I don't know about this case, but AFAIR NASA required forms signed in triplicate saying that any tool taken into the shuttle was later removed from it.
An audit of procedures after the Challenger disaster revealed that this can actually cause the problem it's attempting to solve. When you require three people to sign off that something has been inspected, one day an inspector is a bit rushed and needs to finish by 4:30 to make it to his child's school play. He figures since two other people will be inspecting the part in addition to him, he can cheat a little and just sign off on it without actually inspecting it. After all, what are the odds that all three inspectors would sign off on it without actually inspecting the part?
Until you think, what are the odds that all three inspectors have a child in the school play that day and want to finish early to get off by 4:30? Too few inspectors and you're vulnerable to mistakes. Too many inspectors and you're vulnerable to complacency.
Would love it if our Government go solar over nuclear (alot of the country has suitable weather).
Solar is unsuitable for base load, since its production capacity varies with time of day and the weather. Unless you're willing to invest $billions (if not $trillions) in batteries or pumped storage, you need some other sources of energy with an on/off switch.
Much of rural Kenya has no electricity. For domestic use, I would think solar is ideal especially in areas outside of the grid, just that most cannot afford the components. I'm not sure if many here quite grasp the meaning of living below the poverty line.
The most rudimentary form of solar power is to collect firewood and burn it. Plants collect solar energy through their leaves, and store it as sugar (cellulose is just really long chains of sugar). Burning wood releases that energy. The CO2 emitted by burning wood is CO2 which was extracted from the atmosphere by the plant as it was growing, so it is carbon-neutral.
It's not as efficient as PV panels, but it's much, much cheaper since the plants replicate and grow by themselves. All you need to do is provide land and water, and expend energy in harvesting. I suspect Kenya's root problem is actually lack of fresh water, not lack of energy. PV solar, while sexy, is pretty much the most expensive form of electricity generation (by several hundred percent). Hardly an ideal solution for a poor country.
In rural, undeveloped areas, the primary need for energy is for cooking. That need can be met with a solar oven. No need for an intermediate electricity step. TVs are an extravagance, while radios and simple computers are low enough in power that they can be powered by few minutes turning a hand crank. If you're looking to build a nuclear power plant, it's not because you want to provide power to remote rural areas.
Aluminum does not have a fatigue limit. That is, there is no way to design an aluminum structure so that it does not experience fatigue (growth of microscopic cracks). Any aluminum structure will eventually fail under cyclic loading like a fuselage experiences (pressurization / depressurization which each flight). That is why pressurized airframes must be retired after about 100,000-120,000 cycles (at which point they are chopped up to prevent an unscrupulous person selling it to an unsuspecting buyer).
Since you cannot prevent the growth of cracks, the best you can do is predict when they will become a problem, and do regular maintenance checks to catch any which may have formed before. In the Southwest incident, it turned out the predicted time til a maintenance check was needed was too long. The crack formed and enlarged to failure sooner than expected. "Admitting" that you know of this "weakness" is simply acknowledging what every materials science student already knows - there is no way to prevent fatigue failure of aluminum. Doesn't matter if it's a Boeing plane or an Airbus plane - every aluminum plane has this weakness.
In order for a capitalist society to exist, at least in the type that the US is, you have winners and you have losers.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism. Economics is not a zero-sum game. In a capitalist society, you have big winners and you have small winners. Every transaction is made because both participants feel it is advantageous for them to make it. If either party feels a transaction will make them a "loser", they simply will not make the transaction. Failing to be a big winner is not losing.
If you're consistently generating losers, that points to a problem either in your implementation of capitalism (e.g. overly broad patents prevent competition from introducing and lowering prices for flat, rectangular computing devices), or in the people (lack of education/information, or irrational decision making).
The biggest problem with the EPA figures is that they list fuel economy in MPG - miles per gallon. Fuel economy is the inverse - gallons per mile. The amount of gas you burn in a year will be proportional to gallons per mile, not MPG.
The biggest way this distorts people's buying decision is that MPG exaggerates the benefit of hybrids. Switching from a 25 MPG car to a 35 MPG car saves more fuel than switching from a 35 MPG car to a 50 MPG hybrid. And switching from a 15 MPG SUV to a 25 MPG car saves a lot more fuel than switching from a 35 MPG car to a mythical 100 MPG supercar. To cover 100 miles:
15 MPG = 6.67 gallons
25 MPG = 4 gallons, or a 2.67 gallon savings over 15 MPG
35 MPG = 2.86 gallons, or a 1.14 gallon savings over 25 MPG
50 MPG = 2 gallons, or a 0.86 gallon savings over 35 MPG
100 MPG = 1 gallon, or a 1 gallon savings over 50 MPG
The bigger MPG numbers mean smaller fuel savings. The best way to reduce the country's fuel consumption is by encouraging people to buy sedans instead of SUVs, not by encouraging sedan drivers to buy hybrids. I won't call the emphasis on hybrids misguided, since the technology is useful and helps even in larger vehicles like SUVs. But because of MPG being the inverse of fuel efficiency, we're tackling the wrong end of the problem - the end which will make the smallest difference.
