I agree with you except for the "either party, once in power, actually reduces spending" part.
Under Clinton the budget went from a deficit of almost $300B to a *surplus* of $230B.
Under Obama the budget went from a deficit of almost $1.4T to a deficit of about $750B.
Under all republican presidents in the last 30 years the deficit has gone up.
Now, you can definitely argue that both democrats increased taxes, and that is certainly a factor. But Clinton's tax increases didn't add nearly $600B to the budget and neither did Obama's. Taxes only account for part of the reduction in the deficit. The other part is a reduction in spending.
The combination of the two is what reduced the deficit and is the only sane way to approach the problem.
Obama's first year is a very special case, and using it to show a reduction in the deficit, or imply any kind of partisan strength is a bit misleading. The deficit in that year was hugely inflated because of bailouts and stimulus spending- initiatives which were started under Bush but continued under Obama, although really Congress holds the bulk of the responsibility. Both sides take the blame for that huge increase in the deficit in 2008-2010, and Obama doesn't deserve any credit for bringing those outrageous spending levels closer to those of 2007. I am pretty sure the deficit is in fact larger now than in 2007.
Again, supporting every last device means running up against some seriously fucked up firmware; but not even supporting your own-branded devices? Pure laziness.
Or a completely transparent cash grab. Consoles have always been about the peripheral upsell. Industry standards throw a huge shoe in that business model.
...are on par with Barack Obama, which is to say non-existent.
But at least they're better than Yasser Arafat or Le Duc Tho.
I'm pretty sure that the OPCW would need to be actively manufacturing and selling chemical weapons for that analogy to hold.
Actually, they seem like a fairly good choice (if, unfortunately, probably one made in knee-jerk response to the recent Syrian incident, rather than any more significant thought).
If it is a hasty decision, then they deserve it even less. Chemical deaths are less than 1% of the deaths in Syria. Tens of thousands have died by conventional means. Someone decides they want to get rid of the chemical weapons and they are suddenly deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize?
It elevates the destruction of a weapon to be of a higher importance than the elimination of war. That isn't what the peace prize should be about. Destroying chemical weapons doesn't mean diddly to the average Syrian in the conflict zone. Chemical weapons are mostly a fear of Western nations in the event they "got out" and into the hands of terrorists. Syrians are right to believe that the West only cares about their own potential safety instead of actually stopping a war.
I wouldn't have given the prize to Malala either. She can get it when she turns 18 or 21. Her actions have already made her more than deserving, but she is a big enough celebrity as it is. She should finish what is left of her childhood.
Suppose a person taped that missing episode at that time for themselves. Would they get a share of the profit they make for archiving their stuff for 50 years or would they be prosecuted for theft if they came forward? Copyright is very strange. I suppose it depends on the local laws. It seems there is a statute I recall from grade school called "Finders keepers, losers weepers".
The US Supreme Court weighed in on this in the case of "Keepers vs Weepers". Justice Scalia penned a fierce dissent against the Supreme Court's 8-1 decision in favor of "Weepers", on the basis of the "I gots mine" theory and insisting that the principle of "screw the rest of you's" overrode all other laws.
So I'm not going to respond to the first post because it makes no sense. But I'll happily use the "first reply" spot, thank you very much, to actually say something.
This $2 billion plant breaks down to close to $30,000 per home serviced. Seems a wee bit excessive, considering the average home electric bill in Arizona runs something like $200 (I researched the web for a few minutes to estimate this).
Consider that installing a home solar system would run something like $10-$20k at most in a sunny place like Arizona (considerably less w various tax incentives).
Looking like a bit of a boondoggle?
It is better to evaluate on a $/kW basis, since that is how we evaluate machines in the industry. The "power to supply XXX average houses" that the media loves so much is not a standard conversion rate and it varies considerably depending on who is abusing it. "$/per home serviced" when you are talking about capacity is not a very indicative number. This plant is 280MW, so at a cost of $2 billion they are about $7142/kW to build. They don't need to pay for "fuel", but maintenance costs are probably higher than a traditional power station.
For a coal or natural gas plant, you can build one for somewhere between $2000 and $4000 per kW. But you have to pay for fuel. Machines on the cheaper end will have a higher staff count also. Coal plants have a large amount of staff dedicated to fuel handling, ash handling, and emissions controls. Natural gas is a costlier fuel but doesn't have as many staff. The price for natural gas is volatile.
