You think F-4 is old? What about B-52s! New in 1952, those haven't been used in combat since... oh, never mind.
The requirements for fighter planes have shifted while the requirements for heavy bombers have not. A fighter plane needs to fly fast, turn fast, and climb fast, while carrying all the equipment needed to shoot down other planes which are trying to shoot down them, and be reliable. If you get technological advancements in materials, computer modeling, etc, you need to redesign the whole plane to be faster, more agile, and to carry new equipment.
In contrast, a heavy bomber needs to carry XXX weight over YYY distance in a reasonable amount of time, and be reliable enough to not worry about falling out of the sky. The B52 has received many upgrades over the years, but changing out the engines every now and then is basically good enough to keep up with the requirements.
The tax credit was asked for by GM and Ford, and granted to them (and everyone else). The roads are there for military and freight, and cars are an afterthought. The wear on roads by cars is negligible (something like 1/1000th the wear caused by a loaded big-rig).
Is your argument that since cars cause minimal wear and tear on roads, therefore they should pay nothing?
If the freight companies had to pay their fair share for use of the national roads, they would use rail instead. Time-sensitive freight would go by air. The national road system is for the benefit of personal cars. There are lots of trucks on the road, but only because freight companies abuse the system because it is heavily subsidized. If trucks had to pay their fair share, the number of trucks on the road would diminish dramatically.
Trucks driving on public roads do provide benefits for consumers, but the majority of the road cost is still passed on to taxpayers and not really considered by shipping companies.
I think the reason we don't do heavy tariffs anymore is because it's already known that they only serve to damage the local economy. Sure you might save the sock salesman's job, but it'll have a much greater cost elsewhere in the economy that isn't immediately obvious.
Say we put that nickel tariff on socks, does that make Canada (or any country for that matter) find our socks more attractive than China's? Nope, in fact they're now less attractive because they cost more here. In Canada the sock prices will go down, but ours will be more likely to remain higher (That's the whole point right? Otherwise why bother with this tariff?) Everybody needs socks though, so we all pay more for socks here than Canada might pay (because they don't have said tariff.) Since Canada now pays less for socks, they also now have more money to spend on other things than we do. So in the end, we've crippled our own economy relative to theirs by sticking that tariff on there.
Historically this holds true - imports and domestic production rise and fall with one another. If you add that tariff to slow those imports, you're guaranteed to not only reduce exports, but you're also going to kill local jobs.
Go have a look at the effect of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. That was the cause of the great depression. It is the ultimate lesson to be learned about tariffs and why mercantilism is flat out wrong on so many levels.
Personally I think we should get rid of all tariffs. Corporations love tariffs by the way - and so do unions. They want tariffs so that they can protect themselves against competition and raise prices instead of competing proper. They do this at the expense of somebody else's job somewhere else, not really giving a fuck about them.
I don't see anything wrong with minimal (less than 7% or so) duties. The US has no federal sales tax or VAT, so a small duty compensates for this. A duty this small also ensures that companies aren't shifting jobs overseas to save "just a penny". There has to be real savings (not just net 0) to consider importing. Plus the government gets some guaranteed, undodgable income from corporations, which are increasingly finding more and more clever ways to avoid paying any tax at all.
Part of the complaints came because users can't understand that these are COMPANY devices, not personal devices. And the company has a stake in maintaining the security of the device and the data that resides on it. But people wanted to download whatever apps they wanted, a major security threat, or access whatever network they wanted (again, a security threat).
BYOD may be nice for small companies, but not major ones. Especially if the major companies want to stay major companies, device security and data security will remain essential... which is why Blackberry devices will still be around for a while.
Statements like these seem oblivious to the reasons WHY you issue someone a Company phone. You give someone a company phone because 1. You want to be able to reach them at all times or 2. You want them to be working at all times. In either case, you want them to be in possession of the phone at nearly all times. There has always been a carrot involved to make sure that happens. The employee can use the phone for personal reasons. If I can't derive some personal utility from carrying the company phone around, it is going to stay at home more often than not. Locking down the phone completely removes the carrot- I can't even have Facebook on my company phone so I leave it behind more often than not.