The EPA mileage figures are not supposed to be a predictor of the mileage you'll get when driving the car. Their purpose is so you can compare the mileage of different cars when deciding which one to buy. If one car gets an EPA mileage of 25 MPG while the other gets 30 MPG, regardless of whatever mileage you end up getting, your fuel costs for the first car will likely be about 20% higher than with the second car.
If you think you can cut it, try SSP. It's a heavy-duty course on astrophysics and mathematics with some applied programming. If you plan to apply to a top tech school like MIT, Caltech, or Harvey Mudd (the vast majority of the alumni when I attended went on to those schools), it's a pretty representative of what you can expect in terms of class/study/sleep schedule (meaning very little sleep). The material is first or second year college level, and (assuming they haven't changed the program) goes very in-depth into a specific problem - calculating orbits of asteroids based on observational data. You do everything, collecting the data, to deriving how to calculate the orbit, to crunching the numbers. Quite a departure from all the textbook idealized stuff you're probably used to from high school coursework.
If it's in LEO then one of those things loaded up with tungsten rods would have a devastating conventional attack with just a slight push in the right direction. Kinetic energy weapons would work like that.
The problem is, it costs on the order of $5k-$10k to put a single kg of payload into LEO. A Mk82 500 lb bomb costs $270 and delivers 440 MJ of energy. To get that much energy out of a similar-cost tungsten rod weighing 50 grams, it would have to be moving at 132 km/sec, nearly 20x faster than LEO velocity. If you want to destroy something on the ground, it's several orders of magnitude cheaper to do it with a conventional ground- or air-based attack than with a space-based weapon.
It's not how fast you're going, it's how quickly you stop. A 100 mph crash into a solid barrier like a bridge pillar or tree is basically unsurvivable. A 100 mph crash where the car skids and tumbles across flat land is almost certainly survivable.
It actually has more to do with the size of the tires and the beefiness of the suspension/steering. The land-barges actually do pretty well at high speed (though the steering feels like mush). It's the very small econo-boxes with thin, low rolling resistance tires and small suspensions which start to feel out of control by the time they hit 100 mph.
Front wheel steering is dynamically stable - you can let go of the steering wheel and the car will naturally straighten out (wheel alignment problems excepted). Without getting into a full-blown essay on dynamics, it has to do with the geometry of the wheels relative to the body - try pushing a bicycle forward vs. backward. When going forward, slightly turning the steering wheel results in the body following in a way which straightens out the steering wheel. When going backward, slightly turning the steering wheel results in the body turning in a way which makes the steering wheel turn even more.
As you increase speed, the forces that imperfections in the road impart onto the wheels increases. The smaller wheels with less mass and the smaller suspensions with weaker springs will, at a lower speed, hit the point where these forces overcome the dynamic stability of the front wheel steering configuration.
For example, imagine I had a block size of two bytes, and had the following two files:
02468A
012468A
These two pieces of data are identical except for one inserted byte, but deduplication will be forced to store both files in their entirety.
What you are getting at is dictionary-based compression. You search for repeating sequences of bytes (or bits), then substitute their byte-representation with a shorter one. The longest sequences which show up most frequently get substituted to the shortest byte-representations, thus resulting in space savings (compression). Short but infrequent sequences (e.g. if the letter 'Z' only shows up once) get mapped to a longer byte-representation; so there's data expansion going on there. But the net effect of the two is compression (except possibly in data which has already been compressed).
Since that's just compression, you can achieve it by running your tar file through lzip or compress (bzip2 uses Huffman encoding, which is similar but different). In that respect, the difference between compression and deduplication is not that there are some things deduplication cannot do which compression can. It's that deduplication happens at a different level in the filesystem. Deduplication happens between different files (or blocks); compression happens within a single file, and compressed archive formats like zip and tgz do both.
If you were able to store your entire filesystem in a single compressed tar file, and run disk I/O by dynamically decompressing just the portions of the tar file which had the data you needed, you'd be getting the best of deduplication and compression. Viewed this way, deduplication is just a form of run length encoding compression between files rather than within a file. Instead of compressing the sequence AAA down to 3A, you compress 3 identical copies of File down to 3File.
Getting back on topic, I have the Linux version of ZFS running on my file server (which gets its own backups so I'm not too worried about data loss). I had to turn deduplication off though because of performance problems. Reads were fine, but writes to my RAID-Z went from about 120 MB/s down to below 20 MB/s. And more importantly, it didn't mix well with Samba causing writes to the file server from Windows boxes to frequently time out. This was on an i5 w/ 8GB of RAM, so the hardware was more than up to the task. The files I store don't deduplicate much anyway, so it was easier just to turn it off than to try to figure out the cause. (I tried FreeNAS too, but I wanted to be able to do other stuff with the fileserver, not just have it serve files.)
It's not just the cost of Windows. For many businesses, the $100-$150 cost of Windows 7 is nothing. They'd pay that in a heartbeat. The problem is that their 7 year old computers running XP have 1 GB of RAM and 40 GB hard drives. So upgrading to Win7 would mean $100-$150 for the OS, plus $500 for new hardware. They're unwilling to pay that when the XP box does everything most of them need (data entry, email, corporate web app, Word/Excel/Powerpoint). This is despite me calculating for them that the old computers using ill-conceived Pentium 4 CPUs will burn $20-$50 more electricity per year than newer computers, and $50-$80 more per year than a new laptop.