My back of the envelope calculation for Nuclear would be $10 billion for 1200MW, or about $8333 per kW. Operating it requires a massive amount of staff. Fuel costs are relatively tiny, but waste costs would make up for this.
This site extends the operating time of the system for approximately 6 hours per day compared to the PV system. Lets say a full day is 12 hours, and the panels get full sun for that time (not true, but to simplify things). This system gets 50% more energy compared to the PV system. We could say that a PV system of similar value would be $5000/kW * 1.5 or $7500/kW installed. This is not a boondoggle at all. It might be a little expensive, but it isn't completely crazy.
You never build a Solar plant because you need more electricity. Because if you build one you also have to build a traditional plant in order for cloudy days and night
Except for the fact that, in the southwestern US, peak power demand tracks sunlight pretty well. And that peaking plants (run on coal) are fairly expensive. And that all that solar power can simply displace daytime use of hydro, which can fill-in the shortfall on cloudy days of high demand.
So, you're just *completely* wrong... That's not too bad here on/.
Nobody runs a coal unit as a peaking plant. It takes far too long to start them up- 2-3 hours if they are "hot" and maybe 8-10 if they are cold. By the time you get it running, the high demand period is over.
Natural gas is the fuel of choice for peaking since almost every design can hit 60% load in 10 minutes, with many reaching 100% load in 10 minutes.
Hydro during the day is generally used as a kind of buffer. They have to run anyway (you can't completely bottle the river up). Adding solar isn't going to displace hydro at all.
So YOU are mostly completely wrong. And since I have pointed this out, I am likely wrong in some respect also.
You've collected up to 16 TJ of heat. That's not all going to turn into electricty, some of it needs to be carried off. A closed loop can move heat as steam, but it still needs a heat sink to condense that water. if you don't care about reuse, you can vent not just the steam but also the associated heat into the atmosphere. (The heat will be released when the steam condenses to form a cloud, on a large enough scale everything is closed-loop)
There are a few different types of cooling for a plant of this size. They use varying degrees of water depending on the design constraints. For a desert environment, generally you would use what we in the industry call an "air cooled condenser". It is essentially a giant car radiator and releases no water into the air. It is less efficient than methods which use water, but makes obtaining a water permit much easier.
Onto the topic at hand, when I buy products made in a third world country, I know for a fact somewhere along the line little starving children made it for pennies so I can buy it at a 300% markup. That's the whole point of globalization, to exploit a lesser countries cheaper labor and resources so we can upcharge local americans and pocket the markup. I don't understand the outrage people have. You're knowingly buying a product made from a country that doesn't care about its environment and people. That is why it is super cheap!
Can this continue indefinitely? Why should I buy from a middleman with 200-400% markup when I can just buy the thing on Aliexpress (Ebay of China) directly from the company who makes it? Such middlemen should be very worried. They are in the same position that travel agents were in 10 years ago.
In the US, at least, it's illegal for interns to do any front-line work because the company is not paying them. They are not allowed to do anything that could provide a competative advantage to the company to discourage corporations from bringing on tons of interns for free labor.
It is illegal for unpaid interns to do this kind of work. But generally companies pull it off anyway since the law doesn't have very measureable criteria to judge against.
For paid interns, you can have them do whatever you want. They are basically summer temp workers. Ideally you should give them something slightly interesting to do; part of the goal of such programs should be to help recruit future talent. But that is not mandatory. You could make them be janitors if you wanted.
. . . the boys should not be trusted with nuclear anything. They know how to take notes and make lists, but when it comes to handling risk, they're clueless.
I once found a radioactive test sample in a dumpster when I worked for a medical device manuf. in Tokyo - there are many more stories to go along with that one. Like how we were told if there was a fire to first order a pizza, then tell the firemen to follow the delivery to the fire. A lumber yard caught on fire one night, and we watched as the sirens and flashing lights on the fire trucks zig zagged around the neighborhood - 45 minutes later, the fire was out and they still hadn't found it.
In Japan, an address is generally a number on a block, not a number on a street. Giving directions becomes a lot more tricky. You can wander around for a while looking for the right block even if you know generally where it should be.
If the addresses were tied to the street, eventually you could find the right street and travel along that street, but in Japan this is not the case.
