So, nothing to do with all of the US troops and bases occupying their territory?
Boy, people have short memories. Iraq didn't renew a security agreement back in 2011 for political reasons. The local population didn't want it. The US was mostly withdrawn from Iraq at the end of December 2011. It took about 6 months before ISIS took advantage of the situation.
From 2nd link-
In July 2012, al-Baghdadi released an audio statement online announcing that the group was returning to former strongholds from which US troops and the Sons of Iraq had driven them in 2007 and 2008.[219] He declared the start of a new offensive in Iraq called Breaking the Walls, aimed at freeing members of the group held in Iraqi prisons.[219] Violence in Iraq had begun to escalate in June 2012, primarily with AQI's car bomb attacks, and by July 2013, monthly fatalities exceeded 1,000 for the first time since April 2008.[220]
I'm too lazy to look up when the US sent sizable forces back to Iraq, but it was only on request and permission of the Iraqi government.
If you want to kill an evil food company, lets go after Nestle.
Nestle are saints compared to Hersey.
Everywhere all over the world (except the US), Kit Kat bars are under Nestle control. In the USA, we are stuck with Hersey. Outside the USA, there are multiple flavors of Kit Kat. Some countries have seasonal flavors which they rotate in and out. I believe Japan has more than 30 flavors! Kit Kat bars (even the original flavor) from Japan and Canada taste better than Hersey's Kit Kat bars (opinion).
Hersey basically buys up the rights to brands, and then does nothing with them except swap out ingredients for cheaper ones. Their chocolate is the worst tasting mass-produced chocolate of a company of their size. Nestle at least innovates and brings out new products and flavors.
An attacker who controls the meter also controls the meter's software, allowing him to cause it to literally explode."
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No. Just no. Look them up, at most what they have is remote disconnect relays with a cycle time of 30 to 120 seconds. The aren't solenoids (wire coil relays) but stall motors that move the contanctor open or closed and are not fast acting.
That is their only active function. The rest are passive. So they might be able to fiddle the bill, or turn your power on and off. But make the meter explode? I've not seen any designs that would fail in that way. Admittedly, I've not seen every design, but most use a stall motor to move a spring loaded armature/contactor set open or closed.
Consider these devices to be like a home router. You can hack one router, possibly cause someone some grief, but it generally won't affect them much even if their router is part of a big botnet.
The problem I worry about is if someone were to hack hundreds or thousands of these smart meters and started cycling large numbers of them simultaneously in a nefarious way. Electricity grids are generally managing a predictable demand. To do that, calculations are performed which consider time of day, forecasted temperature, weekday vs weekend vs holiday, recent rate of change of the demand (average of several time periods), yesterday's demand at the same time, etc. If the demand was suddenly unpredictable, managing the grid would become very difficult, possibly even impossible.
Not an expert here. Far from it, but it sounds like the electric generation and the grid control systems have the possibility for multiple sites of failure as well as multiple sites for intrusion by bad guys. This sounds like a recipe for disaster. Hopefully critical sites such as the defense department, local police departments, hospitals, etc., have standalone electric generators independent of the grid and web. Then again, a large enough cohort of spies and terrorists could disable those. Maybe we need a system of signal fires, flags, carrier pigeons to keep the grid up in an emergency. If the fuel supply or cooling water to power plants is shut down, why worry about the Internet controls.
At the end of the day, every major electrical generation site has means for some sort of manual control. There are enough "blackstart" (electrical plants that can start up without any external power) units in place to restart the grid in the event of failure. Syncing a generating unit to the grid "by hand" is not that hard (I have done it). You watch your Synchroscope carefully and flip the switch at the right moment. Then you open the steam valves to your turbine and start "pushing" on the grid, if the grid is small enough that you can actually push the grid past 60.3Hz or so, there are local systems in place to close the steam valve slightly, and automatically.
Much of the automation in place in the grid is mainly for convenience, stability during adverse events, and manpower reduction. You could have somebody physically at each major valve and switch with a radio and have them control the thing. I have done that too, it is a boring job but it is possible.
There are enough varied systems out there that launching a wide-scale attack would take a lot of time to prepare, and somebody would likely notice. Smaller attacks are possible but not particularly worthwhile, you can probably cause a small utility some grief and money but it wouldn't accomplish much. Stuxtnet was a huge wakeup call to the industry and NERC has been ramming good IT practices downwards to utilities and equipment OEMs for the last 6 years. The protections in place aren't foolproof but nothing is. The industry is full of engineers and we generally weigh the likelihood of risk & cost to recover.
If they'd make a nintendo-branded bluetooth dpad and holder we wouldn't be having this conversation, it would be a conversation about how much money they're making.
Touchscreens aren't everything. Humans have fingers. D-pad is brilliant. Stop drinking the Ive kool-aid. Poor Mario.
Oh, and make some more of those NES classics. Stupid nintendo. I'd have bought at least 5 of them if they were available. I got a knockoff chinese USB d-pad clone instead.
The future of gaming in my family is looking more and more like it will be Retroarch on either Android or Windows for the older games, and Steam for the newer ones. Nintendo offers a pretty decent walled garden, but it isn't a very big garden and the per-game cost is high enough to give pause when compared to the bargains that can be had on Steam.
No. Transportion of individuals and their belongings (your flight in), accommodations for a private individual (your hotel), etc are not mentioned in any of the piles of sanctions.
