Increase from one to two? Big fracking deal. You're still far more likely to be struck by lightning or die from slipping in the bathtub than in **any** type of aircraft crash, but I have no intention of giving up walks outdoors or bathing. And seriously, "the Muslims"? Do any of the Muslims you know or have ever met actually want to increase the number of aircraft bombings? None of the half dozen that I work with do, nor any of the other couple score that I speak to on a regular basis. Do you also claim that "the Catholics" want to prohibit birth control worldwide? Or that "the Hindus" want to force vegetarianism on everyone?
In the case of windmills, under high wind conditions the blades are feathered so the windmill isn't rotating at all. In large installations this is done automatically, including in response to the automated National Weather Service tornado alerts. In the case of a tornado a windmill tower is about as likely to survive as an antenna tower, at any sort of distance they're fine but a direct hit will destroy them.
Looked it up, as rock wool batts were always cheaper and inferior to fiberglass, besides sometimes being contaminated with asbestos. What you're referring to is a different product that I've never dealt with. Looks interesting, although wiring and plumbing would be a pain to deal with. Odd that they reused the name of a product that most installers hated.
tie battens, possibly a radiant barrier and counter-batten, and integrated frost barriers
None of that is necessary if you vent your attic space adequately, they're only needed if you attic is occupied living space. Vents aren't pretty so most architects leave them out as much as possible, but anyone who has worked on very old houses can tell you the dramatic difference between the state of a roof when the attic has 2'x3' gable vents in each gable end with soffit vents and ridge vents in likely dead-air spaces and a typical attic with a few pop vents scattered around. In the former case an asphalt shingle roof can last 20-40 years, in the latter you're lucky to get more than 10. Oh, and your fiberglass insulation (not rock wool, which hasn't been used much for two decades) goes between the ceiling joists, not the rafters or trusses. You want to keep the heat/cool in the living space, not the attic.
Here's a simple example of how much money the MIC has to waste: NASA recently acquired two cast-off satellites from the National Reconnaissance Office, one of the more obscure alphabet-soup intel agencies, for free. They are both Hubble-class instruments that have been stored in a nitrogen-filled warehouse for most of a decade simply as spares for an unknown number of spacecraft that they have in orbit. The NRO is foisting them off on NASA because they're obsolete and have been replaced with something apparently even more powerful. NASA went hat in hand to Congress pleading for the relatively minimal funds to equip and launch them, less than the yearly spare parts budget for just the B-52 fleet, and were initially denied until they had sacrificed some other program's budget.
R.E. Reagan; either 1984 or 1986 (can't remember which) was the first, but not last, year when just the NSA had a larger budget for launches than NASA.
Actually, no. Not even when adjusted for inflation. Nixon inherited Apollo, which had lost more than half its budget by the time he was booted out of office, and never has risen above 1% of the Federal budget since. Democrats re-inserted spending on programs over Ronnie Raygun's objections, but the Pentagon had gotten it's claws sunk well into NASA's budgetary belly and it ended up footing the bill for a large chunk of his Star Wars boondoggle. Military contractors such as Boeing (where my roommate worked at the time) also took to dumping their cost overrides onto NASA projects (at least six of his paychecks for building cruise missiles were expensed to the Space Shuttle). Last year's non-official Pentagon budget (Black Budget, the alphabet soup of intel agencies, "war fighting" allocations, etc.) was larger than NASA's entire budget, which depending on how military spending is counted falls somewhere between 1/35 and 1/50 of the Pentagram's budget.
I remember being outraged when Congress and the Pentagon tried to tell NASA that the Soviets/Russians could not be involved in the planning, much less operation, of the ISS. The only country which has had a space station in orbit for a decade, and you don't think they have anything to bring to the table? Bunch of frelling generals and lawyers trying to tell engineers how to design a space program, the same methodology that made the Space Shuttle the half-assed compromise it ended up being.
I was so disappointed when the Russians de-orbited MIR rather than boosting it into a higher parking orbit. It could have been a museum for future generations, or a source of parts and materials for this one, but Baikoneur apparently had their own suite of generals and lawyers to deal with.
