Free market finds a way. Where gov't erects legal barriers, free market becomes black market.
You are right, but if the 'free market' were an argument for making something legal, then we should make assassinations and corporations that dump poison into rivers legal, because they are going to anyway.
A terrible argument. Marijuana is basically harmless, yet it is outlawed. The drug makes you relaxed and the user watches movies or listens to music, usually in their own home or a friend's home. I have never heard of other crimes such as breaking and entering, theft, violence (unrelated to black markets), or robbery as a result of a user's pot habit. At worst, it could be argued that it makes a person lazy. There are plenty of lazy people in the world though, and we don't light fires under them for their laziness. Society shouldn't care about this drug at all.
Assassinations and poisoning rivers is harmful to society. It should be obvious that your argument isn't applicable.
Last I checked, $1 sent by any other money transfer service was still $1 once it got to the other side (ignoring fees, which are fixed and known in advance). With Bitcoin, that $1 might be worth $1.2 or $0.7 by the time it gets to the other side's bank account. That isn't a very smart way to transfer money around unless you have a strong need to hide your transaction from someone.
A library which focuses primarily on books is... almost pointless.
Libraries are there to help improve the general level of education of the nearby population. Storing and lending books were by far the most important functions of libraries when books were the primary source of information in our culture. That is not even close to true anymore. I spend over $200 per month on books at Amazon each month, so I am a heavy reader, but I still consume most information online. And I was a holdout when it came to getting an e-reader, but over half of my book reading is now done on my iPad. In fact the reason I finally bought an iPad last year is because I found myself reading books from my phone far more often than reading paper books, and I wanted a better form factor.
Like it or not, the Internet is a better source of most information now. So libraries need to adapt to that in order to perform their function as education centers. That means more real estate for computers and less for books. With less emphasis on books libraries can also focus on more personal relationships with the community. I go to about five lectures at my local library per year and find them very interesting. I think other services like tutoring and job skill training make a lot of sense in modern libraries as well. I know my local library has many classes each season such as basic accounting, how to appeal your real estate assessment, computer training, etc. These are all far more important than renting out books IMHO.
The problem with a library full of e-books currently is the licensing, which the 'article' unhelpfully doesn't discuss at all. Libraries buy books and they own them. Or people can donate books and then the library owns them. You don't own an e-book, you license it. Most licenses for ebooks for libraries go on a per-checkout model where the library has to pay for each checkout. Suddenly the library isn't a place where you can buy a book, read it once, donate it to the library, and support them that way.
If the library owns the books, then they have a collection, and that collection is a community asset. If the library has to pay for each checkout, I feel that any donation is just subsidizing poor/cheap people's amazon ebook purchases. You can't donate ebooks to the library so all this money has to come from taxes/cash donations. Ultimately at that point the library is an expensive internet cafe and a place taxpayer money is funneled into Amazon in an inefficient way.
If a DNS reply passes DNSSEC validation, I can be confident the response is what the zone administrator wanted it to be and it hasn't been tampered with. DNSCurve provides no such assurance.
Widespread DNSSEC and client-side validation would kill OpenDNS's business model, which revolves around tampering with DNS responses. DNSCurve continues to allow them to do this.
Their product is their business. Not everybody likes the same products. Putting cream and sugar in coffee is "tampering" to one person but value-added to another.
As someone who grew up in a railroad family, I will tell you that this year is just an outlier.
Too soon to tell about the North Dakota one, but the accident on the Maine/Canadian border was an accident waiting to happen. I lived in Maine for 22 years. Back in the 1950/60s, rail had its day. The roads were nonexistent or in very poor shape. The interstate wouldn't come until the mid-late 1970s. 1 entire potato harvest was ruined due to the train cars running out of fuel for the heaters/chillers, and the farmers switched from rail to truck transportation. The last Canadian passenger train crossing through Maine (a shortcut to New Brunswick) was in the 1980s. In the past 20 years the trend for the forestry industry is toward Canadian lumber and Chinese paper, so that traffic is gone too. Maine railways had bankruptcy after bankruptcy, leaving hundreds of miles of abandoned track. You can look at the rail crossings and see that they aren't maintained very well. I saw a lot of empty flatbeds and boxcars. Traffic on most of the lines is low so the companies are cash-strapped and the rails don't get inspected as much. Safety in industry in Maine is, in general, lacking also. There are too many desperate people who are afraid of losing their job or bringing even more economic challenges to their company. Maine doesn't see a lot of industrial accidents so people have let their guard down. It is really a wonder to me this didn't happen sooner.