And Americans can, to this day, send money electronically to a tour company based in China and receive a DPRK visa (delivered to Beijing for you to pick up there) in a couple of weeks. Take it from a guy who went there in 2013. "USA has very nice people but we don't like your government" was the attitude that North Koreans came to me with. The 8-day tour was hugely helpful for me to learn how to understand the reasoning of people from VERY different backgrounds.
Except where it mentions actual cost per MWHr. ' It started with a contract in January to produce electricity for $64 per megawatt-hour in India; then a deal in August pegging $29.10 per megawatt hour in Chile. '
These production costs are huge. Prices in the Houston area wholesale are approximately $20-$25 per MW-h on any given day. And this is in a first world country with high labor costs and a high standard of safety.
The google term you are looking for is "LMP map", which is a map showing the wholesale price of electricity. (LMP stands for Locational Marginal Pricing) Add the term "MISO" for the midwest, "ERCOT" for Texas, "PJM" for the eastern atlantic states, "ISO New England" for the northeast, etc.
Houston seems be benefitting from excess wind production in other areas of the state, many of which are at substantially negative cost. Why would anyone sell wind turbine power at negative cost? Wouldn't it make more sense to shut the turbine down and spare the maintenance? The answer is the subsidies. Many wind farms make much more from the subsidies than their actual function of providing power. These factors are not shown on LMP maps, but you can imagine the subsidies must be quite high- there are pockets in Texas as I type this currently at -$20 to -$50 per MW-hr.
I wonder how much it will help owner/operators and the truck drivers. As it stands now, the truck driving industry is following textiles and meat packing into oblivion, where even a minimal living is tough to do.
I wonder how this will affect immigration policies, both in the USA and elsewhere. My company ships heavy industrial equipment and parts regularly. It is quite rare to see a US-born driver for these loads (step deck or flatbed, other types of trucking may vary). The barrier to entry is low- low education or english ability is not a huge barrier, which makes these jobs viable for foreign immigrants. If the driver workforce starts shrinking, and this seems inevitable, foreign immigration of low-skill workers will become an even more important topic than it is now.
That's why I'll be offering a special device called an AirPods retention strap. It consists of a small cord connected to the end of each AirPod, that you tie to the device. It's so genius, and so obvious, I don't know why anyone never thought of doing that before.
You jest, but it is probably going to happen as a way to deflect liability for broken devices. My hearing aid has the potential to be bumped off and it has an small strap with an aligator clip. I have never used it (nor heard of anyone who does) but the description in the manual indicates that it is clearly a liability dodge.
Depending on the how much pressure the injection well pump can provide and the geology of the field, supercritical geothermal could be possible. Not common, but possible. Most geothermal wells are under 600F and the steam temperature declines over time. Heat carrying capacity of supercritical steam is not great, however, so this could potentially be very damaging to the geothermal field.
It would also wreck havoc on most turbine designs, even ones with superalloy parts and overlays. Unlike most power plant steam, where the water chemistry is very carefully controlled, geothermal steam is quite dirty with sulphur and arsenic compounds and salts. Supercritical or even superheated steam could cause a creep / stress corrosion cracking failure quite quickly.
This is not correct. Combustion temperatures can reach these temperatures, but boiler water circulates by convection fast enough that the heat is conducted away before the boiler tubes reach those temperatures. The superheater tube bundles must be carefully designed since they are cooled only by steam (less heat carrying capacity than water) and are often exposed directly to the radiant heat.
Typical properties for high temperature steam for coal or natural gas plants is 1000F-1050F (538-566C) at 2400psi (measured at the turbine inlet). Plants do exist at up to 1100F steam with some designs using up to 4200psi steam, but these designs are less common due to extra costs of using thicker pipes and pressure vessels, requirement for superalloys and more frequent maintenance.
When a candidate talks about 'revolutionary technology' make sure you see it actually working before you give them mountains of bucks. Oh, and make sure you get it independently tested, too.
Tech has already changed the meaning of 'innovative' to 'same as last year's model minus an interface port' now they're turning revolutionary into some ironic hipster term.
My experience (in a totally unrelated industry) is that there seems to be a large amount of money out there in private equity looking for something to do. Many of the people doing such work do their due diligence (since they will immediately gut and then flip the company), but suckers are born every minute. In other cases, it seems that the investor/investee relationship is protracted battle between con artists.
But I'm just an engineer, some big shot will probably just jump in here and tell me that I was naive to think the world worked any other way.
Why in gawd's name would anyone mass produce such a device? This must be one of those fake news stories we've been hearing so much about.
I can't imagine any legitimate use for such a device, so I assume it would be made illegal as soon as the politicians can get off their duffs.
I'm sure certain companies and government agencies working with very sensitive information or critical infrastructure would find some value in it. You can disable USB in software or fill the ports with hot glue gun glue, but both can be undone/worked around. There may be other, better methods to secure the USB ports, but there are definitely some legitimate uses for such a device.
From what I understood, it was indeed promising but it never went beyond that.
The problem with psychedelics is that while we did have some very good results, it was too unpredictable. You talk about non-scientists but there is nothing scientists hate more than unpredictability.
When a psychiatrist gives a drug to a patient, he wants to know the effects beforehand, he wants to know how things can go wrong, what to do next, etc.. You can't have it with LSD. I don't think we went passed the point of throwing it at a patient and see how it sticks.
One of the last potential use of psychedelics is for treating cluster headaches. A benign but extremely painful condition. Interestingly, the most effective treatments are all hit-or-miss repurposed drugs, psychedelics are of these.
