You know, I can understand why Google might decide that XMPP isn't sufficient for the kinds of features they'd like to support, and so deciding to develop something new in-house with their desired feature set. I really wish, though, they they would open a protocol that still allowed outside people to communicate.
I just find it insane how much we're moving back in the direction of "walled gardens" everywhere. There was a time when most people's exposure to online interaction were services like Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy, and those services couldn't talk to each other. I think we're headed back in that direction, except that soon we'll all be on services like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, and those services won't talk to each other.
We really need a revolution soon, or I think we're going to find that we don't like where we end up. I know it sounds trivial because these are all free services, and most of what's communicated on them is trivial anyway. Still, it's transforming the Internet into a less free place, where we're all at the whim of a small handful of companies. I think it's a bigger problem than we've yet realized.
Nobody has really made a service or software where an open standard was easy to use. Case in point- video calls. There are a lot of free alternatives out there, some seem to work OK, other seem to not work so well. None of the alternatives are easy to use however, so Skype is what we use. I would prefer to use a more open platform, but I have better things to do with my time than troubleshoot such a system for hours.
Give us a 40" desk surface like you guys demonstrated over 5 years ago.
Stop trying to compete where you already lost before you even started, grab onto the market that you own most of the patents for and there is NO competition in right now and run with it.
and yes, there IS a market for $2500 price point for a 37 - 42" coffee table size real surface device. If people are buying $800 ipads in droves, then something like a real surface table will sell for a higher price point.
Perhaps they have calculated that the first to go into that market will be the loser. Microsoft isn't really good at introducing new products anymore (were they ever?).
Fantastic engines would be those 4-cylinder Toyota, Subaru or Honda engines that run efficiently for 200K miles, or diesel engines from mercedes or volvo that can go 500K
Neither exists any more. Those Japanese engines are all interference designs with timing belts now, and the diesels that would make those kind of miles without major mishap are long, long gone.
When is the last time you ruined an interference engine by failure of the timing belt? I don't even know anyone who that has happened to. This fear is a lot like a fear of flying- yes the consequences of failure are disastrous, but the probability of something more common ruining your day is much higher.
You use google. Here is what i found with 3 seconds of googling for a game older than any of the EA titles.
http://dtaskforce.forumotion.c...
The in-game server browser is a huge convenience, and the costs to support such old games are minimal. You could probably support the server browser for all these games on a single blade. The server browser is basically a fancy web server, taking input such as "I have a server a xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" and answering requests such as "Give me your server list". For legacy games this is probably less than a 100kb transaction. For unpopular legacy games, probably less than a 10kb transaction.
When half the people stopped voting and much of the other half got so poor an education that they can't distinguish between truth and bullshit.
If it was just poor schooling, private groups could step in and do something about that. The problem is that politians are on the payola, and they influence public policy, education, and they can even control the public conversation. People in the US are indoctrinated into "tribes" depending on where they were born and who their parents believe politically. I use the word "tribe" because it is far worse system than having a system of political parties where one can switch or choose. The core conservative "tribe" clings to their beliefs as closely as a religion, and so do the core liberal "tribe". A huge amount of people don't belong to either "tribe" although they may associate with a particular party. The problem is that these "tribes" have gotten so large and the indoctrination is so compelling that people in one tribe won't even talk to the other tribe rationally.
Keep in mind that when we think of the word "propaganda", most people imagine a the propaganda of other countries, and something which they are not susceptible to or influenced by. The more people recognize something as propaganda the less likely they are to believe it. But propaganda can be insidious and undetectable- in fact, that is the best kind. It can take the form of education, or "way of life" or nearly anything. It can originate in the marketing department of large companies, by lobbyists, or by the politicians themselves. Lobbists don't just influence politicians, that is only half their work! They also shape the national conversation and influence average people. We are all influenced by it.
This thing would be advantageous if it would keep the car in the shade during summer, and clear of snow in the winter. A garage would be better, though.
This thing would only be advantageous if your electric car spent its daylight hours at your house.
In other words, largely unused. Most of us drive to work in the daytime, drive home in the evening, and our car stays home (with us) overnight. Not as much sunlight as you might expect at night....
Another poster came up with a figure of 30kW-hr per day input to the car (considering efficiency and hours of sun, etc). In my area, that's worth about $3.6 per day. I have 52 weekends off per year, plus 11 company holidays, and 15 days vacation. If my car sits at home for 1/2 of those days, that's 65 days of charging or $234. I would consider a payback period of 5 years to be a reasonable investment for car-related equipment, so for me, the maximum the device could cost is $1170 in order to be a worthwhile investment (ignoring time value of money). I doubt the price will be so low. Even if the BMW is the "commute car" and I use a different car on weekends/holidays (BMW always parked at home when not working), the benefit is only $2340 over 5 years.
However, a lot of people are retired, or stay at home mom/dads, or work from home. For them, it could make a LOT of sense. The US labor force is only roughly 1/2 of the population. Although many people not in the labor force would not be in the market for a BMW, the market is still probably very large.