Unlike computers and software, most business equipment has an expected lifespan of 5-15 years. Businesses were willing to pay for new hardware and OS upgrades when the increased performance offered a compelling reason for the upgrade. But computers have gotten so fast now that even a lowest-end model is plenty fast for 90% of business needs. That means the hardware purchased today is going to be used until it stops working - probably 10-15 years. If Microsoft wants businesses to continue buying OS upgrades, they need to clamp down on bloat and make sure Windows 8 and Windows 9 have the same or lower hardware requirements as Windows 7.
For me personally, the reason I keep XP around is because an XP virtual machine runs most Windows apps while taking up only 2-5 GB on my SSD. A Win7 VM starts off at about 8 GB but quickly grows over 20 GB with use. On a HDD I wouldn't care, but the VMs run much quicker on a SSD, where storage space is a premium.
Because if carrier lock down is not permitted for subsidized phones then that market will end very quickly. As such it would not be something I would want to come to the US. One of the reasons for the explosion in smart phone popularity other than marketing is that buyers never had to pay for the phone up front.
This is a big peeve of mine. The carriers are ripping you off here too. The ETF (early termination fee) handles the loss they would take on the subsidized phone if you jumped ship before your contract expired. But once your contract expires, there is no more subsidy. They've recouped the subsidy cost through your monthly payments over 2-3 years. So once you are off-contract, they should drop your monthly fee an appropriate amount.
T-Mobile is the only carrier which does this. All the other carriers continue charging you the same monthly fee as if you have a subsidized phone. In effect, they are stealing from you by charging you the subsidized monthly fee even though your phone is no longer subsidized. I am generally against regulation, but anti-regulation is just a means to an end. The end is the free market, and hiding charges like this is not conducive to a free market. So regulation which prohibits these hidden charges which can be abused in this manner is a good thing.
At this point, we need legislation to force carriers to break out phone subsidies into a separate charge. If you don't want to pay full-price for your phone, you can get it at a discount. But rather than characterize it as being subsidized via your monthly fee, it should be structured for what it really is - a loan. The carrier loans you the purchase price of your "$0 down" phone. The monthly loan payments get added onto your monthly service bill. When your loan is paid off, you have only service charges left to pay. If you jump ship before repaying the loan, the full amount of the loan becomes due. No ETFs. The way they currently do it is so obfuscated it's rife with abuse and cheating.
The top 5% control greater than 90% of the capital resources in the US, yet pay only 60% of the burden of maintaining that wealth (using the number you supplied).
This is a mistake I see people making over and over. You're mixing up two related but very different concepts.
Wealth is an amount.
Income and taxes are a rate
Just because a group holds 90% of the wealth, in no way indicates they should be paying 90% of the taxes. Wealth is the accumulation of unspent income. Income which has already been taxed. What happens to that income after that point, and how much of it remains as wealth, is completely up to the person's spending decisions. Let me demonstrate with two hypothetical people.
Mary makes $30k/yr. She pays $5k/yr in taxes. She spends $15k/yr on necessities (food, clothing, housing, transportation). She spends the remaining $10k going to movies, clubs, eating out, other entertainment, a shiny new iPad which she didn't really need but all her friends were getting one, etc. She has no savings and lives month-to month. After 10 years, her wealth consists of $500 in her checking account, a car with a blue book value of $3500, and other goods (clothes, furniture, etc) worth $1000. She has a net value (wealth) of $5k.
Jane also makes $30k/yr. She too pays $5k/yr in taxes, and $10k/yr on necessities. She saves money on necessities by buying cheap groceries and making all her own meals. She rarely eats out. She buys used cars instead of shiny new ones, thus avoiding the huge depreciation hit that comes in the early years of owning a new car. Of the reaming $15k, she only uses $2k on entertainment. She puts $5k into a retirement account, which her company matches. $5k goes into a savings account as she tries to reach a 20% down payment for a house. The remaining $3k she donates to charity. After 10 years she uses the $50k she's saved up for a down payment on a $250k house. Her retirement account is worth $100k plus interest. Her car is crappy so only has a blue book value of $1000. And her other possessions are worth $1000. She has a net value (wealth) of $152k.
So to recap, both Mary and Jane had $300k in income in the last 10 years. Mary spent $150k on herself, and has a net wealth of $5k. Jane scrimped and saved, spent $20k on herself, gave away $30k to charity, and has a net wealth of $152k. But because Jane has 30x as much wealth as Mary, by your reasoning Jane should've been paying $19.2k per year in taxes vs. Mary's $5k/yr? How does that make any sense?
Annual taxes are a rate. They need to be assessed against a rate: income. Assessing taxes based on wealth makes no sense (except perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime tax, kinda like inheritance taxes; except I think it's cleaner just to handle those as income). Sure there are probably some corrupt people who are keeping a disproportionate share of their income unfairly. But taxing based on wealth changes the system for everyone in a way which punishes saving and rewards splurging on one's self.
If 10,000 people share a file, and you charge one person for "making available" 10,000 copies, then you cannot penalize those 9,999 other people. Either 10,000 people "made available" 1 file each, or 1 person "made available" 10,000 copies and the other 9,999 are innocent.
The way the studios have been arguing it, they'd be collecting fines on n^n copyright violations when only n copyright violations occurred.