Every drug has potential side effects and some level of unpredictability. If you were to measure the negative side effects and the benefits of commercial prescription antidepressants and mood disorder drugs, the net gain is very small or even negative in some cases. Some antidepressants on the market actually perform worse than a placebo. That's not a particularly high bar for these drugs to clear.
The only reason these drugs weren't fully researched is because they were made very difficult to study, both by regulation and by the social stigma / loss of reputation that anyone trying to study them would have to endure.
He campaigned on a platform of isolationism. Why would he care if two countries on the other side of the world are hacking each other?
Not just that, unlike previous Republican administrations, he takes a dim view of all of Islam: he doesn't view Sunnis as better than Shias or vice versa or any of that. His whole stance of allying w/ the Russians in Syria is based on that: that militias that are financed by the Saudis, Turks or Qatar are just not reliable at best, and Jihadists at worst. That's why he's taken a position that's completely heterodox to the Republicans, if not downright heretical.
On Iran, what he has to do is pull the plug on that deal, and make it clear to Iran's trading partners that they can choose to trade either w/ the US or Iran, but not both. If European countries are so enamored w/ trading w/ Iran, that's fine: just don't expect to do any business w/ the US.
But as far as the Saudis go, we have no dog in the fight b/w Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both are our enemies, and the 2 of them fighting each other is an alien vs predator situation, to paraphrase Debbie Schlussel. Or like the 2 cats of Kilkinney. If they can fight each other and wipe each other out, then praise be to allah - nothing like it!
Wars have a habit of spilling their effects across borders. For a time, I was reading every day's front page of the Canberra Times starting in October 1938. The problem of international refugees appeared again and again, and I had to stop in February 1939 because I got busy with work. The war had only just begun at that point.
65 million people were displaced at the end of 2015. This problem is not just Saudi Arabia and Iran's problem. A lot of the costs of their "not so cold" war are externalized onto other nations.
Research into cannabis, MDMA, LSD, etc was the most promising area of psychiatric research in the 1950s. A mental health revolution was on the horizon until a bunch of non-scientists got involved and shut the whole thing down.
I don't even keep location services turned on except when I need to use my phone as a GPS, never mind allow any apps to access it.
Why the hell would I want to share my location with Uber? Oh, right - "Location data could also be used to provide new channels of revenue for the digital platform. This could include serving ads of local businesses". Yeah, kindly fuck right off, Uber.
Uber may be playing shenanigans but other companies can potentially do useful things with that data. As an example, Pandora seems to play certain songs depending on my location or time of day. I have noticed that John O`Callaghan's "Big Sky" seems to play much more frequently around sunset. Driving home from the airport after a business trip almost guarantees a play of Gareth Emery's "Long Way Home". I have no evidence that Pandora is actually changing the songs played based on location or time of day, but it would not surprise me.
The ads on Pandora don't seem to change much, if at all, based on my location.
Yeah, it is not simple thermodynamics. The complexity of the interactions in the body is overwhelmingly mind-boggling.
Interestingly enough, more and more researchers are buying into the lower-carb side of the diet controversy. And it seems that if you lower the amount of carbohydrates in your diet, you probably have to increase your fat intake to get enough energy to prevent starvation responses. And a gut that is adapted to burning fat for energy is significantly different from a gut that burns sugars. And so on....
However, the report of a single study doesn't provide a prescription for health. Some time ago there was good discussion about creating a comprehensive science database to compare outcomes of different research. This database would report on both successful and unsuccessful experiments and research, which could possibly cut down on instances of "fads" by identifying what works, what doesn't work, and what hasn't been tested yet.
Recent research into gut biology certainly is fascinating and exciting. It seems clear that different types of guy bacteria break down food at different rates and into different components. A lot of research has gone into fecal transplants, but that is the "cheap and roundabout way" of researching this issue, in my opinion. Some questions I have are-
1. Do different species of gut bacteria break down different types of food (vegatables, fruits, proteins, etc) differently?
2. Where are the 'ideal' (most healthy) bacteria commonly found? Are they a byproduct of food decomposition? There does seem to be some benefits of consuming fermented foods. It wouldn't be too surprising to find that bacteria good at decomposing food on the countertop are also good at decomposing food in the gut (as long as they can handle the acidity). This could imply that the super clean food practices commonly used in western countries (refrigeration, washing, etc) could actually be harmful since they restrict bacteria from proliferating.
It only makes sense that you should only be allowed to review something you've actually bought through the site, but man will I miss the comedy reviews. The reviews for the Trump Christmas tree ornament hat are GOLD, as were the reviews for uranium in a can and all the others.
You can still write 5 reviews per week for items that you haven't bought. That should be plenty for legitimate purposes.
The real issue with Amazon is that the actual seller's feedback score is not clearly shown on the product page. If you want feedback for the actual seller, it is buried at least 1 click away. Other websites with 'marketplaces' make this a lot more transparent on the product page. Putting their feedback score front and center would fix several issues. Not every problem, but Amazon's reluctance to do even that shows to me that they don't take the problems of chinese sellers seriously.
Minecraft is slowly rearing its head as one of microsofts worst decisions. Yes it had a lot of users, but not a lot of new users. sure, you can create logic engines in it, but the average 11 year old on minecraft isnt doing that. Notch walked away with the bulk of minecrafts real profit, leaving microsoft to shepherd servers and find new ways to milk a cow he gave up on years ago after the food mechanic. the MS deal alienated a lot of hackers/coders who enjoyed writing mods for the platform and saw it as just another thing gobbled up by redmond to be slowly bled dry through incompetent mismanagement.
