t has reached a price value where it is virtually impossible for it to lose relevance in today's trade market, with the bigwigs coming in and legitimizing it.
What on earth does this mean? For me, the value is so unstable I don't want to use it as a temporary medium to buy anything. The value fluctuates so quickly that the transaction could very rapidly cost me 20% more or less than I initially thought. The more volatile a currency, the less I want to employ it as "money".
I love the arguments that "Bitcoin is a currency used for transactions, therefore it can't be a ponzi scheme". They fail to acknowledge the flipside of this- if it is too volatile to be useful for transactions, then it isn't a currency any more and has no value at all.
If it's mostly glass and steel it's probably not as expensive as you think it is. I work for a fortune 200 company and we just completed a new HQ campus. It looks dramatically more expensive then it really cost to build and makes perfect financial sense given trying to lease the amount of space we needed house all the employees.
Does your HQ have straight walls and 90 degree corners? Because this thing is round as can be. There might be some savings in having 1 round wall section be the same as all the other round wall sections, but building curves are dramatically more expensive than noncurved walls.
Locomotives are turbine-electric and diesel-electric HYBRIDS.
They are not. They are diesel-electric (not hybrids). And outside of some historical experiments, they never incorporate turbines*. In this application, electric power is used since mechanical transmissions are not practical or cost effective. Electric power gives more control and torque at low speeds. There is no battery storage of power, so they are not "hybrids". Similar technology is used in some marine applications for reasons of controllability, eliminating a mechanical transmission, and flexibility.
*a turbocharger is arguably a kind of turbine, but it is a power augmentation device, not a power producing one.
One problem in the boonies (where this sort of thing really makes sense) is repair. Every small town in the US has a shop that can repair the vast majority of ICE powered vehicles. For some time, repair of electrics is going to be the province of dealers and perhaps larger shops. It's primarily the reason that I wouldn't get an hybrid just yet - my local mechanic won't touch them. Not enough volume to make it worthwhile to buy the needed tools and to send his mechanics to school.
Chicken and egg for a while longer.
I can easily see electricians muscling into this market. Maybe they should be partnering with auto shops. Auto shops already subcontract out for certain things, like body work or paint. Adding another subcontractor wouldn't be that earth-shattering.
Nissan and Honda have tried to break into the truck market for years but the market is not the same as the car market. Truck buyers are hard to sway away from what they know, love and trust. Ford lovers don't buy Dodge and vice versa.
With electric engines torque won't be a problem but will reliability and durability be issues?
If Tesla succeeds at making a durable truck that gets at least 300 - 400 miles with a decent load capacity, a price tag to compete and more power, I can see some changing their preferred brand.
The Honda Ridgeline is kind of a funny offering. You an improvement of 1-2mpg over the F-150. In every other measurable way, the F-150 is superior. Size, range, cost, operation cost, etc etc. I would never buy a truck anyway, but the Ridgeline isn't very compeditive in my eyes. And I am usually lean towards Japanese manufacturers.
In the EU there are laws keeping roaming charges down. Often they are less than the cost to use your own phone in your own country!
How is this even going to work though? A plane at 20,000 feet (which is relatively low actually) can see thousands of towers. I am surprised the cell companies haven't complained that this screws with their networks. Only on the very short flights (15-20 minutes) such as Milwaukee to Chicago would the plane be low enough (~5000ft) and see few enough towers for it to even possibly work. Combine this with the metal tube of the airplane and it seems like a technical impossibility.
Honestly it seems like less headache for everyone if mobile phones remain banned on flights.
The problem of the US prisons is pretty well exactly that of England before the American Revolution - private prisons that make a profit out of a government that they ask, with inducements, to send a lot of people their way for minor crimes. The only real difference is the US taxpayer is supplying the profits instead of the prisoners paying a lot of it.
This is a problem, but the bigger problem is that the US system is focused on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Rather than trying to bring these people back into society and make them productive and upstanding citizens, we push them to the margins. We make finding a job after prison exceedingly difficult and only the most menial and low-class jobs will accept former criminals. We strip citizens of the right to vote, which devalues them. We have very lengthy sentences (To punish those evildoers!) for fairly harmless crimes, which is devastating to families and pushes people into poverty needlessly. Depending on the crime, we put them on lists and track them for life which makes their post-prison lives difficult.