I've seen rail in other areas of the country including the Northeast Corridor, the Midwest, and in Nebraska, and the difference is night and day. Rail in those areas looks reasonably-well cared for. Traffic is high enough that tracks get multiple trains per day and have more eyes on them. Many states do rail the way that it should be done. Maine is not one of those states.
$4 / watt doesn't cover a off grid battery system that would last 20 years. So your not going to charge your car anywhere near the getting 100% of the output of the solar system unless it is connected to that grid all day, so now your only using your car at night? Currently you will need the plant to charge your car at night, then make up for it by day, or maintain 2 battery packs... likely not cheaper than gas if scaled at todays tech to even replace a 1/4 of the ICE cars today, luckily we don't have to replace at that rate currently.
Most people drive to work, park there all day, then drive home. Maybe they run some errands but it probably sits at home in the garage for at least an hour a day during daylight too. You don't need grid storage for those people, they just charge the car wherever their workplace is. Electric may never be a solution for salespeople / deliverymen / plumbers, but for a lot of people it could work.
" The rumor went that if there were ever a pinhole leak in one of the 3" deep welds, or porosity in the casting and you walked through it without seeing it, it would cut you in half."
Are these high pressures, truly necessary for oil pipelines, OR are they simply used to maximize number of gallons that can be transmitted per hour?
It seems if safety were the priority, there would be a legal pressure limit of 5 to 10 PSI for the pipeline.
It is clear from the GP post that 2900psi was the test pressure. The operating pressure would be much lower.
If you limited the pipeline to 10 or 15psi you would need a pump every 50 feet.
This drove me so crazy. The most perfect example of how rotten Democrats are, is Marty Lederman, who excoriated the Bush administration for using secret legal memos to authorize due process free detention, but who upon admittance to the Obama team, began writing the secret legal memos to justify due process free execution.
This is why I'm not a Democrat anymore --- evil is evil no matter who does it. The Democratic party's silence on the fact that Obama has embraced and extended every GWB policy they once complained about, has made me understand that GOP and DNC are purely tribal organizations with absolutely no basis in rationality, morality, or even a consistent kind of crazy. They're just teams working toward the same neo-con goals. I will never vote for anyone who is a member of either party.
On a national level, that is definitely true. Big money politics buys big influence for big evil evangalists. However, the closer you get to local politics, the less true it becomes.
At the lowest levels of government, generally you find a bunch of people just doing a good job, and often without their party's ideology influencing them much. Only the creamy evil goodness rises to the top. Why is that?
I was going to post about how high shipping container rates are, and how it doesn't make sense to export them. But a quick estimate shows that shipping from the US to China is 1/7 the cost of China to US (Dalian-Oakland). This is probably the cheapest ocean shipping you can find since the trade between the US and China is so unbalanced. Africa is much more expensive. But you still need rail/truck transport on both ends, and you need to pay the people to process the waste (although not much). I would guess a 40ft container would need at least $3000-5000 of scrap electronics inside before it became worth sending to China. Sending to Africa would probably require a scrap value of at least $8000 since the ocean freight is much more.
I have had plenty of problems with this in the past. I have a small Zotac box with a dinky CPU but hardware playback support. 720p is possible with CPU only but 1080p requires the GPU. Sometimes VLC just doesn't want to use DXVA (hardware decoding) and nothing you can do helps. There are forum threads going back years about this. I hate to pick on free software which is a hobby for other people, but plenty of other free software doesn't have a problem with DXVA.
I have found that Media Player Classic - Home Cinema, XBMC, and Plex (which is based on XBMC) generally pick up the DXVA fine out of the box with no fiddling around in the settings.
The very fact that "Much of these data are unique to a time and place, and is thus irreplaceable, and many other data sets are expensive to regenerate.", makes me wonder if this could even be considered "scientific data" anymore. Since the data is unique to a time & place and irreplaceable, it would completely destroy the reproducibility aspect of the scientific process. Given that, should the lack of reproducibility mean that lost scientific data should be redefined as experimental data or hypothesis data? It also brings up the idea in my mind that scientific data has a half life since it can degrade back to hypothesis or experimental data if not properly stored.