Sometimes a fad product is just a fad. Minecraft was a great game, but only because it had a novel idea at the right time. It's not a particularly clever idea or even a patentable one. Seeing Microsoft invest so much is analogous to Target purchasing Ty (beanie baby company).
I think its good that a few individuals have found a way to cleary demonstrate what many people already knew... That the 'news' media is a joke, and only exists to serve the corporations which own the media outlet.
Good that it is being exposed to the people who read the corrections / false story reports. Not good for anyone who didn't and still thinks the original story is real.
I was taught in elementary school to check sources and not rely on a single source. Even (especially) wikipedia was to be questioned. That seems to have all gone out the window. You don't need any qualifications to write news, and nobody would check anyway. The internet was supposed to level the playing field for everything and everybody. It did that, but it turns out that most players are terrible.
There's a fact about Trump that's growing ever more apparent: his mouth is nearly useless. Only his actions matter (and they've yet to unfold).
Forrest Trump is like a box of chocolates: you don't know what you are getting until you bite into one... or one bites into you.
You could say the same thing of any politician. Or any salesperson for that matter. I find it is helpful to have a book on negotiation handy and to categorize the tactics of such people into negotiation strategies. It doesn't take much practice to recognize the strategies that Trump is most prolific with- making strong opening offers, setting the terms of negotiation, carefully choosing the medium, the time, and the location (often at his own properties), showing signs of disappointment, avoiding weak language, etc. Other politicians do this too, of course, but Trump takes it to another level entirely.
I would not want to negotiate with such a person. I can definitely understand that world leaders would be wary of negotiating with such a person.Trump is one of the most successful timeshare salesman in the country, after all.
He's a fast learner at becoming a typical lying establishment politician, after having been briefed on the actual facts of the nation and the world.
If that was actually the case he'd be an ignorant politician that's been enlightened, it's not a lie to realize the basis of your position was lacking and the past conclusion wrong. Though I think you're closer on this one:
He just said whatever he thought would win him the election.
He did. But not in the "I'll tell you half a truth and go full crazy once I'm elected" way, pretty much every move after he was elected has been reconciliatory and moderating past extremes. We know Trump is far from the traditional, life long Republican. At the same time, in practice you have to be a Democrat or Republican to become president. He's a businessman, clearly he's got some economic theories that he really means but the rest or has he just been pandering?
This might be hilariously wrong in retrospect but just throwing it out there, what if Trump has been playing the long con like you see in reality shows and now that he's maneuvered his way into office he'll actually be a far more moderate, responsible and socially progressive president than anyone expected him to be? Because it's one thing that he flip-flops, but I can't see that all of these are necessary. In many cases he could probably stick to his guns and have the party back him up, but he does it anyway. Most peculiar.
There has been some speculation that the GOP didn't plan to support Trump, since enacting his campaign promises were thought to hurt the GOP in the 2018 elections. The 2018 election is important because of the 2020 census and the redistricting that will take place soon after. Without GOP support, Trump wouldn't accomplish much in the next 4 years, making it easier for the party to distance themselves. By roping in the GOP and including them, Trump ties his fate to the GOP. They have to support him, and won't be able to dump him easily in 2020 if he wants to run for re-election. Whether that is a good or bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.
I was in the Nuclear Propulsion Program in the Navy. By necessity, quality control and training were at near-religious levels. But the systems themselves were designed above all for reliability. One aspect of that was simplicity.
The Zumwalt isn't a nuke, just an over-priced gas turbo-electric. The tech surrounding this project is an engineer's wet dream.However, they have built the flimsiest of paper tigers. It's supposed to be a combatant warship, not a science fair demonstration project, and not a contractor piggy-bank for taxpayer dollars.
The idea of propulsion plant automation as a labor-saving measure is laudable, but the concept is scalar, not linear. There is a tradeoff to be made here, and prudence seems to have gone overboard the garbage. More points of failure with fewer resources to respond to failures does not make for a reliable combat system. Automation gone wild might be OK commercial ships where the price of failure is less, but this is supposed to be a fighting ship, not a bulk freighter.
We have seen the same folly in the littoral combatants and the ridiculously moribund Ford-class carrier.
Who the hell is driving this reliability-be-damned design regime? Certainly not the war fighters.
I studied marine engineering and have several friends from university who work at the shipyard (General Dynamic Bath Iron Works) where the Zumwalt was designed and built. They are among the most patriotic people I know. Individually, they are also smart. But collectively, they are the dumbest bunch of government contract exploiters I have ever seen. From the ship specification (solution in search of a problem) to the expensive and idiotic design choices, the Zumwalt is a complete disaster. We had BIW representatives on our college campus 10 years ago telling us all about the wonderful things the DDX program (which eventually became the single-ship Zumwalt class) could do. It sounded like a car salesman pitch then, and I am not surprised at all how it turned out. There are very good reasons they only built one and then ordered more Arleigh Burke destroyers instead. There is something very, very wrong when the 15,000 ton Zumwalt destroyer costs $3.96B/unit (excluding R&D costs). For comparison, a much more capable 9000 Ton Arleigh Burke destroyer costs $1.84B and you can get a 100,000 ton Ford-class aircraft carrier for $10.44B.
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So, nothing to do with all of the US troops and bases occupying their territory?