Sweden, on the other hand, focuses on bringing people who have strayed from the path back into society. Their methods work. However, if anyone in the US wants to employ their methods, they are seen as "soft on crime" at worst. At best, they can't get the funding needed to enact meaningful rehabilitation programs. It is far cheaper (in the short term) and easier to put people in cages compared to education and rehabilitation.
Side note: The reactors at Fukushima are GE design, not Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, as some readers might conclude from the author's attempt to tie the two together.
Mitsubishi's reactor design probably originates from GE or Westinghouse. In the 1970's, the cool thing to do was for an American company to liscense their design to a Japanese company. Many foreign markets tough to break into, so foreign companies would make technology deals and get royalties. GE licensed their steam turbines to Toshiba, Hitachi, and later Doosan (Korea) and Ansaldo (Italy). Westinghouse licensed their steam turbines to Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse steam turbines have strong design ties to Siemens.
Did Mitsubishi license reactor technology from GE when they bought the steam turbine technology? Of that I am not sure. But I would place a good bet that they did not develop their technology entirely on their own and most likely licensed the reactor from somebody.
The engine is a 6-cylinder boxer type, which seems undersized for the claimed performance. Most supercars have from 8 to 18 cylinders.
Why don't supercars use Wankel rotary engines? Twice the power-to-weight ratio of piston engines, fewer moving parts, more efficient at high speed, intrinsically balanced and low-vibration and can run at much higher RPMs.
Or, failing that, a hybrid electric gas turbine system?
What's with the Victorian engine design?
Because supercars are made for the experience. The sound, the vibration, etc are part of the experience. More power is not necessarily desirable if the rest of the driving experience suffers.
For a multibillion dollar industry, "failure" is a rather strong term. It may be declining, but it topped over $4.4bn a year at one point. That's probably bigger than AMD.
It is a complete and dismal failure if you consider Intel's plan for this architecture. It was supposed to be the next i386, the architecture all processors would use. Instead it was a huge flop in the beginning, and only redeemed itself 2 generations later. AMD snuck in their own 64 bit architecture which became the de-facto standard for all 64 bit laptop/desktop processors. Itanium became the architecture of a few supercomputers, and gained a toehold into some miscellaneous scientific computing niches.
In this respect it is about a big a failure as "new coke". Sure, selling it may have been profitable, but it failed to meet expectations and become the Next Big Thing.
If I was a congressman, I would troll the other congressmembers hard. Whenever a bill got to the floor that was sure to pass, I would secretly insert provisions that legalized marijuana, mandated mastrubation on Tuesday evenings at 6PM, federally recognized members of the other party as "Dingleberries", etc. Then vote against it.
Not only that, but it has taken an awfully long time for the price of Blu-Ray drives to really drop... maybe there was some fixing going on. I wouldn't be shocked.
The 405nm blue lasers in Blu-ray drives were covered by Nichia patents until the expired recently, and Nichia does sue to protect it's patents. Single source, patent-protected lasers were part of the reason it took so long for the prices to drop.
If this is true, it might explain a lot.
If it's not true (or not the main reason), then- as the GP suggested- it's the main story that would explain it. I'd been ready to say *exactly*.
Matter of fact, I'd say that the prices- of burners at least- haven't even dropped noticeably in recent years. Some time ago they gradually fell from around UK £150 to circa £70 (maybe £60-something on a good day) for the cheapest- and have been stuck there for several years now.
Looking at EBuyer, they appear to have a couple of slimlines in the £50-something range (why are those cheaper?!) but their cheapest desktop model is still £65 (inc VAT/tax).
Obviously that's burners- readers are cheaper and Blu-Ray video players appear to have become quite affordable a while back (like DVD players did in the early noughties).
But as for burners... while £65 is easily cheap enough for most computer geeks remotely bothered to be able to afford one, it's still nowhere near cheap enough to be a "no brainer" alternative to a DVD writer in a commodity PC for Joe Public (in the way that DVD writers replaced CD drives and DVD readers because the price difference was so minor). And that's what is needed- or *would* have been needed- for it to repeat the success of DVD-R.