That they put the generators in line with a tsunami path, rather than mounting them on the roof of a reinforced shed (which would have prevented the meltdown, so long as the fuel wasn't contaminated before the backup fuel was brought in), wasn't error. It was intentional. There's a difference.
1. It probably wasn't intentional. The nuclear industry takes this kind of thing very seriously if anybody points it out during the design stage. It was overlooked.
2. They would have been screwed even if the generators were fine, because the pumps, and the motors/turbines which drive the pumps, were also located in the basement and were ruined. This placement is almost unavoidable because you generally need to put the pump below the lowest possible water level of the supply tank.
Saudi Arabia has some Pretty enormous subsidies on oil. According to this link, they are domestically selling oil at $5 to $15 a barrel when international buyers pay more than $100. If that doesn't distort a market, I don't know what would.
Besides that, I think anyone predicting a sudden collapse of supply is silly. That's not how the world works; you don't see all of the fields simultaneously ceasing production, instead many fields begin to decline at differing rates. The result -- when we near exhaustion -- will be that available supply gradually tapers off, which will cause prices to gradually rise in order to limit demand to available supply. Rising prices will eventually move us off of fossil fuels, if we haven't already done it for other reasons.
A lot of hydrocarbon consumption is inelastic. I can trim unnecessary driving trips, fiddle with my thermostat at home, and try to reduce my use of plastics. But I still need to get to and from work every day, and buy groceries at least once every 2 weeks. Some of my usage is "want" and some of it is "need". When there is not enough hydrocarbons to support peoples "needs" then the price will skyrocket. Right now hydrocarbons are somewhere in the middle of "perfectly elastic" and "perfectly inelastic", but we are moving closer and closer towards inelasticity.
This has little to do with oifields tapering off slowly vs suddenly running dry.
You may be forgetting that (we are told that) oil price is set in the global marketplace. "American" oil does not stay in America. This "fact" is always used to explain price increases. Increased "American" oil production will only effect oil prices in the context of global supply. "Drill baby Drill would have only marginal downward presure on prices. So it follows that "Hoard baby Hoard" would also have only marginal upward presure on oil prices. All this talk about increased American production being a boon to Americal consumers is mostly nonsense. Same applies to the argument that the Keystone pipeline would be a boon to consumers here in America. These are con jobs designed to make a very small handful of already very wealthty Americans even more wealthty. Most Americans will/would see very small price changes at the pump.
For oil this is true. The cost to ship oil is quite low, so oil produced in one country doesn't really help lower prices. The price is reasonably the same around the world.
For natural gas, this doesn't apply. Transporting large amounts of natural gas is expensive. It is energy intensive to compress and cool the gas into a liquid. Some gas is lost during the ocean journey, either as blowoff (LNG ships typically do not have liquification equipment on board, so as the gas heats up, it boils off), fuel for the ship, or both. Right now the US has huge natural gas production, but moving it outside of the US is expensive. So natural gas in the US costs ~25% what it costs in Europe, and ~35% of what it costs in Russia. The natural gas boom IS keeping gas prices very low, and in places where electricity and heating is gas, this is saving US consumers a lot of money.
Yes, but it's generally expected that once congress gets back in order they'll authorised back-pay, as has happened in previous shutdowns. Some of the employees may need to borrow money to get them through the crisis, but they'll get paid. Eventually. Probably.
My cousin and his wife are both sitting at home. They are both pretty sure that this time is different, and they likely will NOT be paid.
You do realize that this is a battery operated device, and that such 'tweaking' dramatically impacts that battery life. Couple that with them not reporting the actual battery life while running the GPU/CPU coverclocked, and you are essentially lying out of you eye teeth.
This may not be as straightforward as you think- when batteries are cold, they have a different "extractable" capacity compared to when they are hot. Running the CPU/GPU at full tilt is going to warm up the battery. It is kind of a guess as to how much is actually left in there, which could easily explain this.
Drugs taken in a controlled manner rarely kill. You list heroin as a killer drug: I can tell you that prior to the 1970s, the drug was prescribed by doctors to addicts in the UK, who lead normal, ordinary lives (and interestingly the number of addicts was less than 1,000 - largely because there was no industry pushing the drug, if you managed to get someone hooked then they could get their supplies for free on the NHS, so why bother?) and rarely died.
This is ingenious. A lot, if not all, drug dealers start selling because they need money to support their own habit. It resembles a pyramid scheme in that respect. Giving away heroin cuts all the cords between all the different levels of the pyramid simultaneously. Too bad people hate the idea and lynch any politician who would propose such a thing.
