I agree, what does being a scientist have to do with the price of tea in China.
Considering that most threats the US military vehicles face these days are from IED's and not standard munitions, this sort of makes more sense. It's not like the guys rigging these IED's are chemical engineers or anything.
This mostly depends where you live. If you live in the suburbs and are like a 20-60 min drive away, then yes telecommuting might make sense.
If your like me, I bought my house specifically close to work so I could walk every day. I got a smaller house that isn't as new (1915 VS 0-20 years old). I am close enough I even walk home for lunch most of the time. I bought a new car in 2002 and have a under 65k on it so far.
So while sure you could have your employee makes these options and decision for you, or you can decide on your own what is important to you. Personally I can't imagine spending more than 40min each day commuting to work, added up over time its crazy. I would rather live closer to work, and all that it entails. As an added bonus its great for the environment, and so far as carbon foot print is pretty hard to beat.
The same reason software companies give their software away for free for Universities to use, and having cheap "educational" copies...
Its not out of the goodness of their hearts. Its because they know that the more people that know how to use their product will help decide what products business will use in the future.
Yes, lets randomly compare robots to something they don't have. They probably have more robots than spaceships also. Not to even mention the amount of robots they have to banana trees or icebergs...
Probably because taxes typically get spent on things like health care and welfare, while lobbyist "donations" get spent on things like hookers and blow.
Maybe if we spent more taxpayers money on hookers and blow, we might get somewhere...
or worse in Ontario spending 1 billion on a medical computer system, and not getting anything. At least the gun registry exists (though people can argue about its effectiveness). The Ministry of Health broke all the vendor rules, awarding overpriced contracts to consultant friends, I wouldn't be surprised if their were kickbacks etc... In the end, they fired the woman in charge, but then gave her a huge settlement on her severance... Nothing really happened to the Minister that was supposed to be at the helm.
If the public REALLY wants to curtail government waste, I bet you could realistically save la huge amount simply by building talent internally again, rather than not hiring or allowing work to be done by actual employees for the sake of "smaller government", while at the same time using consultant vendors that cost like 500% more. It really is crazy when you think rationally about it.
Serves them right I say. If executives do not want to hire the right people and have internal staff, and want to vendor everything out to get raped by consultants it serves them right. Maybe eventually they will learn that this is a very stupid business model, at least to the extreme that it is taken. The best part is now if they need additional work, or if something breaks, guess what, more consultants. Not to mention in 10 years no one will have the documentation or know how anything works, and the actual folks that worked on it as consultants will be long gone. Likely the executives got bonuses for having so few employees. This is pretty much standard operating procedure in government, I see and hear about it all the time.
While its pretty cool that some folks built a personal sub, looking at the pictures I am not sure how easy they might find "volunteers" to pilot the thing. I mean much of it looks held together with string and duct tape, though from the outside it looks impressive enough.
What I find funny is that the Drug runners probably have more subs than Ecuador!
Been working in GIS for 10 years. Yeah that's pretty standard.
Two sets of data:
1) That you use to do actual work and analysis on. It isn't pretty. 2) That you use for presentations, that is heavily edited, photo shopped/illustrator, and very pretty.
Managers and public don't want to see the stuff you do actual work on, as its fuglie as hell. They want pretty pictures they can go ohhh and ahhhh at.
Then of course they want all sorts of unreasonable requests based on that not knowing how many hours went into fudging it to make it look that way...
Can't say in this specific example, but its pretty common practice.
Anyway when doing analysis people aren't really actually "looking" at the image, rather looking at pixel values and applying computer algorithms to gather information, meaning, and to provide data for decision making processes. Different sats use different wavelengths, and have various resolutions, as well to consider, and much of the color is false color applied afterwords. Anyway its been awhile since I did much raster work, but such is what I remember.
MS did the tablet thing years ago. They basically tried to take a laptop and turn it into a tablet. What they got as you might expect was a heavy tablet that was a tablet lite. What Apple did recently was leverage the popularity of their iPhone and rather than make a tablet out of a laptop they made their iPhone bigger. In this way you get something that is very thin and light, and has a long battery life.
Current available technology then and now had something to do with it as well, so MS was a bit too far ahead of the curve. While apple using the maturing technology of its iPhones and iPods was in a good position to make them right.
Remember generally speaking MS makes software not hardware or devices. Apple makes devices (or has them made specifically for them anyway).
