a race car windshield at relatively low speed (compared to a F16 or T38), but they show a plane canopy for comparison.
Yes it makes it more durable. The more rigid the body, the faster it decelerates when dropped and hits the ground. The faster it decelerates, the greater the acceleration forces. SInce F = ma, high acceleration = high forces on the internal components. Contrary to conventional wisdom, you don't want your phone to be a rigid metal body. They tried that in the 1940s and 1950s with cars, with the result that the cars were surviving the crashes while the passengers inside were turning into paste. You want the most delicate components inside a stiff metal cage, but the cage should be surrounded by flexible "crumple zones" to cushion the impact forces and absorb the impact energy rather than transmit them directly to what's inside.
The fly in the ointment so far has been that the most delicate component on a phone is the screen, which has to be on the outside, and has to be the full size of the device. So its impossible to house it inside a protective cage (well, some phone cases attempt to do that, with rather ugly results). But if the screen is flexible it's no longer the most delicate component.
You jest, but I really think that's the direction mobile computing is going to go. If you open up a modern tablet, the "computer" part of it is a thin PCB little wider than a stick of gum. The battery can be molded to fit whatever shape you want. The only reason tablets are the bulky slate shape (which has tremendously excessive surface area for the volume of components) is because of the screen. As technology progresses, the computer bits are going to continue to get smaller, and both battery capacity will increase while required capacity will decrease as power efficiency improves. The screen is more and more going to become the millstone around the neck of these devices.
If you could roll up or fold the screen, you could substantially shrink the size of the device when it's not in use. A 10" tablet could roll into something about the size of a fat pen. There's some engineering work which needs to be done to make a collapsible frame to hold the screen flat when unrolled, but I think the tradeoff is going to be worth it.
Half right. Sometimes it cause by plates rubbing against each other but there are other ways to create earthquakes. Since Texas is far away from any fault lines that I know of I donâ(TM)t think this is the case.
The amount of energy added by injecting CO2 or whatever else is trivial. An earthquake it "causes" would amount to little more than a truck rumbling by. Any energy release greater than that has to have been from energy already there before the fracking. If the injection added enough energy to create the earthquake all by itself, they wouldn't be doing it because they'd be using more energy in the injection than they got back in any oil/gas extracted.
I really doubt it's the injection causing the earthquakes. More than likely it's the (improper) removal of liquid and matter (sand, fractured rock). There was a story a few months back about how drilling had created a sinkhole. The injected water had dissolved the limestone, then as the water drained away it left a chasm, and when that collapsed you got a sinkhole. In that case, the removal of material lowered the potential energy floor. And the potential energy of all the rock sitting above the new chasm IS substantial enough to create an earthquake (or a sinkhole). In a regular uncapped oil well (e.g. Deepwater Horizon), that enormous potential energy of the rock and dirt above wanting to settle down is what's squeezing the oil up to create a geyser.
That would also help explain why most injection wells aren't leading to earthquakes, while some are.
That's true for a regular hard drive, but I'm not sure that's true in this case.
e.g. A computer used at the ski resort in Mammoth Lakes experiences an air pressure about 25% less than sea level. So the volume of air inside the HDD enclosure wants to expand until it's 33% greater. With a regular HDD they just put in a filtered breathing hole to allow air in or out to equalize the pressure. This equalization is why the drive won't work in a near-vacuum.
If they'd filled this with helium, I can think of two ways they're handling this expansion problem. They're either using a bladder with regular air inside, and the breathing hole goes to the bladder. That's the way we handled the problem in submersibles - oil compresses slightly more than water, so if you simply seal your thruster motors in an oil bath, the water pressure will crush them and cause the rotating parts to bind. Instead, you attach the oil reservoir to a flexible oil-filled bladder exposed to water. The bladder shrinks under pressure, equalizing the oil pressure inside the motor with the water pressure outside, without contaminating the motor with water.