I'm not confused at all. Engineering and science have different goals. Science seeks to discover facts. Engineeering seeks to design systems which work, even in the face of uncertainty about facts.
I did not claim that climate science had no place in estimating fresh water supply. I merely pointed out that if you choose to do so, you must change your assumptions to reflect your change in goal: Discovery of physical phenomena, vs. construction of a system which will operate under the influence of those physical phenomena.
My studies as an undergraduate concentrated on construction of earthquake-resistant structures. Seismologists at the time were reasonably certain that the maximum vertical acceleration possible in an earthquake was typically (far) less about 0.6g and never more than 1g. There had never been an earthquake in recorded history which exceeded 1g peak vertical acceleration. Engineers designed structures with those figures as maximums. Then the Northridge earthquake hit and several seismograph measured a peak vertical accelerations in excess of 1g (the greatest being something like 1.6g). The I-5 freeway overpass which collapsed near downtown L.A. is thought to have failed because the vertical acceleration exceeded its design maximum.
While it feels comfy and safe to take refuge in historical statistical evidence, as engineers we should have realized that if an earthquake can produce horizontal accelerations in excess of 1g, then it's not that farfetched to think that some freak underground geologic structure could somehow reflect those movements in the vertical direction. Engineers accepted the "conservative" estimates of seismologists without question, and forgot that our "conservative" estimates frequently err in the opposite direction. Science strives for accuracy. Engineering strives for handling the worst case.
If you're estimating how many years of fresh water you have left, that's an engineering question. "Being conservative" means erring on the short end, rather than the long end. Factors which are not well characterized yet are assumed to be worst case, not discounted. Basically, you're trying to answer "What's the worst that could happen, so I can plan ahead for it?"
OTOH, if you're estimating the melt rate for glaciers for a study on climate change, then that's a science question. "Being conservative" means erring on the long end (i.e. no change). Basically, you're trying to answer "Is something happening?" If that's what happened then it begs the question - who took a study on climate change, and decided to use it to estimate remaining fresh water supply?
I am in up to my eyeballs at Godaddy. Who has similar prices and services that are worth changing to?
I was searching for Godaddy alternatives yesterday.
At a similar price, the registrars which consistently came up were namecheap.com, name.com, and surprisingly dreamhost.com (not for their features, but because they include whois privacy in their regular price). I think all these are resellers though (enom kept coming up as their registrar).
In terms of features and support, gandi.net and hover.com seemed to be most popular. They are pricier than Godaddy though.
The flip side of that... is that choosing not to work for Satan means having a lot less to fear from would-be exorcists. [...] What I am saying is that if they were more careful about choosing their employer they wouldn't have these concerns.
The problem is that there is no absolute definition of Satan. Anonymous hackers come in as many varieties as the people/companies they hack. No matter what your beliefs, morals, or political affiliation, there is a hacker out there who disagrees with you. The only way to choose "not to work for Satan" in the eyes of all hackers, is to choose not to work at all.
The evil organizations of the world never seem to have a problem finding those who will join ranks with them. Ever notice that and wonder if that's the real problem?
That's a question as old as democracy. Can a just democracy survive the shenanigans of evil organizations without resorting to evil tactics itself? Can you become what you behold and be content that you have done right? Because that's what you're doing if you do not condemn black hat hacking when it's used to take down evil organizations. I won't say if it's right or wrong; I haven't been able to decide yet for myself.
The Soviet Union used the metric system, thus 1/16 inch (1.6 mm) thick sheet aluminum and proper rivet lengths were unavailable. The corresponding metric-gauge metal was thicker; as a result, the Tu-4 weighed about 3,100 lb (1,400 kg) more than the B-29, with a corresponding decrease in range and payload.
Well how about that. A reason to continue using Imperial units.
The skies aren't safe because of the TSA, it's because nobody really wants to blow up an airplane, jihadi style.
The purpose of security theater isn't to protect us from terrorists wanting to blow up airplanes. It's to protect airlines from people who are too scared to fly because terrorists could blow up airplanes.
People generally suck at making rational decisions about high risks with an infinitesimally small chance of occurring. They see a terrorist attack on TV, and even though terrorism is more than a million times less likely to kill them than their drive to the airport, they choose not to fly for that reason. So to counter this overreaction to illusory risk, you create illusory security - security theater.
The problem has never been that security theater is wrong or pointless - it serves a useful purpose. The problem is that some people in the government and TSA take their jobs way too seriously. They never got the memo that their job is just an act, and they're trying to restrict real rights and freedoms all in the name of maintaining an illusion.
If you use the mean, 90% of web pages could stay the exact same size, but if the other 10% go nuts and increase their size 20x, the mean will grow nearly 3x.
Not if everyone has robots! Then we can have robots fight robots. Maybe in the future, global conflicts will be resolved via LAN party in a mutually agreed-upon FPS!
U.S. spending on K-12 education per student is the second highest in the world (adjusted for local cost of living, PPP). If your kid's school can't afford to hire enough teachers, the problem isn't because they lack funding.
IANAL, but I understand, at least in Australia and perhaps the UK also, you *cannot* sign away your common-law right to sue.