Blackberry's predicted collapse is spurring a lot of big companies to pursue other options. My company is a very conservative company of about 120,000 people and they are experimenting with BYOD in the USA. It has already been rolled out 100% in Europe since the market there is easier for BYOD to implement (every phone uses the same frequencies and every phone has a SIM card). If a popular phone such as the IPhone or the Galaxy started coming with 2 SIM slots (such phones do exist already) then the program would probably be implemented fully. Wiping the user's data off the phone is the only real hiccup right now.
Blackberry is basically cooked unless they have something really good they can roll out in the next quarter. Based on their past performance of "this product is revolutionary!!" and then unveiling a dud, betting on them is a fool's game.
Maybe Samsung will wait until they can buyout on the cheap. Get some of the device designs and patents. Although whatever Samsung would do with it would likely be based on Android, but carry over the keypad and Blackberry look-and-feel.
It's not about the phone, it is about the secure email system. A lot of large conservative companies still can't break free of them because of the difficulty in controlling large numbers of android/IOS phones.
When there is an auction house that lets you buy end game gear then all that happens is people grind gold and voila, the game is beaten.
Instead of allowing people to buy their end game content(and subsequently quit because they're max powered), you maybe only let early/mid game be bought and sold on the AH.
There is quite a huge market for frivolous items which make your character "look cool". It was a long time ago that I played World of Warcraft, but there was a certain % of people who paid vast sums of in-game money for basically cosmetic reasons. Similarly, Valve's Hat Fortress 2 has had great success in selling purely cosmetic items.
How do you snap two windows side by side in XP?
I move them side-by-side. How hard is that?
How do you utilize more than 3GB of your memory in XP?
XP supports up to 4GB of memory
There are LOTS of usability tweaks in later versions.
I'm still waiting to find them. I did multiple tests comparing how easy it is to get to places in XP or make configuration changes and the extra steps involved in W7. In some cases it takes twice as many steps to accomplish the same thing.
Then there are the visual issues such as not being able to completely turn off all effects. In XP I could turn them all off. In W7 you can sort of turn them off but the system will still use them when it feels like.
The only reason people believe 7 is good is because it's the Service Pack for Vista which was so horrible. Of course 7 looks good when you use that comparison.
WinsplitRevolution is a far better improvement over XP or 7 if you want to tile different Windows. It makes it almost effortless.
I have XP at work and 7 at home. The XP work laptop can't really go a week without a reboot without severe slowdowns or stability issues. It also routinely fails to return from hibernation/standby. I never reboot my home computers unless something drastic needs to be installed, and the power managment works much more reliably. 7 is a big improvement over XP in these regards.
It would seem a shame for all his experience not be passed on to another generation, even if it is for an archaic technology..
Why? We have better ways to solve that problem now. It is like losing a repairman who specialized in Penny-farthing bicycles. Those skills aren't especially needed now. If society needed that skill again, someone could figure out how it was done.
Well you can always take the "get off my lawn" approach and complain about the low quality of everything, but most of it is simply refined mass production.
You have got this completely wrong. It's not about mass production, it's about cost reduction. It's about using cheap plastic cases that snap together and have to be spudged apart because it's cheaper than a nice metal case that's screwed together. It's about using a rivet when you could use a screw or bolt. It's about producing a product which will last just long enough to outlive the warranty.
Take a look at all the techniques for mending clothes for example, why are they disappearing? Is it because clothes are much weaker now or harder to repair than in the past? No, mostly it's because when they're so worn and torn they start needing it we'd rather throw them away and buy new ones because a pack of socks is cheap and spending hours darning is so extremely poor value for our time.
Clothes ARE weaker and harder to repair than in the past. This trend is exemplified by shoes; even most leather shoes are effectively unrepairable because they don't have enough leather to actually stitch together, and they were only glued to begin with. Army issue combat boots can be resoled maybe once now before disposal and the fabric tore out of the side of my Belleville desert boots on the second wearing. (This is the kind of gear they're selling our GIs? Traitors.) Natural fabrics have been waning due, believe it or not, to climate change. Cotton did poorly last year and failed horribly this year.