To be honest, I already came to the conclusion some time back that BD-R had missed the boat. If it hasn't happened by now, it's not going to. While the DVD-R market is clearly declining, it's not being replaced by BD-R drives and discs, which never seemed to have achieved the same momentum. Solid state, HDD and online storage appear to be taking DVDs' place, not BD-R.
The question is, did the industry ever want it to?
My only problem with this situation is archiving.
If you have a good backup strategy, you don't have all your eggs in one basket. But hard drives are a basket that generally dies all at once. I feel a lot better if I have multiple optical disks each with a portion of my backup on it. Sure, a fire might still overcome my safe's fire rating and ruin all the disks, but in that case all bets are off anyway. Also optical disks are invulnerable to water/shock in general. I can be sure that optical disks driven to the bank's safety deposit box will probably be fine with the trip, but sometimes hard drives don't like to be transported. Backing up 500gb to an online backup provider is painful or very expensive- especially if your server is running a server version of Windows, or running something other than Windows entirely.
Now the plant is closing taking the jobs and the property values with it.
This is a pretty poor complaint, if you are complaining about the plant or the company which runs it. I doubt there is a single person at Entergy who wants to see the plant shut down.
I just re-serve the CAPTCHAs on my own popular website. Crowdsourcing for the win.
That's the real problem with captchas. As long as you can hire people real cheap to brute force them how well a computer can do that is really just an interesting computational feat. I can create a test that says "Answer this: 1+3=" with instructions above it that say to answer with the name at the top of the blog; while a machine may be fooled a person who is served the entire web page can just as easily defeat that. If the gain from defeating a captcha is big enough someone will pay to brute force them.
to make a real world analogy, we use shredders to destroy documents. However, if you can throw enough people together in a room over time the can recreate the document in many cases. It's only a question is the effort worth the outcome.
You don't even have to hire people anymore. You can sneak in someone else's captcha onto your web page, then use this real person's entry to submit to the other site.
Captchas are a pox on mankind. http://www.google.com/recaptcha claims that they serve 30 million daily. If each one takes just 6 seconds to complete (this is being pretty generous, especially if the first attempt fails), 50,000 man-hours are spent every day just on this idiotic practice. 5.7 man-years. Every single day. There has to be a better way.
I don't think it's the lack of Ethernet in itself that's the problem, I suspect it's that:
Has Ethernet port = printer is a business oriented printer and thus is aimed at people who know are relatively savvy and know what to look for in a printer, thus printer is relatively good
No Ethernet port = printer is a consumer oriented printer and thus is aimed at people who know nothing about printers and will by and old crap, thus printer is any old crap
Not necessarily. Some of the low end laser printers have an ethernet port. Many of them are quite good, like the Brother HL-2270DW. Some are awful, notably the low end HP models (unreliable toner guzzlers). The presence of an ethernet port is not a good indicator of how good a printer is. Conversely, wifi is not a good indicator that the printer is bad.
30Km isn't space, its only about 1/3 of the way there
I think the definition of space starts at about 100Km
you certainly couldnt achieve orbit at 30Km, you'd burn up
Here are some photos from approximately 30km up- . The curvature of the earth is evident, and the sky is pretty black at that height. It might still be inside the atmosphere, but it is outside most of the atmosphere. The air pressure at 30km is less than 3% of sea level. Good enough for everyone? No. But it is good enough for a lot of people, and at a far lower price.
This is all bullshit. The one reason to articulated bogies, which is all we're talking about, is that you can cram more seats on each car, which means saving money. Please ignore the weird PR spin.
This is true for planes and maybe long-distance trains but not subways. On a busy subway line, you actually want fewer seats because the cars are packed during rush hour. Tokyo even has a few (very new) trainsets with folding jump seats. Standing for 20 minutes isn't going to kill you.
I've been to London, it ain't better than NYC. The gaps between the car and station are gigantic, hence "mind the gap" warnings. The escalators are super speedy and steep, and when it rains very slick. Try going from Heathrow with some luggage and you start notice that London Underground is a death trap.