Profitable doesn't imply that it isn't consuming a resource. It just means that the price charged covers the current costs of that resource, and still yields profits to the machine owners. As the supply of He dwindles, its price will go up, and MRI machines will become increasingly expensive to operate. Those costs will be passed to the patients (and their insurance companies.) Eventually the procedures will become unaffordable, and some hospitals will shut them down as a result.
Meanwhile, engineers will continue to look at alternate cooling solutions, such as liquid hydrogen. As hydrogen is the most abundant element on the planet, we won't be limited by availability. However, the hazards of liquid hydrogen will certainly increase risks, and those will come with their own costs.
So the lesson our management is taking away from all this is: get your MRIs now, while they're cheap!:-)
Not only that, but helium is basically subsidized by the US government. Our consumption of it is higher than it should be, because the cost is artificially low.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need
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How BlackBerry Blew It
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· Score: 1
"We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did."
Yeah, except Steve Jobs thought this too, and look where Apple is.
This piece is interesting as a historical account but, like all these journalistic articles on why something happened, it's all hindsight 20/20 bullshit. If you want to understand why you can't trust the press to really explain the cause and effect of events, I encourage you to check out this book: The Halo Effect. Tears it all apart.
The bigger problem is that they didn't come up with much new in the last 4 years, which is an eternity in the mobile market. The stuff they did come up with wasn't very inspired, or wasn't useful to their customers. Whenever they borrowed new ideas from their competition (which is not necessarily a bad thing), their implementation was inferior to the competition. Unfortunately at this point the survival of the company itself is in doubt*, which means that every company with the slightest amount of foresight will migrate away as fast as they can. You can't cut 40% of a white-collar workforce and be OK after that.
*Whether the company is in actual financial jeopardy or imagined financial jeopardy doesn't really matter. The result is essentially the same.
Burner phones are getting hard. You can buy a phone second-hand for cash easily enough, but getting it on the cell network is trickier - even prepaid SIMs usually require a bank card for initial activation. It's a result of deliberate government pressure to eliminate untraceable cellphones - not for reasons of terrorism, but to make identifying drug traffickers and sellers easier.
Use an overseas SIP provider, run it through a VPN located somewhere else? Use it only from coffee shop wifi if you are really paranoid. Unless you are Al-Qaeda #2 (the worst job in the world it seems), this is probably safe enough.
This is also an example of technology pushing social change further than it has ever been able to go by itself.
Ineffective boycotts are farther than technology has ever gone? No, we've had ineffective boycotts long before then. Remember when Chic-fil-a closed because of the boycott? Neither do I.
There is a small difference here. Chic-fil-a is pretty darn delicious for a fast-food restaurant. Their chicken is properly chicken, and not some ridiculous processed patty like the major fast-food chains have. I disagree with the owners completely, but the product is so good I won't stop eating there. We don't have them in the northeast US, generally, so I eat there when I can. In other words, there are many reasons to eat there, and only a minor reason to not eat there.
However, there are dozens of makers of pasta sauces and pasta. The products are all pretty much the same on a quality per $ basis. I have no good reason to choose this company over any other pasta company, and so the 1 tiny reason not to buy their product drives my decision.
This is their hail marry, and if any company is crazy enough to pull it off I think its Valve.
I'm not a big fan of American football, or any other sport actually. But a "hail mary" is an act of desperation, and it doesn't really apply to Valve. They have lots of money, a great revenue model, and their business is probably increasing, not decreasing. Kind of a ridiculous statement for a company that will be Just Fine even if this product flops utterly and completely.
It also allows me to download the game any number of times, long after I would have lost a disk or lost a CD-check key. They also have huge sales on AAA games with discounts you generally will not find in retail stores. Steam has advantages and disadvantages. For a lot of people the disadvantages are not important.
Gamestop gives pennies on the dollar and I can't be bothered to sell used goods $10 at a time on Craigslist, including fielding emails and calls, arranging to meet the person, haggling, etc. If you sell used games on Ebay, you'll have nothing left after fees and shipping. For some people that much hassle for $10 might be worth it, but for a lot of people it is not.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you except for the "either party, once in power, actually reduces spending" part.
Under Clinton the budget went from a deficit of almost $300B to a *surplus* of $230B. Under Obama the budget went from a deficit of almost $1.4T to a deficit of about $750B.