Completely incorrect! How can you study "how X has changed over time" if you don't have data from other times? It is also impossible in many, if not most, cases to gather such historical data in the present time.
We went through 3 different types of storage media in 10 years, and I remember having to write software to allow Exabyte drives to find the end of the tape and add data. (Exabytes had no End-Of-Tape marker.) Preserving that data.... was a lot of work.
Do what everybody else does. Encrypt it using a strong password, then upload it to The Pirate Bay or the Semi-centralized Filesharing Platform Which Shall Not Be Named, and call it "insurance file xxxxx".
Agreed. DLNA is what I want; a Roku equipped with that would be pretty much the last piece of media hardware I'd need to buy.
I think an android stick with XBMC is probably what you want then.
I used Plex extensively until very recently when the foreign subtitles broke. Apparently this is something that can be only fixed by paying them $4 a month for eternity.
Both parties in a trade value what they are getting more than what they give. The person selling the item values the cash higher than the item. The person buying values the item higher than the cash. The price is where the exchange takes place where both parties value what they get more.
This is a key part of the economic argument (The "Scrooge" argument) on why giving non-cash gifts is a colossal waste of time and money. It is difficult to know how much another person values something unless they tell you.
And yeah, it's high time we started doing that with the PC/monitor power cables as well. Almost every computer owner has at least an extra half dozen of them. There's no reason for manufacturers to include something that's been standard forever. I'm surprised it hasn't already been done for the cost savings.
What's the cost savings? $1? What's the cost? 10 - 50% of your customers losing their shit when they can't plug in their new PC/monitor and complaining to the retailer, calling the manufacturers support line, and/or leaving bad reviews online. Yeah, I wonder why they don't do that.
Amazon does a lot of volume. I'm sure they could work out a deal with a lot of the manufacturers and offer monitors both with and without any cables. Similar to how some products have the Frustration-free packaging alongside the retail packaging.
Diesel engines are twice as efficient at extracting energy from fuel as are gas engines. The US should do what Europe has done and basically fully embrace diesel fueled vehicles for their efficiency.
No, you won't be breaking any 0-60 records, which might make it difficult for the MURKA! FUCK YEAH! crowd to accept, but when you can drive from Bakersfield to Baltimore on 100 gallons of diesel, it's worthy of serious consideration.
I am dismayed that this administration is so openly hostile towards diesel technology when it would seem to be a very simple, very clean, very cheap, and very easy solution both in the short and long term. You can buy a Jetta TDI cheap and get 55mpg on the highway. That beats the snot out of any Hybrid in overall cost.
People who want fuel efficiency already know about diesels. They need to approach this from the other side. Market a car with a turbodiesel and tune it to death in pursuit of a good sound. Make commercials showcasing the "powerful" sound of the diesel and the "exotic" spoolup of the turbo. With all the torque a diesel has, they could probably make car that could lose traction in 3rd gear.
Also lobby to make the emissions requirements to be comparable to, and not far in excess of, the gasoline cars. Then the diesel wouldn't cost $5000 more than the comparable gas car.
Ethanol is a poor excuse for a bio-fuel: low energy and not well-suited for pipelines because it is corrosive and absorbs water.
True, but the energy density of ethanol is low hanging fruit. You can get there relativity easily. And for the standard automobile, E10 can be burned with minimal detrimental effects, zero changes in equipment, and minimal-to-zero engine re-tuning.
Changing out the physical engines in a country's entire automotive fleet is cost prohibitive, so what ever is synthesized as a fuel stretcher must be easy to manufacture and not require extensive or expensive engine changes.
You must be joking. E10 Ethanol drops my MPG by more than 10%. It is actually worse than a neutral nonreactive filler.
For short space-walks (under 8 hours), why does the skin need air? Have a suit that's skin-tight (and air tight). It'd keep the pressure without having the bulk and weight of a large air-tight suit. Have cooling/heating lines run in the surface of the skin, like Tron. Then, all you'd need is a helmet attached to the skinsuit.
There has been a fair amount of research on skin suits. One of the downsides is that they have to be individually fitted to each astronaut, but they'd probably be light enough that you could carry six suits for the same mass as one existing suit.
I suspect the big downside is that they've never been tested in space, whereas NASA know their existing suits work.