I haven't read Sony's EULA but my guess is it's probably the standard binding arbitration clause. It's not literally signing away your common-law right to sue like the summary implies. In a binding arbitration clause both parties agree to resolve disputes via arbitration instead of in the courts. You can't sue Sony, but neither can Sony sue you. You take up any issues with an arbitrator, who acts as judge and decides the case. Companies like it because it can't be dragged on for years and endless appeals like court trials.
Most states have pretty sophisticated laws regarding arbitration. So while it's not for all situations, it's certainly not necessarily slanted to favor companies. The big losers in arbitration are the lawyers who would otherwise be able to bill for months if not years of court and prep time.
That means that all those so-called waivers people are supposed to sign before they can hop into a go-kart, play soccer, or whatever, are legally void. You might argue that the person signing should have been aware of the risks because they were spelled out in the waiver, but that doesn't stop the injured party from suing.
AFAIK, that is the whole point of those waivers - written and signed proof that said person was aware of the dangers of said activities. That way when they sue, they can't claim "I never knew the playground was so dangerous!" It provides written proof that the case is not one of them being blindsided by an unknown danger, but rather one of them being aware of the danger but participating anyway. I don't think such a waiver which also gives up your right to sue would be legal anyway, unless it was a binding arbitration clause.
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An audit of procedures after the Challenger disaster revealed that this can actually cause the problem it's attempting to solve. When you require three people to sign off that something has been inspected, one day an inspector is a bit rushed and needs to finish by 4:30 to make it to his child's school play. He figures since two other people will be inspecting the part in addition to him, he can cheat a little and just sign off on it without actually inspecting it. After all, what are the odds that all three inspectors would sign off on it without actually inspecting the part?
Until you think, what are the odds that all three inspectors have a child in the school play that day and want to finish early to get off by 4:30? Too few inspectors and you're vulnerable to mistakes. Too many inspectors and you're vulnerable to complacency.
Solar is unsuitable for base load, since its production capacity varies with time of day and the weather. Unless you're willing to invest $billions (if not $trillions) in batteries or pumped storage, you need some other sources of energy with an on/off switch.
The most rudimentary form of solar power is to collect firewood and burn it. Plants collect solar energy through their leaves, and store it as sugar (cellulose is just really long chains of sugar). Burning wood releases that energy. The CO2 emitted by burning wood is CO2 which was extracted from the atmosphere by the plant as it was growing, so it is carbon-neutral.
It's not as efficient as PV panels, but it's much, much cheaper since the plants replicate and grow by themselves. All you need to do is provide land and water, and expend energy in harvesting. I suspect Kenya's root problem is actually lack of fresh water, not lack of energy. PV solar, while sexy, is pretty much the most expensive form of electricity generation (by several hundred percent). Hardly an ideal solution for a poor country.
In rural, undeveloped areas, the primary need for energy is for cooking. That need can be met with a solar oven. No need for an intermediate electricity step. TVs are an extravagance, while radios and simple computers are low enough in power that they can be powered by few minutes turning a hand crank. If you're looking to build a nuclear power plant, it's not because you want to provide power to remote rural areas.
Aluminum does not have a fatigue limit. That is, there is no way to design an aluminum structure so that it does not experience fatigue (growth of microscopic cracks). Any aluminum structure will eventually fail under cyclic loading like a fuselage experiences (pressurization / depressurization which each flight). That is why pressurized airframes must be retired after about 100,000-120,000 cycles (at which point they are chopped up to prevent an unscrupulous person selling it to an unsuspecting buyer).
Since you cannot prevent the growth of cracks, the best you can do is predict when they will become a problem, and do regular maintenance checks to catch any which may have formed before. In the Southwest incident, it turned out the predicted time til a maintenance check was needed was too long. The crack formed and enlarged to failure sooner than expected. "Admitting" that you know of this "weakness" is simply acknowledging what every materials science student already knows - there is no way to prevent fatigue failure of aluminum. Doesn't matter if it's a Boeing plane or an Airbus plane - every aluminum plane has this weakness.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism. Economics is not a zero-sum game. In a capitalist society, you have big winners and you have small winners. Every transaction is made because both participants feel it is advantageous for them to make it. If either party feels a transaction will make them a "loser", they simply will not make the transaction. Failing to be a big winner is not losing.
If you're consistently generating losers, that points to a problem either in your implementation of capitalism (e.g. overly broad patents prevent competition from introducing and lowering prices for flat, rectangular computing devices), or in the people (lack of education/information, or irrational decision making).
The biggest problem with the EPA figures is that they list fuel economy in MPG - miles per gallon. Fuel economy is the inverse - gallons per mile. The amount of gas you burn in a year will be proportional to gallons per mile, not MPG.
The biggest way this distorts people's buying decision is that MPG exaggerates the benefit of hybrids. Switching from a 25 MPG car to a 35 MPG car saves more fuel than switching from a 35 MPG car to a 50 MPG hybrid. And switching from a 15 MPG SUV to a 25 MPG car saves a lot more fuel than switching from a 35 MPG car to a mythical 100 MPG supercar. To cover 100 miles:
15 MPG = 6.67 gallons
25 MPG = 4 gallons, or a 2.67 gallon savings over 15 MPG
35 MPG = 2.86 gallons, or a 1.14 gallon savings over 25 MPG
50 MPG = 2 gallons, or a 0.86 gallon savings over 35 MPG
100 MPG = 1 gallon, or a 1 gallon savings over 50 MPG
The bigger MPG numbers mean smaller fuel savings. The best way to reduce the country's fuel consumption is by encouraging people to buy sedans instead of SUVs, not by encouraging sedan drivers to buy hybrids. I won't call the emphasis on hybrids misguided, since the technology is useful and helps even in larger vehicles like SUVs. But because of MPG being the inverse of fuel efficiency, we're tackling the wrong end of the problem - the end which will make the smallest difference.