But since the HDD is bathed in a gas instead of a liquid, that wastes a lot of interior space - at least 33% if you want the drive to work at about 8000 ft, more if you want it to work higher. I'm not sure they have that much space available if they've crammed in 7 platters. So the other possibility is they've completely sealed the helium inside and the drive maintains the same internal pressure even at altitude.
Either way, there's a minimum pressure below which the inside of the drive won't drop. In the latter case the pressure is constant. In the former case the minimum pressure is simply the pressure when the bladder is completely emptied of outside air - i.e. even in a vacuum there will still be pressure inside the drive. And if they're having to do that anyway, they'd be smart to make sure that low pressure was still sufficient to allow the drive to operate. That would make this drive the only (relatively) cheap large-capacity drive capable of being used in low ambient pressure applications which normally have to use flash storage or an SSD.
Beg/borrow/steal an old laptop that isn't be used anymore. Those only draw about 10-15 Watts under normal use, so are about the same as a router or NAS if you leave it on all the time. Plug an external USB drive into it if its internal HDD isn't big enough for your purposes. You can use Windows, Linux, or even OS X; but the common network sharing system everyone uses seems to be SMB and CIFS which is Windows native. That's not to diss the Samba guys - I think they've done a great job reverse engineering a proprietary Microsoft protocol. But when I test it side by side, native Windows shares always seem to be a smidge faster. (Samba/Unix is much better if you're setting up multiple accounts and permissions though. Windows doesn't seem to like that unless you buy the server version).
Just be sure to do the initial 1TB full backup over the wired network. Subsequent backups should be incremental or differential backups, and shouldn't take long over wifi (unless you're generating or downloading a ton of new files every day). Every month or two you can drop by next door, plug into the wired network, and make a new full backup.
This is essentially what I set up for my dad, to backup his laptop to a NAS I put in his house. His laptop does the backup silently, in the background, over wifi. He is none the wiser, except the few times he's accidentally deleted a file I've been able to recover it from the previous day's backup. I just VPNed in and it looks like his differential backups are only about 10-50 MB each day. Based on that file size, I could probably just have his laptop do a second backup to my file server over the Internet/VPN for an off-site backup.
But the BIGGER question I don't see anybody asking, is why is there no apparent fall back or concession to delay requirements due to the problems? ANY significantly complicated computer system can reasonably be expected to encounter problems at deployment.
Because anyone saying something is wrong, it won't work, it lacks safeguards and failsafes, we need more time, is labeled disruptive, bad for morale, a troublemaker, and is subsequently fired.
This isn't something new. It's been an age-old problem with management that instead of taking bad news as a statement of fact, they tend to blame it on the messenger. Shoot enough messengers and you eventually have a system full of yes men who are in complete denial about any problems. Until the system has to survive on its own in the real world, and not in the fantasy world of self-aggrandizing work summaries and progress reports. Making the people who tell you bad news go away doesn't make the problem go away. It just blinds you to the problem.
Hint for anyone who ever makes it to management: If someone never tells you any bad news about something they're working on, they are lying and obstructing your ability to properly manage by not giving you the full picture.
the weirdest part is?/. is such a YRO crowd that you think they would be outraged at all the privacy invasion stuff that google does, but instead there is this love and forgiveness. I think mostly because it sounds like a cool place to work and gives free stuff like gmail (hint: it's not free). oh and they support "open source" (but not really).
It makes perfect sense. Google is completely up-front about it. They tell you they'll give you a service for free, but in exchange they'll mine your content for data and show you ads based on that data. If you take them up on their offer but later change your mind, you're free to leave at any time, and they even make it easy for you to extract your data (unlike other services like Quickbooks or Facebook).
The YRO crowd isn't against both sides of a party mutually agreeing to enter an agreement. They're against one side doing something not disclosed in the agreement, or changing it without the consent of the other party. They're not against you willingly giving up your personal info, they're against the other party giving it away without your consent or knowledge.
say what you will about apple, but at least your relationship with them is clear. you buy a product from them, and you own a product. no selling of your info. no things that can be taken away (igoogle, reader). it's regular old business. I prefer that.