Same with shoes, they still last years but now when they're almost worn out it doesn't pay off to try eeking out the last shreds of life anymore.
I'm hard on shoes. I'm lucky if they last me a year. They used to last me two, when I was even harder on shoes. Shoes have gone straight to fucking hell.
I don't disagree with you, but a significant portion of this could be attributed to weight reduction and size reduction. Each traditional fastener (screw, bolt, etc) might weigh only a gram or two, but adding enough material to support a fastener starts to add significant bulk and weight. For mobile electronics, this absolutely matters.
You could make a strong case for footwear as well, especially performance footwear where the difference between a soldier running at 18mph and a soldier running at 18.1mph could literally be the difference between life and death. Repairability and modularity aren't really considerations if you are making something like that.
For consumer goods, however, it is really irritating how far cost-cutting has gone. I am restoring a John Deere pedal tractor (for reference only, I do not endorse this website) and it is refreshing how old things were built with repairability in mind. Absolutely everything on the this toy can be replaced.
Our newfound infatuation with extremely flat laptops that have about as many user-servicable parts as 2001's Monolith means that demand for 18650 Li-ion cells in laptops should be plummeting! Problem solved.
Now we just need to go liberate whoever is living on top of our lithium, and we are good to go.
There is a difference between a "battery" or "battery pack" and a "battery cell". One "battery" generally needs to have several "battery cells" inside. The voltage of the battery "cell" is determined by chemistry and can not be changed. To make higher voltages, you need to use more cells or a different chemistry. The simplest example is a 9V (PP3) battery. Alkaline chemistry gives a per-cell output of abour 1.5v, so to get 9v you need 6 cells. Usually this comes in the form of 6 AAAA batteries inside.
Google 'Short Term Operating Reserve' , the lights will be kept on using thousands of back up diesel generators. Don Quiote must be spinning in his grave.
It is pretty easy to have a situation where the emergency diesels are insufficient. Connecticut has reached that point in 2 of the last 7 years due to very hot summers. No new power stations, several retirements, and the bulk of the power comes from Ontario/New Brunswick. When the high voltage lines from Canada get saturated, there isn't enough power to go around and large customers start getting calls telling them to shut down operations.
The emergency units have no emissions controls and are therefore limited to around 96 hours of operation per year in any event.
That's what I was thinkng also!
Then again, it is a very interesting way of damage control. Simply bring equipment which can only measure up to the damage level we want.
I cannot understand how a company can make such a mistake. This is the most severe radioactive problem at the moment, threatening to change a country for the next decades.
They know how important this is, and fail to bring along the right equipment?
Unbelievable...
In the measuring instrument business, you generally size the instrument to have a scale which is 50-80% of its range. So, for example, a speedometer for a Honda Civic might go to 140mph even though the vehicle is capable of only 115mph. It is bad to only use a very small % of the range of a measuring device for many reasons. If you have a speedometer in your Honda that goes to 5,000MPH, the accuracy at normal speeds is likely to suffer. If these were instruments for measuring leakage out of a storage tank, then 100 millisieverts seems entirely appropriate to me. If they used an instrument with a larger range, the sensitivity at low levels would be lacking.
Using an instrument with a small range is not the problem here. Perhaps they should have had a second instrument with a larger range in the same location. Maybe there was a procedure which stated that "if the instrument maxes out, assume the dosage is very high and don't go anywhere near it". Since there is no story about how Worker X was exposed and has 10 days to live, it could very well be that such a procedure was in place.
Every time we lose a an engineer, we suffer a noticeable loss of engineering capacity. It can take 2 to 6 months to find a suitable replacement and then 6 months to a year before they settle in and really get productive. Yet our top management thinks it's OK to have 6 percent turnover in our technical staff.
6% turnover isn't bad from my perspective. It means that the average employee lasts 7 years before moving on. That's a pretty decent stint.
I worked at a company where the sales force had roughly a 25-30% attrition rate. At one point, the most senior one (out of a group of 7) had less than 2 years in the company. Their manager and their manager's manager have since been promoted twice.