The EPA mileage figures are not supposed to be a predictor of the mileage you'll get when driving the car. Their purpose is so you can compare the mileage of different cars when deciding which one to buy. If one car gets an EPA mileage of 25 MPG while the other gets 30 MPG, regardless of whatever mileage you end up getting, your fuel costs for the first car will likely be about 20% higher than with the second car.
If you think you can cut it, try SSP. It's a heavy-duty course on astrophysics and mathematics with some applied programming. If you plan to apply to a top tech school like MIT, Caltech, or Harvey Mudd (the vast majority of the alumni when I attended went on to those schools), it's a pretty representative of what you can expect in terms of class/study/sleep schedule (meaning very little sleep). The material is first or second year college level, and (assuming they haven't changed the program) goes very in-depth into a specific problem - calculating orbits of asteroids based on observational data. You do everything, collecting the data, to deriving how to calculate the orbit, to crunching the numbers. Quite a departure from all the textbook idealized stuff you're probably used to from high school coursework.
The problem is, it costs on the order of $5k-$10k to put a single kg of payload into LEO. A Mk82 500 lb bomb costs $270 and delivers 440 MJ of energy. To get that much energy out of a similar-cost tungsten rod weighing 50 grams, it would have to be moving at 132 km/sec, nearly 20x faster than LEO velocity. If you want to destroy something on the ground, it's several orders of magnitude cheaper to do it with a conventional ground- or air-based attack than with a space-based weapon.
It's not how fast you're going, it's how quickly you stop. A 100 mph crash into a solid barrier like a bridge pillar or tree is basically unsurvivable. A 100 mph crash where the car skids and tumbles across flat land is almost certainly survivable.
It actually has more to do with the size of the tires and the beefiness of the suspension/steering. The land-barges actually do pretty well at high speed (though the steering feels like mush). It's the very small econo-boxes with thin, low rolling resistance tires and small suspensions which start to feel out of control by the time they hit 100 mph.
Front wheel steering is dynamically stable - you can let go of the steering wheel and the car will naturally straighten out (wheel alignment problems excepted). Without getting into a full-blown essay on dynamics, it has to do with the geometry of the wheels relative to the body - try pushing a bicycle forward vs. backward. When going forward, slightly turning the steering wheel results in the body following in a way which straightens out the steering wheel. When going backward, slightly turning the steering wheel results in the body turning in a way which makes the steering wheel turn even more.
As you increase speed, the forces that imperfections in the road impart onto the wheels increases. The smaller wheels with less mass and the smaller suspensions with weaker springs will, at a lower speed, hit the point where these forces overcome the dynamic stability of the front wheel steering configuration.
What you are getting at is dictionary-based compression. You search for repeating sequences of bytes (or bits), then substitute their byte-representation with a shorter one. The longest sequences which show up most frequently get substituted to the shortest byte-representations, thus resulting in space savings (compression). Short but infrequent sequences (e.g. if the letter 'Z' only shows up once) get mapped to a longer byte-representation; so there's data expansion going on there. But the net effect of the two is compression (except possibly in data which has already been compressed).
Since that's just compression, you can achieve it by running your tar file through lzip or compress (bzip2 uses Huffman encoding, which is similar but different). In that respect, the difference between compression and deduplication is not that there are some things deduplication cannot do which compression can. It's that deduplication happens at a different level in the filesystem. Deduplication happens between different files (or blocks); compression happens within a single file, and compressed archive formats like zip and tgz do both.
If you were able to store your entire filesystem in a single compressed tar file, and run disk I/O by dynamically decompressing just the portions of the tar file which had the data you needed, you'd be getting the best of deduplication and compression. Viewed this way, deduplication is just a form of run length encoding compression between files rather than within a file. Instead of compressing the sequence AAA down to 3A, you compress 3 identical copies of File down to 3File.
Getting back on topic, I have the Linux version of ZFS running on my file server (which gets its own backups so I'm not too worried about data loss). I had to turn deduplication off though because of performance problems. Reads were fine, but writes to my RAID-Z went from about 120 MB/s down to below 20 MB/s. And more importantly, it didn't mix well with Samba causing writes to the file server from Windows boxes to frequently time out. This was on an i5 w/ 8GB of RAM, so the hardware was more than up to the task. The files I store don't deduplicate much anyway, so it was easier just to turn it off than to try to figure out the cause. (I tried FreeNAS too, but I wanted to be able to do other stuff with the fileserver, not just have it serve files.)