Boy, people have short memories. Iraq didn't renew a security agreement back in 2011 for political reasons. The local population didn't want it. The US was mostly withdrawn from Iraq at the end of December 2011. It took about 6 months before ISIS took advantage of the situation.
From 2nd link-
In July 2012, al-Baghdadi released an audio statement online announcing that the group was returning to former strongholds from which US troops and the Sons of Iraq had driven them in 2007 and 2008.[219] He declared the start of a new offensive in Iraq called Breaking the Walls, aimed at freeing members of the group held in Iraqi prisons.[219] Violence in Iraq had begun to escalate in June 2012, primarily with AQI's car bomb attacks, and by July 2013, monthly fatalities exceeded 1,000 for the first time since April 2008.[220]
I'm too lazy to look up when the US sent sizable forces back to Iraq, but it was only on request and permission of the Iraqi government.
If you want to kill an evil food company, lets go after Nestle.
Nestle are saints compared to Hersey.
Everywhere all over the world (except the US), Kit Kat bars are under Nestle control. In the USA, we are stuck with Hersey. Outside the USA, there are multiple flavors of Kit Kat. Some countries have seasonal flavors which they rotate in and out. I believe Japan has more than 30 flavors! Kit Kat bars (even the original flavor) from Japan and Canada taste better than Hersey's Kit Kat bars (opinion).
Hersey basically buys up the rights to brands, and then does nothing with them except swap out ingredients for cheaper ones. Their chocolate is the worst tasting mass-produced chocolate of a company of their size. Nestle at least innovates and brings out new products and flavors.
An attacker who controls the meter also controls the meter's software, allowing him to cause it to literally explode."
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No. Just no. Look them up, at most what they have is remote disconnect relays with a cycle time of 30 to 120 seconds. The aren't solenoids (wire coil relays) but stall motors that move the contanctor open or closed and are not fast acting. That is their only active function. The rest are passive. So they might be able to fiddle the bill, or turn your power on and off. But make the meter explode? I've not seen any designs that would fail in that way. Admittedly, I've not seen every design, but most use a stall motor to move a spring loaded armature/contactor set open or closed.
Consider these devices to be like a home router. You can hack one router, possibly cause someone some grief, but it generally won't affect them much even if their router is part of a big botnet.
The problem I worry about is if someone were to hack hundreds or thousands of these smart meters and started cycling large numbers of them simultaneously in a nefarious way. Electricity grids are generally managing a predictable demand. To do that, calculations are performed which consider time of day, forecasted temperature, weekday vs weekend vs holiday, recent rate of change of the demand (average of several time periods), yesterday's demand at the same time, etc. If the demand was suddenly unpredictable, managing the grid would become very difficult, possibly even impossible.
Not an expert here. Far from it, but it sounds like the electric generation and the grid control systems have the possibility for multiple sites of failure as well as multiple sites for intrusion by bad guys. This sounds like a recipe for disaster. Hopefully critical sites such as the defense department, local police departments, hospitals, etc., have standalone electric generators independent of the grid and web. Then again, a large enough cohort of spies and terrorists could disable those. Maybe we need a system of signal fires, flags, carrier pigeons to keep the grid up in an emergency. If the fuel supply or cooling water to power plants is shut down, why worry about the Internet controls.
At the end of the day, every major electrical generation site has means for some sort of manual control. There are enough "blackstart" (electrical plants that can start up without any external power) units in place to restart the grid in the event of failure. Syncing a generating unit to the grid "by hand" is not that hard (I have done it). You watch your Synchroscope carefully and flip the switch at the right moment. Then you open the steam valves to your turbine and start "pushing" on the grid, if the grid is small enough that you can actually push the grid past 60.3Hz or so, there are local systems in place to close the steam valve slightly, and automatically.
Much of the automation in place in the grid is mainly for convenience, stability during adverse events, and manpower reduction. You could have somebody physically at each major valve and switch with a radio and have them control the thing. I have done that too, it is a boring job but it is possible.
There are enough varied systems out there that launching a wide-scale attack would take a lot of time to prepare, and somebody would likely notice. Smaller attacks are possible but not particularly worthwhile, you can probably cause a small utility some grief and money but it wouldn't accomplish much. Stuxtnet was a huge wakeup call to the industry and NERC has been ramming good IT practices downwards to utilities and equipment OEMs for the last 6 years. The protections in place aren't foolproof but nothing is. The industry is full of engineers and we generally weigh the likelihood of risk & cost to recover.
If they'd make a nintendo-branded bluetooth dpad and holder we wouldn't be having this conversation, it would be a conversation about how much money they're making.
Touchscreens aren't everything. Humans have fingers. D-pad is brilliant. Stop drinking the Ive kool-aid. Poor Mario.
Oh, and make some more of those NES classics. Stupid nintendo. I'd have bought at least 5 of them if they were available. I got a knockoff chinese USB d-pad clone instead.
The future of gaming in my family is looking more and more like it will be Retroarch on either Android or Windows for the older games, and Steam for the newer ones. Nintendo offers a pretty decent walled garden, but it isn't a very big garden and the per-game cost is high enough to give pause when compared to the bargains that can be had on Steam.
No. Transportion of individuals and their belongings (your flight in), accommodations for a private individual (your hotel), etc are not mentioned in any of the piles of sanctions. And Americans can, to this day, send money electronically to a tour company based in China and receive a DPRK visa (delivered to Beijing for you to pick up there) in a couple of weeks. Take it from a guy who went there in 2013. "USA has very nice people but we don't like your government" was the attitude that North Koreans came to me with. The 8-day tour was hugely helpful for me to learn how to understand the reasoning of people from VERY different backgrounds.