Well I ran pirated Windows XP for years (to replace the crap ME that came pre-installed), and never enabled auto updates, nor tried to ever do an update. Your running illegal software and connecting to MS serves for updates? Not if you think MS might disable your OS, or do something about it. Anyway I would bet that MOST do not update their security, and I am not sure it was always this way, and that is a recent development in order to fight spam. I had no idea til just now. I can even recall trying to DL service packs and installing them manually.
Anyway it got so bad with virus, malware, trojans, adware, etc... that my PC would become unusable. For awhile I would do clean installs and backups every so often, but over time it just became compromised so quickly to make it a pain. In the end I install Linux and used that until I finally bought a new computer, and bought a copy of Vista to use (ya I seem to always buy the OS too soon apparently) which I use today with auto updates.
Anyway I would bet the majority of pirated XP out there isn't getting updated security patches on a regular basis.
Ya, the thing about insurance and nuclear plants is something I just learned about this month. I guess one of the good outcomes of the Japanese plant disaster and the global craziness about it.
Basically there is a law in Ontario, or it may be Canada wide I am not sure, that basically indemnifies a corporation of insurance liability in the event of a nuclear disaster. I see this as very BAD.
So while I would still support the state if it wanted to build new reactors, as they would be on the hook for a disaster anyway, there is no way in hell I would every support a private corporation building a reactor, or the selling or operation of said reactors by a private corporation for that exact reason. They have nothing to lose, and much to gain by cutting corners. I had no idea such a law existed until very recently.
Really the biggest thing against building new nuclear generation (aside from the nuclear boogyman), is the initial construction costs. In Canada we have CANDU reactors. While the design is really good, it is also one of the more expensive designs and takes a long time to build. So to build one you need a politician that is willing to take a political hit due to nuclear popularity, then spend massive amount of money on it, and be forward looking enough to want to build it in the first place knowing that it will be completed after your not elected anymore and someone else will take credit. Such a beast is rare I think. Which is why so many of our plants are so old. Throwing up a few windmills here and there makes for good PR pictures, and gives the impression that something is being done, however unless you do it on a MASSIVE scale it is all just window dressing.
How you produce power directly influences those problems however. A) You can more less put nuclear anywhere, that is to say for instance in places with no wind or sun to speak of, and as such you can put them a bit closer to where the electricity is consumed in the interior of the continent and next to urban centers. B) The nice thing about nuclear that all the distributors like is that you flick a switch and its ON, all the time, day or night, with no variations in power. You get 2GW rain or shine. (provided a reactor isn't down for service)
No I don't know how efficient the hydro pumps are, I was just using common sense. As rather than say using a wind dynamo to directly make electricity, put it through a sub station and onto the grid, you have to do pretty much the same, but power pumps, move water, then when you need it open the sluice gates and generate hydro power. That's a lot of energy to lose to say mechanical, friction, and even evaporation! Just makes sense it would be way less efficient, however your able to store it, which is the trade off. But as I said you need a place to store it, which you might now have available.
I do not believe my assumptions are outdated or debunked. All my experiences in this has been in the last couple of years. However also keep in mind that "the grid" for the most part actually is at least 30-40 years old as well, so not only are we lacking on generation capabilities, but in infrastructure to actually provide said generation.
Anyway if you think Solar and Wind are real solutions in the next 50 years to replace nuclear your snorting faerie dust and smoking unicorn horn...
The one thing that I would like to see is the real TCO of nuclear. Getting those figures can be a bit hard. Solar and Wind is pretty straight forward costs.
Ironically enough I have been to several wind farms, solar farms, and hydro stations, but none of the "other" generating facilities such as Nuclear, Gas, Oil, or Coal. One likes PR a bit more than the other methinks...
Anyway the best example is simple math. In Ontario to replace the 20GW of generation from Gas, Oil, Coal, and Nuclear, you would have to install something like 7000 3MW wind turbines. However as I said that wouldn't help you if the wind isn't blowing.
Way to counter his argument with no number or citations of your own.
From my understanding of the situation he is correct. In every sense. You are correct likely that if you cover the entire coast of the US with Wind and entire southern states with solar, that it will have significant impact. However that is a pretty retarded argument, as it is total fiction and will never happen. You are correct in that the coast with where all the really good wind is at, it is also much more expensive to build there, and faces much more obstruction from lobbyists disguised as environmentalists who don't want the view from their cottage wreaked, or their million dollar property to drop in value.