Under all republican presidents in the last 30 years the deficit has gone up.
Now, you can definitely argue that both democrats increased taxes, and that is certainly a factor. But Clinton's tax increases didn't add nearly $600B to the budget and neither did Obama's. Taxes only account for part of the reduction in the deficit. The other part is a reduction in spending.
The combination of the two is what reduced the deficit and is the only sane way to approach the problem.
Obama's first year is a very special case, and using it to show a reduction in the deficit, or imply any kind of partisan strength is a bit misleading. The deficit in that year was hugely inflated because of bailouts and stimulus spending- initiatives which were started under Bush but continued under Obama, although really Congress holds the bulk of the responsibility. Both sides take the blame for that huge increase in the deficit in 2008-2010, and Obama doesn't deserve any credit for bringing those outrageous spending levels closer to those of 2007. I am pretty sure the deficit is in fact larger now than in 2007.
Again, supporting every last device means running up against some seriously fucked up firmware; but not even supporting your own-branded devices? Pure laziness.
Or a completely transparent cash grab. Consoles have always been about the peripheral upsell. Industry standards throw a huge shoe in that business model.
...are on par with Barack Obama, which is to say non-existent.
But at least they're better than Yasser Arafat or Le Duc Tho.
I'm pretty sure that the OPCW would need to be actively manufacturing and selling chemical weapons for that analogy to hold. Actually, they seem like a fairly good choice (if, unfortunately, probably one made in knee-jerk response to the recent Syrian incident, rather than any more significant thought).
If it is a hasty decision, then they deserve it even less. Chemical deaths are less than 1% of the deaths in Syria. Tens of thousands have died by conventional means. Someone decides they want to get rid of the chemical weapons and they are suddenly deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize?
It elevates the destruction of a weapon to be of a higher importance than the elimination of war. That isn't what the peace prize should be about. Destroying chemical weapons doesn't mean diddly to the average Syrian in the conflict zone. Chemical weapons are mostly a fear of Western nations in the event they "got out" and into the hands of terrorists. Syrians are right to believe that the West only cares about their own potential safety instead of actually stopping a war.
I wouldn't have given the prize to Malala either. She can get it when she turns 18 or 21. Her actions have already made her more than deserving, but she is a big enough celebrity as it is. She should finish what is left of her childhood.
Suppose a person taped that missing episode at that time for themselves. Would they get a share of the profit they make for archiving their stuff for 50 years or would they be prosecuted for theft if they came forward? Copyright is very strange. I suppose it depends on the local laws. It seems there is a statute I recall from grade school called "Finders keepers, losers weepers".
The US Supreme Court weighed in on this in the case of "Keepers vs Weepers". Justice Scalia penned a fierce dissent against the Supreme Court's 8-1 decision in favor of "Weepers", on the basis of the "I gots mine" theory and insisting that the principle of "screw the rest of you's" overrode all other laws.
So I'm not going to respond to the first post because it makes no sense. But I'll happily use the "first reply" spot, thank you very much, to actually say something. This $2 billion plant breaks down to close to $30,000 per home serviced. Seems a wee bit excessive, considering the average home electric bill in Arizona runs something like $200 (I researched the web for a few minutes to estimate this). Consider that installing a home solar system would run something like $10-$20k at most in a sunny place like Arizona (considerably less w various tax incentives). Looking like a bit of a boondoggle?
It is better to evaluate on a $/kW basis, since that is how we evaluate machines in the industry. The "power to supply XXX average houses" that the media loves so much is not a standard conversion rate and it varies considerably depending on who is abusing it. "$/per home serviced" when you are talking about capacity is not a very indicative number. This plant is 280MW, so at a cost of $2 billion they are about $7142/kW to build. They don't need to pay for "fuel", but maintenance costs are probably higher than a traditional power station.
For a coal or natural gas plant, you can build one for somewhere between $2000 and $4000 per kW. But you have to pay for fuel. Machines on the cheaper end will have a higher staff count also. Coal plants have a large amount of staff dedicated to fuel handling, ash handling, and emissions controls. Natural gas is a costlier fuel but doesn't have as many staff. The price for natural gas is volatile.
My back of the envelope calculation for Nuclear would be $10 billion for 1200MW, or about $8333 per kW. Operating it requires a massive amount of staff. Fuel costs are relatively tiny, but waste costs would make up for this.