Except where it mentions actual cost per MWHr. ' It started with a contract in January to produce electricity for $64 per megawatt-hour in India; then a deal in August pegging $29.10 per megawatt hour in Chile. '
These production costs are huge. Prices in the Houston area wholesale are approximately $20-$25 per MW-h on any given day. And this is in a first world country with high labor costs and a high standard of safety.
The google term you are looking for is "LMP map", which is a map showing the wholesale price of electricity. (LMP stands for Locational Marginal Pricing) Add the term "MISO" for the midwest, "ERCOT" for Texas, "PJM" for the eastern atlantic states, "ISO New England" for the northeast, etc.
Houston seems be benefitting from excess wind production in other areas of the state, many of which are at substantially negative cost. Why would anyone sell wind turbine power at negative cost? Wouldn't it make more sense to shut the turbine down and spare the maintenance? The answer is the subsidies. Many wind farms make much more from the subsidies than their actual function of providing power. These factors are not shown on LMP maps, but you can imagine the subsidies must be quite high- there are pockets in Texas as I type this currently at -$20 to -$50 per MW-hr.
I wonder how much it will help owner/operators and the truck drivers. As it stands now, the truck driving industry is following textiles and meat packing into oblivion, where even a minimal living is tough to do.
I wonder how this will affect immigration policies, both in the USA and elsewhere. My company ships heavy industrial equipment and parts regularly. It is quite rare to see a US-born driver for these loads (step deck or flatbed, other types of trucking may vary). The barrier to entry is low- low education or english ability is not a huge barrier, which makes these jobs viable for foreign immigrants. If the driver workforce starts shrinking, and this seems inevitable, foreign immigration of low-skill workers will become an even more important topic than it is now.
Absolutely not absurd for anyone running RetroArch
That's why I'll be offering a special device called an AirPods retention strap. It consists of a small cord connected to the end of each AirPod, that you tie to the device. It's so genius, and so obvious, I don't know why anyone never thought of doing that before.
You jest, but it is probably going to happen as a way to deflect liability for broken devices. My hearing aid has the potential to be bumped off and it has an small strap with an aligator clip. I have never used it (nor heard of anyone who does) but the description in the manual indicates that it is clearly a liability dodge.
Depending on the how much pressure the injection well pump can provide and the geology of the field, supercritical geothermal could be possible. Not common, but possible. Most geothermal wells are under 600F and the steam temperature declines over time. Heat carrying capacity of supercritical steam is not great, however, so this could potentially be very damaging to the geothermal field. It would also wreck havoc on most turbine designs, even ones with superalloy parts and overlays. Unlike most power plant steam, where the water chemistry is very carefully controlled, geothermal steam is quite dirty with sulphur and arsenic compounds and salts. Supercritical or even superheated steam could cause a creep / stress corrosion cracking failure quite quickly.
This is not correct. Combustion temperatures can reach these temperatures, but boiler water circulates by convection fast enough that the heat is conducted away before the boiler tubes reach those temperatures. The superheater tube bundles must be carefully designed since they are cooled only by steam (less heat carrying capacity than water) and are often exposed directly to the radiant heat. Typical properties for high temperature steam for coal or natural gas plants is 1000F-1050F (538-566C) at 2400psi (measured at the turbine inlet). Plants do exist at up to 1100F steam with some designs using up to 4200psi steam, but these designs are less common due to extra costs of using thicker pipes and pressure vessels, requirement for superalloys and more frequent maintenance.
Note to VCs and other money-types.
When a candidate talks about 'revolutionary technology' make sure you see it actually working before you give them mountains of bucks. Oh, and make sure you get it independently tested, too.
Tech has already changed the meaning of 'innovative' to 'same as last year's model minus an interface port' now they're turning revolutionary into some ironic hipster term.
My experience (in a totally unrelated industry) is that there seems to be a large amount of money out there in private equity looking for something to do. Many of the people doing such work do their due diligence (since they will immediately gut and then flip the company), but suckers are born every minute. In other cases, it seems that the investor/investee relationship is protracted battle between con artists.
But I'm just an engineer, some big shot will probably just jump in here and tell me that I was naive to think the world worked any other way.
Why in gawd's name would anyone mass produce such a device? This must be one of those fake news stories we've been hearing so much about.
I can't imagine any legitimate use for such a device, so I assume it would be made illegal as soon as the politicians can get off their duffs.
I'm sure certain companies and government agencies working with very sensitive information or critical infrastructure would find some value in it. You can disable USB in software or fill the ports with hot glue gun glue, but both can be undone/worked around. There may be other, better methods to secure the USB ports, but there are definitely some legitimate uses for such a device.
From what I understood, it was indeed promising but it never went beyond that. The problem with psychedelics is that while we did have some very good results, it was too unpredictable. You talk about non-scientists but there is nothing scientists hate more than unpredictability. When a psychiatrist gives a drug to a patient, he wants to know the effects beforehand, he wants to know how things can go wrong, what to do next, etc.. You can't have it with LSD. I don't think we went passed the point of throwing it at a patient and see how it sticks.
One of the last potential use of psychedelics is for treating cluster headaches. A benign but extremely painful condition. Interestingly, the most effective treatments are all hit-or-miss repurposed drugs, psychedelics are of these.