Nixon and Reagan still had reasonable amounts of money budgeted for space because they inherited the programs from their predecessors. Both slashed spending as much as they could get away with in order to funnel money to the Pentagon.
Even returning to Earth costs fuel, as you need to reduce your velocity enough to start aerobraking. Not having to haul that fuel from the surface means that a larger payload can be lofted into orbit.
This should have been happening in the 1980s and '90s, except that Congress decided that killing brown people was more profitable for their true constituents in the MIC. In the 1970s I (and almost everyone else) assumed that we would have people living and working in space within the next decade. Now forty years later we still only have a (comparatively) small lab in LEO. By the time Bezos and the few other visionaries finally get their operations under way I'll be far too old to go.
If I ever spend any time in California I'll make it a point to go to the grave sites of Nixon and Reagan and piss all over them
Currently I see this as most useful during peak delivery times, Valentines Day, Mother's Day, Christmas Season, and the like. In my neighborhood during those times an air view would probably show two or more delivery trucks from both UPS and Fed Ex wandering around the neighborhood for pretty much the entire day. Now Amazon is going into the delivery business in some areas as well. Load the delivery drones up at the [fulfillment center/distribution center/whatever you call it] and pile the ones for my neighborhood on a truck in the morning. Drop them off, let them spread out and do their thing, then pick them up that night.
Amazon has a bunch of sites around urban areas where they have lockers mostly utilized by apartment dwellers (in the US these are often located in 7-11 stores). You order your item from Amazon, it gets delivered to the closest locker, you get notification that it's arrived, and then you can pick it up from there when you have time. If you have ever done deliveries of any type in a downtown area you know what a nightmare it can be to find an appropriate spot where you can park long enough to cart the stuff there. A drone can drive directly to the location from its fulfillment center or can roll off the truck in a minute or less somewhere in the area, wait until the staff has time to unload its cargo into the lockers, then hop back on the next time a truck comes back through the area.
A century ago? In the US it wasn't until the 1970s that it became *legally* possible for a man to rape his wife, the late '70s IIRC, and the whole concept was considered absurd by a large portion of the population (male and female). We've come a really long way in a short time, in that same time period I had an instructor go to jail for two weeks for getting caught having homosexual sex, and just a few years before that my aunt had to caution my cousin on a trip to DC that he and his girlfriend had to be careful not to run afoul of anti-miscegenation laws in states on their route.
Philip massacred the Templars because 1) they were one of the few organizations who loaned money (at what was then considered exorbitant interest rates),2) France owed them an enormous amount of debt, 3) the Templars were interfering in internal French politics, threatening Philips hold on power, and 4) the Templars owned an enormous amount of property in France (much of it acquired as debt repayment), which Philip seized. In one stroke he wiped out France's debt to the Templars, seized whatever treasure they had that he could find (location of which he tried to get through torture), eliminated their moralizing and criticism, and grabbed property that the crown could sell to pay off debt it owed to others. By and large the operation was a failure though as it scared off other lenders, increased internal criticism from other quarters and from the Church, didn't turn up as much treasure as estimated, and dumping that much property on the market all at once depressed prices. He wasn't France's brightest ruler.
Bezos' idea up to now has been to keep declared profit to a minimum or negative in order to not have to pay taxes, and just plow that money back into the business. Not a bad strategy, as it improves the stock value that most shareholders are more interested in. Amazon Web Services is now bringing in so much money that they've had to declare a profit (and pay a bunch of taxes) the last couple of years in spite of the money they're spending building. I would be very surprised if AWS isn't spun off in in the next couple of years.
You live in Bellevue and drive downtown? You're a moron. From the Eastgate Park & Ride it's 25 minutes on the bus, and they run every 8 minutes at peak hours.