Google had the opportunity to do the same thing Apple did - simply lift the GPS and wifi data from Android phone users. But instead they chose the extra expense of doing it themselves to avoid violating their users' privacy. They paid to send out their own cars to every corner of the Earth to (along with taking StreetView photos) record wifi SSIDs (and got themselves into trouble when they recorded more than just the SSIDs - which btw they self-reported to the EU after the EU asked them to investigate).
I like Google because they're up-front about what they do. I'm not crazy about some of their data collection, but because they're up-front about it I can take steps to avoid/thwart it when I think they take it too far. I am in control. Totally different from Apple and Microsoft which have a history of doing things I don't like nor approve of with my data (I include Microsoft because I make a unique email alias for every company where I sign up for something, and so far the only one to get lots of spam is microsoft@mydomain.com).
The debate is that as solar power use grows the people using with zero bills aren't paying any maintenance dollars to support upkeep of the grid. Right now power rates combine generation and grid maintenance costs in one per/kw number.
That sounds like it'd be rather simple to solve. Instead of the meter running backwards when the home is generating excess electricity, newer meters should measure electricity sent to the home separately from electricity sent from the home. The electricity generation charge can then be based on (IN - OUT), and the maintenance charge can be based on (IN + OUT).
Um, if you want define "mistake" as "making lots of money", then yeah, they made a "mistake". If you look at usage stats though what you see is a very different picture. For instance, iPhones still dominate in mobile web usage, as well as app usage etc.
No it doesn't. Those stats are for iOS (iPhone + iPad) vs Android phones and tablets. And it's only for wifi traffic. On web traffic over cellular networks, Android devices generate slightly more traffic than iOS devices. Basically your link cherry-picked the one chart favorable to iOS.
If you limit the comparison to just iPhone vs Android phones, Android generates more web traffic. And before you pull out the NetMarketShare data showing iPhone still leading: (1) NetMarketShare gets data from only a few tens of thousands of sites, while StatCounter gets its data from millions of sites. And (2) NetMarketShare's figures are normalized to unique visitors per month. i.e. Someone who visits a site once in a month counts as much as someone who uses the site every day. StatCounter counts web hits, so is measuring actual web usage rather than counting number of users. In other words, more iPhone users browse the web on their phone than Android users, but they don't do much browsing. The hardcore phone browser users are on Android and they generate more web traffic than the larger number of iPhone users who use the browser..
Basically the only lead Apple still has is the iPad in the tablet market, and it's rapidly losing that too. Their share of quarterly tablet sales dropped from a commanding 60% in 2012 to 33% in 2Q2013, and now 29% in 3Q2013. Those are quarterly sales, so iPads probably still comprise the majority of tablets in use, which match with your initial stats showing iOS dominating in wifi-based web traffic.
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According to TFA, the initial turbine has a 2 MW capacity. Offshore wind has about a 0.3-0.4 capacity factor. Nuclear has a 0.9 capacity factor. So to replace the 4696 MW the Fukushima nuclear plant could generate, you'd need (4696*0.9) / (2*0.35) = 6038 of these 2 MW turbines. Even if you go with the larger 7 MW turbines they're planning as a follow-up, you'd need 1725 of those.
Considering they've set aside $222 million to build and operate these three turbines for 5 years, a full replacement for the nuclear plant's generating capacity would cost $167.5 billion. Realistically I expect that price would come down if they did roll it out on that scale. But even land-based wind turbines are about $1.8 million per MW of capacity. So the 12000 MW of turbines you'd need to replace the Fukushima nuclear plant would have a baseline cost of $22 billion before you added the floating platforms and adapted them to survive in a saltwater environment and lay down power cables to bring the electricity back to shore.
Here's what the Japanese 2011 tsunami looked like a few miles out at sea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdhfV-8dbCE
For those who don't know why Ford Pintos are supposed to explode. It's a meme which spread via TV in the 1970s that has carried over to the Internet. The problem with the car wasn't as bad as alleged. Similar to the brouhaha over Tesla fires, the incident rate wasn't statistically elevated over other cars. But once the TV comedies got on board and began making jokes about Pintos exploding when rear-ended, it was all over. That's what Tesla really has to worry about - that the car could get an undeserved reputation for catching on fire simply because of bad publicity.