Hell, most people look at it like it's a major chore to change the starter battery even when it's right up front, held down with one wrench size that fits both the retainer strap and the battery terminal cables.
For some people (not me) this kind of maintenance is a safety / reliability issue. In inexperienced hands, starter batteries can be very dangerous. More importantly, if a mistake is made or they get "stuck", someone with only 1 car could be stranded and face embarrassment in having to ask a friend for help, or have to get a tow or a mechanic who does housecalls. They would also not have a car to go to work, buy groceries, etc until the problem is fixed, which is to high a risk for many people.
No, they had billions of government dollars to do it a decade ago, and didn't. Just took the money and pocketed it.
I see this point repeated everywhere on various blogs, forums, and especially slashdot. And yet I have never seen any source for this information, reputable or not. I couldn't come up with a google search termto generate anything relevent.
Is there a source on this bold claim? It seems reasonable that it could be true, but I am a lot more skeptical than I used to be.
There is a lot I don't understand at financial reports, but these numbers really strike me as odd.
How can you have a revenue of 731 M$ while producing in the same period about 500 M$ worth of merchandise? Said otherwise, for each car produced in Q1, they have a revenue of about 100 k$. I know the Tesla is not a cheep car, but that seems excessive. Or did I miss something here?
Companies make money in lost of ways. If you can't understand the financial statement or how the company makes their money, don't invest in the company! No matter what!
I adopted this policy a short time ago and it has been a much better strategy than others I have tried. If you are want to start looking at simple financial reports, the easiest example I can think of is RICK's Caberet (RICK). Another simple business (aquire ships, lease them out) is Navios Maritime Holdings Inc. (NM), although I have marine experience so I understand this business better than many people might. Fly Leasing Ltd (FLY) is a reasonably simple business (aquire airplanes, lease them out) also. Keep looking at smaller companies with easy to understand business models, they generally have much simpler financial reports. It isn't reasonable for a person just learning this stuff to be able to understand a large and complicated business.
I don't take a stand on either buying or selling any of the companies I have listed, they are provided only as examples of reasonably simple financial reports.
That's *just* what you all want, right? For me to move here in time to retire & live off a pension? [/sarcasm]
It would be a pretty small "pension". US retirement benefits are based on complicated formulas which have inputs of # of years working, highest salary attained, and similar. The idea is that on average, people get out what they paid into the system. So if you start working in the US at age 62 and retire at 66, your social security check might cover a loaf or two of bread but not much else.
How long does it take to go from "can apply for a green card" to "has a green card"? If you've just moved to a new country, a second income makes a huge difference.
For my wife (Korean passport & nationality, but born and always lived in Japan), it took about 18 months for the green card to finally arrive. However, this was based on a fiance visa, and I am a US citizen. There are many different waiting lists and they all have different priorities. In general processing times and fees keep going up however.
The biggest joke is that about 4-5 years ago they tripled a lot of the application fees and claimed they would use the new revenue to reduce waiting times. Waiting times have only gone up since then.
BMW won nothing. Tesla won the electric car race by creating a car that has the range of a normal car, is faster than a normal car, and looks as good as any normal car. This is why it is scoring so high in consumer reports that cover ALL cars, not just electric vehicles.
The BMW i3 has 1/3 of the range, does 0-60 in twice the time (7 seconds), and looks fugly. In my city we have dozens of public cars like this all over the city that anybody can jump into and use for €8/hour. I am sure lots of companies will buy it for staff than need to do local runs. Probably got a good market in local governments, councils and utility companies. Being one of the slowest production cars ever to hit the road will probably mean low insurance cost.
It's apples and oranges. A bicycle is more efficient than either. It doesn't do the same job though.
Phillip.
Wow, fanboy much? The Tesla is roughly double the cost- It might be a good car but it isn't anywhere near the same market. 0-60 in 7 seconds is not "the slowest production car to hit the road", it is actually pretty average and comparable with BMW 3-series and 5-series vehicles as well as typical with the rest of the industry.
What makes the i3 different from every other car on the market is under the skin - it's almost entirely made out of plastic. This is no ordinary plastic, mind you - it's carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic. It's basically the same stuff used to make Formula One cars and stealth bombers. What's remarkable about the i3 is that it's the first mass-market car made out of carbon fiber. There's no metal in the car's body - all the bumpers, doors and skins are plastic as well. The only major metal parts are the drive unit and suspension components. The result is a four-seat, four-door city car that weighs only about 2,700 pounds - or nearly 500 pounds less than a BMW 1 Series.
This actually quite a bold and innovative new product. It's a shame they made it so ugly. I'm really curious to see crash test results.
Prices have dropped rapidly so you really need to check quarterly and not use any source even slightly outdated. That EIA report uses 3 year old data, and further monkeys with the cost of money in weird ways costing "green" ones at 3.5% and fossil 6.5% - for no reason at all other than a hit job on fossil prices. It also uses $8/mmBTU price for natural gas without saying it, so overcosts natural gas. Kind of a load of crap.
