I hate any system where you can buy "points" but have no way of changing points back to money.
While I agree that points systems are mostly a psychological scam to get people to spend more money, there actually is one good reason for not letting you change points back to money. Many places have laws restricting or prohibiting online gambling. If a system worked on dollars or euros or whatever, and let you play a minigame where you could win or lose money, suddenly it's gambling and subject to a whole bunch of new laws. But if the system converts your money to nonrefundable points and you play to win or lose points, even though it's still gambling you're now gambling in points instead of "real money", so it's considered ok.
We spend about $10,000 per student each year on public education. The stats I'm seeing for average class size is between 25-30, so we're spending more than a quarter million dollars per teacher each year. The problem with education isn't that we aren't funding it enough. The problem is that most of the money is being spent on stuff other than teaching kids, and never makes it to the teachers/classrooms.
Those subsidies are literally a drop in the bucket. Obama stated the petroleum industry gets $4 billion/yr in subsidies and tax breaks. In 2009, the U.S. used 18.7 million barrels of oil per day. That's 6.83 billion barrels per year. The subsidy works out to $4 / 6.83 barrels = $0.586 per barrel. From one barrel of oil, we get 10 gallons of diesel, 19.4 gallons of gasoline.
So ignoring all the other uses for the oil, the subsidy works out to $0.586 / (10 + 19.4 gallons) = 2 cents per gallon of diesel or gasoline. While getting rid of them may be the right thing to do, they're not going to change the cost nor demand for petroleum energy in the slightest.
Just grab droid48, an HP48 emulator. I was scouring ebay looking for a replacement for my trusty HP15C, until I found this and installed it on my phone. I still think the 15C looks cooler, but the 48 does everything I need.
Just impose a road tax on electricity use at a residence above a certain threshold. The GM Volt uses about 10 kWh to travel 40 miles, which would be a bit below the typical daily use for an American car. The typical American home uses 11,040 kWh per year, which works out to about 30 kWh per day. So charging your electric car daily represents a rather substantial increase (at least 33%) in the average home's daily electrical consumption. Just tax that. No need to come up with some new intrusive and foolproof system to measure how many miles every car is driven every year.
it's become politically unacceptable for some reason to increase the fuel tax rate which means revenue has been dropping and the drop is likely to accelerate even as our need to overhaul or transportation infrastructure is increasing (average age of bridges in the US is 50+ years even though most were designed for 40 year lifespans and for half the traffic they support today).
Start taxing in proportion to how much damage the vehicles cause to the roads. Right now, trucks cause nearly all of the damage to our roads (they have a substantially higher loading per area), but pay less fuel taxes per ton than cars. The trucking industry is basically subsidized by passenger vehicle fuel taxes. Correct that and you should see rail transport (about 10x more fuel efficient per ton-mile than trucks) becoming competitive again in the U.S.
* Step 1: Concentrate brine in large evaporation ponds
* Step 2: Generate electricity from the osmotic difference between this brine and normal seawater
* Step 3: Use the electricity to split seawater into fresh water and brine
* Step 4: Recycle the brine back into the evaporation ponds
* Step 5: Profit!
The reason this works is that you are effectively collecting the solar energy that shines on the evaporation ponds.
No it doesn't work. Well, it would work, but it'd be less effective than simply running an evaporation pond.
The solar energy you're collecting in step 1 gets stored in the decreased entropy of the brine (call it pool 1). Steps 2-4 is simply converting that decreased entropy to electricity, which is used to decrease the entropy in a different pool of water (pool 2). However, since this is done at the cost of increasing entropy in pool 1, you're simply transferring entropy from pool 2 to pool 1. Best case you'd do this with 100% efficiency. But since thermodynamics doesn't allow 100% efficiency, you're better off if you simply dumped pool 2's water into pool 1, allowed it to evaporate, and ran the moisture-laden air through a condenser to extract the fresh water.
If anyone is trying this for real, I suspect it's because step 3 (use electricity to split seawater into fresh water and brine) may be easier than covering your evaporation pond with clear plastic and running the moisture-laden air through a condenser. i.e. It's a higher energy cost solution (which doesn't really matter if you're getting your energy free from the sun), but a lower construction cost solution. Distributed systems (covering the evaporation ponds) tend to have high construction and maintenance costs (the bane of PV) relative to concentrated systems (a reverse osmosis filter system pressurized by electric pumps).
The recorder has pingers in it, and even if they go dead, sidescan sonar makes it little more than a matter of time.