Paris' subway is better but Paris is small that it probably only takes about 20 minutes for a train to make a round-trip through it's route. Relatively clean compare to London and NYC. Walkways still smell like urine though and it lacks escalators in many places. You're very likely to get pick-pocketed and with the articulated subway cars make it easier for them to escape from you if you notice.
Tokyo's metro system is amazing. Trains are on time, stations and cars are clean, but the system is confusing as NYC.
I haven't try Beijing's or Shanghai metro system yet.
The Tokyo system is very easy. Ticketing and payment are very straightforward. You can buy a 1-way ticket or have a declining balance card and just swipe, swipe, swipe. If you stick to JR trains (which is easily possible), routing is easy. The only points of confusion I experienced were with signs lacking English text.
Zurich's system was a nightmare for me. There are a couple dozen different kind of tickets and figuring out which one is needed was less than intuitive. Many train stations did not have prominent signage indicating the station name, so knowing where you were was a problem at times. I was baffled my first 4 days because nobody ever checked my ticket (and there are no gates). I never did understand routing. Even finding the right track/train was a problem since Zurich main station is a terminus and all the trains share all the tracks.
I had my annual physical with my family doctor yesterday. He told me that he no longer does, nor does he recommend, prostate cancer screening based on recent studies. Most of the prostate cancers detected are not the ones that will kill you, but it's not possible to test for that without an invasive biopsy that is very uncomfortable. If you jump right into treating the cancer, that is also very uncomfortable and potentially debilitating.
Caution definitely needs to be taken in treatment of this kind of cancer.
But why not test for it? Wouldn't it be a good idea to monitor the size/shape of anything which was found?
without pushing the seatback back (which I never like doing if there is someone behind me, I think airlines should remove that option)
Why? If the person in front of me in a flight pushes their seat back, then it moves the bottom forward very slightly, so I get about half a centimetre of knee room, and it moves the (small) screen of the in-flight entertainment system closer to my eyes. The seats are designed not to be made more uncomfortable when the person in front of you leans back...
This depends on the plane. Newer Airbus designs do this quite well (the 330? but not the 320/319), sliding the entire bottom portion of the seat forward. Generally Boeing intrudes the seat back into the person behind's space (not sure about the 787 though), and the seatback TV, if one exists, becomes quite difficult to view, even if it is the tilting kind. Regional jets (CRJ, ERJ) are similar to Boeing. It can be done well but it usually is not.
Any AC/Climate Control people know how the energy costs of modifying humidity compare to those of modifying temperature?
For weedy little freestanding units, dehumidifiers appear to be pretty close to air conditioners that blow warm exhaust air in your face rather than outside; but there may be greater economies to be had in some mechanisms that only work on a larger scale, or when built into the building from day one, or so forth.
At my old house (with central AC) I purchased a fancy thermostat with 7 day programming, 4 programming points per day, and the ability to take several remote temperature measurements and average them.
Another feature it had was "humidity control". You could make a setpoint for humidity, and the AC would come on every now and then to maintain that humidity level. Temperature might have been 78F but with reduced humidity it was quite comfortable.
Did the 3d image include those climbing the mountain at that time as well?
Probably not unless they stood still for the entire time. Anytime you stitch data together from multiple photos, there are artifacts from things which are in 1 photo but not in another photo. Software can deal with this in various ways, ranging from ignoring the problem (which creates an artifact or 'glitch') to removing anything which has moved completely.
perhaps because lower-level violations get limited review."
There's a simpler explanation here; Fewer reactors mean less experience for those running them. A system administrator who works with 150,000 workstations and 13,000 servers is going to do things differently than someone who only supports 1,500 workstations and 10 servers.
I think it's premature to suggest that the same agency responsible for oversight of all these different reactors is giving preferential treatment based simply on a single statistic.
I agree with your general point, but "those running them" are generally tied to the plant and don't travel around much. They live near the plant and commute each day, just like anyone else with a 9-5 job. Transfers between plants in the same company are possible, of course, but nobody likes to relocate for no reason. Similarly, the plant operators can change companies, but that is about turnover and has nothing to do with the number of reactors in a given area. Operator experience is not really tied to the number of reactors in a given area.
For the NRC inspectors, your point is entirely true. Perhaps that is what you meant to say.