We got to the Space Needle for dinner for our anniversary every summer, and we're of the opinion that the South Lake Union building boom has dramatically improved the view. That used to be a run-down neighborhood of warehouses, abandoned buildings, and parking lots, now it's actually something interesting and attractive to look at. Yeah, the view of the Space Needle is obstructed from some places in that area, but since the only people there much of the time before the new buildings were hookers and crack dealers I don't see it as much of an issue.
Amazon has thousands of employees on hundreds of teams that need to work together. Physical proximity makes that a frack of a lot easier to accomplish.
Besides, they've got piles of money, why not? The South Lake Union area where the main campus is located was a dump, full of warehouses, abandoned buildings, parking lots, hookers and crack dealers. Today that region is unrecognizable to someone who visited only five or six years ago, in a good way.
Seattle traffic is part of the reason that we have a decent bus system, the other part being Seattle parking. I can drive downtown from home in 10-20 minutes, then spend 15 minutes and $10 to park. Alternatively I can spend $3 and 25 minutes on the bus (well, free actually since my employer pays for my bus pass). Guess which one I generally prefer?
When we first moved out here I was complaining to my mother about traffic and she asked, "Well, why don't they just build more roads?" Since they were planning to come out and visit in a couple of months I told her that she would have an answer to her question soon. They came out and after seeing floating bridges across the lake, highways elevated 15 meters above an almost perpendicular hillside, bridges 50 meters above a canal that cuts the city in half, and hills that would be ski slopes back in the midwest she said, "Oh, I guess I understand now."
I monitor cameras at sites in 21 countries on every continent but Africa and Antarctica (and we're going to drop a site in South Africa next year). **NOT ONE** is directly on the Internet. There is absolutely no reason for any of these NVRs to be on the Internet, except laziness by the installer and salescritters. I have been barking up this tree for years on LinkedIn, that a VPN is cheap and easy to install, and the vast majority of even professional security system installers who work with Fortune 500 customers will pay no attention at all. Their smaller customers want to click the link and have a camera come up, they don't want to click the VPN, wait for the secure connection to be established, and then open their camera.
With the coming Internet Of Things flood this is only going to get worse.
It's China, a nice deposit in a regulator's bank account and any such order evaporates.
It's likely that TVT has no clue where all the devices even went, they sell to wholesalers who sell to wholesalers who sell to rebranders who sell to wholesalers who sell to retailers. Good luck tracking that down.
this is Joe and Jane Sixpack we're talking about here. They buy it, they plug it in. The End.
Oh, no, it's considerably worse than that. Most security hardware installers will happily drop the customer's NVR on the Internet outside of the company firewall,and then proudly show the customer that they can now access the cameras on their frelling smartphone. I have been railing for years on LinkedIn and other venues the necessity of protecting security equipment from the network, to no avail. Installing and configuring a VPN isn't rocket surgery, but Joe Cable-Puller doesn't know or care what one even is.
BTW, I'm not talking about just small shops either, major security vendors to Fortune 500 companies are doing this at their smaller customers.
Go look at the NVR or DVR in your employer's security center (if that's allowed). Can you tell who made it? Probably not. HikVision, Indigo, etc. don't make their own hardware, they contract it out. Possibly if you open the case you might see a label, but you might not. For a decade SuperMicro made all the DVRs for Lenel, and the only way you could tell is if you got into the password-protected BIOS. This issue was first discovered on an NVR from an Israeli company, would you automatically assume that a Chinese company actually built it?
Why do Libertarian solutions always require thundering herds of lawyers to implement?
Taxes are what pay for services, so yes, I'm certainly a fan of paying taxes. I like paved roads, safe food, and potable water that comes out of the tap. I don't even complain about paying for schools even though we don't have kids, because I know if kids get educated adequately then my area will be nicer to live in. We pay considerably more in taxes than we need to at our income level, because we don't shelter our income. What I am NOT a fan of are Libertardians who think that all this stuff arrives for free or would somehow be supplied by the magical mystical Free Market Fairy. Hopefully you're not one, or I'll probably hear a death threat in a minute.