Doesn't mean that "gamers" won't buy this stuff... People are stupid when it comes to buying components. Only have 1 video card? Not overclocking your CPU? Only one hard drive? Yeah let's just get this 750W supply just in case.
A 750W power supply isn't that ridiculous. I had a system with 2 hard drives, a mid-level medium-power video card, and a dual-core processor (45W TDP). It had a 450W power supply from a reputable brand, which should have been more than plenty. However, when I switched out the processor to a 6-core one with a 95W TDP, stability went out the window. No overclocking, all BIOS settings on "safe", but it would freeze about every 30 minutes or so. I was going crazy trying to figure it out. I reformatted Windows, but no good. It was crashing using some Linux CD diagnostics tools so it had nothing to do with the software. I even RMA'd the CPU and got a new one.
Eventually I bought a new 550W power supply and all the problems went away. Maybe the "reputable brand" of my 450W power supply wasn't actually reputable, or maybe some element inside had degraded over time, but power supply problems are the most frustrating kinds of problems to solve if you are assuming that X watts should be enough. I'm not made of money, but I'm going to buy the best power supply I can afford in the future.
But I hope he's wrong. Chances of anyone in government coming together for long enough to get something like this done again are slim, especially without a military reason.
I think he is wrong. The statement "Space is dangerous. It's expensive. There are unquantified risks. Combine all of those under one umbrella; you cannot establish a free market capitalization of that enterprise" seems a little harsh considering the history of risky endeavors. In the 1700s, building and operating a ship was risky, expensive, and had unknown risks. There were plenty of non-government owned ships though.
Government has its place in this kind of industry. For hundreds of years, governments have built lighthouses, made maps, created navigational calculation devices and systems, made rules for designing and operating ships, etc. These are things which the private industry can not do, or struggles to do by themselves. Space rockets should be no different. Government can supply some helpful tools (maybe access to relay stations, communications networks, locating systems, basic research etc), but there is no reason why private enterprises can't build and operate rockets and spacecraft.
I just struggle to see a situation that wouldn't be better served by a laptop in the field or a workstation back at the studio.
Really? Because it's kind of in the summary:
The Black Betty gets around one issue with the massive data processing and storage needs inherent to high-capacity, high-resolution video cameras by attacking it head-on
This covers the data storage, the camera, and in a pinch or out of necessity you can do the editing on the device itself.
It's likely not going to be your primary place to do processing on the video, but it will cover your storage needs and give you some editing as well.
With it's low-noise, high-dynamic range sensor, over 10 f-stops of dynamic range are freely manipulatable with user generated Iridas look files, and IT-friendly connectivity through open PC platforms, battery-powered operation, and up to 4-hours of continuous shooting on a 160GB notebook hard drive round out an impressive array of digital cinema firsts in the industry.
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This looks like a very serious camera, maybe on par or somewhat in the same segment as the Red cameras (I am not an expert on high-end videocameras however). Most cameras in this segment have some system of high-capacity SSD or spinning drive storage, usually with replaceable storage cartridges. I don't understand why they felt the need to build the camera in the article. In fact, the SI-2k (not mini) looks an awful lot like what they have built, and seems to use the same sensor as the SI-2K mini.
I think crisp video and microphones that eliminate background noise and breathing would go a long way. How many times have you had a video conference and been utter exhausted from filtering out all of the echos, cuts, and scratches?
My company's equipment has the opposite problem. The noise filtering is too aggressive, causing people to fade in and out unless they are nearly shouting. It is embarrassing how crappy phone quality is these days.
I use a SIP service at home and pay for premium routing. The difference in call quality is pretty astounding, even when calling the other side of the planet.
I am not sure if 3D is the answer, but we need more realistic immersive technology. We consume millions of barrels of oil every day to physically move people to the same location as other people, so they can interact and collaborate. Telecommuting with current technology just doesn't work well for most people. We need some sort of holodeck that allows people to be fully immersed in their work environment without being physically present.
We need a system where I look at someone's image in the eye, and from their perspective they are looking at me in the eye. This is basically impossible to do with current technology. You can try to fake it in various ways, but the illusion is never perfect. Until this happens videoconferencing will always be an inferior means of communication.