I'm not going to stand behind a report that I can't be bothered to read, but perhaps the difference in discount rates of 3.5% "green" and 6.5% for fossil power is due to government loan guarantee availability or other loan programs for green projects? Fossil power companies need to finance either through the open market, or if the company is large, sometimes they self-finance using balance sheet financing. Green projects may have better/cheaper financing options.
Free piston engines have a distinct difference with respect to vibration. They can potentially couple a lot less vibration to the chassis than traditional designs because the vibration is only in one plane and there is no need to couple the engine to the chassis to provide torsional reaction force for the drive train.
The vibration of any individual component doesn't matter, only the vibration that is coupled to the chassis of the vehicle. With a free piston design, there is no need to couple the engine directly to anything because you have no output shafts to couple to the drive train, and no mechanical reaction forces to contain. That means that the body of the engine can be decoupled from the chassis of the vehicle in the axis of vibration, and *allowed* to vibrate back and forth as much as it needs to. That provides the reaction force to the piston, and the forces coupled to the chassis are only the frictional loss in your mounting system.
I'm not a free piston engine expert but vibration is generally a mechanical loss. If the engine were allowed to vibrate (or oscilate) back and forth as much as it liked, a substantial amount of energy would be used up in initiating and maintaining that motion.
A related problem would be that if you tried to have the piston produce useful work, you would be essentially restraining the piston while the engine frame moved around like mad. It would be the equivalent of holding firmly to an small electric motor shaft and allowing the motor body to spin around. Fun to watch but no useful work is being done. The engine frame needs to be restrained in order for useful work to be done.
Recalling that rescue workers dealing with Prius might not know if a vehicle is de-energized, one of the thoughts that went through my mind is that an electrician or fireman might think that by cutting off power at the breaker, they can assume the entire house and all subsystems are de-energized. I wonder if their procedures involve checking for alternate sources of power such as checking for solar panels and uninterruptible power supplies.
The typical procedure in industry is to put a very large and very prominent warning label on the panel cover- "THIS PANEL ENERGIZED FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES", and then list the panel #'s which power the subject panel. I assume this is compliant to OSHA and NEC standards since I have seen this approach in many different places.
What? The market will not go out of business. Capital is relatively plentiful and there are many participants, many trying to geologically diversify. No economic plant will stay shutdown for long. The sooner uneconomic plants shutdown the better. That was the main point of power pools...
What you describe might happen in areas still under rate base. Fortunately most power pools have been running for a decade now (without the drama we saw in CA). Only areas where the 'local' power companies have so much power (cough, Southern Company, cough) that market based systems are being delayed is bankruptcy and bailout still a possibility.
The fundamental flaw in your argument is that you assume that uneconomic plants are not needed. This is far from true!! For the 1-5 hottest days of the year*, uneconomic plants are desperately needed when the rest of power is already used up. There are plenty of sites across the US which operate for less than 2 weeks a year, because they are for the greatest "peak of the peak". The power grid needs these plants just as badly as it needs the 24/7 coal/nuclear plant. But in a pure economic model, those handful of days a year aren't enough to justify maintaining that kind of plant. Speculating that the price will skyrocket on hottest of hot days enough to keep you solvent is very risky. It is also bad for society as a whole- society risks not having enough power AND is assured of higher electricity rates on hot days.
In the old days, the utility would operate such plants since they relied on them. Nowadays, there are 2 kinds of power pools- those which subsidize this kind of plant and those which do not. In subsidized markets, they are paid a capacity payment every day which they are "ready". This kind of "payment for nothing" gives free-marketers heartburn however, so some markets don't do this, or don't do it as much as they need. Those markets are the ones which have huge problems on the hottest days, and because they are frequently on the edge of overcapacity, the price of electricity is always higher.
Keep in mind that "idle plants" is a synonym to "overhead which isn't making me money". Private industry wants to keep the % of idle plants as low as possible. In regulated markets, the utility has the obligation to do what is best for their customers. It is better for their customers that the grid isn't near the edge of overcapacity on a daily basis. Their % of idle plants is higher as a result. With a larger pool of potential power available, the utility can use the cheapest generation on the majority of days, and keep the expensive power plants as a reserve for the very hottest days. The private industry model thinks those reserve plants are uneconomical, and so on the hottest days they get into trouble.
For the end customer, private electricity markets will always be less predictable compared to a regulated market. Usually in a way which is not favorable to the customer.
Perhaps partly but that plant was a piddly 63MW. In the 1960s they were building 500MW coal powered plants and rapidly scaling up nuclear power output. By the early 1970s, 800-1000MW nuclear power plants were the standard. The manpower requirements of a big nuclear power plant aren't substantially different from a small nuclear power plant. Humboldt Bay was economically obsolete. Other factors may have provided good excuses but IMO the underlying problem was the output was no longer competitive.
Yes, this would make things simpler. The French have done this (PDF link), using one standard reactor design wherever possible. IIRC the American method was to use some standard components, but allow the architect responsible for the plant to make lots of changes (e.g. the piping between the standard components is different at each plant).