You're vastly overestimating the effectiveness of sidescan sonar. The CSMU is about 5" in diameter and 9" long. If the longer dimension generated a 1 pixel wide sonar return, a 1x1 km search area would be 1 pixel among 19 million. The search area for AF447 ranged from about 250 to 2000 sq km. 1 pixel mixed in with numerous other 1 pixel returns from rocks, trash, debris, etc. (if you've ever seen sidescan sonar images, they're hardly clean, and frequently take an expert to interpret since you can get returns and reflections from a significant depth underground).
The previous "crowning moment" of an underwater search and recovery was the cargo door from United 811. The door blew out on a flight from Hawaii, killing 9 people. After an extensive search 15,000 ft underwater (chapter 5, page 4-16) they found and recovered the cargo door from the floor of the Pacific. It was vital to determining that a design flaw in the door's locking mechanism caused the accident. (I remember the Oceans '91 paper being better, but it's behind a paywall.)
Finding something this small in the middle of the Atlantic at these depths is quite an accomplishment. The cargo door at least was large enough to generate a return on sidescan sonar, and was sitting in relatively flat terrain.
During an underwater robotics conference I attended, one of the presenters was describing their attempt at using GPS for location fixes every time their autonomous underwater vehicle surfaced in the ocean. They ended up trashing the idea because they found that as little 5 mm of seawater on top of the GPS antenna would prevent a GPS lock.
To answer everyone's question, all they found is the chassis housing the FDR. It connects to the plane's avionics and does the actual flight data recording, which it then writes to flash memory in a separate memory module. It is only important before the crash. The memory module plugs into this chassis and screws on (you can see the 4 screws on the chassis and the screw holes on the memory module's feet if you click on the pic in the link). During the crash, the two got separated. The memory module itself is the part that's designed to be crash/fire/water-proof, and the locater beacon they were listening for immediately after the crash is attached to the memory module.
It should be significantly cheaper to get a degree in a field where their is demand - the STEM degrees - and should cost significantly more for all other degrees.
The problem is insufficient competition. Education is not a commodity, even though it probably should be. School name and reputation plays a disproportionately large role in prospective students' selection. Consequently, the competition for supply of education isn't all schools combined, it's just the 1 or 2 schools the student really wants to get into.
Schools have realized this and started to exploit it for financial gain. Freed from the normal constraints of supply and demand, tuition prices are no longer tracking closely to the cost to provide an education. They're more closely following what students are willing to pay. Increasingly, students are factoring in future potential earnings into what they're willing to pay. If you're going to go into a lucrative field like medicine or law, your future earning potential is much higher so students are willing to rack up $150k in debt to get that education. (I should mention that the easy availability of student loans, as noble as they are in concept, is accelerating this process.)
So how much students are willing to pay for a major is going to be roughly proportional to how much they can earn after graduating with that major. Graduates with STEM degrees will tend to earn more than liberal arts majors, so they will be willing to pay more for it. The proposal in TFA is just a reflection of this. Simply wishing it were the other way around will not make it so.
The solution is to artificially make top-level education available at the cost to provide that education, not at what the student is willing to pay. You'll end up having to subsidize it though so you can attract top-level professors away from schools making a lot more money per student. So this becomes a public university. Yes, that's right, a conservative slashdotter advocating public universities. In this case, you're using one market distortion (government funding for a public university) to try to cancel out another market distortion (a school essentially having a monopoly on students wishing to attend it).
A part (half?) of the sphere will have to be removed to allow people/things in and out (unlike "ecospheres") it can't be seamlessly sealed. Isn't that the most likely place of failure?
Benthos already makes glass floatation spheres (they provide buoyancy for deep-water submersibles and platforms). They're cut so the two halves fit perfectly (or as near to perfect as mechanically possible with current technology). It's precise enough that even though the cut appears flat to the eye, the two halves are keyed - you can't offset the angle at which they mate or there will be microscopic gaps/ridges. Also in their tests, they found that a glass-on-glass mating worked best. Rubber or a gasket is useless because under extreme pressure it gets deformed and squeezed out. If it doesn't deform uniformly (maybe one section of the rubber is harder), it's actually worse than not having a gasket.
The hard part is keeping the two halves mated at 1 atmosphere (which is why you see tape on the middle in the picture). Underwater, and especially at depth, the water pressure alone is enough to hold the two halves tightly together. Friction increases with the normal force, so at depth there's a helluva lot of friction preventing the halves from sliding relative to each other. The glass would probably shatter before any impact would cause the two halves to slide apart.
Crashing a browser is actively and knowingly interfering with the users local software and could have unknown consequences, moreso if it manages to take their entire machine out.
Great! So all we have to do is program Firefox to crash and lock up the machine if it runs across a website that doeesn't support Firefox. Then it would be unethical for websites not to support Firefox, right?