For straight PV, a ballpark estimate seems to be about $5/watt for installed retail panels. Or approx $5000/kW.
This site extends the operating time of the system for approximately 6 hours per day compared to the PV system. Lets say a full day is 12 hours, and the panels get full sun for that time (not true, but to simplify things). This system gets 50% more energy compared to the PV system. We could say that a PV system of similar value would be $5000/kW * 1.5 or $7500/kW installed. This is not a boondoggle at all. It might be a little expensive, but it isn't completely crazy.
Except for the fact that, in the southwestern US, peak power demand tracks sunlight pretty well. And that peaking plants (run on coal) are fairly expensive. And that all that solar power can simply displace daytime use of hydro, which can fill-in the shortfall on cloudy days of high demand.
So, you're just *completely* wrong... That's not too bad here on /.
Nobody runs a coal unit as a peaking plant. It takes far too long to start them up- 2-3 hours if they are "hot" and maybe 8-10 if they are cold. By the time you get it running, the high demand period is over.
Natural gas is the fuel of choice for peaking since almost every design can hit 60% load in 10 minutes, with many reaching 100% load in 10 minutes.
Hydro during the day is generally used as a kind of buffer. They have to run anyway (you can't completely bottle the river up). Adding solar isn't going to displace hydro at all.
So YOU are mostly completely wrong. And since I have pointed this out, I am likely wrong in some respect also.
You've collected up to 16 TJ of heat. That's not all going to turn into electricty, some of it needs to be carried off. A closed loop can move heat as steam, but it still needs a heat sink to condense that water. if you don't care about reuse, you can vent not just the steam but also the associated heat into the atmosphere. (The heat will be released when the steam condenses to form a cloud, on a large enough scale everything is closed-loop)
There are a few different types of cooling for a plant of this size. They use varying degrees of water depending on the design constraints. For a desert environment, generally you would use what we in the industry call an "air cooled condenser". It is essentially a giant car radiator and releases no water into the air. It is less efficient than methods which use water, but makes obtaining a water permit much easier.
Onto the topic at hand, when I buy products made in a third world country, I know for a fact somewhere along the line little starving children made it for pennies so I can buy it at a 300% markup. That's the whole point of globalization, to exploit a lesser countries cheaper labor and resources so we can upcharge local americans and pocket the markup. I don't understand the outrage people have. You're knowingly buying a product made from a country that doesn't care about its environment and people. That is why it is super cheap!
Can this continue indefinitely? Why should I buy from a middleman with 200-400% markup when I can just buy the thing on Aliexpress (Ebay of China) directly from the company who makes it? Such middlemen should be very worried. They are in the same position that travel agents were in 10 years ago.
In the US, at least, it's illegal for interns to do any front-line work because the company is not paying them. They are not allowed to do anything that could provide a competative advantage to the company to discourage corporations from bringing on tons of interns for free labor.
It is illegal for unpaid interns to do this kind of work. But generally companies pull it off anyway since the law doesn't have very measureable criteria to judge against.
For paid interns, you can have them do whatever you want. They are basically summer temp workers. Ideally you should give them something slightly interesting to do; part of the goal of such programs should be to help recruit future talent. But that is not mandatory. You could make them be janitors if you wanted.
. . . the boys should not be trusted with nuclear anything. They know how to take notes and make lists, but when it comes to handling risk, they're clueless. I once found a radioactive test sample in a dumpster when I worked for a medical device manuf. in Tokyo - there are many more stories to go along with that one. Like how we were told if there was a fire to first order a pizza, then tell the firemen to follow the delivery to the fire. A lumber yard caught on fire one night, and we watched as the sirens and flashing lights on the fire trucks zig zagged around the neighborhood - 45 minutes later, the fire was out and they still hadn't found it.
In Japan, an address is generally a number on a block, not a number on a street. Giving directions becomes a lot more tricky. You can wander around for a while looking for the right block even if you know generally where it should be.
If the addresses were tied to the street, eventually you could find the right street and travel along that street, but in Japan this is not the case.
That they put the generators in line with a tsunami path, rather than mounting them on the roof of a reinforced shed (which would have prevented the meltdown, so long as the fuel wasn't contaminated before the backup fuel was brought in), wasn't error. It was intentional. There's a difference.
1. It probably wasn't intentional. The nuclear industry takes this kind of thing very seriously if anybody points it out during the design stage. It was overlooked.