Part of this is a problem of capability. Companies like Siemens, Alstom, Areva, etc build turnkey plants based on a "reference" design in Europe. They have thousands of engineers to plan every detail of a power station, all under the umbrella of 1 company. But in the USA, no single company has this capability. GE and Westinghouse (Toshiba) have decided they don't want to be in that business, and want to sell equipment only. Customers are accustomed to buying the condenser from one company, the turbine from another company, the overall control system from a different company etc. The European conglomerates have the capability to provide everything, but have decided that since the tradition in the US is equipment-only (not turnkey), they don't want to take the risk in trying to push that kind of solution. This goes for both nuclear plants and conventional (gas, coal, etc) plants. I don't see this practice changing unless 1/2 of the major equipment OEMs in the US leave the business, which might lead to consortiums or joint-ventures between the manufacturers of different types of equipment. This isn't that likely so the situation of custom-built plants in the US will likely never change.
Recent history is littered with interesting start-ups getting bought out and abandoned because of a misunderstanding of the start-up's core concept.
Or maybe there's a patent that Facebook wants for leverage in some other area and everything else will just be dropped...
2 Billion dollars is a ridiculous amount to pay for patents, supposing Occulus even has any good ones, and supposing they are in some way vital to Facebook's future plans. You could licence such a patent, even at exorbitant rates, for a LONG time for 2 Billion dollars. And if it turned out to be a worthless patent you could just stop licencing it and walk away.
When companies (especially Facebook) are spending these huge sums of money on dubious investments, something very bad is coming. Maybe it is another bubble ready to pop, or maybe it is something different. When it happens, it isn't going to be pretty.
So yes, your 40 mpg motorcycle (horrible mileage by the way, a crotch-rocket by any chance?
40MPG isn't great for a motorcycle, but it isn't "horrible" either. The MPG has absolutely nothing to do with being a "crotch rocket" or not. Most motorcycles 650cc or larger have efficiency which is somewhat comparable.
The calculations show the southern flight path and consequently a water landing. But...how can they be so certain that no one survived? Isn't it possible that the airplane made a controlled glide into a non-powered water landing and that the life rafts deployed and allowed some of the passengers to survive? That has happened before. Admittedly this is very unlikely but can anyone at this point say it is impossible as the Malaysian government is doing?
Each life raft has an EPIRB which is marine rated, and can be picked up by sattelites basically anywhere on the planet. At least one EPIRB would be of the automatic type which starts transmitting when it hits water. The EPIRB is wrapped up deeply inside the packed life rafts, so disabling them would be impossible while the plane was in the air. Unfortunately this means that if the life raft doesn't deploy and instead sinks, the EPIRB will not go off. The fact that no EPIRB signals were transmitted indicates to me that if anyone survived the crash, they are long dead. Even if they were hanging on to floating wreckage, with no potable water and no shelter from the elements they would not last much more than a week.
No EPIRB signals also implies that the plane either broke up in the air, broke up when it hit the water at high speed, or nobody was alive to open a cabin door. In any of those cases the chance for survivors would be very low.
Still vastly better than what it was only a day ago, and there seems to be a lot more possible debris sightings in the search area which I take as a sign they might be in the right area and will hopefully pin it down some more. The race now is to find it before the black box transmitters go silent, a task for which the US is dispatching some specialist search gear apparently, because that's probably the only hope of giving the bereaved a chance at some closure left now.
Forget the bereaved, how on earth will the media ever get closure if the plane isn't found?
I used to think the same, until I got video from my Samsung S4 and compared it to my Canon T2i. I can't tell the difference between video in a lot of cases.
Now, the T2i isn't primarily a video camera, but it has far better lenses and a far better/bigger sensor than the S4. It should perform substantially and irrefutably better than the S4. It doesn't.
As far as photos go, I'm either going to get out the big DSLR or I'm not. The DSLR obviously has superior image quality, but the camera is too big to carry around all the time, and is a significant theft risk if left unattended. If I have to wrangle 2 kids and whatever bags of stuff they require, I don't have a lot of patience for carrying around a camera bag too. Point-and-shoot consumer cameras are pretty much the same thing as cameraphones, unless you are talking about large models with big lenses (which have the same size problems as DSLRs). The cameraphone goes in my pocket. Of course it can be stolen but it is unlikely to be stolen if it is in my pocket. With the larger cameras you have to constantly be on guard and conscious of possible theft.
The best camera is the one you have with you. 1 device to rule them all is perhaps not the ideal solution but it is the most practical.
For the same price you could get a cheap feature phone, a tablet, and a camera. Use the phone for tethering the tablet, which works better for browsing the web and other such functions, and use the camera for taking pictures. That way you don't have to worry about your $600+ phone when you just want to go hiking or go for a bike ride where you don't really need internet connectivity anyway.
I have enough complexity in my life already without juggling 3 physical devices, managing all the interfaces (networking, file transfers, charging) between them, and upgrading/replacing them when needed.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I can understand why Google might decide that XMPP isn't sufficient for the kinds of features they'd like to support, and so deciding to develop something new in-house with their desired feature set. I really wish, though, they they would open a protocol that still allowed outside people to communicate.