You aren't liable for fraudulent charges. And until Sony sends you a certified letter stating that your credit card was compromised you don't know that your card was. I'll just wait until I see a fraudulent charge, then make a 10 minute phone call and have a new card/number mailed out to me.
The credit card companies don't pay for fraud. Their merchant services agreements force the merchants to pay for any fraud. So if there's a fraudulent charge on your card, it ends up costing merchants, who in response have to raise the prices you pay when you buy from them. I won't tell anyone they must cancel and reissue their card, but do keep this in mind before you dismiss this as "doesn't cost me anything."
I'm agreed that overall law enforcement is not a dangerous job. However, it's one of those jobs which has hours of mindless boredom interspersed with a few moments of sheer terror. While the fatality rate overall is low, the fatality rate during an encounter is much higher. Not saying this justifies their crappy behavior, but it does explain them wanting to err on the side of their own safety and stack things in their favor when they know such a moment is coming up.
It's like wearing life vests when you take a boat out on the water. Overall your chance of drowning is rather low because 99% of the time you're on dry land. But if you know you're going to be on the water, you don't base your actions on your overall chances of drowning. You base it on your chances of drowning in that 1% of the time when you're on the water - so you don the life vest.
Just give them their own medicine. Trial lawyers always claim that being able to file lawsuits against people/companies in other professions is necessary to keep them honest. So make it legal to sue lawyers/law firms for filing frivolous lawsuits. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Just to play devil's advocate, child porn is such a stigmatized crime (they are lowest on the totem pole in prison) that someone guilty of it is highly likely to attempt to flee when faced with arrest. So it's a bit naive to believe an officer could politely knock, show the warrant, and get the guy to open the door so he could be cuffed and arrested.
And to play devi's advocate to the devil's advocate, a child pornographer is so unlikely to get sympathy from the public that the police probably figure they can trample all over his rights and nobody will care.
Or not so good. CDs could potentially hold 2 hours of music losslessly, except the spec calls for sound intensity to be stored on a linear scale. Human hearing works on a logarithmic scale. So on the really quiet parts, there probably isn't enough granularity between different intensity levels. Meanwhile on the loud parts, the granularity is so fine that there's no way you'll notice even (relatively) large changes on the linear scale. If they'd gone with a logarithmic scale, they could have cut down the sound file size considerably and squeezed more music onto a single CD. An 8-bit u-law (logarithmic) sound file is considered roughly equivalent to a 14-bit wav (linear) sound file (CDs are 16-bit linear).
There are lots of theories as to why they did this. The most credible IMHO is that the studios balked when a 2 hour CD was proposed. They wanted something around 1 hour to better match the length of an LP (45-50 min) or cassette (60 min) album. They didn't want their customers questioning why they were only filling up half the CD with music, and they didn't want to have to put 2 hours of music on each CD. So they picked a deliberately inefficient sound format to fill up half of the CD with useless "data".
Of course they got hoisted by their own petard when MP3s came out. Because the raw files ripped from CDs were about twice as big as they needed to be, it made MP3 files look twice as small in comparison. That increased the desirability of and accelerated the adoption of MP3s.
You're comparing an accident at a 4.6 GW nuclear plant to a single rooftop solar installation and a single wind farm, which is patently ridiculous. Any definition of "cleaner" and "safer" must be normalized to the same amount of energy generated. Since most people have little concept of what a MW or kWh is, let's put it in terms they can relate to. How much electricity does a typical U.S. home use in 30 years? The average U.S. home in 2009 consumed about 11,040 kWh/yr. So in 30 years it would use 330 MWh.
According to the EIA, a ton of coal yields about 2000 kWh of electricity. To power a typical U.S. home for 30 years with coal will take about 165 tons of coal. You'll see that this is so high I'm not even gonna bother calculating the steel and concrete needed for the coal plant itself.
Commercial solar panels generate about 125 W/m^2 peak. Factor in night, weather, angle to the sun, and they have a capacity factor of about 15%. So on average you're getting about 20 W/m^2 throughout the year. I'm feeling generous so let's say this house is in the Southwest and you're getting a 20% capacity factor. 25 W/m^2. One year is 8766 hours, so to generate 11,040 kWh in the year would require 50 m^2 of solar panels. They typically have a 20-25 rated life, but let's give them 30. And ignore any battery requirements - pretend there's another power source (like nuclear) providing base load and solar is merely supplementing it. The stats I'm finding online say with support structure, solar panels are about 16 kg/m^2, so 50 m^2 would be 800 kg of trash after 30 years.