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t has reached a price value where it is virtually impossible for it to lose relevance in today's trade market, with the bigwigs coming in and legitimizing it.
What on earth does this mean? For me, the value is so unstable I don't want to use it as a temporary medium to buy anything. The value fluctuates so quickly that the transaction could very rapidly cost me 20% more or less than I initially thought. The more volatile a currency, the less I want to employ it as "money".
I love the arguments that "Bitcoin is a currency used for transactions, therefore it can't be a ponzi scheme". They fail to acknowledge the flipside of this- if it is too volatile to be useful for transactions, then it isn't a currency any more and has no value at all.
If it's mostly glass and steel it's probably not as expensive as you think it is. I work for a fortune 200 company and we just completed a new HQ campus. It looks dramatically more expensive then it really cost to build and makes perfect financial sense given trying to lease the amount of space we needed house all the employees.
Does your HQ have straight walls and 90 degree corners? Because this thing is round as can be. There might be some savings in having 1 round wall section be the same as all the other round wall sections, but building curves are dramatically more expensive than noncurved walls.
Locomotives are turbine-electric and diesel-electric HYBRIDS.
They are not. They are diesel-electric (not hybrids). And outside of some historical experiments, they never incorporate turbines*. In this application, electric power is used since mechanical transmissions are not practical or cost effective. Electric power gives more control and torque at low speeds. There is no battery storage of power, so they are not "hybrids". Similar technology is used in some marine applications for reasons of controllability, eliminating a mechanical transmission, and flexibility.
*a turbocharger is arguably a kind of turbine, but it is a power augmentation device, not a power producing one.
One problem in the boonies (where this sort of thing really makes sense) is repair. Every small town in the US has a shop that can repair the vast majority of ICE powered vehicles. For some time, repair of electrics is going to be the province of dealers and perhaps larger shops. It's primarily the reason that I wouldn't get an hybrid just yet - my local mechanic won't touch them. Not enough volume to make it worthwhile to buy the needed tools and to send his mechanics to school.
Chicken and egg for a while longer.
I can easily see electricians muscling into this market. Maybe they should be partnering with auto shops. Auto shops already subcontract out for certain things, like body work or paint. Adding another subcontractor wouldn't be that earth-shattering.
Nissan and Honda have tried to break into the truck market for years but the market is not the same as the car market. Truck buyers are hard to sway away from what they know, love and trust. Ford lovers don't buy Dodge and vice versa.
With electric engines torque won't be a problem but will reliability and durability be issues?
If Tesla succeeds at making a durable truck that gets at least 300 - 400 miles with a decent load capacity, a price tag to compete and more power, I can see some changing their preferred brand.
The Honda Ridgeline is kind of a funny offering. You an improvement of 1-2mpg over the F-150. In every other measurable way, the F-150 is superior. Size, range, cost, operation cost, etc etc. I would never buy a truck anyway, but the Ridgeline isn't very compeditive in my eyes. And I am usually lean towards Japanese manufacturers.
In the EU there are laws keeping roaming charges down. Often they are less than the cost to use your own phone in your own country!
How is this even going to work though? A plane at 20,000 feet (which is relatively low actually) can see thousands of towers. I am surprised the cell companies haven't complained that this screws with their networks. Only on the very short flights (15-20 minutes) such as Milwaukee to Chicago would the plane be low enough (~5000ft) and see few enough towers for it to even possibly work. Combine this with the metal tube of the airplane and it seems like a technical impossibility.
Honestly it seems like less headache for everyone if mobile phones remain banned on flights.
The problem of the US prisons is pretty well exactly that of England before the American Revolution - private prisons that make a profit out of a government that they ask, with inducements, to send a lot of people their way for minor crimes. The only real difference is the US taxpayer is supplying the profits instead of the prisoners paying a lot of it.
This is a problem, but the bigger problem is that the US system is focused on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Rather than trying to bring these people back into society and make them productive and upstanding citizens, we push them to the margins. We make finding a job after prison exceedingly difficult and only the most menial and low-class jobs will accept former criminals. We strip citizens of the right to vote, which devalues them. We have very lengthy sentences (To punish those evildoers!) for fairly harmless crimes, which is devastating to families and pushes people into poverty needlessly. Depending on the crime, we put them on lists and track them for life which makes their post-prison lives difficult.