Also bear in mind that even that chart is skewed to show more hurricanes in recent years. Satellites and aircraft flying into hurricanes are fairly recent inventions. So any storms which were hurricanes at sea but diminished to tropical storms by the time they hit land during the first half of the 20th century wouldn't be included in that chart, simply because nobody knew they existed.
Don't collect the data on your own. Have your users collect it for you, then secretly take it from their phones. That way if the government has a problem with it, you can just say, "We didn't collect any data, all these people did. They just agreed to share it with us by clicking on an OK button."
Most people don't realize, but wood-burning is the sleeping giant of renewable energy. It's the largest form of renewable energy consumption in the U.S. If you look at the EIA's energy source breakdown, wood falls under biomass. It comprises about half the total renewable energy we produce, and accounts for nearly twice as much energy as hydroelectric (the next largest renewable). Even for electricity generation which isn't wood's forte (heating is), wood is third after hydro and wind, and far ahead of PV solar.
I'm all for cleaner wood-burning stoves. But it has to be done in a cost-effective manner, lest you drive people to dirtier options like coal or oil.
All of this will happen again.
I guess most of you weren't around when Skylab fell back to Earth. Skylab was a much bigger satellite, but its equatorial orbit somewhat narrowed down the possible landing site locations. Everyone said it would probably fall into the sea. When pressed why, they'd admit they had no idea where it would come down. It was just that the majority of the surface area of the swath of the earth covered by Skylab's orbital inclination was ocean.
Nowadays they try to maintain enough propellant to steer the satellite into a forced re-entry over the ocean. From what I gather, GOCE only had an ion engine so this wasn't an option.
Have you actually had to work with a health inspector? When I worked at a hotel/restaurant, we did. Our health inspector seemed to be on a power trip. She would ask us to do all sorts of strange things, like put sneeze guards on the ends of our self-serving tables (which are designed to abut end-to-end so you can't serve yourself food from the ends). When we couldn't find any for sale through our regular channels, we called the manufacturer about it. They told us they sell these serving tables throughout the country, and they had never heard of any locale's health regulations requiring sneeze guards on the ends. We eventually had our maintenance crew buy some clear PVC and hand-craft it.
Another time she told us we needed flashing (metal sheeting) above our walk-in refrigerators which extended all the way to the ceiling, to block access to the top of the refrigerator. We did so at the cost of a few thousand dollars. When we got our annual fire inspection, the fire marshal told us it was a fire code violation. The tops are supposed to be open so the smoke from any electrical fire is immediately obvious.
We tried challenging her, asking her to show us where in the health safety codes it says we needed to do this stuff. She docked us down a grade the next inspection for a bunch of trivial things like a cap being left of a jar, the counter not being angled sufficiently so every drop of water didn't drain into the sink. So we just stoked her ego and played along. It was less hassle that way - this is a person who has the power to put you out of business. (And if you're curious, we worked hard to maintain an A rating; she would dock us down to B for these perceived slights to her authority.)
In theory health inspections are a checklist. You cross-reference the code of health and safety regulations against the actual state of the restaurant, and give it a score based on the number of violations. In reality, because the code is so large, it's impossible to use it as a checklist. The inspector just walks around and looks for any violations. Failures can be both on the part of the restaurant or in the inspector's memory of the health codes. The smarter jurisdictions have realized that the inspectors are fallible to, and have switched to a simpler pass/fail system rather than giving a grade. As long as your restaurant is reasonably clean, it's unlikely that a harsh or incompetent inspector can find enough trivial violations to fail you. Whereas with a grade system, the multiple levels of cleanliness opens up a lot of room for interpretation and abuse. Knowing what I know now, when I drive through sections of Los Angeles and see restaurants with nothing but C ratings, my first though isn't that those restaurants must be dirty. It's that the inspector for that area must be a hard-ass.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese were intent on being the world leaders in HDTV. They poured the equivalent of billions of dollars (which was a lot more money back then) into R&D of HDTV broadcast standards and transmission and display technologies. They showcased their impressive work at expos and technology conferences around the world. So what happened? Why aren't we all using Japanese HDTV standards?