How about wind? A 1 MW wind turbine needs about 150 tons of steel and concrete. Most onshore wind farms operate at a 20%-25% capacity factor, but let's go with the higher 25%. So the average generation from our 1 MW turbine will be 250 kW. Over a year, that's 2192 MWh/yr. A typical home uses 11 MWh/yr, so the single turbine will provide for about 200 homes. They have a rated life of 30 years (U.S. accounting uses 40 years, but the rest of the world uses 30 years before they're expected to need to be replaced). So after 30 years of wind electricity generation for your home, you're talking about 150/200 = 3/4 ton of trash = 750 kg. I'll make the same assumption about batteries as with solar.
How about nuclear? The U.S. generated about 800 TWh of electricity using nuclear in 2008, producing about 2000 tons of nuclear waste in the process. That's about 2.5 tons per TWh. So the 11 MWh of our typical homeresults in the production of 0.000275 tons, or 25 grams of nuclear waste per year. That's about 1.3 cubic centimeters - about a quarter of a teaspoon. In 30 years, you're at about 2.5 tablespoons. (If we reprocessed, the waste would be about 1/10th that amount, and only "hot" for a few hundred years.)
The plant itself would be about 250,000 tons of concrete and steel for a 1.6 GW plant. But that provides enough energy for 1.25 million homes @ 11 MWh/yr per home. Most nuclear plants will operate for more than 30 years, but just to keep it simple let's pretend it'll be decommissioned after 30 years. 250,000/1.25 million = 0.2 tons of steel and concrete trash per home.
So to summarize, to power a typical U.S. home for 30 years:
Coal: 165 tons of waste pollution
Solar: 640 kg of trash
Wind: 750 kg of trash
Nuclear: 200 kg of trash, 2.5 tablespoons of nuclear waste w/o reprocessing
The petrofuels compete only on the $BILLIONS a year in subsidies they get. Which you are paying.
You're conflating total subsidy dollars with amount of energy that's generated per subsidy dollar. Yes the oil companies get billions in subsidies. But the amount the oil companies get per unit of energy produced is peanuts compared to what developing technologies like solar and wind get. It has next to no impact on the competitiveness of the petroleum industry. (Note that these are subsidies only for electrical generation. But the figures I found for total subsidies for the oil industry were only about 4x higher, which would still put it far, far below what solar and wind get per MWh.)
Page 6, table E35, subsidy dollars per MWh
Coal - $0.44
Refined Coal - $29.81
Natural Gas and Petroleum $0.25
Nuclear - $1.59
Biofuels - $0.89
Geothermal - $0.92
Hydroelectric - $0.67
Solar - $24.34
Wind - $23.37
Landfill Gas - $1.37
Municipal solid waste - $0.13
Instead of concentrating on total subsidy dollars (which is silly - like arguing a homeless shelter is wasteful because it spends $5,000/mo on food while you only spend $100/mo), you need admit that solar and wind are getting disproportionately large subsidies for the amount of energy they produce, but then shift the argument over to appropriateness of the subsidy. Nuclear, oil, and coal all got substantial government aid when they were first being developed. Solar and wind deserve the same. So their extraordinarily high subsidy per unit of energy is warranted.
By using more efficient lighting and appliances, driving higher gas mileage cars, and living and working in buildings with more insulation, we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by simply not using as much energy in the first place.
Paradoxically, increased efficiency typically leads to increased energy consumption. Basically, as technology becomes more efficient, demand for demand for energy for essential services drops, lowering its price, causing an increase in consumption which exceeds the amount saved by the efficiency gain.
To bypass it, you have to keep the price of energy the same. That means you're basically subverting economic processes to force higher energy prices onto people (e.g. gasoline taxes). It can work, but expect a lot of opposition to it from free market types.
This is the default galaxy S i9000 homescreen vs the apple home screen. Absolutely identical, aren't they. If you picked one up, you'd never be able to tell them apart, they're *that* similar.
That claim has puzzled me too. I have a Galaxy S phone. I've never used an iPhone. When the lawsuit came up, I took a look at the iPhone's icons for the first time (low-res so I couldn't see the names). The only icons I recognized were the phone and clock. I correctly identified the calendar icon, even though it looks nothing like the Galaxy S' calendar icon. And what I thought was the SMS icon (an envelope on the Galaxy S) turned out to be email on the iPhone. None of the other icons were remotely similar (though the music player had the same purple color). Internet, photo gallery, camera, maps, calculator, notes, music player, app store/market, all have distinctly different icons on the two. The iPhone icons also have the shiny bubble look, which the Samsung/Android icons lack.
The only other similarities are the icons are in a grid, there's a launch bar with most-used icons on the bottom (which has been true for UIs with docks for over a decade), and the phones are black. I suppose if you stretched, you could argue the earpiece and microphone positions are similar, but where else are you going to put those on a phone? If Samsung knocked off the iPhone, they did a really lousy job at it.