Every drug has potential side effects and some level of unpredictability. If you were to measure the negative side effects and the benefits of commercial prescription antidepressants and mood disorder drugs, the net gain is very small or even negative in some cases. Some antidepressants on the market actually perform worse than a placebo. That's not a particularly high bar for these drugs to clear.
The only reason these drugs weren't fully researched is because they were made very difficult to study, both by regulation and by the social stigma / loss of reputation that anyone trying to study them would have to endure.
He campaigned on a platform of isolationism. Why would he care if two countries on the other side of the world are hacking each other?
Not just that, unlike previous Republican administrations, he takes a dim view of all of Islam: he doesn't view Sunnis as better than Shias or vice versa or any of that. His whole stance of allying w/ the Russians in Syria is based on that: that militias that are financed by the Saudis, Turks or Qatar are just not reliable at best, and Jihadists at worst. That's why he's taken a position that's completely heterodox to the Republicans, if not downright heretical.
On Iran, what he has to do is pull the plug on that deal, and make it clear to Iran's trading partners that they can choose to trade either w/ the US or Iran, but not both. If European countries are so enamored w/ trading w/ Iran, that's fine: just don't expect to do any business w/ the US.
But as far as the Saudis go, we have no dog in the fight b/w Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both are our enemies, and the 2 of them fighting each other is an alien vs predator situation, to paraphrase Debbie Schlussel. Or like the 2 cats of Kilkinney. If they can fight each other and wipe each other out, then praise be to allah - nothing like it!
Wars have a habit of spilling their effects across borders. For a time, I was reading every day's front page of the Canberra Times starting in October 1938. The problem of international refugees appeared again and again, and I had to stop in February 1939 because I got busy with work. The war had only just begun at that point.
65 million people were displaced at the end of 2015. This problem is not just Saudi Arabia and Iran's problem. A lot of the costs of their "not so cold" war are externalized onto other nations.
A single dose of magic mushrooms can make people with severe anxiety and depression better for months, according to a landmark pair of new studies.
Research into cannabis, MDMA, LSD, etc was the most promising area of psychiatric research in the 1950s. A mental health revolution was on the horizon until a bunch of non-scientists got involved and shut the whole thing down.
I don't even keep location services turned on except when I need to use my phone as a GPS, never mind allow any apps to access it. Why the hell would I want to share my location with Uber? Oh, right - "Location data could also be used to provide new channels of revenue for the digital platform. This could include serving ads of local businesses". Yeah, kindly fuck right off, Uber.
Uber may be playing shenanigans but other companies can potentially do useful things with that data. As an example, Pandora seems to play certain songs depending on my location or time of day. I have noticed that John O`Callaghan's "Big Sky" seems to play much more frequently around sunset. Driving home from the airport after a business trip almost guarantees a play of Gareth Emery's "Long Way Home". I have no evidence that Pandora is actually changing the songs played based on location or time of day, but it would not surprise me.
The ads on Pandora don't seem to change much, if at all, based on my location.
Yeah, it is not simple thermodynamics. The complexity of the interactions in the body is overwhelmingly mind-boggling.
Interestingly enough, more and more researchers are buying into the lower-carb side of the diet controversy. And it seems that if you lower the amount of carbohydrates in your diet, you probably have to increase your fat intake to get enough energy to prevent starvation responses. And a gut that is adapted to burning fat for energy is significantly different from a gut that burns sugars. And so on....
However, the report of a single study doesn't provide a prescription for health. Some time ago there was good discussion about creating a comprehensive science database to compare outcomes of different research. This database would report on both successful and unsuccessful experiments and research, which could possibly cut down on instances of "fads" by identifying what works, what doesn't work, and what hasn't been tested yet.
Recent research into gut biology certainly is fascinating and exciting. It seems clear that different types of guy bacteria break down food at different rates and into different components. A lot of research has gone into fecal transplants, but that is the "cheap and roundabout way" of researching this issue, in my opinion. Some questions I have are-
1. Do different species of gut bacteria break down different types of food (vegatables, fruits, proteins, etc) differently?
2. Where are the 'ideal' (most healthy) bacteria commonly found? Are they a byproduct of food decomposition? There does seem to be some benefits of consuming fermented foods. It wouldn't be too surprising to find that bacteria good at decomposing food on the countertop are also good at decomposing food in the gut (as long as they can handle the acidity). This could imply that the super clean food practices commonly used in western countries (refrigeration, washing, etc) could actually be harmful since they restrict bacteria from proliferating.
It only makes sense that you should only be allowed to review something you've actually bought through the site, but man will I miss the comedy reviews. The reviews for the Trump Christmas tree ornament hat are GOLD, as were the reviews for uranium in a can and all the others.
You can still write 5 reviews per week for items that you haven't bought. That should be plenty for legitimate purposes.
The real issue with Amazon is that the actual seller's feedback score is not clearly shown on the product page. If you want feedback for the actual seller, it is buried at least 1 click away. Other websites with 'marketplaces' make this a lot more transparent on the product page. Putting their feedback score front and center would fix several issues. Not every problem, but Amazon's reluctance to do even that shows to me that they don't take the problems of chinese sellers seriously.
Minecraft is slowly rearing its head as one of microsofts worst decisions. Yes it had a lot of users, but not a lot of new users. sure, you can create logic engines in it, but the average 11 year old on minecraft isnt doing that. Notch walked away with the bulk of minecrafts real profit, leaving microsoft to shepherd servers and find new ways to milk a cow he gave up on years ago after the food mechanic. the MS deal alienated a lot of hackers/coders who enjoyed writing mods for the platform and saw it as just another thing gobbled up by redmond to be slowly bled dry through incompetent mismanagement.