Slashdot Mirror
Increase from one to two? Big fracking deal. You're still far more likely to be struck by lightning or die from slipping in the bathtub than in **any** type of aircraft crash, but I have no intention of giving up walks outdoors or bathing. And seriously, "the Muslims"? Do any of the Muslims you know or have ever met actually want to increase the number of aircraft bombings? None of the half dozen that I work with do, nor any of the other couple score that I speak to on a regular basis. Do you also claim that "the Catholics" want to prohibit birth control worldwide? Or that "the Hindus" want to force vegetarianism on everyone?
Idiot.
In the case of windmills, under high wind conditions the blades are feathered so the windmill isn't rotating at all. In large installations this is done automatically, including in response to the automated National Weather Service tornado alerts. In the case of a tornado a windmill tower is about as likely to survive as an antenna tower, at any sort of distance they're fine but a direct hit will destroy them.
Looked it up, as rock wool batts were always cheaper and inferior to fiberglass, besides sometimes being contaminated with asbestos. What you're referring to is a different product that I've never dealt with. Looks interesting, although wiring and plumbing would be a pain to deal with. Odd that they reused the name of a product that most installers hated.
tie battens, possibly a radiant barrier and counter-batten, and integrated frost barriers
None of that is necessary if you vent your attic space adequately, they're only needed if you attic is occupied living space. Vents aren't pretty so most architects leave them out as much as possible, but anyone who has worked on very old houses can tell you the dramatic difference between the state of a roof when the attic has 2'x3' gable vents in each gable end with soffit vents and ridge vents in likely dead-air spaces and a typical attic with a few pop vents scattered around. In the former case an asphalt shingle roof can last 20-40 years, in the latter you're lucky to get more than 10. Oh, and your fiberglass insulation (not rock wool, which hasn't been used much for two decades) goes between the ceiling joists, not the rafters or trusses. You want to keep the heat/cool in the living space, not the attic.
Just another note:
Here's a simple example of how much money the MIC has to waste: NASA recently acquired two cast-off satellites from the National Reconnaissance Office, one of the more obscure alphabet-soup intel agencies, for free. They are both Hubble-class instruments that have been stored in a nitrogen-filled warehouse for most of a decade simply as spares for an unknown number of spacecraft that they have in orbit. The NRO is foisting them off on NASA because they're obsolete and have been replaced with something apparently even more powerful. NASA went hat in hand to Congress pleading for the relatively minimal funds to equip and launch them, less than the yearly spare parts budget for just the B-52 fleet, and were initially denied until they had sacrificed some other program's budget.
R.E. Reagan; either 1984 or 1986 (can't remember which) was the first, but not last, year when just the NSA had a larger budget for launches than NASA.
Actually, no. Not even when adjusted for inflation. Nixon inherited Apollo, which had lost more than half its budget by the time he was booted out of office, and never has risen above 1% of the Federal budget since. Democrats re-inserted spending on programs over Ronnie Raygun's objections, but the Pentagon had gotten it's claws sunk well into NASA's budgetary belly and it ended up footing the bill for a large chunk of his Star Wars boondoggle. Military contractors such as Boeing (where my roommate worked at the time) also took to dumping their cost overrides onto NASA projects (at least six of his paychecks for building cruise missiles were expensed to the Space Shuttle). Last year's non-official Pentagon budget (Black Budget, the alphabet soup of intel agencies, "war fighting" allocations, etc.) was larger than NASA's entire budget, which depending on how military spending is counted falls somewhere between 1/35 and 1/50 of the Pentagram's budget.
I remember being outraged when Congress and the Pentagon tried to tell NASA that the Soviets/Russians could not be involved in the planning, much less operation, of the ISS. The only country which has had a space station in orbit for a decade, and you don't think they have anything to bring to the table? Bunch of frelling generals and lawyers trying to tell engineers how to design a space program, the same methodology that made the Space Shuttle the half-assed compromise it ended up being.
I was so disappointed when the Russians de-orbited MIR rather than boosting it into a higher parking orbit. It could have been a museum for future generations, or a source of parts and materials for this one, but Baikoneur apparently had their own suite of generals and lawyers to deal with.