It's not just the cost of Windows. For many businesses, the $100-$150 cost of Windows 7 is nothing. They'd pay that in a heartbeat. The problem is that their 7 year old computers running XP have 1 GB of RAM and 40 GB hard drives. So upgrading to Win7 would mean $100-$150 for the OS, plus $500 for new hardware. They're unwilling to pay that when the XP box does everything most of them need (data entry, email, corporate web app, Word/Excel/Powerpoint). This is despite me calculating for them that the old computers using ill-conceived Pentium 4 CPUs will burn $20-$50 more electricity per year than newer computers, and $50-$80 more per year than a new laptop.
Unlike computers and software, most business equipment has an expected lifespan of 5-15 years. Businesses were willing to pay for new hardware and OS upgrades when the increased performance offered a compelling reason for the upgrade. But computers have gotten so fast now that even a lowest-end model is plenty fast for 90% of business needs. That means the hardware purchased today is going to be used until it stops working - probably 10-15 years. If Microsoft wants businesses to continue buying OS upgrades, they need to clamp down on bloat and make sure Windows 8 and Windows 9 have the same or lower hardware requirements as Windows 7.
For me personally, the reason I keep XP around is because an XP virtual machine runs most Windows apps while taking up only 2-5 GB on my SSD. A Win7 VM starts off at about 8 GB but quickly grows over 20 GB with use. On a HDD I wouldn't care, but the VMs run much quicker on a SSD, where storage space is a premium.
This is a big peeve of mine. The carriers are ripping you off here too. The ETF (early termination fee) handles the loss they would take on the subsidized phone if you jumped ship before your contract expired. But once your contract expires, there is no more subsidy. They've recouped the subsidy cost through your monthly payments over 2-3 years. So once you are off-contract, they should drop your monthly fee an appropriate amount.
T-Mobile is the only carrier which does this. All the other carriers continue charging you the same monthly fee as if you have a subsidized phone. In effect, they are stealing from you by charging you the subsidized monthly fee even though your phone is no longer subsidized. I am generally against regulation, but anti-regulation is just a means to an end. The end is the free market, and hiding charges like this is not conducive to a free market. So regulation which prohibits these hidden charges which can be abused in this manner is a good thing.
At this point, we need legislation to force carriers to break out phone subsidies into a separate charge. If you don't want to pay full-price for your phone, you can get it at a discount. But rather than characterize it as being subsidized via your monthly fee, it should be structured for what it really is - a loan. The carrier loans you the purchase price of your "$0 down" phone. The monthly loan payments get added onto your monthly service bill. When your loan is paid off, you have only service charges left to pay. If you jump ship before repaying the loan, the full amount of the loan becomes due. No ETFs. The way they currently do it is so obfuscated it's rife with abuse and cheating.
This is a mistake I see people making over and over. You're mixing up two related but very different concepts.
Wealth is an amount.
Income and taxes are a rate
Just because a group holds 90% of the wealth, in no way indicates they should be paying 90% of the taxes. Wealth is the accumulation of unspent income. Income which has already been taxed. What happens to that income after that point, and how much of it remains as wealth, is completely up to the person's spending decisions. Let me demonstrate with two hypothetical people.
Mary makes $30k/yr. She pays $5k/yr in taxes. She spends $15k/yr on necessities (food, clothing, housing, transportation). She spends the remaining $10k going to movies, clubs, eating out, other entertainment, a shiny new iPad which she didn't really need but all her friends were getting one, etc. She has no savings and lives month-to month. After 10 years, her wealth consists of $500 in her checking account, a car with a blue book value of $3500, and other goods (clothes, furniture, etc) worth $1000. She has a net value (wealth) of $5k.
Jane also makes $30k/yr. She too pays $5k/yr in taxes, and $10k/yr on necessities. She saves money on necessities by buying cheap groceries and making all her own meals. She rarely eats out. She buys used cars instead of shiny new ones, thus avoiding the huge depreciation hit that comes in the early years of owning a new car. Of the reaming $15k, she only uses $2k on entertainment. She puts $5k into a retirement account, which her company matches. $5k goes into a savings account as she tries to reach a 20% down payment for a house. The remaining $3k she donates to charity. After 10 years she uses the $50k she's saved up for a down payment on a $250k house. Her retirement account is worth $100k plus interest. Her car is crappy so only has a blue book value of $1000. And her other possessions are worth $1000. She has a net value (wealth) of $152k.
So to recap, both Mary and Jane had $300k in income in the last 10 years. Mary spent $150k on herself, and has a net wealth of $5k. Jane scrimped and saved, spent $20k on herself, gave away $30k to charity, and has a net wealth of $152k. But because Jane has 30x as much wealth as Mary, by your reasoning Jane should've been paying $19.2k per year in taxes vs. Mary's $5k/yr? How does that make any sense?
Annual taxes are a rate. They need to be assessed against a rate: income. Assessing taxes based on wealth makes no sense (except perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime tax, kinda like inheritance taxes; except I think it's cleaner just to handle those as income). Sure there are probably some corrupt people who are keeping a disproportionate share of their income unfairly. But taxing based on wealth changes the system for everyone in a way which punishes saving and rewards splurging on one's self.
If 10,000 people share a file, and you charge one person for "making available" 10,000 copies, then you cannot penalize those 9,999 other people. Either 10,000 people "made available" 1 file each, or 1 person "made available" 10,000 copies and the other 9,999 are innocent.
The way the studios have been arguing it, they'd be collecting fines on n^n copyright violations when only n copyright violations occurred.