2. They would have been screwed even if the generators were fine, because the pumps, and the motors/turbines which drive the pumps, were also located in the basement and were ruined. This placement is almost unavoidable because you generally need to put the pump below the lowest possible water level of the supply tank.
AC, please, He's just living different.
Not just living different, but celebrating 2 years cancer free!
Saudi Arabia has some Pretty enormous subsidies on oil. According to this link, they are domestically selling oil at $5 to $15 a barrel when international buyers pay more than $100. If that doesn't distort a market, I don't know what would.
Besides that, I think anyone predicting a sudden collapse of supply is silly. That's not how the world works; you don't see all of the fields simultaneously ceasing production, instead many fields begin to decline at differing rates. The result -- when we near exhaustion -- will be that available supply gradually tapers off, which will cause prices to gradually rise in order to limit demand to available supply. Rising prices will eventually move us off of fossil fuels, if we haven't already done it for other reasons.
A lot of hydrocarbon consumption is inelastic. I can trim unnecessary driving trips, fiddle with my thermostat at home, and try to reduce my use of plastics. But I still need to get to and from work every day, and buy groceries at least once every 2 weeks. Some of my usage is "want" and some of it is "need". When there is not enough hydrocarbons to support peoples "needs" then the price will skyrocket. Right now hydrocarbons are somewhere in the middle of "perfectly elastic" and "perfectly inelastic", but we are moving closer and closer towards inelasticity.
This has little to do with oifields tapering off slowly vs suddenly running dry.
You may be forgetting that (we are told that) oil price is set in the global marketplace. "American" oil does not stay in America. This "fact" is always used to explain price increases. Increased "American" oil production will only effect oil prices in the context of global supply. "Drill baby Drill would have only marginal downward presure on prices. So it follows that "Hoard baby Hoard" would also have only marginal upward presure on oil prices. All this talk about increased American production being a boon to Americal consumers is mostly nonsense. Same applies to the argument that the Keystone pipeline would be a boon to consumers here in America. These are con jobs designed to make a very small handful of already very wealthty Americans even more wealthty. Most Americans will/would see very small price changes at the pump.
For oil this is true. The cost to ship oil is quite low, so oil produced in one country doesn't really help lower prices. The price is reasonably the same around the world.
For natural gas, this doesn't apply. Transporting large amounts of natural gas is expensive. It is energy intensive to compress and cool the gas into a liquid. Some gas is lost during the ocean journey, either as blowoff (LNG ships typically do not have liquification equipment on board, so as the gas heats up, it boils off), fuel for the ship, or both. Right now the US has huge natural gas production, but moving it outside of the US is expensive. So natural gas in the US costs ~25% what it costs in Europe, and ~35% of what it costs in Russia. The natural gas boom IS keeping gas prices very low, and in places where electricity and heating is gas, this is saving US consumers a lot of money.
Yes, but it's generally expected that once congress gets back in order they'll authorised back-pay, as has happened in previous shutdowns. Some of the employees may need to borrow money to get them through the crisis, but they'll get paid. Eventually. Probably.
My cousin and his wife are both sitting at home. They are both pretty sure that this time is different, and they likely will NOT be paid.
You do realize that this is a battery operated device, and that such 'tweaking' dramatically impacts that battery life. Couple that with them not reporting the actual battery life while running the GPU/CPU coverclocked, and you are essentially lying out of you eye teeth.
This may not be as straightforward as you think- when batteries are cold, they have a different "extractable" capacity compared to when they are hot. Running the CPU/GPU at full tilt is going to warm up the battery. It is kind of a guess as to how much is actually left in there, which could easily explain this.
Actually, manufacturers do report their own efficiency numbers, and the EPA spot-checks them.
http://business.time.com/2012/12/10/more-reason-to-be-skeptical-about-new-car-mpg-claims/
Not only that, but they are allowed to use the same numbers if the drivetrain and weight of the vehicle is the same as to a previously tested vehicle.
Drugs taken in a controlled manner rarely kill. You list heroin as a killer drug: I can tell you that prior to the 1970s, the drug was prescribed by doctors to addicts in the UK, who lead normal, ordinary lives (and interestingly the number of addicts was less than 1,000 - largely because there was no industry pushing the drug, if you managed to get someone hooked then they could get their supplies for free on the NHS, so why bother?) and rarely died.