If someone could figure out how to embed cameras in a display panel, that would be the best solution. A stopgap solution is to have a very small camera on a small tripod and putting it directly infront of the other person's face on the screen, but this isn't a great solution.
Come on.. 8 hours without power outage IS bad for a industrial country that has a whole economy relying on electricity.
And as I didn't pull out the 17min out of thin air, it's quite feasible.
8 hours without power over an entire year isn't bad at all. Situations where power is out for more than a few minutes usually coincide with major weather events where businesses, schools, and government are shut down anyway. Oftentimes, roads are impassible and/or it is not safe for linemen to be working on the lines. Maybe the weather is more mild where you live.
The source of the second one is the "World Development Indicators database". So it makes sense that 1st world countries are not completely represented in that data. The US average of 8 hours (0.33 days) compares fairly well with a similarly geographically large country such as Russia (2.73 days), or a well-developed industrial power such as Germany (0.23 days).
Where did you get those 0.23 days for Germany from? Because that's exactly what I looked up and found my 17 minutes.
Getting statistics on this is an error prone process anyhow. The US alone has several regional electric grids with minimal ties between them. Then each regional grid feeds into hundreds of local/regional utilities who actually deliver (and sometimes generate) the power. I am a little doubtful that these utilities collect information on every single outage, and especially in a common format. Querying all the utility companies in the US seems implausible. Perhaps they polled a sample of customers, but then they are relying on customer memory which seems like a stupid way to collect this kind of data.
Other countries often have national grid operators so getting this kind of data might be easier.
What happens when the cheap American gas runs out, or demand begins to become large enough to influence the price? The US would then be saddled with hundreds of power stations using a fuel which is suddenly 3-4 times more expensive than it used to be. The consequences for the economy will be disastrous.
You make it sound like someone is going to turn off the spigot one day. When prices become unbearable, we'll go back to the cheaper options; even nuclear if it's viable.
This is already happening in certain cases. There have been several instances of power stations in the Northeast failing to start when dispatched because the pipeline company could not supply enough gas. This gets a bit of attention within the industry, but not much press in the wider media. Here is one example.
When you buy this much gas, there is a choice- guaranteed flow throughput or best-effort. Best-effort gas service is obviously cheaper, but can lead to the problem of not having the gas when it is needed the most. The article above indicates that even if the power plant bought guaranteed throughput, there wouldn't be enough gas on the pipeline if everyone else with guaranteed throughput was using their share. It is a similar problem to a cable company oversubscribing the lines. Only instead of slower internet, the electrical grid has to start calling big customers up and ask them to shut down their operations for the day.
Gas prices are also very volatile. Our ability to build power stations in a hurry can not hope to keep up with such a price swing.
What happens when the cheap American gas runs out, or demand begins to become large enough to influence the price? The US would then be saddled with hundreds of power stations using a fuel which is suddenly 3-4 times more expensive than it used to be. The consequences for the economy will be disastrous.
Well it's a good thing hydrocarbons won't "suddenly run out"
Don't get me wrong, I think we should be seriously cutting down on the number of dead prehistoric plants that we burn for fuel, and looking at all other alternatives (nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc). My point is more that:
1) We have time to make this transition
5) Alarmism doesn't help the cause of getting off of fossil fuels. Absurd statements like "fuel suddenly costing 3-4 times what it used to" just make people disregard the real concerns of incremental inflation due to fuel costs, and climate issues to due burning fossil fuels.
The price of natural gas is incredibly volatile. Saying that the cost could triple or quadruple is not an absurd proposition. This price for this commodity has frequently doubled and halved in the space of a year. Natural gas in the US currently is overabundant- supply and demand doesn't have much effect on the price. That will change at some point. It is harder to conserve industrial natural gas (compared to automotive gasoline) since the costs trickle down to consumers over a significant period of time. Everything will get more expensive but it may not be immediately clear (to consumers) why.
Furthermore, you can't replace hundreds of power stations in a couple years. There isn't the engineering capability or millwright manpower to run all those projects, and the OEMs can't supply that many machines anyway. There are restrictions all along the supply process, from the forging delivery time/throughput to the large lathes to the large (1000ton) cranes which are required to assemble this kind of machine. None of that capability can be built up quickly, and throwing money at that problem won't provide immediate results.