The skin doesn't need air, but wouldn't the body have decompression-like symptoms if the static pressure went from 14.7psi to 0? The only solution with a skin-tight suit would be to ratchet up the tightness. This would make putting them on in 0g pretty difficult. Plus when you put it on inside the spacecraft, you would have nearly 14.7psi + suit pressure on the skin. That probably isn't comfortable. Additionally, extra pressure over the body makes it difficult to breathe. Even 2psi is tough- just try sitting on the bottom of a 4ft (~2psi pressure differential) pool and breathing air through a hose to the surface. It is difficult if not impossible.
I am not a rocket scientist but I don't think a completely skin-tight suit is possible. Maybe if you blew it up "gimp suit" style but that doesn't seem like a great idea either.
I was a little surprised by the 3 billion spent on "cross agency support" -- what's that about?)
Probably the layers upon layers of dysfunctional management we are always hearing about. A bigger question is how you spend $600+ on a dead program- The last shuttle flight was in July 2011 but funding continued to 2013. I can understand there will be some costs but you don't need gold-plated tarps to cover a machine that will never fly again.
Yes, but with today's computers and all the information available, you can carve out exactly the ridiculously-drawn district you need, considering the needs of your fellow party members in other districts. Thousands of calculations about ideal demographics, balancing against nearby districts, etc can be done per second. This certainly must have been substantially harder in the 1800s. The more you gerrymander, the more extreme you have to be to win your primary. Then, you need to gerrymander some more to get the moderates (swing voters) into a different district. It is a vicious cycle which has taken some time to reach the point we are at today.
Today the Senate is a much better representation of the people living in their state than the House. When they consider the needs of all the people they represent, it is a big and diverse slice. Not so in the House.
There Are a lot of public schools in the northeast better than most private schools. Too bad most them cost a lot of property taxes to get into
Depends on what your reference is I guess. The town south of me here in Connecticut has some of the best public schools in the nation. Property tax there is about what I had in a Milwaukee suburb. The Milwaukee suburb had solidly mediocre to slightly under average schools at best.
On the other hand, the Milwaukee suburb had good emergency response times for real emergencies. "Infant nonresponsive" is about the most urgent call you can make to 911. That Milwaukee suburb had an average of 3 minute response times for this. The average here in Connecticut is about 20 minutes in an area of similar population density.
You might go back and check your calculations. What exactly is the efficiency of a heat pump when the outside air temp is below 20F like it is in the upper midwest this week?
Resistive heat, by definition, has a COP (coefficient of performance) of 1.0.
The average heat pump has a COP of about 3.0 at 47F and only gets down to 1.0 around 0F.
A modern heat pump with a variable speed compressor like the Carrier 25VNA should have a COP of roughly 1.5 at 0F.
Which means that between 47F and 0F, the heat pump has lost not only half its efficiency, but also half its capacity. There comes a point when the diminishing capacity of the heat pump can't keep up with the heat loss from the building.
I live in Wisconsin, seriously, that "waste" heat is NOT wasted! It's freaking cold outside!! I'm an American, I want to be free to choose!
I suspect that Poe's Law is at work here. But I'll play it straight and point out that a heat-pump is a lot more efficient than simple resistive heating like the waste heat from a light-bulb. Modern heat-pumps work even in sub-freezing temperatures like a Wisconsin winter.
They might "work" in subfreezing temperatures, but they lose capacity and efficiency the lower the temperature goes. Unless the system is well oversized it simply won't be able to keep up with the amount of heat the house is losing. The heat strips will have to run from time to time.
That "super expensive LED" costs about $13, and will save you a LOT of money over an incandescent over its lifetime. That's with a ten year warranty.
The highest output LED's barely scratch 1100 lumens. And those are the $30 apiece ones. The cheapie LEDs usually do not exceed 800 lumens. A traditional 100 watt bulb is in the 1600 lumen range. The 27-30watt CFLs come pretty close to 1600 lumens. Retrofitting fixtures to use double the amount of bulbs isn't really feasible.
I have all CFLs in my house with 1 experimental LED. The LED room is pretty dark compared to everywhere else. We need a higher output LED bulb, which doesn't exist yet. And we need that cutting edge technology, after it arrives, to become common and cheap. LEDs have a LONG way to go still.
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Free market finds a way. Where gov't erects legal barriers, free market becomes black market.
You are right, but if the 'free market' were an argument for making something legal, then we should make assassinations and corporations that dump poison into rivers legal, because they are going to anyway.