I just find it insane how much we're moving back in the direction of "walled gardens" everywhere. There was a time when most people's exposure to online interaction were services like Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy, and those services couldn't talk to each other. I think we're headed back in that direction, except that soon we'll all be on services like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, and those services won't talk to each other.
We really need a revolution soon, or I think we're going to find that we don't like where we end up. I know it sounds trivial because these are all free services, and most of what's communicated on them is trivial anyway. Still, it's transforming the Internet into a less free place, where we're all at the whim of a small handful of companies. I think it's a bigger problem than we've yet realized.
Nobody has really made a service or software where an open standard was easy to use. Case in point- video calls. There are a lot of free alternatives out there, some seem to work OK, other seem to not work so well. None of the alternatives are easy to use however, so Skype is what we use. I would prefer to use a more open platform, but I have better things to do with my time than troubleshoot such a system for hours.
Stop with this tablet crap, nobody wants it.
What do we want? the REAL surface.
Give us a 40" desk surface like you guys demonstrated over 5 years ago.
Stop trying to compete where you already lost before you even started, grab onto the market that you own most of the patents for and there is NO competition in right now and run with it.
and yes, there IS a market for $2500 price point for a 37 - 42" coffee table size real surface device. If people are buying $800 ipads in droves, then something like a real surface table will sell for a higher price point.
Perhaps they have calculated that the first to go into that market will be the loser. Microsoft isn't really good at introducing new products anymore (were they ever?).
Fantastic engines would be those 4-cylinder Toyota, Subaru or Honda engines that run efficiently for 200K miles, or diesel engines from mercedes or volvo that can go 500K
Neither exists any more. Those Japanese engines are all interference designs with timing belts now, and the diesels that would make those kind of miles without major mishap are long, long gone.
When is the last time you ruined an interference engine by failure of the timing belt? I don't even know anyone who that has happened to. This fear is a lot like a fear of flying- yes the consequences of failure are disastrous, but the probability of something more common ruining your day is much higher.
You use google. Here is what i found with 3 seconds of googling for a game older than any of the EA titles. http://dtaskforce.forumotion.c...
The in-game server browser is a huge convenience, and the costs to support such old games are minimal. You could probably support the server browser for all these games on a single blade. The server browser is basically a fancy web server, taking input such as "I have a server a xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" and answering requests such as "Give me your server list". For legacy games this is probably less than a 100kb transaction. For unpopular legacy games, probably less than a 10kb transaction.
When half the people stopped voting and much of the other half got so poor an education that they can't distinguish between truth and bullshit.
If it was just poor schooling, private groups could step in and do something about that. The problem is that politians are on the payola, and they influence public policy, education, and they can even control the public conversation. People in the US are indoctrinated into "tribes" depending on where they were born and who their parents believe politically. I use the word "tribe" because it is far worse system than having a system of political parties where one can switch or choose. The core conservative "tribe" clings to their beliefs as closely as a religion, and so do the core liberal "tribe". A huge amount of people don't belong to either "tribe" although they may associate with a particular party. The problem is that these "tribes" have gotten so large and the indoctrination is so compelling that people in one tribe won't even talk to the other tribe rationally.
Keep in mind that when we think of the word "propaganda", most people imagine a the propaganda of other countries, and something which they are not susceptible to or influenced by. The more people recognize something as propaganda the less likely they are to believe it. But propaganda can be insidious and undetectable- in fact, that is the best kind. It can take the form of education, or "way of life" or nearly anything. It can originate in the marketing department of large companies, by lobbyists, or by the politicians themselves. Lobbists don't just influence politicians, that is only half their work! They also shape the national conversation and influence average people. We are all influenced by it.
This thing would only be advantageous if your electric car spent its daylight hours at your house.
In other words, largely unused. Most of us drive to work in the daytime, drive home in the evening, and our car stays home (with us) overnight. Not as much sunlight as you might expect at night....
Another poster came up with a figure of 30kW-hr per day input to the car (considering efficiency and hours of sun, etc). In my area, that's worth about $3.6 per day. I have 52 weekends off per year, plus 11 company holidays, and 15 days vacation. If my car sits at home for 1/2 of those days, that's 65 days of charging or $234. I would consider a payback period of 5 years to be a reasonable investment for car-related equipment, so for me, the maximum the device could cost is $1170 in order to be a worthwhile investment (ignoring time value of money). I doubt the price will be so low. Even if the BMW is the "commute car" and I use a different car on weekends/holidays (BMW always parked at home when not working), the benefit is only $2340 over 5 years.
However, a lot of people are retired, or stay at home mom/dads, or work from home. For them, it could make a LOT of sense. The US labor force is only roughly 1/2 of the population. Although many people not in the labor force would not be in the market for a BMW, the market is still probably very large.
Hell, most people look at it like it's a major chore to change the starter battery even when it's right up front, held down with one wrench size that fits both the retainer strap and the battery terminal cables.