But 8 hours power outage per year sounds more like a developing country to me. (Here: 17min in 2010. Drop from 18min in 2009)
The first chart appears to be an opinion survey- "How would you assess the quality of the electricity supply in your country (lack of interruptions and lack of voltage fluctuations)? [1 = insufficient and suffers frequent interruptions; 7 = sufficient and reliable]". I don't make a habit of dismissing charts completely, but this doesn't seem to be based on actual data about the power system. People in the US have an opinion of their electrical grid which is comparable to the opinion which people living in Slovenia have of their grid. This doesn't mean much to me and could be influenced by any number of factors.
The source of the second one is the "World Development Indicators database". So it makes sense that 1st world countries are not completely represented in that data. The US average of 8 hours (0.33 days) compares fairly well with a similarly geographically large country such as Russia (2.73 days), or a well-developed industrial power such as Germany (0.23 days).
Particularly Natural Gas. For the purposes of argument, let us disregard any environmental concerns for a moment and look at what is happening in the US-
1. Natural gas is cheap in the US. Really really cheap. It is at historical lows. Not only that, but it is much cheaper compared to the rest of the world. The US natural gas price is 1/4 the price that Europe is paying (wholesale, before taxes), and 1/3 the price of even Russian natural gas. Natural Gas is stupidly, unbelievably cheap. Coal power stations are no longer competitive based on fuel costs + labor costs + relative efficiency.
2. The vast majority of new power stations (by Megawatt) in the US are, and have for the last 10 years, been natural gas. There was a "mini coal boom" in 2007-2012 but this only added a couple of gigawatts to the grid, and there are no orders for new coal power stations.
3. Nearly all natural gas used in the US is produced in the US or in Canada/Mexico. Shipping natural gas using methods other than pipelines is prohibitively expensive (for the North American market). It is energy-intensive to store, compared to oil or coal which can just be deposited on a ship. This means that if China found massive quantities of cheap natural gas, North America can not benefit from the low cost.
4. Thanks to deregulation, in most areas of the US power plants are built based on cost/KW in the near term. Subsidies are taken into account which leads to some green technologies being used, but for the most part we don't built coal-burning plants or nuclear power stations "to diversify the generation mix". The cheapest option (now) is taken. Power generating companies might worry about fuel price risk, but they aren't building coal power stations to reduce that risk.
What happens when the cheap American gas runs out, or demand begins to become large enough to influence the price? The US would then be saddled with hundreds of power stations using a fuel which is suddenly 3-4 times more expensive than it used to be. The consequences for the economy will be disastrous.
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You think F-4 is old? What about B-52s! New in 1952, those haven't been used in combat since ... oh, never mind.
The requirements for fighter planes have shifted while the requirements for heavy bombers have not. A fighter plane needs to fly fast, turn fast, and climb fast, while carrying all the equipment needed to shoot down other planes which are trying to shoot down them, and be reliable. If you get technological advancements in materials, computer modeling, etc, you need to redesign the whole plane to be faster, more agile, and to carry new equipment.
In contrast, a heavy bomber needs to carry XXX weight over YYY distance in a reasonable amount of time, and be reliable enough to not worry about falling out of the sky. The B52 has received many upgrades over the years, but changing out the engines every now and then is basically good enough to keep up with the requirements.
The tax credit was asked for by GM and Ford, and granted to them (and everyone else). The roads are there for military and freight, and cars are an afterthought. The wear on roads by cars is negligible (something like 1/1000th the wear caused by a loaded big-rig).
Is your argument that since cars cause minimal wear and tear on roads, therefore they should pay nothing?
If the freight companies had to pay their fair share for use of the national roads, they would use rail instead. Time-sensitive freight would go by air. The national road system is for the benefit of personal cars. There are lots of trucks on the road, but only because freight companies abuse the system because it is heavily subsidized. If trucks had to pay their fair share, the number of trucks on the road would diminish dramatically.