A terrible argument. Marijuana is basically harmless, yet it is outlawed. The drug makes you relaxed and the user watches movies or listens to music, usually in their own home or a friend's home. I have never heard of other crimes such as breaking and entering, theft, violence (unrelated to black markets), or robbery as a result of a user's pot habit. At worst, it could be argued that it makes a person lazy. There are plenty of lazy people in the world though, and we don't light fires under them for their laziness. Society shouldn't care about this drug at all.
Assassinations and poisoning rivers is harmful to society. It should be obvious that your argument isn't applicable.
Last I checked, $1 sent by any other money transfer service was still $1 once it got to the other side (ignoring fees, which are fixed and known in advance). With Bitcoin, that $1 might be worth $1.2 or $0.7 by the time it gets to the other side's bank account. That isn't a very smart way to transfer money around unless you have a strong need to hide your transaction from someone.
A library without books is... pointless.
A library which focuses primarily on books is ... almost pointless.
Libraries are there to help improve the general level of education of the nearby population. Storing and lending books were by far the most important functions of libraries when books were the primary source of information in our culture. That is not even close to true anymore. I spend over $200 per month on books at Amazon each month, so I am a heavy reader, but I still consume most information online. And I was a holdout when it came to getting an e-reader, but over half of my book reading is now done on my iPad. In fact the reason I finally bought an iPad last year is because I found myself reading books from my phone far more often than reading paper books, and I wanted a better form factor.
Like it or not, the Internet is a better source of most information now. So libraries need to adapt to that in order to perform their function as education centers. That means more real estate for computers and less for books. With less emphasis on books libraries can also focus on more personal relationships with the community. I go to about five lectures at my local library per year and find them very interesting. I think other services like tutoring and job skill training make a lot of sense in modern libraries as well. I know my local library has many classes each season such as basic accounting, how to appeal your real estate assessment, computer training, etc. These are all far more important than renting out books IMHO.
The problem with a library full of e-books currently is the licensing, which the 'article' unhelpfully doesn't discuss at all. Libraries buy books and they own them. Or people can donate books and then the library owns them. You don't own an e-book, you license it. Most licenses for ebooks for libraries go on a per-checkout model where the library has to pay for each checkout. Suddenly the library isn't a place where you can buy a book, read it once, donate it to the library, and support them that way.
If the library owns the books, then they have a collection, and that collection is a community asset. If the library has to pay for each checkout, I feel that any donation is just subsidizing poor/cheap people's amazon ebook purchases. You can't donate ebooks to the library so all this money has to come from taxes/cash donations. Ultimately at that point the library is an expensive internet cafe and a place taxpayer money is funneled into Amazon in an inefficient way.
If a DNS reply passes DNSSEC validation, I can be confident the response is what the zone administrator wanted it to be and it hasn't been tampered with. DNSCurve provides no such assurance.
Widespread DNSSEC and client-side validation would kill OpenDNS's business model, which revolves around tampering with DNS responses. DNSCurve continues to allow them to do this.
Their product is their business. Not everybody likes the same products. Putting cream and sugar in coffee is "tampering" to one person but value-added to another.
As someone who grew up in a railroad family, I will tell you that this year is just an outlier.
Too soon to tell about the North Dakota one, but the accident on the Maine/Canadian border was an accident waiting to happen. I lived in Maine for 22 years. Back in the 1950/60s, rail had its day. The roads were nonexistent or in very poor shape. The interstate wouldn't come until the mid-late 1970s. 1 entire potato harvest was ruined due to the train cars running out of fuel for the heaters/chillers, and the farmers switched from rail to truck transportation. The last Canadian passenger train crossing through Maine (a shortcut to New Brunswick) was in the 1980s. In the past 20 years the trend for the forestry industry is toward Canadian lumber and Chinese paper, so that traffic is gone too. Maine railways had bankruptcy after bankruptcy, leaving hundreds of miles of abandoned track. You can look at the rail crossings and see that they aren't maintained very well. I saw a lot of empty flatbeds and boxcars. Traffic on most of the lines is low so the companies are cash-strapped and the rails don't get inspected as much. Safety in industry in Maine is, in general, lacking also. There are too many desperate people who are afraid of losing their job or bringing even more economic challenges to their company. Maine doesn't see a lot of industrial accidents so people have let their guard down. It is really a wonder to me this didn't happen sooner.