I'm not confused at all. Engineering and science have different goals. Science seeks to discover facts. Engineeering seeks to design systems which work, even in the face of uncertainty about facts.
I did not claim that climate science had no place in estimating fresh water supply. I merely pointed out that if you choose to do so, you must change your assumptions to reflect your change in goal: Discovery of physical phenomena, vs. construction of a system which will operate under the influence of those physical phenomena.
My studies as an undergraduate concentrated on construction of earthquake-resistant structures. Seismologists at the time were reasonably certain that the maximum vertical acceleration possible in an earthquake was typically (far) less about 0.6g and never more than 1g. There had never been an earthquake in recorded history which exceeded 1g peak vertical acceleration. Engineers designed structures with those figures as maximums. Then the Northridge earthquake hit and several seismograph measured a peak vertical accelerations in excess of 1g (the greatest being something like 1.6g). The I-5 freeway overpass which collapsed near downtown L.A. is thought to have failed because the vertical acceleration exceeded its design maximum.
While it feels comfy and safe to take refuge in historical statistical evidence, as engineers we should have realized that if an earthquake can produce horizontal accelerations in excess of 1g, then it's not that farfetched to think that some freak underground geologic structure could somehow reflect those movements in the vertical direction. Engineers accepted the "conservative" estimates of seismologists without question, and forgot that our "conservative" estimates frequently err in the opposite direction. Science strives for accuracy. Engineering strives for handling the worst case.
If you're estimating how many years of fresh water you have left, that's an engineering question. "Being conservative" means erring on the short end, rather than the long end. Factors which are not well characterized yet are assumed to be worst case, not discounted. Basically, you're trying to answer "What's the worst that could happen, so I can plan ahead for it?"
OTOH, if you're estimating the melt rate for glaciers for a study on climate change, then that's a science question. "Being conservative" means erring on the long end (i.e. no change). Basically, you're trying to answer "Is something happening?" If that's what happened then it begs the question - who took a study on climate change, and decided to use it to estimate remaining fresh water supply?
I was searching for Godaddy alternatives yesterday.
At a similar price, the registrars which consistently came up were namecheap.com, name.com, and surprisingly dreamhost.com (not for their features, but because they include whois privacy in their regular price). I think all these are resellers though (enom kept coming up as their registrar).
In terms of features and support, gandi.net and hover.com seemed to be most popular. They are pricier than Godaddy though.
The problem is that there is no absolute definition of Satan. Anonymous hackers come in as many varieties as the people/companies they hack. No matter what your beliefs, morals, or political affiliation, there is a hacker out there who disagrees with you. The only way to choose "not to work for Satan" in the eyes of all hackers, is to choose not to work at all.
That's a question as old as democracy. Can a just democracy survive the shenanigans of evil organizations without resorting to evil tactics itself? Can you become what you behold and be content that you have done right? Because that's what you're doing if you do not condemn black hat hacking when it's used to take down evil organizations. I won't say if it's right or wrong; I haven't been able to decide yet for myself.
Well how about that. A reason to continue using Imperial units.
The purpose of security theater isn't to protect us from terrorists wanting to blow up airplanes. It's to protect airlines from people who are too scared to fly because terrorists could blow up airplanes.
People generally suck at making rational decisions about high risks with an infinitesimally small chance of occurring. They see a terrorist attack on TV, and even though terrorism is more than a million times less likely to kill them than their drive to the airport, they choose not to fly for that reason. So to counter this overreaction to illusory risk, you create illusory security - security theater.
The problem has never been that security theater is wrong or pointless - it serves a useful purpose. The problem is that some people in the government and TSA take their jobs way too seriously. They never got the memo that their job is just an act, and they're trying to restrict real rights and freedoms all in the name of maintaining an illusion.
Median is the measure you want.
If you use the mean, 90% of web pages could stay the exact same size, but if the other 10% go nuts and increase their size 20x, the mean will grow nearly 3x.
Not if everyone has robots! Then we can have robots fight robots. Maybe in the future, global conflicts will be resolved via LAN party in a mutually agreed-upon FPS!
U.S. spending on K-12 education per student is the second highest in the world (adjusted for local cost of living, PPP). If your kid's school can't afford to hire enough teachers, the problem isn't because they lack funding.
I haven't read Sony's EULA but my guess is it's probably the standard binding arbitration clause. It's not literally signing away your common-law right to sue like the summary implies. In a binding arbitration clause both parties agree to resolve disputes via arbitration instead of in the courts. You can't sue Sony, but neither can Sony sue you. You take up any issues with an arbitrator, who acts as judge and decides the case. Companies like it because it can't be dragged on for years and endless appeals like court trials.
Most states have pretty sophisticated laws regarding arbitration. So while it's not for all situations, it's certainly not necessarily slanted to favor companies. The big losers in arbitration are the lawyers who would otherwise be able to bill for months if not years of court and prep time.
AFAIK, that is the whole point of those waivers - written and signed proof that said person was aware of the dangers of said activities. That way when they sue, they can't claim "I never knew the playground was so dangerous!" It provides written proof that the case is not one of them being blindsided by an unknown danger, but rather one of them being aware of the danger but participating anyway. I don't think such a waiver which also gives up your right to sue would be legal anyway, unless it was a binding arbitration clause.