For some people (not me) this kind of maintenance is a safety / reliability issue. In inexperienced hands, starter batteries can be very dangerous. More importantly, if a mistake is made or they get "stuck", someone with only 1 car could be stranded and face embarrassment in having to ask a friend for help, or have to get a tow or a mechanic who does housecalls. They would also not have a car to go to work, buy groceries, etc until the problem is fixed, which is to high a risk for many people.
No, they had billions of government dollars to do it a decade ago, and didn't. Just took the money and pocketed it.
I see this point repeated everywhere on various blogs, forums, and especially slashdot. And yet I have never seen any source for this information, reputable or not. I couldn't come up with a google search termto generate anything relevent.
Is there a source on this bold claim? It seems reasonable that it could be true, but I am a lot more skeptical than I used to be.
There is a lot I don't understand at financial reports, but these numbers really strike me as odd. How can you have a revenue of 731 M$ while producing in the same period about 500 M$ worth of merchandise? Said otherwise, for each car produced in Q1, they have a revenue of about 100 k$. I know the Tesla is not a cheep car, but that seems excessive. Or did I miss something here?
Companies make money in lost of ways. If you can't understand the financial statement or how the company makes their money, don't invest in the company! No matter what!
I adopted this policy a short time ago and it has been a much better strategy than others I have tried. If you are want to start looking at simple financial reports, the easiest example I can think of is RICK's Caberet (RICK). Another simple business (aquire ships, lease them out) is Navios Maritime Holdings Inc. (NM), although I have marine experience so I understand this business better than many people might. Fly Leasing Ltd (FLY) is a reasonably simple business (aquire airplanes, lease them out) also. Keep looking at smaller companies with easy to understand business models, they generally have much simpler financial reports. It isn't reasonable for a person just learning this stuff to be able to understand a large and complicated business.
I don't take a stand on either buying or selling any of the companies I have listed, they are provided only as examples of reasonably simple financial reports.
That's *just* what you all want, right? For me to move here in time to retire & live off a pension? [/sarcasm]
It would be a pretty small "pension". US retirement benefits are based on complicated formulas which have inputs of # of years working, highest salary attained, and similar. The idea is that on average, people get out what they paid into the system. So if you start working in the US at age 62 and retire at 66, your social security check might cover a loaf or two of bread but not much else.
How long does it take to go from "can apply for a green card" to "has a green card"? If you've just moved to a new country, a second income makes a huge difference.
For my wife (Korean passport & nationality, but born and always lived in Japan), it took about 18 months for the green card to finally arrive. However, this was based on a fiance visa, and I am a US citizen. There are many different waiting lists and they all have different priorities. In general processing times and fees keep going up however.
The biggest joke is that about 4-5 years ago they tripled a lot of the application fees and claimed they would use the new revenue to reduce waiting times. Waiting times have only gone up since then.
BMW won nothing. Tesla won the electric car race by creating a car that has the range of a normal car, is faster than a normal car, and looks as good as any normal car. This is why it is scoring so high in consumer reports that cover ALL cars, not just electric vehicles.
The BMW i3 has 1/3 of the range, does 0-60 in twice the time (7 seconds), and looks fugly. In my city we have dozens of public cars like this all over the city that anybody can jump into and use for €8/hour. I am sure lots of companies will buy it for staff than need to do local runs. Probably got a good market in local governments, councils and utility companies. Being one of the slowest production cars ever to hit the road will probably mean low insurance cost.
It's apples and oranges. A bicycle is more efficient than either. It doesn't do the same job though.
Phillip.
Wow, fanboy much? The Tesla is roughly double the cost- It might be a good car but it isn't anywhere near the same market. 0-60 in 7 seconds is not "the slowest production car to hit the road", it is actually pretty average and comparable with BMW 3-series and 5-series vehicles as well as typical with the rest of the industry.
The BMW didn't win by chance, but because it is based on a totally different construction method to makes it lighter:
This actually quite a bold and innovative new product. It's a shame they made it so ugly. I'm really curious to see crash test results.
I'd love to see average body damage repair costs.
About $70/MWh in Texas. Just under $50/MWh aka 5 cents/kWh after the federal subsidy.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Cheapest-Solar-Ever-Austin-Energy-Buys-PV-From-SunEdison-at-5-Cents-Per-Ki
Prices have dropped rapidly so you really need to check quarterly and not use any source even slightly outdated. That EIA report uses 3 year old data, and further monkeys with the cost of money in weird ways costing "green" ones at 3.5% and fossil 6.5% - for no reason at all other than a hit job on fossil prices. It also uses $8/mmBTU price for natural gas without saying it, so overcosts natural gas. Kind of a load of crap.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm
I'm not going to stand behind a report that I can't be bothered to read, but perhaps the difference in discount rates of 3.5% "green" and 6.5% for fossil power is due to government loan guarantee availability or other loan programs for green projects? Fossil power companies need to finance either through the open market, or if the company is large, sometimes they self-finance using balance sheet financing. Green projects may have better/cheaper financing options.