Nixon and Reagan still had reasonable amounts of money budgeted for space because they inherited the programs from their predecessors. Both slashed spending as much as they could get away with in order to funnel money to the Pentagon.
Even returning to Earth costs fuel, as you need to reduce your velocity enough to start aerobraking. Not having to haul that fuel from the surface means that a larger payload can be lofted into orbit.
This should have been happening in the 1980s and '90s, except that Congress decided that killing brown people was more profitable for their true constituents in the MIC. In the 1970s I (and almost everyone else) assumed that we would have people living and working in space within the next decade. Now forty years later we still only have a (comparatively) small lab in LEO. By the time Bezos and the few other visionaries finally get their operations under way I'll be far too old to go.
If I ever spend any time in California I'll make it a point to go to the grave sites of Nixon and Reagan and piss all over them
Currently I see this as most useful during peak delivery times, Valentines Day, Mother's Day, Christmas Season, and the like. In my neighborhood during those times an air view would probably show two or more delivery trucks from both UPS and Fed Ex wandering around the neighborhood for pretty much the entire day. Now Amazon is going into the delivery business in some areas as well. Load the delivery drones up at the [fulfillment center/distribution center/whatever you call it] and pile the ones for my neighborhood on a truck in the morning. Drop them off, let them spread out and do their thing, then pick them up that night.
Amazon has a bunch of sites around urban areas where they have lockers mostly utilized by apartment dwellers (in the US these are often located in 7-11 stores). You order your item from Amazon, it gets delivered to the closest locker, you get notification that it's arrived, and then you can pick it up from there when you have time. If you have ever done deliveries of any type in a downtown area you know what a nightmare it can be to find an appropriate spot where you can park long enough to cart the stuff there. A drone can drive directly to the location from its fulfillment center or can roll off the truck in a minute or less somewhere in the area, wait until the staff has time to unload its cargo into the lockers, then hop back on the next time a truck comes back through the area.
More likely Amazon, since it has more capacity than their copter-drone.
A century ago? In the US it wasn't until the 1970s that it became *legally* possible for a man to rape his wife, the late '70s IIRC, and the whole concept was considered absurd by a large portion of the population (male and female). We've come a really long way in a short time, in that same time period I had an instructor go to jail for two weeks for getting caught having homosexual sex, and just a few years before that my aunt had to caution my cousin on a trip to DC that he and his girlfriend had to be careful not to run afoul of anti-miscegenation laws in states on their route.
Philip massacred the Templars because 1) they were one of the few organizations who loaned money (at what was then considered exorbitant interest rates),2) France owed them an enormous amount of debt, 3) the Templars were interfering in internal French politics, threatening Philips hold on power, and 4) the Templars owned an enormous amount of property in France (much of it acquired as debt repayment), which Philip seized. In one stroke he wiped out France's debt to the Templars, seized whatever treasure they had that he could find (location of which he tried to get through torture), eliminated their moralizing and criticism, and grabbed property that the crown could sell to pay off debt it owed to others. By and large the operation was a failure though as it scared off other lenders, increased internal criticism from other quarters and from the Church, didn't turn up as much treasure as estimated, and dumping that much property on the market all at once depressed prices. He wasn't France's brightest ruler.
I believe that you're referring to when he still reported to the British.
Bezos' idea up to now has been to keep declared profit to a minimum or negative in order to not have to pay taxes, and just plow that money back into the business. Not a bad strategy, as it improves the stock value that most shareholders are more interested in. Amazon Web Services is now bringing in so much money that they've had to declare a profit (and pay a bunch of taxes) the last couple of years in spite of the money they're spending building. I would be very surprised if AWS isn't spun off in in the next couple of years.
You live in Bellevue and drive downtown? You're a moron. From the Eastgate Park & Ride it's 25 minutes on the bus, and they run every 8 minutes at peak hours.