However even if you dismiss all of that, you run into how power is used, and how the grid operates. It is not enough to simply generate X amount of power. You have to A get it someplace and B provide certain levels. Both wind and solar depend on there being sun and wind. If either of those are not present, you don't produce squat. Also if you produce all your power say in the south, or say on the coast, you have to run transmission lines from here to timbucktoo. Guess what? The more power you try to run across a line for longer distance the less efficient it is. That is to say, if you want to transmit X amount of power Y distance, you better be prepared to produce several times what you need as you will lose it over transmission. ON top of all of that, we don't use power consistently as a society. Different times of day require different loads of power, and you HAVE to maintain a BASE power load, or guess what? Your grid will fail, and no one gets power. You have to keep it energized. Base power must be constant, and that means coal, gas, oil, nuclear, hydro. That's about it. You can do some messing about using wind or solar power to run pumps to pump water into a resovior to make a type of potential energy battery, but its not exactly efficient way to do things, and that is assuming you have the hydro capacity to do so in the first place which most likely you don't as most has already been developed already.
So yes solar and wind is TOTALLY unrealistic to replace nuclear, which by the way in the USA contributes to about 25% of all energy generation. You would as the previous commenter noted go broke trying to replace it, and even if you did it would be totally unsuitable and wouldn't work to begin with. I have been to all of these types of sources, I have talked with the people to actually run the system. Anyone that has any knowlege in the area will tell you right now renewable sources of generation are nice supplementary sources but in no possible way, no how can they even come close to replacing coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and hydro (which is limited). The amount that it currently makes up is so insignificant that it is really just PR by politicians.
Well to be fair, probably like 90% of those are pirated versions of Windows XP and as such never got any security updates. Not sure MS is responsible for large number of people around the world ripping off their software and not paying for it...
Just sayin'
Don't worry MS is still evil. Just that these botnets are predominately made up of pirated software to begin with.
I remember seeing a joke (probably on XKCD) about mathematicians when solving a problem......first assume the cow is a perfect sphere and that it exists in a vacuum...
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, what does being a scientist have to do with the price of tea in China.
Considering that most threats the US military vehicles face these days are from IED's and not standard munitions, this sort of makes more sense. It's not like the guys rigging these IED's are chemical engineers or anything.
This mostly depends where you live. If you live in the suburbs and are like a 20-60 min drive away, then yes telecommuting might make sense.
If your like me, I bought my house specifically close to work so I could walk every day. I got a smaller house that isn't as new (1915 VS 0-20 years old). I am close enough I even walk home for lunch most of the time. I bought a new car in 2002 and have a under 65k on it so far.
So while sure you could have your employee makes these options and decision for you, or you can decide on your own what is important to you. Personally I can't imagine spending more than 40min each day commuting to work, added up over time its crazy. I would rather live closer to work, and all that it entails. As an added bonus its great for the environment, and so far as carbon foot print is pretty hard to beat.
The same reason software companies give their software away for free for Universities to use, and having cheap "educational" copies...
Its not out of the goodness of their hearts. Its because they know that the more people that know how to use their product will help decide what products business will use in the future.
Yes, lets randomly compare robots to something they don't have. They probably have more robots than spaceships also. Not to even mention the amount of robots they have to banana trees or icebergs...
I guess the Governor is assuming fat people and smokers can't get off the couch to vote either.
Probably because taxes typically get spent on things like health care and welfare, while lobbyist "donations" get spent on things like hookers and blow.
Maybe if we spent more taxpayers money on hookers and blow, we might get somewhere...
What were we talking about again?
or worse in Ontario spending 1 billion on a medical computer system, and not getting anything. At least the gun registry exists (though people can argue about its effectiveness). The Ministry of Health broke all the vendor rules, awarding overpriced contracts to consultant friends, I wouldn't be surprised if their were kickbacks etc... In the end, they fired the woman in charge, but then gave her a huge settlement on her severance... Nothing really happened to the Minister that was supposed to be at the helm.
If the public REALLY wants to curtail government waste, I bet you could realistically save la huge amount simply by building talent internally again, rather than not hiring or allowing work to be done by actual employees for the sake of "smaller government", while at the same time using consultant vendors that cost like 500% more. It really is crazy when you think rationally about it.
Serves them right I say. If executives do not want to hire the right people and have internal staff, and want to vendor everything out to get raped by consultants it serves them right. Maybe eventually they will learn that this is a very stupid business model, at least to the extreme that it is taken. The best part is now if they need additional work, or if something breaks, guess what, more consultants. Not to mention in 10 years no one will have the documentation or know how anything works, and the actual folks that worked on it as consultants will be long gone. Likely the executives got bonuses for having so few employees. This is pretty much standard operating procedure in government, I see and hear about it all the time.
For a God with omniscience he doesn't seem to be very good at picking/making Angels then eh?