Sweden, on the other hand, focuses on bringing people who have strayed from the path back into society. Their methods work. However, if anyone in the US wants to employ their methods, they are seen as "soft on crime" at worst. At best, they can't get the funding needed to enact meaningful rehabilitation programs. It is far cheaper (in the short term) and easier to put people in cages compared to education and rehabilitation.
Side note: The reactors at Fukushima are GE design, not Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, as some readers might conclude from the author's attempt to tie the two together.
Mitsubishi's reactor design probably originates from GE or Westinghouse. In the 1970's, the cool thing to do was for an American company to liscense their design to a Japanese company. Many foreign markets tough to break into, so foreign companies would make technology deals and get royalties. GE licensed their steam turbines to Toshiba, Hitachi, and later Doosan (Korea) and Ansaldo (Italy). Westinghouse licensed their steam turbines to Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse steam turbines have strong design ties to Siemens.
Did Mitsubishi license reactor technology from GE when they bought the steam turbine technology? Of that I am not sure. But I would place a good bet that they did not develop their technology entirely on their own and most likely licensed the reactor from somebody.
The engine is a 6-cylinder boxer type, which seems undersized for the claimed performance. Most supercars have from 8 to 18 cylinders.
Why don't supercars use Wankel rotary engines? Twice the power-to-weight ratio of piston engines, fewer moving parts, more efficient at high speed, intrinsically balanced and low-vibration and can run at much higher RPMs.
Or, failing that, a hybrid electric gas turbine system?
What's with the Victorian engine design?
Because supercars are made for the experience. The sound, the vibration, etc are part of the experience. More power is not necessarily desirable if the rest of the driving experience suffers.
It certainly isn't inherently untraceable, but it is trivial to launder. Wallets are anonymous and unlimited.
Is laundering effective if the entire record of all transactions is public information? At best, it would provide plausible deniability only.
given its failure out of the gate.
For a multibillion dollar industry, "failure" is a rather strong term. It may be declining, but it topped over $4.4bn a year at one point. That's probably bigger than AMD.
It is a complete and dismal failure if you consider Intel's plan for this architecture. It was supposed to be the next i386, the architecture all processors would use. Instead it was a huge flop in the beginning, and only redeemed itself 2 generations later. AMD snuck in their own 64 bit architecture which became the de-facto standard for all 64 bit laptop/desktop processors. Itanium became the architecture of a few supercomputers, and gained a toehold into some miscellaneous scientific computing niches.
In this respect it is about a big a failure as "new coke". Sure, selling it may have been profitable, but it failed to meet expectations and become the Next Big Thing.
If I was a congressman, I would troll the other congressmembers hard. Whenever a bill got to the floor that was sure to pass, I would secretly insert provisions that legalized marijuana, mandated mastrubation on Tuesday evenings at 6PM, federally recognized members of the other party as "Dingleberries", etc. Then vote against it.
Not only that, but it has taken an awfully long time for the price of Blu-Ray drives to really drop... maybe there was some fixing going on. I wouldn't be shocked.
The 405nm blue lasers in Blu-ray drives were covered by Nichia patents until the expired recently, and Nichia does sue to protect it's patents. Single source, patent-protected lasers were part of the reason it took so long for the prices to drop.
If this is true, it might explain a lot. If it's not true (or not the main reason), then- as the GP suggested- it's the main story that would explain it. I'd been ready to say *exactly*. Matter of fact, I'd say that the prices- of burners at least- haven't even dropped noticeably in recent years. Some time ago they gradually fell from around UK £150 to circa £70 (maybe £60-something on a good day) for the cheapest- and have been stuck there for several years now. Looking at EBuyer, they appear to have a couple of slimlines in the £50-something range (why are those cheaper?!) but their cheapest desktop model is still £65 (inc VAT/tax). Obviously that's burners- readers are cheaper and Blu-Ray video players appear to have become quite affordable a while back (like DVD players did in the early noughties). But as for burners... while £65 is easily cheap enough for most computer geeks remotely bothered to be able to afford one, it's still nowhere near cheap enough to be a "no brainer" alternative to a DVD writer in a commodity PC for Joe Public (in the way that DVD writers replaced CD drives and DVD readers because the price difference was so minor). And that's what is needed- or *would* have been needed- for it to repeat the success of DVD-R. To be honest, I already came to the conclusion some time back that BD-R had missed the boat. If it hasn't happened by now, it's not going to. While the DVD-R market is clearly declining, it's not being replaced by BD-R drives and discs, which never seemed to have achieved the same momentum. Solid state, HDD and online storage appear to be taking DVDs' place, not BD-R. The question is, did the industry ever want it to?