This is ingenious. A lot, if not all, drug dealers start selling because they need money to support their own habit. It resembles a pyramid scheme in that respect. Giving away heroin cuts all the cords between all the different levels of the pyramid simultaneously. Too bad people hate the idea and lynch any politician who would propose such a thing.
Profitable doesn't imply that it isn't consuming a resource. It just means that the price charged covers the current costs of that resource, and still yields profits to the machine owners. As the supply of He dwindles, its price will go up, and MRI machines will become increasingly expensive to operate. Those costs will be passed to the patients (and their insurance companies.) Eventually the procedures will become unaffordable, and some hospitals will shut them down as a result.
Meanwhile, engineers will continue to look at alternate cooling solutions, such as liquid hydrogen. As hydrogen is the most abundant element on the planet, we won't be limited by availability. However, the hazards of liquid hydrogen will certainly increase risks, and those will come with their own costs.
So the lesson our management is taking away from all this is: get your MRIs now, while they're cheap! :-)
Not only that, but helium is basically subsidized by the US government. Our consumption of it is higher than it should be, because the cost is artificially low.
"We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did."
Yeah, except Steve Jobs thought this too, and look where Apple is.
This piece is interesting as a historical account but, like all these journalistic articles on why something happened, it's all hindsight 20/20 bullshit. If you want to understand why you can't trust the press to really explain the cause and effect of events, I encourage you to check out this book: The Halo Effect. Tears it all apart.
The bigger problem is that they didn't come up with much new in the last 4 years, which is an eternity in the mobile market. The stuff they did come up with wasn't very inspired, or wasn't useful to their customers. Whenever they borrowed new ideas from their competition (which is not necessarily a bad thing), their implementation was inferior to the competition. Unfortunately at this point the survival of the company itself is in doubt*, which means that every company with the slightest amount of foresight will migrate away as fast as they can. You can't cut 40% of a white-collar workforce and be OK after that.
*Whether the company is in actual financial jeopardy or imagined financial jeopardy doesn't really matter. The result is essentially the same.
Burner phones are getting hard. You can buy a phone second-hand for cash easily enough, but getting it on the cell network is trickier - even prepaid SIMs usually require a bank card for initial activation. It's a result of deliberate government pressure to eliminate untraceable cellphones - not for reasons of terrorism, but to make identifying drug traffickers and sellers easier.
Use an overseas SIP provider, run it through a VPN located somewhere else? Use it only from coffee shop wifi if you are really paranoid. Unless you are Al-Qaeda #2 (the worst job in the world it seems), this is probably safe enough.
This is also an example of technology pushing social change further than it has ever been able to go by itself.
Ineffective boycotts are farther than technology has ever gone? No, we've had ineffective boycotts long before then. Remember when Chic-fil-a closed because of the boycott? Neither do I.
There is a small difference here. Chic-fil-a is pretty darn delicious for a fast-food restaurant. Their chicken is properly chicken, and not some ridiculous processed patty like the major fast-food chains have. I disagree with the owners completely, but the product is so good I won't stop eating there. We don't have them in the northeast US, generally, so I eat there when I can. In other words, there are many reasons to eat there, and only a minor reason to not eat there.
However, there are dozens of makers of pasta sauces and pasta. The products are all pretty much the same on a quality per $ basis. I have no good reason to choose this company over any other pasta company, and so the 1 tiny reason not to buy their product drives my decision.
This is their hail marry, and if any company is crazy enough to pull it off I think its Valve.
I'm not a big fan of American football, or any other sport actually. But a "hail mary" is an act of desperation, and it doesn't really apply to Valve. They have lots of money, a great revenue model, and their business is probably increasing, not decreasing. Kind of a ridiculous statement for a company that will be Just Fine even if this product flops utterly and completely.
It keeps you from reselling what you paid for.
It also allows me to download the game any number of times, long after I would have lost a disk or lost a CD-check key. They also have huge sales on AAA games with discounts you generally will not find in retail stores. Steam has advantages and disadvantages. For a lot of people the disadvantages are not important.
Gamestop gives pennies on the dollar and I can't be bothered to sell used goods $10 at a time on Craigslist, including fielding emails and calls, arranging to meet the person, haggling, etc. If you sell used games on Ebay, you'll have nothing left after fees and shipping. For some people that much hassle for $10 might be worth it, but for a lot of people it is not.