I've seen rail in other areas of the country including the Northeast Corridor, the Midwest, and in Nebraska, and the difference is night and day. Rail in those areas looks reasonably-well cared for. Traffic is high enough that tracks get multiple trains per day and have more eyes on them. Many states do rail the way that it should be done. Maine is not one of those states.
$4 / watt doesn't cover a off grid battery system that would last 20 years. So your not going to charge your car anywhere near the getting 100% of the output of the solar system unless it is connected to that grid all day, so now your only using your car at night? Currently you will need the plant to charge your car at night, then make up for it by day, or maintain 2 battery packs... likely not cheaper than gas if scaled at todays tech to even replace a 1/4 of the ICE cars today, luckily we don't have to replace at that rate currently.
Most people drive to work, park there all day, then drive home. Maybe they run some errands but it probably sits at home in the garage for at least an hour a day during daylight too. You don't need grid storage for those people, they just charge the car wherever their workplace is. Electric may never be a solution for salespeople / deliverymen / plumbers, but for a lot of people it could work.
" The rumor went that if there were ever a pinhole leak in one of the 3" deep welds, or porosity in the casting and you walked through it without seeing it, it would cut you in half."
Are these high pressures, truly necessary for oil pipelines, OR are they simply used to maximize number of gallons that can be transmitted per hour?
It seems if safety were the priority, there would be a legal pressure limit of 5 to 10 PSI for the pipeline.
It is clear from the GP post that 2900psi was the test pressure. The operating pressure would be much lower.
If you limited the pipeline to 10 or 15psi you would need a pump every 50 feet.
This drove me so crazy. The most perfect example of how rotten Democrats are, is Marty Lederman, who excoriated the Bush administration for using secret legal memos to authorize due process free detention, but who upon admittance to the Obama team, began writing the secret legal memos to justify due process free execution.
This is why I'm not a Democrat anymore --- evil is evil no matter who does it. The Democratic party's silence on the fact that Obama has embraced and extended every GWB policy they once complained about, has made me understand that GOP and DNC are purely tribal organizations with absolutely no basis in rationality, morality, or even a consistent kind of crazy. They're just teams working toward the same neo-con goals. I will never vote for anyone who is a member of either party.
On a national level, that is definitely true. Big money politics buys big influence for big evil evangalists. However, the closer you get to local politics, the less true it becomes.
At the lowest levels of government, generally you find a bunch of people just doing a good job, and often without their party's ideology influencing them much. Only the creamy evil goodness rises to the top. Why is that?
I was going to post about how high shipping container rates are, and how it doesn't make sense to export them. But a quick estimate shows that shipping from the US to China is 1/7 the cost of China to US (Dalian-Oakland). This is probably the cheapest ocean shipping you can find since the trade between the US and China is so unbalanced. Africa is much more expensive. But you still need rail/truck transport on both ends, and you need to pay the people to process the waste (although not much). I would guess a 40ft container would need at least $3000-5000 of scrap electronics inside before it became worth sending to China. Sending to Africa would probably require a scrap value of at least $8000 since the ocean freight is much more.
I have had plenty of problems with this in the past. I have a small Zotac box with a dinky CPU but hardware playback support. 720p is possible with CPU only but 1080p requires the GPU. Sometimes VLC just doesn't want to use DXVA (hardware decoding) and nothing you can do helps. There are forum threads going back years about this. I hate to pick on free software which is a hobby for other people, but plenty of other free software doesn't have a problem with DXVA.
I have found that Media Player Classic - Home Cinema, XBMC, and Plex (which is based on XBMC) generally pick up the DXVA fine out of the box with no fiddling around in the settings.
The very fact that "Much of these data are unique to a time and place, and is thus irreplaceable, and many other data sets are expensive to regenerate.", makes me wonder if this could even be considered "scientific data" anymore. Since the data is unique to a time & place and irreplaceable, it would completely destroy the reproducibility aspect of the scientific process. Given that, should the lack of reproducibility mean that lost scientific data should be redefined as experimental data or hypothesis data? It also brings up the idea in my mind that scientific data has a half life since it can degrade back to hypothesis or experimental data if not properly stored.
Completely incorrect! How can you study "how X has changed over time" if you don't have data from other times? It is also impossible in many, if not most, cases to gather such historical data in the present time.