Trucks driving on public roads do provide benefits for consumers, but the majority of the road cost is still passed on to taxpayers and not really considered by shipping companies.
I think the reason we don't do heavy tariffs anymore is because it's already known that they only serve to damage the local economy. Sure you might save the sock salesman's job, but it'll have a much greater cost elsewhere in the economy that isn't immediately obvious.
Say we put that nickel tariff on socks, does that make Canada (or any country for that matter) find our socks more attractive than China's? Nope, in fact they're now less attractive because they cost more here. In Canada the sock prices will go down, but ours will be more likely to remain higher (That's the whole point right? Otherwise why bother with this tariff?) Everybody needs socks though, so we all pay more for socks here than Canada might pay (because they don't have said tariff.) Since Canada now pays less for socks, they also now have more money to spend on other things than we do. So in the end, we've crippled our own economy relative to theirs by sticking that tariff on there.
Historically this holds true - imports and domestic production rise and fall with one another. If you add that tariff to slow those imports, you're guaranteed to not only reduce exports, but you're also going to kill local jobs.
Go have a look at the effect of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. That was the cause of the great depression. It is the ultimate lesson to be learned about tariffs and why mercantilism is flat out wrong on so many levels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQQon4tjlSA
Personally I think we should get rid of all tariffs. Corporations love tariffs by the way - and so do unions. They want tariffs so that they can protect themselves against competition and raise prices instead of competing proper. They do this at the expense of somebody else's job somewhere else, not really giving a fuck about them.
I don't see anything wrong with minimal (less than 7% or so) duties. The US has no federal sales tax or VAT, so a small duty compensates for this. A duty this small also ensures that companies aren't shifting jobs overseas to save "just a penny". There has to be real savings (not just net 0) to consider importing. Plus the government gets some guaranteed, undodgable income from corporations, which are increasingly finding more and more clever ways to avoid paying any tax at all.
Part of the complaints came because users can't understand that these are COMPANY devices, not personal devices. And the company has a stake in maintaining the security of the device and the data that resides on it. But people wanted to download whatever apps they wanted, a major security threat, or access whatever network they wanted (again, a security threat). BYOD may be nice for small companies, but not major ones. Especially if the major companies want to stay major companies, device security and data security will remain essential... which is why Blackberry devices will still be around for a while.
Statements like these seem oblivious to the reasons WHY you issue someone a Company phone. You give someone a company phone because 1. You want to be able to reach them at all times or 2. You want them to be working at all times. In either case, you want them to be in possession of the phone at nearly all times. There has always been a carrot involved to make sure that happens. The employee can use the phone for personal reasons. If I can't derive some personal utility from carrying the company phone around, it is going to stay at home more often than not. Locking down the phone completely removes the carrot- I can't even have Facebook on my company phone so I leave it behind more often than not.
Blackberry's predicted collapse is spurring a lot of big companies to pursue other options. My company is a very conservative company of about 120,000 people and they are experimenting with BYOD in the USA. It has already been rolled out 100% in Europe since the market there is easier for BYOD to implement (every phone uses the same frequencies and every phone has a SIM card). If a popular phone such as the IPhone or the Galaxy started coming with 2 SIM slots (such phones do exist already) then the program would probably be implemented fully. Wiping the user's data off the phone is the only real hiccup right now.
Blackberry is basically cooked unless they have something really good they can roll out in the next quarter. Based on their past performance of "this product is revolutionary!!" and then unveiling a dud, betting on them is a fool's game.
Maybe Samsung will wait until they can buyout on the cheap. Get some of the device designs and patents. Although whatever Samsung would do with it would likely be based on Android, but carry over the keypad and Blackberry look-and-feel.
It's not about the phone, it is about the secure email system. A lot of large conservative companies still can't break free of them because of the difficulty in controlling large numbers of android/IOS phones.
When there is an auction house that lets you buy end game gear then all that happens is people grind gold and voila, the game is beaten. Instead of allowing people to buy their end game content(and subsequently quit because they're max powered), you maybe only let early/mid game be bought and sold on the AH.