Free piston engines have a distinct difference with respect to vibration. They can potentially couple a lot less vibration to the chassis than traditional designs because the vibration is only in one plane and there is no need to couple the engine to the chassis to provide torsional reaction force for the drive train.
The vibration of any individual component doesn't matter, only the vibration that is coupled to the chassis of the vehicle. With a free piston design, there is no need to couple the engine directly to anything because you have no output shafts to couple to the drive train, and no mechanical reaction forces to contain. That means that the body of the engine can be decoupled from the chassis of the vehicle in the axis of vibration, and *allowed* to vibrate back and forth as much as it needs to. That provides the reaction force to the piston, and the forces coupled to the chassis are only the frictional loss in your mounting system.
I'm not a free piston engine expert but vibration is generally a mechanical loss. If the engine were allowed to vibrate (or oscilate) back and forth as much as it liked, a substantial amount of energy would be used up in initiating and maintaining that motion.
A related problem would be that if you tried to have the piston produce useful work, you would be essentially restraining the piston while the engine frame moved around like mad. It would be the equivalent of holding firmly to an small electric motor shaft and allowing the motor body to spin around. Fun to watch but no useful work is being done. The engine frame needs to be restrained in order for useful work to be done.
=...
Recalling that rescue workers dealing with Prius might not know if a vehicle is de-energized, one of the thoughts that went through my mind is that an electrician or fireman might think that by cutting off power at the breaker, they can assume the entire house and all subsystems are de-energized. I wonder if their procedures involve checking for alternate sources of power such as checking for solar panels and uninterruptible power supplies.
The typical procedure in industry is to put a very large and very prominent warning label on the panel cover- "THIS PANEL ENERGIZED FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES", and then list the panel #'s which power the subject panel. I assume this is compliant to OSHA and NEC standards since I have seen this approach in many different places.
What? The market will not go out of business. Capital is relatively plentiful and there are many participants, many trying to geologically diversify. No economic plant will stay shutdown for long. The sooner uneconomic plants shutdown the better. That was the main point of power pools...
What you describe might happen in areas still under rate base. Fortunately most power pools have been running for a decade now (without the drama we saw in CA). Only areas where the 'local' power companies have so much power (cough, Southern Company, cough) that market based systems are being delayed is bankruptcy and bailout still a possibility.
The fundamental flaw in your argument is that you assume that uneconomic plants are not needed. This is far from true!! For the 1-5 hottest days of the year*, uneconomic plants are desperately needed when the rest of power is already used up. There are plenty of sites across the US which operate for less than 2 weeks a year, because they are for the greatest "peak of the peak". The power grid needs these plants just as badly as it needs the 24/7 coal/nuclear plant. But in a pure economic model, those handful of days a year aren't enough to justify maintaining that kind of plant. Speculating that the price will skyrocket on hottest of hot days enough to keep you solvent is very risky. It is also bad for society as a whole- society risks not having enough power AND is assured of higher electricity rates on hot days.
In the old days, the utility would operate such plants since they relied on them. Nowadays, there are 2 kinds of power pools- those which subsidize this kind of plant and those which do not. In subsidized markets, they are paid a capacity payment every day which they are "ready". This kind of "payment for nothing" gives free-marketers heartburn however, so some markets don't do this, or don't do it as much as they need. Those markets are the ones which have huge problems on the hottest days, and because they are frequently on the edge of overcapacity, the price of electricity is always higher.
Keep in mind that "idle plants" is a synonym to "overhead which isn't making me money". Private industry wants to keep the % of idle plants as low as possible.
In regulated markets, the utility has the obligation to do what is best for their customers. It is better for their customers that the grid isn't near the edge of overcapacity on a daily basis. Their % of idle plants is higher as a result. With a larger pool of potential power available, the utility can use the cheapest generation on the majority of days, and keep the expensive power plants as a reserve for the very hottest days. The private industry model thinks those reserve plants are uneconomical, and so on the hottest days they get into trouble.
For the end customer, private electricity markets will always be less predictable compared to a regulated market. Usually in a way which is not favorable to the customer.
Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant closed because of this situation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Perhaps partly but that plant was a piddly 63MW. In the 1960s they were building 500MW coal powered plants and rapidly scaling up nuclear power output. By the early 1970s, 800-1000MW nuclear power plants were the standard. The manpower requirements of a big nuclear power plant aren't substantially different from a small nuclear power plant. Humboldt Bay was economically obsolete. Other factors may have provided good excuses but IMO the underlying problem was the output was no longer competitive.
Yes, this would make things simpler. The French have done this (PDF link), using one standard reactor design wherever possible. IIRC the American method was to use some standard components, but allow the architect responsible for the plant to make lots of changes (e.g. the piping between the standard components is different at each plant).