Like standard definition TV, the system they developed was analog. Around the 1990s, digital signal processors came down in price enough that you could affordably do real-time analog-to-digital conversion, compress the digital stream for transmission, then do decompression at the receiver end. This resulted in an order of magnitude bandwidth savings over purely analog systems. At a certain threshold price point, all that Japanese R&D was rendered obsolete.
Not betting on the wrong horse is just as important as betting on the right horse. PV solar still isn't cost-competitive with other energy sources (if you want to bet on a green energy source right now, wind is the closest to economic parity with coal). Betting heavily on solar now is high-risk. The smart money is on further R&D. Who knows, it could very much end up a repeat of HDTV, with some new photovoltaic chemistry coming out of some little lab which renders all previous PV technologies obsolete.
The reason is pretty simple. It's because if you add up all the costs, every study done by someone other than an environmental wacko group says PV solar is 2-5x more expensive per kWh generated than other energy sources. I wish it weren't so, but PV solar is very much a technology which needs further R&D before widescale adoption. There are a few locations (e.g. desert southwest U.S.) where the abundance of sunlight makes it more feasible (though still not advantageous). But in general, outside of a few niche applications (e.g. off-grid, like generating electricity on sailboats), and certain locations where geography already makes the price of electricity naturally high (e.g. Hawaii), it's not economically effective yet.
If you ignore that and decide to charge ahead with it anyway, the decision isn't without consequences. Your average electricity price increases.
Stepping back from the min/max recordkeeping for a bit, the size of the storm also makes a huge difference in the amount of damage it causes. Even if a storm is powerful, its impact may be minimal if it's small in size. From what I can tell from news reports, Haiyan is about half the diameter of the largest and strongest typhoon on record - Typhoon Tip. About 2200 km vs about 1200 km.
The diameter (extent of tropical storm-force winds) of hurricane Katrina was about 600 km, which is rather large for a storm. Hurricane Sandy (largest on record in the Atlantic) was about 1500 km across. I have to remind my European friends about this when they comment about the long recovery time from these storms for a "so-called" first-world nation. These storms were as large or larger than entire European countries - recovery efforts in an area that large are going to be slow even in a first-world country.
The rate of travel and rainfall amounts matter too. Hurricane Mitch was only a category 1 when it made landfall and a tropical storm or tropical depression most of its time over land, but it's the second deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record because it lingered for almost two weeks dropping torrential rain causing massive flooding and landslides.
Katrina and Rita grew to such enormous strength and size due to freakishly warm water in the Gulf of Mexico that year. So it's not impossible for powerful storms to hit the U.S. (the 1935 labor day hurricane was measured at 892 mbar at landfall).
It may seem harmless at first glance. But this is analogous to the problem we're having with cable TV - where the company which owns the delivery hardware is also the company which is selling you the content.
For this to work properly, the delivery infrastructure has to remain separate from the product being delivered. That's what we do with electricity and gas. For efficiency purposes, one company owns the power lines or the gas pipes. But they're not allowed to discriminate against electricity and gas suppliers, and anyone is allowed to sell those products through their lines/pipes.
Without this separation, there's a huge conflict of interest. A company with an inferior product can force its acceptance through its dominance of the delivery system (e.g. cable companies and their "packages" where you're forced to pay for lots of channels you haven't the slightest interest in watching). Or a company with an inferior delivery system can force its acceptance through dominance in a popular product (e.g. game consoles which sign an exclusive deal for a certain game).
In a nutshell, you shouldn't be allowed to use dominance in one market as leverage to gain dominance in a different, orthogonal market.
The prisoner's dilemma is one specific set of circumstances. If you tweak the numbers in the grid, everyone acting in their own best interests results in everyone winning. In fact, for most situations this is true (which is why capitalism tends to work so well), and the prisoner's dilemma is the minority case.