The "coal is dangerous" shit whenever nuclear is mentioned is getting very old. We all know it kills people, in fact there is almost a weekly death toll in direct mining accidents alone. However usually the comparison is brought up as a frankly very childish distraction along the lines of "little jimmy is being bad, why can't I be bad too". It's depressing and each time it is used I have to tell myself that the person who used it is a real human being and not just a juvenile lying weasel that thinks everyone else is stupid.
How the hell are you supposed to compare how bad different technologies are if you can't compare how bad they are? The line is only brought up because of people incorrectly comparing against nothing - zero deaths. As if all other technologies except the one being critiqued have zero deaths associated with them. That's simply wrong.
Nothing is 100% safe. If you're ever comparing something to 100% safety, that's a dead giveaway that you've made an error in your thinking process. It's not "little Jimmy is being bad, why can't I be bad too." It's "little Jimmy is this bad, little Susie is this bad, and little Joey is this bad, so which one should I put in charge?"
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In the U.S., commercial wind power has killed more people than commercial nuclear power (still at zero deaths after 53 years).
While I agree that points systems are mostly a psychological scam to get people to spend more money, there actually is one good reason for not letting you change points back to money. Many places have laws restricting or prohibiting online gambling. If a system worked on dollars or euros or whatever, and let you play a minigame where you could win or lose money, suddenly it's gambling and subject to a whole bunch of new laws. But if the system converts your money to nonrefundable points and you play to win or lose points, even though it's still gambling you're now gambling in points instead of "real money", so it's considered ok.
We spend about $10,000 per student each year on public education. The stats I'm seeing for average class size is between 25-30, so we're spending more than a quarter million dollars per teacher each year. The problem with education isn't that we aren't funding it enough. The problem is that most of the money is being spent on stuff other than teaching kids, and never makes it to the teachers/classrooms.
Those subsidies are literally a drop in the bucket. Obama stated the petroleum industry gets $4 billion/yr in subsidies and tax breaks. In 2009, the U.S. used 18.7 million barrels of oil per day. That's 6.83 billion barrels per year. The subsidy works out to $4 / 6.83 barrels = $0.586 per barrel. From one barrel of oil, we get 10 gallons of diesel, 19.4 gallons of gasoline.
So ignoring all the other uses for the oil, the subsidy works out to $0.586 / (10 + 19.4 gallons) = 2 cents per gallon of diesel or gasoline. While getting rid of them may be the right thing to do, they're not going to change the cost nor demand for petroleum energy in the slightest.
Just grab droid48, an HP48 emulator. I was scouring ebay looking for a replacement for my trusty HP15C, until I found this and installed it on my phone. I still think the 15C looks cooler, but the 48 does everything I need.
Just impose a road tax on electricity use at a residence above a certain threshold. The GM Volt uses about 10 kWh to travel 40 miles, which would be a bit below the typical daily use for an American car. The typical American home uses 11,040 kWh per year, which works out to about 30 kWh per day. So charging your electric car daily represents a rather substantial increase (at least 33%) in the average home's daily electrical consumption. Just tax that. No need to come up with some new intrusive and foolproof system to measure how many miles every car is driven every year.
Start taxing in proportion to how much damage the vehicles cause to the roads. Right now, trucks cause nearly all of the damage to our roads (they have a substantially higher loading per area), but pay less fuel taxes per ton than cars. The trucking industry is basically subsidized by passenger vehicle fuel taxes. Correct that and you should see rail transport (about 10x more fuel efficient per ton-mile than trucks) becoming competitive again in the U.S.
No it doesn't work. Well, it would work, but it'd be less effective than simply running an evaporation pond.
The solar energy you're collecting in step 1 gets stored in the decreased entropy of the brine (call it pool 1). Steps 2-4 is simply converting that decreased entropy to electricity, which is used to decrease the entropy in a different pool of water (pool 2). However, since this is done at the cost of increasing entropy in pool 1, you're simply transferring entropy from pool 2 to pool 1. Best case you'd do this with 100% efficiency. But since thermodynamics doesn't allow 100% efficiency, you're better off if you simply dumped pool 2's water into pool 1, allowed it to evaporate, and ran the moisture-laden air through a condenser to extract the fresh water.
If anyone is trying this for real, I suspect it's because step 3 (use electricity to split seawater into fresh water and brine) may be easier than covering your evaporation pond with clear plastic and running the moisture-laden air through a condenser. i.e. It's a higher energy cost solution (which doesn't really matter if you're getting your energy free from the sun), but a lower construction cost solution. Distributed systems (covering the evaporation ponds) tend to have high construction and maintenance costs (the bane of PV) relative to concentrated systems (a reverse osmosis filter system pressurized by electric pumps).