My only problem with this situation is archiving.
If you have a good backup strategy, you don't have all your eggs in one basket. But hard drives are a basket that generally dies all at once. I feel a lot better if I have multiple optical disks each with a portion of my backup on it. Sure, a fire might still overcome my safe's fire rating and ruin all the disks, but in that case all bets are off anyway. Also optical disks are invulnerable to water/shock in general. I can be sure that optical disks driven to the bank's safety deposit box will probably be fine with the trip, but sometimes hard drives don't like to be transported. Backing up 500gb to an online backup provider is painful or very expensive- especially if your server is running a server version of Windows, or running something other than Windows entirely.
Now the plant is closing taking the jobs and the property values with it.
This is a pretty poor complaint, if you are complaining about the plant or the company which runs it. I doubt there is a single person at Entergy who wants to see the plant shut down.
I just re-serve the CAPTCHAs on my own popular website. Crowdsourcing for the win.
That's the real problem with captchas. As long as you can hire people real cheap to brute force them how well a computer can do that is really just an interesting computational feat. I can create a test that says "Answer this: 1+3=" with instructions above it that say to answer with the name at the top of the blog; while a machine may be fooled a person who is served the entire web page can just as easily defeat that. If the gain from defeating a captcha is big enough someone will pay to brute force them.
to make a real world analogy, we use shredders to destroy documents. However, if you can throw enough people together in a room over time the can recreate the document in many cases. It's only a question is the effort worth the outcome.
You don't even have to hire people anymore. You can sneak in someone else's captcha onto your web page, then use this real person's entry to submit to the other site.
Captchas are a pox on mankind. http://www.google.com/recaptcha claims that they serve 30 million daily. If each one takes just 6 seconds to complete (this is being pretty generous, especially if the first attempt fails), 50,000 man-hours are spent every day just on this idiotic practice. 5.7 man-years. Every single day. There has to be a better way.
I don't think it's the lack of Ethernet in itself that's the problem, I suspect it's that:
Not necessarily. Some of the low end laser printers have an ethernet port. Many of them are quite good, like the Brother HL-2270DW. Some are awful, notably the low end HP models (unreliable toner guzzlers). The presence of an ethernet port is not a good indicator of how good a printer is. Conversely, wifi is not a good indicator that the printer is bad.
30Km isn't space, its only about 1/3 of the way there I think the definition of space starts at about 100Km you certainly couldnt achieve orbit at 30Km, you'd burn up
Here are some photos from approximately 30km up- . The curvature of the earth is evident, and the sky is pretty black at that height. It might still be inside the atmosphere, but it is outside most of the atmosphere. The air pressure at 30km is less than 3% of sea level. Good enough for everyone? No. But it is good enough for a lot of people, and at a far lower price.
This is all bullshit. The one reason to articulated bogies, which is all we're talking about, is that you can cram more seats on each car, which means saving money. Please ignore the weird PR spin.
This is true for planes and maybe long-distance trains but not subways. On a busy subway line, you actually want fewer seats because the cars are packed during rush hour. Tokyo even has a few (very new) trainsets with folding jump seats. Standing for 20 minutes isn't going to kill you.
I've been to London, it ain't better than NYC. The gaps between the car and station are gigantic, hence "mind the gap" warnings. The escalators are super speedy and steep, and when it rains very slick. Try going from Heathrow with some luggage and you start notice that London Underground is a death trap.
Paris' subway is better but Paris is small that it probably only takes about 20 minutes for a train to make a round-trip through it's route. Relatively clean compare to London and NYC. Walkways still smell like urine though and it lacks escalators in many places. You're very likely to get pick-pocketed and with the articulated subway cars make it easier for them to escape from you if you notice.