We went through 3 different types of storage media in 10 years, and I remember having to write software to allow Exabyte drives to find the end of the tape and add data. (Exabytes had no End-Of-Tape marker.) Preserving that data.... was a lot of work.
Do what everybody else does. Encrypt it using a strong password, then upload it to The Pirate Bay or the Semi-centralized Filesharing Platform Which Shall Not Be Named, and call it "insurance file xxxxx".
Agreed. DLNA is what I want; a Roku equipped with that would be pretty much the last piece of media hardware I'd need to buy.
I think an android stick with XBMC is probably what you want then. I used Plex extensively until very recently when the foreign subtitles broke. Apparently this is something that can be only fixed by paying them $4 a month for eternity.
Both parties in a trade value what they are getting more than what they give. The person selling the item values the cash higher than the item. The person buying values the item higher than the cash. The price is where the exchange takes place where both parties value what they get more.
This is a key part of the economic argument (The "Scrooge" argument) on why giving non-cash gifts is a colossal waste of time and money. It is difficult to know how much another person values something unless they tell you.
And yeah, it's high time we started doing that with the PC/monitor power cables as well. Almost every computer owner has at least an extra half dozen of them. There's no reason for manufacturers to include something that's been standard forever. I'm surprised it hasn't already been done for the cost savings.
What's the cost savings? $1? What's the cost? 10 - 50% of your customers losing their shit when they can't plug in their new PC/monitor and complaining to the retailer, calling the manufacturers support line, and/or leaving bad reviews online. Yeah, I wonder why they don't do that.
Amazon does a lot of volume. I'm sure they could work out a deal with a lot of the manufacturers and offer monitors both with and without any cables. Similar to how some products have the Frustration-free packaging alongside the retail packaging.
Diesel engines are twice as efficient at extracting energy from fuel as are gas engines. The US should do what Europe has done and basically fully embrace diesel fueled vehicles for their efficiency.
No, you won't be breaking any 0-60 records, which might make it difficult for the MURKA! FUCK YEAH! crowd to accept, but when you can drive from Bakersfield to Baltimore on 100 gallons of diesel, it's worthy of serious consideration.
I am dismayed that this administration is so openly hostile towards diesel technology when it would seem to be a very simple, very clean, very cheap, and very easy solution both in the short and long term. You can buy a Jetta TDI cheap and get 55mpg on the highway. That beats the snot out of any Hybrid in overall cost.
People who want fuel efficiency already know about diesels. They need to approach this from the other side. Market a car with a turbodiesel and tune it to death in pursuit of a good sound. Make commercials showcasing the "powerful" sound of the diesel and the "exotic" spoolup of the turbo. With all the torque a diesel has, they could probably make car that could lose traction in 3rd gear.
Also lobby to make the emissions requirements to be comparable to, and not far in excess of, the gasoline cars. Then the diesel wouldn't cost $5000 more than the comparable gas car.
They would sell like hotcakes.
It's not just the corn; it's the ethanol.
Ethanol is a poor excuse for a bio-fuel: low energy and not well-suited for pipelines because it is corrosive and absorbs water.
True, but the energy density of ethanol is low hanging fruit. You can get there relativity easily. And for the standard automobile, E10 can be burned with minimal detrimental effects, zero changes in equipment, and minimal-to-zero engine re-tuning.
Changing out the physical engines in a country's entire automotive fleet is cost prohibitive, so what ever is synthesized as a fuel stretcher must be easy to manufacture and not require extensive or expensive engine changes.
You must be joking. E10 Ethanol drops my MPG by more than 10%. It is actually worse than a neutral nonreactive filler.
There's just a lot of "woohoo microsoft" phrasing in this, that makes it feel far too much like an advertisement to actually investigate.
It seems clear they are saying that this guy worked on some good and interesting projects, not that Microsoft's products are the best evar.
For short space-walks (under 8 hours), why does the skin need air? Have a suit that's skin-tight (and air tight). It'd keep the pressure without having the bulk and weight of a large air-tight suit. Have cooling/heating lines run in the surface of the skin, like Tron. Then, all you'd need is a helmet attached to the skinsuit.
There has been a fair amount of research on skin suits. One of the downsides is that they have to be individually fitted to each astronaut, but they'd probably be light enough that you could carry six suits for the same mass as one existing suit.