You're vastly overestimating the effectiveness of sidescan sonar. The CSMU is about 5" in diameter and 9" long. If the longer dimension generated a 1 pixel wide sonar return, a 1x1 km search area would be 1 pixel among 19 million. The search area for AF447 ranged from about 250 to 2000 sq km. 1 pixel mixed in with numerous other 1 pixel returns from rocks, trash, debris, etc. (if you've ever seen sidescan sonar images, they're hardly clean, and frequently take an expert to interpret since you can get returns and reflections from a significant depth underground).
The previous "crowning moment" of an underwater search and recovery was the cargo door from United 811. The door blew out on a flight from Hawaii, killing 9 people. After an extensive search 15,000 ft underwater (chapter 5, page 4-16) they found and recovered the cargo door from the floor of the Pacific. It was vital to determining that a design flaw in the door's locking mechanism caused the accident. (I remember the Oceans '91 paper being better, but it's behind a paywall.)
Finding something this small in the middle of the Atlantic at these depths is quite an accomplishment. The cargo door at least was large enough to generate a return on sidescan sonar, and was sitting in relatively flat terrain.
During an underwater robotics conference I attended, one of the presenters was describing their attempt at using GPS for location fixes every time their autonomous underwater vehicle surfaced in the ocean. They ended up trashing the idea because they found that as little 5 mm of seawater on top of the GPS antenna would prevent a GPS lock.
To answer everyone's question, all they found is the chassis housing the FDR. It connects to the plane's avionics and does the actual flight data recording, which it then writes to flash memory in a separate memory module. It is only important before the crash. The memory module plugs into this chassis and screws on (you can see the 4 screws on the chassis and the screw holes on the memory module's feet if you click on the pic in the link). During the crash, the two got separated. The memory module itself is the part that's designed to be crash/fire/water-proof, and the locater beacon they were listening for immediately after the crash is attached to the memory module.
The problem is insufficient competition. Education is not a commodity, even though it probably should be. School name and reputation plays a disproportionately large role in prospective students' selection. Consequently, the competition for supply of education isn't all schools combined, it's just the 1 or 2 schools the student really wants to get into.
Schools have realized this and started to exploit it for financial gain. Freed from the normal constraints of supply and demand, tuition prices are no longer tracking closely to the cost to provide an education. They're more closely following what students are willing to pay. Increasingly, students are factoring in future potential earnings into what they're willing to pay. If you're going to go into a lucrative field like medicine or law, your future earning potential is much higher so students are willing to rack up $150k in debt to get that education. (I should mention that the easy availability of student loans, as noble as they are in concept, is accelerating this process.)
So how much students are willing to pay for a major is going to be roughly proportional to how much they can earn after graduating with that major. Graduates with STEM degrees will tend to earn more than liberal arts majors, so they will be willing to pay more for it. The proposal in TFA is just a reflection of this. Simply wishing it were the other way around will not make it so.
The solution is to artificially make top-level education available at the cost to provide that education, not at what the student is willing to pay. You'll end up having to subsidize it though so you can attract top-level professors away from schools making a lot more money per student. So this becomes a public university. Yes, that's right, a conservative slashdotter advocating public universities. In this case, you're using one market distortion (government funding for a public university) to try to cancel out another market distortion (a school essentially having a monopoly on students wishing to attend it).
Benthos already makes glass floatation spheres (they provide buoyancy for deep-water submersibles and platforms). They're cut so the two halves fit perfectly (or as near to perfect as mechanically possible with current technology). It's precise enough that even though the cut appears flat to the eye, the two halves are keyed - you can't offset the angle at which they mate or there will be microscopic gaps/ridges. Also in their tests, they found that a glass-on-glass mating worked best. Rubber or a gasket is useless because under extreme pressure it gets deformed and squeezed out. If it doesn't deform uniformly (maybe one section of the rubber is harder), it's actually worse than not having a gasket.
The hard part is keeping the two halves mated at 1 atmosphere (which is why you see tape on the middle in the picture). Underwater, and especially at depth, the water pressure alone is enough to hold the two halves tightly together. Friction increases with the normal force, so at depth there's a helluva lot of friction preventing the halves from sliding relative to each other. The glass would probably shatter before any impact would cause the two halves to slide apart.
Great! So all we have to do is program Firefox to crash and lock up the machine if it runs across a website that doeesn't support Firefox. Then it would be unethical for websites not to support Firefox, right?
The credit card companies don't pay for fraud. Their merchant services agreements force the merchants to pay for any fraud. So if there's a fraudulent charge on your card, it ends up costing merchants, who in response have to raise the prices you pay when you buy from them. I won't tell anyone they must cancel and reissue their card, but do keep this in mind before you dismiss this as "doesn't cost me anything."