Tokyo's metro system is amazing. Trains are on time, stations and cars are clean, but the system is confusing as NYC.
I haven't try Beijing's or Shanghai metro system yet.
The Tokyo system is very easy. Ticketing and payment are very straightforward. You can buy a 1-way ticket or have a declining balance card and just swipe, swipe, swipe. If you stick to JR trains (which is easily possible), routing is easy. The only points of confusion I experienced were with signs lacking English text.
Zurich's system was a nightmare for me. There are a couple dozen different kind of tickets and figuring out which one is needed was less than intuitive. Many train stations did not have prominent signage indicating the station name, so knowing where you were was a problem at times. I was baffled my first 4 days because nobody ever checked my ticket (and there are no gates). I never did understand routing. Even finding the right track/train was a problem since Zurich main station is a terminus and all the trains share all the tracks.
I had my annual physical with my family doctor yesterday. He told me that he no longer does, nor does he recommend, prostate cancer screening based on recent studies. Most of the prostate cancers detected are not the ones that will kill you, but it's not possible to test for that without an invasive biopsy that is very uncomfortable. If you jump right into treating the cancer, that is also very uncomfortable and potentially debilitating.
Caution definitely needs to be taken in treatment of this kind of cancer.
But why not test for it? Wouldn't it be a good idea to monitor the size/shape of anything which was found?
29lb isn't that impressive when you consider they're not individual seats, but actually glorified benches.
It is pretty impressive for a seat which has to support a 200lb person in a 16g crash and not break.
without pushing the seatback back (which I never like doing if there is someone behind me, I think airlines should remove that option)
Why? If the person in front of me in a flight pushes their seat back, then it moves the bottom forward very slightly, so I get about half a centimetre of knee room, and it moves the (small) screen of the in-flight entertainment system closer to my eyes. The seats are designed not to be made more uncomfortable when the person in front of you leans back...
This depends on the plane. Newer Airbus designs do this quite well (the 330? but not the 320/319), sliding the entire bottom portion of the seat forward. Generally Boeing intrudes the seat back into the person behind's space (not sure about the 787 though), and the seatback TV, if one exists, becomes quite difficult to view, even if it is the tilting kind. Regional jets (CRJ, ERJ) are similar to Boeing. It can be done well but it usually is not.
Any AC/Climate Control people know how the energy costs of modifying humidity compare to those of modifying temperature? For weedy little freestanding units, dehumidifiers appear to be pretty close to air conditioners that blow warm exhaust air in your face rather than outside; but there may be greater economies to be had in some mechanisms that only work on a larger scale, or when built into the building from day one, or so forth.
At my old house (with central AC) I purchased a fancy thermostat with 7 day programming, 4 programming points per day, and the ability to take several remote temperature measurements and average them.
Another feature it had was "humidity control". You could make a setpoint for humidity, and the AC would come on every now and then to maintain that humidity level. Temperature might have been 78F but with reduced humidity it was quite comfortable.
Did the 3d image include those climbing the mountain at that time as well?
Probably not unless they stood still for the entire time. Anytime you stitch data together from multiple photos, there are artifacts from things which are in 1 photo but not in another photo. Software can deal with this in various ways, ranging from ignoring the problem (which creates an artifact or 'glitch') to removing anything which has moved completely.
perhaps because lower-level violations get limited review."
There's a simpler explanation here; Fewer reactors mean less experience for those running them. A system administrator who works with 150,000 workstations and 13,000 servers is going to do things differently than someone who only supports 1,500 workstations and 10 servers.
I think it's premature to suggest that the same agency responsible for oversight of all these different reactors is giving preferential treatment based simply on a single statistic.
I agree with your general point, but "those running them" are generally tied to the plant and don't travel around much. They live near the plant and commute each day, just like anyone else with a 9-5 job. Transfers between plants in the same company are possible, of course, but nobody likes to relocate for no reason. Similarly, the plant operators can change companies, but that is about turnover and has nothing to do with the number of reactors in a given area. Operator experience is not really tied to the number of reactors in a given area.
For the NRC inspectors, your point is entirely true. Perhaps that is what you meant to say.