While its pretty cool that some folks built a personal sub, looking at the pictures I am not sure how easy they might find "volunteers" to pilot the thing. I mean much of it looks held together with string and duct tape, though from the outside it looks impressive enough.
What I find funny is that the Drug runners probably have more subs than Ecuador!
http://xkcd.com/538/
One of my favorite ones...
Gitmo and Gnomeland Security you can thank for the drugs and wrenches...
Been working in GIS for 10 years. Yeah that's pretty standard.
Two sets of data:
1) That you use to do actual work and analysis on. It isn't pretty.
2) That you use for presentations, that is heavily edited, photo shopped/illustrator, and very pretty.
Managers and public don't want to see the stuff you do actual work on, as its fuglie as hell. They want pretty pictures they can go ohhh and ahhhh at.
Then of course they want all sorts of unreasonable requests based on that not knowing how many hours went into fudging it to make it look that way...
Can't say in this specific example, but its pretty common practice.
Anyway when doing analysis people aren't really actually "looking" at the image, rather looking at pixel values and applying computer algorithms to gather information, meaning, and to provide data for decision making processes. Different sats use different wavelengths, and have various resolutions, as well to consider, and much of the color is false color applied afterwords. Anyway its been awhile since I did much raster work, but such is what I remember.
It also comes when a HEMI and runs on diesel because our robots are build for the working man, who need to do work.
Ya, its radiation hardened, hard like the folks they buy them, and it doesn't have time to namby pamby about.
Available now at the robotics division of the good folks at Ford...
MS did the tablet thing years ago. They basically tried to take a laptop and turn it into a tablet. What they got as you might expect was a heavy tablet that was a tablet lite. What Apple did recently was leverage the popularity of their iPhone and rather than make a tablet out of a laptop they made their iPhone bigger. In this way you get something that is very thin and light, and has a long battery life.
Current available technology then and now had something to do with it as well, so MS was a bit too far ahead of the curve. While apple using the maturing technology of its iPhones and iPods was in a good position to make them right.
Remember generally speaking MS makes software not hardware or devices. Apple makes devices (or has them made specifically for them anyway).
Well I ran pirated Windows XP for years (to replace the crap ME that came pre-installed), and never enabled auto updates, nor tried to ever do an update. Your running illegal software and connecting to MS serves for updates? Not if you think MS might disable your OS, or do something about it. Anyway I would bet that MOST do not update their security, and I am not sure it was always this way, and that is a recent development in order to fight spam. I had no idea til just now. I can even recall trying to DL service packs and installing them manually.
Anyway it got so bad with virus, malware, trojans, adware, etc... that my PC would become unusable. For awhile I would do clean installs and backups every so often, but over time it just became compromised so quickly to make it a pain. In the end I install Linux and used that until I finally bought a new computer, and bought a copy of Vista to use (ya I seem to always buy the OS too soon apparently) which I use today with auto updates.
Anyway I would bet the majority of pirated XP out there isn't getting updated security patches on a regular basis.
Ya, the thing about insurance and nuclear plants is something I just learned about this month. I guess one of the good outcomes of the Japanese plant disaster and the global craziness about it.
Basically there is a law in Ontario, or it may be Canada wide I am not sure, that basically indemnifies a corporation of insurance liability in the event of a nuclear disaster. I see this as very BAD.
So while I would still support the state if it wanted to build new reactors, as they would be on the hook for a disaster anyway, there is no way in hell I would every support a private corporation building a reactor, or the selling or operation of said reactors by a private corporation for that exact reason. They have nothing to lose, and much to gain by cutting corners. I had no idea such a law existed until very recently.
Really the biggest thing against building new nuclear generation (aside from the nuclear boogyman), is the initial construction costs. In Canada we have CANDU reactors. While the design is really good, it is also one of the more expensive designs and takes a long time to build. So to build one you need a politician that is willing to take a political hit due to nuclear popularity, then spend massive amount of money on it, and be forward looking enough to want to build it in the first place knowing that it will be completed after your not elected anymore and someone else will take credit. Such a beast is rare I think. Which is why so many of our plants are so old. Throwing up a few windmills here and there makes for good PR pictures, and gives the impression that something is being done, however unless you do it on a MASSIVE scale it is all just window dressing.