I'm agreed that overall law enforcement is not a dangerous job. However, it's one of those jobs which has hours of mindless boredom interspersed with a few moments of sheer terror. While the fatality rate overall is low, the fatality rate during an encounter is much higher. Not saying this justifies their crappy behavior, but it does explain them wanting to err on the side of their own safety and stack things in their favor when they know such a moment is coming up.
It's like wearing life vests when you take a boat out on the water. Overall your chance of drowning is rather low because 99% of the time you're on dry land. But if you know you're going to be on the water, you don't base your actions on your overall chances of drowning. You base it on your chances of drowning in that 1% of the time when you're on the water - so you don the life vest.
Just give them their own medicine. Trial lawyers always claim that being able to file lawsuits against people/companies in other professions is necessary to keep them honest. So make it legal to sue lawyers/law firms for filing frivolous lawsuits. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Just to play devil's advocate, child porn is such a stigmatized crime (they are lowest on the totem pole in prison) that someone guilty of it is highly likely to attempt to flee when faced with arrest. So it's a bit naive to believe an officer could politely knock, show the warrant, and get the guy to open the door so he could be cuffed and arrested.
And to play devi's advocate to the devil's advocate, a child pornographer is so unlikely to get sympathy from the public that the police probably figure they can trample all over his rights and nobody will care.
Or not so good. CDs could potentially hold 2 hours of music losslessly, except the spec calls for sound intensity to be stored on a linear scale. Human hearing works on a logarithmic scale. So on the really quiet parts, there probably isn't enough granularity between different intensity levels. Meanwhile on the loud parts, the granularity is so fine that there's no way you'll notice even (relatively) large changes on the linear scale. If they'd gone with a logarithmic scale, they could have cut down the sound file size considerably and squeezed more music onto a single CD. An 8-bit u-law (logarithmic) sound file is considered roughly equivalent to a 14-bit wav (linear) sound file (CDs are 16-bit linear).
There are lots of theories as to why they did this. The most credible IMHO is that the studios balked when a 2 hour CD was proposed. They wanted something around 1 hour to better match the length of an LP (45-50 min) or cassette (60 min) album. They didn't want their customers questioning why they were only filling up half the CD with music, and they didn't want to have to put 2 hours of music on each CD. So they picked a deliberately inefficient sound format to fill up half of the CD with useless "data".
Of course they got hoisted by their own petard when MP3s came out. Because the raw files ripped from CDs were about twice as big as they needed to be, it made MP3 files look twice as small in comparison. That increased the desirability of and accelerated the adoption of MP3s.
You're comparing an accident at a 4.6 GW nuclear plant to a single rooftop solar installation and a single wind farm, which is patently ridiculous. Any definition of "cleaner" and "safer" must be normalized to the same amount of energy generated. Since most people have little concept of what a MW or kWh is, let's put it in terms they can relate to. How much electricity does a typical U.S. home use in 30 years? The average U.S. home in 2009 consumed about 11,040 kWh/yr. So in 30 years it would use 330 MWh.
According to the EIA, a ton of coal yields about 2000 kWh of electricity. To power a typical U.S. home for 30 years with coal will take about 165 tons of coal. You'll see that this is so high I'm not even gonna bother calculating the steel and concrete needed for the coal plant itself.
Commercial solar panels generate about 125 W/m^2 peak. Factor in night, weather, angle to the sun, and they have a capacity factor of about 15%. So on average you're getting about 20 W/m^2 throughout the year. I'm feeling generous so let's say this house is in the Southwest and you're getting a 20% capacity factor. 25 W/m^2. One year is 8766 hours, so to generate 11,040 kWh in the year would require 50 m^2 of solar panels. They typically have a 20-25 rated life, but let's give them 30. And ignore any battery requirements - pretend there's another power source (like nuclear) providing base load and solar is merely supplementing it. The stats I'm finding online say with support structure, solar panels are about 16 kg/m^2, so 50 m^2 would be 800 kg of trash after 30 years.
How about wind? A 1 MW wind turbine needs about 150 tons of steel and concrete. Most onshore wind farms operate at a 20%-25% capacity factor, but let's go with the higher 25%. So the average generation from our 1 MW turbine will be 250 kW. Over a year, that's 2192 MWh/yr. A typical home uses 11 MWh/yr, so the single turbine will provide for about 200 homes. They have a rated life of 30 years (U.S. accounting uses 40 years, but the rest of the world uses 30 years before they're expected to need to be replaced). So after 30 years of wind electricity generation for your home, you're talking about 150/200 = 3/4 ton of trash = 750 kg. I'll make the same assumption about batteries as with solar.