We got to the Space Needle for dinner for our anniversary every summer, and we're of the opinion that the South Lake Union building boom has dramatically improved the view. That used to be a run-down neighborhood of warehouses, abandoned buildings, and parking lots, now it's actually something interesting and attractive to look at. Yeah, the view of the Space Needle is obstructed from some places in that area, but since the only people there much of the time before the new buildings were hookers and crack dealers I don't see it as much of an issue.
Amazon has thousands of employees on hundreds of teams that need to work together. Physical proximity makes that a frack of a lot easier to accomplish.
Besides, they've got piles of money, why not? The South Lake Union area where the main campus is located was a dump, full of warehouses, abandoned buildings, parking lots, hookers and crack dealers. Today that region is unrecognizable to someone who visited only five or six years ago, in a good way.
Seattle traffic is part of the reason that we have a decent bus system, the other part being Seattle parking. I can drive downtown from home in 10-20 minutes, then spend 15 minutes and $10 to park. Alternatively I can spend $3 and 25 minutes on the bus (well, free actually since my employer pays for my bus pass). Guess which one I generally prefer?
When we first moved out here I was complaining to my mother about traffic and she asked, "Well, why don't they just build more roads?" Since they were planning to come out and visit in a couple of months I told her that she would have an answer to her question soon. They came out and after seeing floating bridges across the lake, highways elevated 15 meters above an almost perpendicular hillside, bridges 50 meters above a canal that cuts the city in half, and hills that would be ski slopes back in the midwest she said, "Oh, I guess I understand now."
I monitor cameras at sites in 21 countries on every continent but Africa and Antarctica (and we're going to drop a site in South Africa next year). **NOT ONE** is directly on the Internet. There is absolutely no reason for any of these NVRs to be on the Internet, except laziness by the installer and salescritters. I have been barking up this tree for years on LinkedIn, that a VPN is cheap and easy to install, and the vast majority of even professional security system installers who work with Fortune 500 customers will pay no attention at all. Their smaller customers want to click the link and have a camera come up, they don't want to click the VPN, wait for the secure connection to be established, and then open their camera.
With the coming Internet Of Things flood this is only going to get worse.
It's China, a nice deposit in a regulator's bank account and any such order evaporates.
It's likely that TVT has no clue where all the devices even went, they sell to wholesalers who sell to wholesalers who sell to rebranders who sell to wholesalers who sell to retailers. Good luck tracking that down.
this is Joe and Jane Sixpack we're talking about here. They buy it, they plug it in. The End.
Oh, no, it's considerably worse than that. Most security hardware installers will happily drop the customer's NVR on the Internet outside of the company firewall,and then proudly show the customer that they can now access the cameras on their frelling smartphone. I have been railing for years on LinkedIn and other venues the necessity of protecting security equipment from the network, to no avail. Installing and configuring a VPN isn't rocket surgery, but Joe Cable-Puller doesn't know or care what one even is.
BTW, I'm not talking about just small shops either, major security vendors to Fortune 500 companies are doing this at their smaller customers.
Go look at the NVR or DVR in your employer's security center (if that's allowed). Can you tell who made it? Probably not. HikVision, Indigo, etc. don't make their own hardware, they contract it out. Possibly if you open the case you might see a label, but you might not. For a decade SuperMicro made all the DVRs for Lenel, and the only way you could tell is if you got into the password-protected BIOS. This issue was first discovered on an NVR from an Israeli company, would you automatically assume that a Chinese company actually built it?
Why do Libertarian solutions always require thundering herds of lawyers to implement?
Taxes are what pay for services, so yes, I'm certainly a fan of paying taxes. I like paved roads, safe food, and potable water that comes out of the tap. I don't even complain about paying for schools even though we don't have kids, because I know if kids get educated adequately then my area will be nicer to live in. We pay considerably more in taxes than we need to at our income level, because we don't shelter our income. What I am NOT a fan of are Libertardians who think that all this stuff arrives for free or would somehow be supplied by the magical mystical Free Market Fairy. Hopefully you're not one, or I'll probably hear a death threat in a minute.