So most of the time capitalism works. Some of the time it doesn't. The prisoner's dilemma (and tragedy of the commons) aren't a blanket condemnation of capitalism. They identify specific cases where capitalism fails and we need government management (specifically, those with externalized costs). But just as they demonstrate that unfettered capitalism doesn't work in some situations, they likewise demonstrate that government oversight is unnecessary in most cases.
Capitalism doesn't claim to be benign or benevolent. It just claims to be better at finding more efficient solutions than systems which are (over)managed.
The key to making capitalism work though is competition. The more eyeballs you have looking at a problem and trying to solve it, the more quickly you can arrive at an optimal solution (vs. a single set of eyeballs in the managed solution). Evolution is capitalism. The totalitarianism and serfdom you complain about is the antithesis of capitalism. If you corrupt the system so all parties can no longer compete freely, by definition it's no longer pure capitalism.
The one area where capitalism does fail is in externalized costs. Where one actor gains the benefits of their decision while the other actor is stuck with the costs. Pollution and overfishing are primary examples of this. The technical nomenclature is the prisoner's dilemma (one actor shifts the costs of their decision onto another actor) and the tragedy of the commons (one actor divides the cost among all actors). So it's not a case of capitalism being a panacea or a complete failure. In these types of situations, capitalism fails and you need management. Outside of these situations, it's the most efficient solution (that we've been able to find) and management is usually just an opportunity to introduce corruption. Both sides of this debate are right, we just need to clarify the situations when one side is right and when the other side is right.
Energy goes as velocity squared, so a bird strike at 600 mph has 16x the energy of a strike at a 150 mph takeoff speed where most bird strikes occur. At these higher impact velocities and without the metal airframe surrounding the entire windshield like on an airliner, the only way the canopy can survive an impact is by deforming enough to spread out the impact over time, but not so much that it hits the pilot's head.
There's a beautiful film of a high-speed bird strike test on a F16 canopy that I saw in a 1980s or 1990s documentary. Unfortunately the only version I could find on youtube has the gamma set too low so you can't really see the detail. The canopy bubbles underneath as it deflects the bird up, then snaps back to its original shape. You can kinda see at 6-7 seconds when the bird remains disappear from view due to the canopy bouncing back to its original shape. This video shows a similar test from the side and you can see the impressive amount of deformation. The canopy bends enough to smash the HUD, but bounces back into shape. This video is tests of road debris (a tire) into a race car windshield at relatively low speed (compared to a F16 or T38), but they show a plane canopy for comparison.
Yes it makes it more durable. The more rigid the body, the faster it decelerates when dropped and hits the ground. The faster it decelerates, the greater the acceleration forces. SInce F = ma, high acceleration = high forces on the internal components. Contrary to conventional wisdom, you don't want your phone to be a rigid metal body. They tried that in the 1940s and 1950s with cars, with the result that the cars were surviving the crashes while the passengers inside were turning into paste. You want the most delicate components inside a stiff metal cage, but the cage should be surrounded by flexible "crumple zones" to cushion the impact forces and absorb the impact energy rather than transmit them directly to what's inside.
The fly in the ointment so far has been that the most delicate component on a phone is the screen, which has to be on the outside, and has to be the full size of the device. So its impossible to house it inside a protective cage (well, some phone cases attempt to do that, with rather ugly results). But if the screen is flexible it's no longer the most delicate component.
You jest, but I really think that's the direction mobile computing is going to go. If you open up a modern tablet, the "computer" part of it is a thin PCB little wider than a stick of gum. The battery can be molded to fit whatever shape you want. The only reason tablets are the bulky slate shape (which has tremendously excessive surface area for the volume of components) is because of the screen. As technology progresses, the computer bits are going to continue to get smaller, and both battery capacity will increase while required capacity will decrease as power efficiency improves. The screen is more and more going to become the millstone around the neck of these devices.
If you could roll up or fold the screen, you could substantially shrink the size of the device when it's not in use. A 10" tablet could roll into something about the size of a fat pen. There's some engineering work which needs to be done to make a collapsible frame to hold the screen flat when unrolled, but I think the tradeoff is going to be worth it.