Part of this is a problem of capability. Companies like Siemens, Alstom, Areva, etc build turnkey plants based on a "reference" design in Europe. They have thousands of engineers to plan every detail of a power station, all under the umbrella of 1 company. But in the USA, no single company has this capability. GE and Westinghouse (Toshiba) have decided they don't want to be in that business, and want to sell equipment only. Customers are accustomed to buying the condenser from one company, the turbine from another company, the overall control system from a different company etc. The European conglomerates have the capability to provide everything, but have decided that since the tradition in the US is equipment-only (not turnkey), they don't want to take the risk in trying to push that kind of solution. This goes for both nuclear plants and conventional (gas, coal, etc) plants. I don't see this practice changing unless 1/2 of the major equipment OEMs in the US leave the business, which might lead to consortiums or joint-ventures between the manufacturers of different types of equipment. This isn't that likely so the situation of custom-built plants in the US will likely never change.
Do you understand either Glass or Occulus Rift?
Does Facebook?
Recent history is littered with interesting start-ups getting bought out and abandoned because of a misunderstanding of the start-up's core concept.
Or maybe there's a patent that Facebook wants for leverage in some other area and everything else will just be dropped...
2 Billion dollars is a ridiculous amount to pay for patents, supposing Occulus even has any good ones, and supposing they are in some way vital to Facebook's future plans. You could licence such a patent, even at exorbitant rates, for a LONG time for 2 Billion dollars. And if it turned out to be a worthless patent you could just stop licencing it and walk away.
When companies (especially Facebook) are spending these huge sums of money on dubious investments, something very bad is coming. Maybe it is another bubble ready to pop, or maybe it is something different. When it happens, it isn't going to be pretty.
So yes, your 40 mpg motorcycle (horrible mileage by the way, a crotch-rocket by any chance?
40MPG isn't great for a motorcycle, but it isn't "horrible" either. The MPG has absolutely nothing to do with being a "crotch rocket" or not. Most motorcycles 650cc or larger have efficiency which is somewhat comparable.
The calculations show the southern flight path and consequently a water landing. But...how can they be so certain that no one survived? Isn't it possible that the airplane made a controlled glide into a non-powered water landing and that the life rafts deployed and allowed some of the passengers to survive? That has happened before. Admittedly this is very unlikely but can anyone at this point say it is impossible as the Malaysian government is doing?
Each life raft has an EPIRB which is marine rated, and can be picked up by sattelites basically anywhere on the planet. At least one EPIRB would be of the automatic type which starts transmitting when it hits water. The EPIRB is wrapped up deeply inside the packed life rafts, so disabling them would be impossible while the plane was in the air. Unfortunately this means that if the life raft doesn't deploy and instead sinks, the EPIRB will not go off. The fact that no EPIRB signals were transmitted indicates to me that if anyone survived the crash, they are long dead. Even if they were hanging on to floating wreckage, with no potable water and no shelter from the elements they would not last much more than a week.
No EPIRB signals also implies that the plane either broke up in the air, broke up when it hit the water at high speed, or nobody was alive to open a cabin door. In any of those cases the chance for survivors would be very low.
Still vastly better than what it was only a day ago, and there seems to be a lot more possible debris sightings in the search area which I take as a sign they might be in the right area and will hopefully pin it down some more. The race now is to find it before the black box transmitters go silent, a task for which the US is dispatching some specialist search gear apparently, because that's probably the only hope of giving the bereaved a chance at some closure left now.
Forget the bereaved, how on earth will the media ever get closure if the plane isn't found?
I used to think the same, until I got video from my Samsung S4 and compared it to my Canon T2i. I can't tell the difference between video in a lot of cases.
Now, the T2i isn't primarily a video camera, but it has far better lenses and a far better/bigger sensor than the S4. It should perform substantially and irrefutably better than the S4. It doesn't.
As far as photos go, I'm either going to get out the big DSLR or I'm not. The DSLR obviously has superior image quality, but the camera is too big to carry around all the time, and is a significant theft risk if left unattended. If I have to wrangle 2 kids and whatever bags of stuff they require, I don't have a lot of patience for carrying around a camera bag too. Point-and-shoot consumer cameras are pretty much the same thing as cameraphones, unless you are talking about large models with big lenses (which have the same size problems as DSLRs). The cameraphone goes in my pocket. Of course it can be stolen but it is unlikely to be stolen if it is in my pocket. With the larger cameras you have to constantly be on guard and conscious of possible theft.
The best camera is the one you have with you. 1 device to rule them all is perhaps not the ideal solution but it is the most practical.
For the same price you could get a cheap feature phone, a tablet, and a camera. Use the phone for tethering the tablet, which works better for browsing the web and other such functions, and use the camera for taking pictures. That way you don't have to worry about your $600+ phone when you just want to go hiking or go for a bike ride where you don't really need internet connectivity anyway.
I have enough complexity in my life already without juggling 3 physical devices, managing all the interfaces (networking, file transfers, charging) between them, and upgrading/replacing them when needed.
Putin's actions are almost cartoon villianny. Maybe he was bunkmates with Boris Badenov when he was in the KGB.
Putin can call the US hippocrites all he wants, but at least when the US invades someplace we don't plant evidence to justify it.
And if we do, we don't get caught redhanded over and over again.