How you produce power directly influences those problems however. A) You can more less put nuclear anywhere, that is to say for instance in places with no wind or sun to speak of, and as such you can put them a bit closer to where the electricity is consumed in the interior of the continent and next to urban centers. B) The nice thing about nuclear that all the distributors like is that you flick a switch and its ON, all the time, day or night, with no variations in power. You get 2GW rain or shine. (provided a reactor isn't down for service)
No I don't know how efficient the hydro pumps are, I was just using common sense. As rather than say using a wind dynamo to directly make electricity, put it through a sub station and onto the grid, you have to do pretty much the same, but power pumps, move water, then when you need it open the sluice gates and generate hydro power. That's a lot of energy to lose to say mechanical, friction, and even evaporation! Just makes sense it would be way less efficient, however your able to store it, which is the trade off. But as I said you need a place to store it, which you might now have available.
I do not believe my assumptions are outdated or debunked. All my experiences in this has been in the last couple of years. However also keep in mind that "the grid" for the most part actually is at least 30-40 years old as well, so not only are we lacking on generation capabilities, but in infrastructure to actually provide said generation.
Anyway if you think Solar and Wind are real solutions in the next 50 years to replace nuclear your snorting faerie dust and smoking unicorn horn...
The one thing that I would like to see is the real TCO of nuclear. Getting those figures can be a bit hard. Solar and Wind is pretty straight forward costs.
Ironically enough I have been to several wind farms, solar farms, and hydro stations, but none of the "other" generating facilities such as Nuclear, Gas, Oil, or Coal. One likes PR a bit more than the other methinks...
Anyway the best example is simple math. In Ontario to replace the 20GW of generation from Gas, Oil, Coal, and Nuclear, you would have to install something like 7000 3MW wind turbines. However as I said that wouldn't help you if the wind isn't blowing.
That's a great one, I hadn't seen it yet! If I had karma I would give you a point just for that laugh.
So Radioactive. Bubbling Water. Controls Time.
That's Hot Tub Time Machine!
http://phantomkat813.deviantart.com/art/Redshirt-Facebook-Page-155448981?q=gallery%3APhantomKat813%2F24757110&qo=2
Hey Spock check out this YouTube video!
Way to counter his argument with no number or citations of your own.
From my understanding of the situation he is correct. In every sense. You are correct likely that if you cover the entire coast of the US with Wind and entire southern states with solar, that it will have significant impact. However that is a pretty retarded argument, as it is total fiction and will never happen. You are correct in that the coast with where all the really good wind is at, it is also much more expensive to build there, and faces much more obstruction from lobbyists disguised as environmentalists who don't want the view from their cottage wreaked, or their million dollar property to drop in value.
However even if you dismiss all of that, you run into how power is used, and how the grid operates. It is not enough to simply generate X amount of power. You have to A get it someplace and B provide certain levels. Both wind and solar depend on there being sun and wind. If either of those are not present, you don't produce squat. Also if you produce all your power say in the south, or say on the coast, you have to run transmission lines from here to timbucktoo. Guess what? The more power you try to run across a line for longer distance the less efficient it is. That is to say, if you want to transmit X amount of power Y distance, you better be prepared to produce several times what you need as you will lose it over transmission. ON top of all of that, we don't use power consistently as a society. Different times of day require different loads of power, and you HAVE to maintain a BASE power load, or guess what? Your grid will fail, and no one gets power. You have to keep it energized. Base power must be constant, and that means coal, gas, oil, nuclear, hydro. That's about it. You can do some messing about using wind or solar power to run pumps to pump water into a resovior to make a type of potential energy battery, but its not exactly efficient way to do things, and that is assuming you have the hydro capacity to do so in the first place which most likely you don't as most has already been developed already.
So yes solar and wind is TOTALLY unrealistic to replace nuclear, which by the way in the USA contributes to about 25% of all energy generation. You would as the previous commenter noted go broke trying to replace it, and even if you did it would be totally unsuitable and wouldn't work to begin with. I have been to all of these types of sources, I have talked with the people to actually run the system. Anyone that has any knowlege in the area will tell you right now renewable sources of generation are nice supplementary sources but in no possible way, no how can they even come close to replacing coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and hydro (which is limited). The amount that it currently makes up is so insignificant that it is really just PR by politicians.
Well to be fair, probably like 90% of those are pirated versions of Windows XP and as such never got any security updates. Not sure MS is responsible for large number of people around the world ripping off their software and not paying for it...
Just sayin'
Don't worry MS is still evil. Just that these botnets are predominately made up of pirated software to begin with.
Rodgers_ITMP ;Bunch of jerks.
If BitTorrent = "WOW"
Then THROTTLE = "NO"
Elseif
Then THROTTLE = "HELLYA"
Endif
Can sing about love and relationships...
I remember seeing a joke (probably on XKCD) about mathematicians when solving a problem... ...first assume the cow is a perfect sphere and that it exists in a vacuum...
or something like that, I can't remember.