The amount of energy added by injecting CO2 or whatever else is trivial. An earthquake it "causes" would amount to little more than a truck rumbling by. Any energy release greater than that has to have been from energy already there before the fracking. If the injection added enough energy to create the earthquake all by itself, they wouldn't be doing it because they'd be using more energy in the injection than they got back in any oil/gas extracted.
I really doubt it's the injection causing the earthquakes. More than likely it's the (improper) removal of liquid and matter (sand, fractured rock). There was a story a few months back about how drilling had created a sinkhole. The injected water had dissolved the limestone, then as the water drained away it left a chasm, and when that collapsed you got a sinkhole. In that case, the removal of material lowered the potential energy floor. And the potential energy of all the rock sitting above the new chasm IS substantial enough to create an earthquake (or a sinkhole). In a regular uncapped oil well (e.g. Deepwater Horizon), that enormous potential energy of the rock and dirt above wanting to settle down is what's squeezing the oil up to create a geyser.
That would also help explain why most injection wells aren't leading to earthquakes, while some are.
That's true for a regular hard drive, but I'm not sure that's true in this case.
e.g. A computer used at the ski resort in Mammoth Lakes experiences an air pressure about 25% less than sea level. So the volume of air inside the HDD enclosure wants to expand until it's 33% greater. With a regular HDD they just put in a filtered breathing hole to allow air in or out to equalize the pressure. This equalization is why the drive won't work in a near-vacuum.
If they'd filled this with helium, I can think of two ways they're handling this expansion problem. They're either using a bladder with regular air inside, and the breathing hole goes to the bladder. That's the way we handled the problem in submersibles - oil compresses slightly more than water, so if you simply seal your thruster motors in an oil bath, the water pressure will crush them and cause the rotating parts to bind. Instead, you attach the oil reservoir to a flexible oil-filled bladder exposed to water. The bladder shrinks under pressure, equalizing the oil pressure inside the motor with the water pressure outside, without contaminating the motor with water.
But since the HDD is bathed in a gas instead of a liquid, that wastes a lot of interior space - at least 33% if you want the drive to work at about 8000 ft, more if you want it to work higher. I'm not sure they have that much space available if they've crammed in 7 platters. So the other possibility is they've completely sealed the helium inside and the drive maintains the same internal pressure even at altitude.
Either way, there's a minimum pressure below which the inside of the drive won't drop. In the latter case the pressure is constant. In the former case the minimum pressure is simply the pressure when the bladder is completely emptied of outside air - i.e. even in a vacuum there will still be pressure inside the drive. And if they're having to do that anyway, they'd be smart to make sure that low pressure was still sufficient to allow the drive to operate. That would make this drive the only (relatively) cheap large-capacity drive capable of being used in low ambient pressure applications which normally have to use flash storage or an SSD.
Beg/borrow/steal an old laptop that isn't be used anymore. Those only draw about 10-15 Watts under normal use, so are about the same as a router or NAS if you leave it on all the time. Plug an external USB drive into it if its internal HDD isn't big enough for your purposes. You can use Windows, Linux, or even OS X; but the common network sharing system everyone uses seems to be SMB and CIFS which is Windows native. That's not to diss the Samba guys - I think they've done a great job reverse engineering a proprietary Microsoft protocol. But when I test it side by side, native Windows shares always seem to be a smidge faster. (Samba/Unix is much better if you're setting up multiple accounts and permissions though. Windows doesn't seem to like that unless you buy the server version).
Just be sure to do the initial 1TB full backup over the wired network. Subsequent backups should be incremental or differential backups, and shouldn't take long over wifi (unless you're generating or downloading a ton of new files every day). Every month or two you can drop by next door, plug into the wired network, and make a new full backup.