How about nuclear? The U.S. generated about 800 TWh of electricity using nuclear in 2008, producing about 2000 tons of nuclear waste in the process. That's about 2.5 tons per TWh. So the 11 MWh of our typical homeresults in the production of 0.000275 tons, or 25 grams of nuclear waste per year. That's about 1.3 cubic centimeters - about a quarter of a teaspoon. In 30 years, you're at about 2.5 tablespoons. (If we reprocessed, the waste would be about 1/10th that amount, and only "hot" for a few hundred years.)
The plant itself would be about 250,000 tons of concrete and steel for a 1.6 GW plant. But that provides enough energy for 1.25 million homes @ 11 MWh/yr per home. Most nuclear plants will operate for more than 30 years, but just to keep it simple let's pretend it'll be decommissioned after 30 years. 250,000/1.25 million = 0.2 tons of steel and concrete trash per home.
So to summarize, to power a typical U.S. home for 30 years:
Coal: 165 tons of waste pollution
Solar: 640 kg of trash
Wind: 750 kg of trash
Nuclear: 200 kg of trash, 2.5 tablespoons of nuclear waste w/o reprocessing
So... which one is cleanest again?
As for "safer", you're in for a surprise when you find out which power generation technology has historically had the fewest fatalities per TWh of electricity generated.
You're conflating total subsidy dollars with amount of energy that's generated per subsidy dollar. Yes the oil companies get billions in subsidies. But the amount the oil companies get per unit of energy produced is peanuts compared to what developing technologies like solar and wind get. It has next to no impact on the competitiveness of the petroleum industry. (Note that these are subsidies only for electrical generation. But the figures I found for total subsidies for the oil industry were only about 4x higher, which would still put it far, far below what solar and wind get per MWh.)
Page 6, table E35, subsidy dollars per MWh
Coal - $0.44
Refined Coal - $29.81
Natural Gas and Petroleum $0.25
Nuclear - $1.59
Biofuels - $0.89
Geothermal - $0.92
Hydroelectric - $0.67
Solar - $24.34
Wind - $23.37
Landfill Gas - $1.37
Municipal solid waste - $0.13
Instead of concentrating on total subsidy dollars (which is silly - like arguing a homeless shelter is wasteful because it spends $5,000/mo on food while you only spend $100/mo), you need admit that solar and wind are getting disproportionately large subsidies for the amount of energy they produce, but then shift the argument over to appropriateness of the subsidy. Nuclear, oil, and coal all got substantial government aid when they were first being developed. Solar and wind deserve the same. So their extraordinarily high subsidy per unit of energy is warranted.
Paradoxically, increased efficiency typically leads to increased energy consumption. Basically, as technology becomes more efficient, demand for demand for energy for essential services drops, lowering its price, causing an increase in consumption which exceeds the amount saved by the efficiency gain.
To bypass it, you have to keep the price of energy the same. That means you're basically subverting economic processes to force higher energy prices onto people (e.g. gasoline taxes). It can work, but expect a lot of opposition to it from free market types.
That claim has puzzled me too. I have a Galaxy S phone. I've never used an iPhone. When the lawsuit came up, I took a look at the iPhone's icons for the first time (low-res so I couldn't see the names). The only icons I recognized were the phone and clock. I correctly identified the calendar icon, even though it looks nothing like the Galaxy S' calendar icon. And what I thought was the SMS icon (an envelope on the Galaxy S) turned out to be email on the iPhone. None of the other icons were remotely similar (though the music player had the same purple color). Internet, photo gallery, camera, maps, calculator, notes, music player, app store/market, all have distinctly different icons on the two. The iPhone icons also have the shiny bubble look, which the Samsung/Android icons lack.
The only other similarities are the icons are in a grid, there's a launch bar with most-used icons on the bottom (which has been true for UIs with docks for over a decade), and the phones are black. I suppose if you stretched, you could argue the earpiece and microphone positions are similar, but where else are you going to put those on a phone? If Samsung knocked off the iPhone, they did a really lousy job at it.
How the hell are you supposed to compare how bad different technologies are if you can't compare how bad they are? The line is only brought up because of people incorrectly comparing against nothing - zero deaths. As if all other technologies except the one being critiqued have zero deaths associated with them. That's simply wrong.
Nothing is 100% safe. If you're ever comparing something to 100% safety, that's a dead giveaway that you've made an error in your thinking process. It's not "little Jimmy is being bad, why can't I be bad too." It's "little Jimmy is this bad, little Susie is this bad, and little Joey is this bad, so which one should I put in charge?"
Correction: 35 kWh is more per day than the house.