I suspect the big downside is that they've never been tested in space, whereas NASA know their existing suits work.
The skin doesn't need air, but wouldn't the body have decompression-like symptoms if the static pressure went from 14.7psi to 0? The only solution with a skin-tight suit would be to ratchet up the tightness. This would make putting them on in 0g pretty difficult. Plus when you put it on inside the spacecraft, you would have nearly 14.7psi + suit pressure on the skin. That probably isn't comfortable. Additionally, extra pressure over the body makes it difficult to breathe. Even 2psi is tough- just try sitting on the bottom of a 4ft (~2psi pressure differential) pool and breathing air through a hose to the surface. It is difficult if not impossible.
I am not a rocket scientist but I don't think a completely skin-tight suit is possible. Maybe if you blew it up "gimp suit" style but that doesn't seem like a great idea either.
I was a little surprised by the 3 billion spent on "cross agency support" -- what's that about?)
Probably the layers upon layers of dysfunctional management we are always hearing about. A bigger question is how you spend $600+ on a dead program- The last shuttle flight was in July 2011 but funding continued to 2013. I can understand there will be some costs but you don't need gold-plated tarps to cover a machine that will never fly again.
Yes, but with today's computers and all the information available, you can carve out exactly the ridiculously-drawn district you need, considering the needs of your fellow party members in other districts. Thousands of calculations about ideal demographics, balancing against nearby districts, etc can be done per second. This certainly must have been substantially harder in the 1800s. The more you gerrymander, the more extreme you have to be to win your primary. Then, you need to gerrymander some more to get the moderates (swing voters) into a different district. It is a vicious cycle which has taken some time to reach the point we are at today.
Today the Senate is a much better representation of the people living in their state than the House. When they consider the needs of all the people they represent, it is a big and diverse slice. Not so in the House.
There Are a lot of public schools in the northeast better than most private schools. Too bad most them cost a lot of property taxes to get into
Depends on what your reference is I guess. The town south of me here in Connecticut has some of the best public schools in the nation. Property tax there is about what I had in a Milwaukee suburb. The Milwaukee suburb had solidly mediocre to slightly under average schools at best.
On the other hand, the Milwaukee suburb had good emergency response times for real emergencies. "Infant nonresponsive" is about the most urgent call you can make to 911. That Milwaukee suburb had an average of 3 minute response times for this. The average here in Connecticut is about 20 minutes in an area of similar population density.
You might go back and check your calculations. What exactly is the efficiency of a heat pump when the outside air temp is below 20F like it is in the upper midwest this week?
Resistive heat, by definition, has a COP (coefficient of performance) of 1.0.
The average heat pump has a COP of about 3.0 at 47F and only gets down to 1.0 around 0F.
A modern heat pump with a variable speed compressor like the Carrier 25VNA should have a COP of roughly 1.5 at 0F.
Which means that between 47F and 0F, the heat pump has lost not only half its efficiency, but also half its capacity. There comes a point when the diminishing capacity of the heat pump can't keep up with the heat loss from the building.
I live in Wisconsin, seriously, that "waste" heat is NOT wasted! It's freaking cold outside!! I'm an American, I want to be free to choose!
I suspect that Poe's Law is at work here. But I'll play it straight and point out that a heat-pump is a lot more efficient than simple resistive heating like the waste heat from a light-bulb. Modern heat-pumps work even in sub-freezing temperatures like a Wisconsin winter.
They might "work" in subfreezing temperatures, but they lose capacity and efficiency the lower the temperature goes. Unless the system is well oversized it simply won't be able to keep up with the amount of heat the house is losing. The heat strips will have to run from time to time.
That "super expensive LED" costs about $13, and will save you a LOT of money over an incandescent over its lifetime. That's with a ten year warranty.
The highest output LED's barely scratch 1100 lumens. And those are the $30 apiece ones. The cheapie LEDs usually do not exceed 800 lumens. A traditional 100 watt bulb is in the 1600 lumen range. The 27-30watt CFLs come pretty close to 1600 lumens. Retrofitting fixtures to use double the amount of bulbs isn't really feasible.
I have all CFLs in my house with 1 experimental LED. The LED room is pretty dark compared to everywhere else. We need a higher output LED bulb, which doesn't exist yet. And we need that cutting edge technology, after it arrives, to become common and cheap. LEDs have a LONG way to go still.