This is essentially what I set up for my dad, to backup his laptop to a NAS I put in his house. His laptop does the backup silently, in the background, over wifi. He is none the wiser, except the few times he's accidentally deleted a file I've been able to recover it from the previous day's backup. I just VPNed in and it looks like his differential backups are only about 10-50 MB each day. Based on that file size, I could probably just have his laptop do a second backup to my file server over the Internet/VPN for an off-site backup.
Because anyone saying something is wrong, it won't work, it lacks safeguards and failsafes, we need more time, is labeled disruptive, bad for morale, a troublemaker, and is subsequently fired.
This isn't something new. It's been an age-old problem with management that instead of taking bad news as a statement of fact, they tend to blame it on the messenger. Shoot enough messengers and you eventually have a system full of yes men who are in complete denial about any problems. Until the system has to survive on its own in the real world, and not in the fantasy world of self-aggrandizing work summaries and progress reports. Making the people who tell you bad news go away doesn't make the problem go away. It just blinds you to the problem.
Hint for anyone who ever makes it to management: If someone never tells you any bad news about something they're working on, they are lying and obstructing your ability to properly manage by not giving you the full picture.
It makes perfect sense. Google is completely up-front about it. They tell you they'll give you a service for free, but in exchange they'll mine your content for data and show you ads based on that data. If you take them up on their offer but later change your mind, you're free to leave at any time, and they even make it easy for you to extract your data (unlike other services like Quickbooks or Facebook).
The YRO crowd isn't against both sides of a party mutually agreeing to enter an agreement. They're against one side doing something not disclosed in the agreement, or changing it without the consent of the other party. They're not against you willingly giving up your personal info, they're against the other party giving it away without your consent or knowledge.
You seriously believe that? How do you think Apple built up its own wifi map database so quickly? By lifting GPS and wifi data from people's iPhones.
Google had the opportunity to do the same thing Apple did - simply lift the GPS and wifi data from Android phone users. But instead they chose the extra expense of doing it themselves to avoid violating their users' privacy. They paid to send out their own cars to every corner of the Earth to (along with taking StreetView photos) record wifi SSIDs (and got themselves into trouble when they recorded more than just the SSIDs - which btw they self-reported to the EU after the EU asked them to investigate).
I like Google because they're up-front about what they do. I'm not crazy about some of their data collection, but because they're up-front about it I can take steps to avoid/thwart it when I think they take it too far. I am in control. Totally different from Apple and Microsoft which have a history of doing things I don't like nor approve of with my data (I include Microsoft because I make a unique email alias for every company where I sign up for something, and so far the only one to get lots of spam is microsoft@mydomain.com).
That sounds like it'd be rather simple to solve. Instead of the meter running backwards when the home is generating excess electricity, newer meters should measure electricity sent to the home separately from electricity sent from the home. The electricity generation charge can then be based on (IN - OUT), and the maintenance charge can be based on (IN + OUT).
No it doesn't. Those stats are for iOS (iPhone + iPad) vs Android phones and tablets. And it's only for wifi traffic. On web traffic over cellular networks, Android devices generate slightly more traffic than iOS devices. Basically your link cherry-picked the one chart favorable to iOS.
If you limit the comparison to just iPhone vs Android phones, Android generates more web traffic. And before you pull out the NetMarketShare data showing iPhone still leading: (1) NetMarketShare gets data from only a few tens of thousands of sites, while StatCounter gets its data from millions of sites. And (2) NetMarketShare's figures are normalized to unique visitors per month. i.e. Someone who visits a site once in a month counts as much as someone who uses the site every day. StatCounter counts web hits, so is measuring actual web usage rather than counting number of users. In other words, more iPhone users browse the web on their phone than Android users, but they don't do much browsing. The hardcore phone browser users are on Android and they generate more web traffic than the larger number of iPhone users who use the browser..
Basically the only lead Apple still has is the iPad in the tablet market, and it's rapidly losing that too. Their share of quarterly tablet sales dropped from a commanding 60% in 2012 to 33% in 2Q2013, and now 29% in 3Q2013. Those are quarterly sales, so iPads probably still comprise the majority of tablets in use, which match with your initial stats showing iOS dominating in wifi-based web traffic.