Sometimes a fad product is just a fad. Minecraft was a great game, but only because it had a novel idea at the right time. It's not a particularly clever idea or even a patentable one. Seeing Microsoft invest so much is analogous to Target purchasing Ty (beanie baby company).
I think its good that a few individuals have found a way to cleary demonstrate what many people already knew... That the 'news' media is a joke, and only exists to serve the corporations which own the media outlet.
Good that it is being exposed to the people who read the corrections / false story reports. Not good for anyone who didn't and still thinks the original story is real.
I was taught in elementary school to check sources and not rely on a single source. Even (especially) wikipedia was to be questioned. That seems to have all gone out the window. You don't need any qualifications to write news, and nobody would check anyway. The internet was supposed to level the playing field for everything and everybody. It did that, but it turns out that most players are terrible.
There's a fact about Trump that's growing ever more apparent: his mouth is nearly useless. Only his actions matter (and they've yet to unfold).
Forrest Trump is like a box of chocolates: you don't know what you are getting until you bite into one ... or one bites into you.
You could say the same thing of any politician. Or any salesperson for that matter. I find it is helpful to have a book on negotiation handy and to categorize the tactics of such people into negotiation strategies. It doesn't take much practice to recognize the strategies that Trump is most prolific with- making strong opening offers, setting the terms of negotiation, carefully choosing the medium, the time, and the location (often at his own properties), showing signs of disappointment, avoiding weak language, etc. Other politicians do this too, of course, but Trump takes it to another level entirely.
I would not want to negotiate with such a person. I can definitely understand that world leaders would be wary of negotiating with such a person.Trump is one of the most successful timeshare salesman in the country, after all.
He's a fast learner at becoming a typical lying establishment politician, after having been briefed on the actual facts of the nation and the world.
If that was actually the case he'd be an ignorant politician that's been enlightened, it's not a lie to realize the basis of your position was lacking and the past conclusion wrong. Though I think you're closer on this one:
He just said whatever he thought would win him the election.
He did. But not in the "I'll tell you half a truth and go full crazy once I'm elected" way, pretty much every move after he was elected has been reconciliatory and moderating past extremes. We know Trump is far from the traditional, life long Republican. At the same time, in practice you have to be a Democrat or Republican to become president. He's a businessman, clearly he's got some economic theories that he really means but the rest or has he just been pandering?
This might be hilariously wrong in retrospect but just throwing it out there, what if Trump has been playing the long con like you see in reality shows and now that he's maneuvered his way into office he'll actually be a far more moderate, responsible and socially progressive president than anyone expected him to be? Because it's one thing that he flip-flops, but I can't see that all of these are necessary. In many cases he could probably stick to his guns and have the party back him up, but he does it anyway. Most peculiar.
There has been some speculation that the GOP didn't plan to support Trump, since enacting his campaign promises were thought to hurt the GOP in the 2018 elections. The 2018 election is important because of the 2020 census and the redistricting that will take place soon after. Without GOP support, Trump wouldn't accomplish much in the next 4 years, making it easier for the party to distance themselves. By roping in the GOP and including them, Trump ties his fate to the GOP. They have to support him, and won't be able to dump him easily in 2020 if he wants to run for re-election. Whether that is a good or bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.
I was in the Nuclear Propulsion Program in the Navy. By necessity, quality control and training were at near-religious levels. But the systems themselves were designed above all for reliability. One aspect of that was simplicity.
The Zumwalt isn't a nuke, just an over-priced gas turbo-electric. The tech surrounding this project is an engineer's wet dream.However, they have built the flimsiest of paper tigers. It's supposed to be a combatant warship, not a science fair demonstration project, and not a contractor piggy-bank for taxpayer dollars.
The idea of propulsion plant automation as a labor-saving measure is laudable, but the concept is scalar, not linear. There is a tradeoff to be made here, and prudence seems to have gone overboard the garbage. More points of failure with fewer resources to respond to failures does not make for a reliable combat system. Automation gone wild might be OK commercial ships where the price of failure is less, but this is supposed to be a fighting ship, not a bulk freighter.
We have seen the same folly in the littoral combatants and the ridiculously moribund Ford-class carrier.
Who the hell is driving this reliability-be-damned design regime? Certainly not the war fighters.
I studied marine engineering and have several friends from university who work at the shipyard (General Dynamic Bath Iron Works) where the Zumwalt was designed and built. They are among the most patriotic people I know. Individually, they are also smart. But collectively, they are the dumbest bunch of government contract exploiters I have ever seen. From the ship specification (solution in search of a problem) to the expensive and idiotic design choices, the Zumwalt is a complete disaster. We had BIW representatives on our college campus 10 years ago telling us all about the wonderful things the DDX program (which eventually became the single-ship Zumwalt class) could do. It sounded like a car salesman pitch then, and I am not surprised at all how it turned out. There are very good reasons they only built one and then ordered more Arleigh Burke destroyers instead. There is something very, very wrong when the 15,000 ton Zumwalt destroyer costs $3.96B/unit (excluding R&D costs). For comparison, a much more capable 9000 Ton Arleigh Burke destroyer costs $1.84B and you can get a 100,000 ton Ford-class aircraft carrier for $10.44B.