There is quite a huge market for frivolous items which make your character "look cool". It was a long time ago that I played World of Warcraft, but there was a certain % of people who paid vast sums of in-game money for basically cosmetic reasons. Similarly, Valve's Hat Fortress 2 has had great success in selling purely cosmetic items.
How do you snap two windows side by side in XP? I move them side-by-side. How hard is that? How do you utilize more than 3GB of your memory in XP? XP supports up to 4GB of memory There are LOTS of usability tweaks in later versions. I'm still waiting to find them. I did multiple tests comparing how easy it is to get to places in XP or make configuration changes and the extra steps involved in W7. In some cases it takes twice as many steps to accomplish the same thing. Then there are the visual issues such as not being able to completely turn off all effects. In XP I could turn them all off. In W7 you can sort of turn them off but the system will still use them when it feels like. The only reason people believe 7 is good is because it's the Service Pack for Vista which was so horrible. Of course 7 looks good when you use that comparison.
WinsplitRevolution is a far better improvement over XP or 7 if you want to tile different Windows. It makes it almost effortless.
I have XP at work and 7 at home. The XP work laptop can't really go a week without a reboot without severe slowdowns or stability issues. It also routinely fails to return from hibernation/standby. I never reboot my home computers unless something drastic needs to be installed, and the power managment works much more reliably. 7 is a big improvement over XP in these regards.
modded down by mistake, undoing it
It would seem a shame for all his experience not be passed on to another generation, even if it is for an archaic technology. .
Why? We have better ways to solve that problem now. It is like losing a repairman who specialized in Penny-farthing bicycles. Those skills aren't especially needed now. If society needed that skill again, someone could figure out how it was done.
Well you can always take the "get off my lawn" approach and complain about the low quality of everything, but most of it is simply refined mass production.
You have got this completely wrong. It's not about mass production, it's about cost reduction. It's about using cheap plastic cases that snap together and have to be spudged apart because it's cheaper than a nice metal case that's screwed together. It's about using a rivet when you could use a screw or bolt. It's about producing a product which will last just long enough to outlive the warranty.
Take a look at all the techniques for mending clothes for example, why are they disappearing? Is it because clothes are much weaker now or harder to repair than in the past? No, mostly it's because when they're so worn and torn they start needing it we'd rather throw them away and buy new ones because a pack of socks is cheap and spending hours darning is so extremely poor value for our time.
Clothes ARE weaker and harder to repair than in the past. This trend is exemplified by shoes; even most leather shoes are effectively unrepairable because they don't have enough leather to actually stitch together, and they were only glued to begin with. Army issue combat boots can be resoled maybe once now before disposal and the fabric tore out of the side of my Belleville desert boots on the second wearing. (This is the kind of gear they're selling our GIs? Traitors.) Natural fabrics have been waning due, believe it or not, to climate change. Cotton did poorly last year and failed horribly this year.
Same with shoes, they still last years but now when they're almost worn out it doesn't pay off to try eeking out the last shreds of life anymore.
I'm hard on shoes. I'm lucky if they last me a year. They used to last me two, when I was even harder on shoes. Shoes have gone straight to fucking hell.
I don't disagree with you, but a significant portion of this could be attributed to weight reduction and size reduction. Each traditional fastener (screw, bolt, etc) might weigh only a gram or two, but adding enough material to support a fastener starts to add significant bulk and weight. For mobile electronics, this absolutely matters.
You could make a strong case for footwear as well, especially performance footwear where the difference between a soldier running at 18mph and a soldier running at 18.1mph could literally be the difference between life and death. Repairability and modularity aren't really considerations if you are making something like that.
For consumer goods, however, it is really irritating how far cost-cutting has gone. I am restoring a John Deere pedal tractor (for reference only, I do not endorse this website) and it is refreshing how old things were built with repairability in mind. Absolutely everything on the this toy can be replaced.
Our newfound infatuation with extremely flat laptops that have about as many user-servicable parts as 2001's Monolith means that demand for 18650 Li-ion cells in laptops should be plummeting! Problem solved. Now we just need to go liberate whoever is living on top of our lithium, and we are good to go.
There is a difference between a "battery" or "battery pack" and a "battery cell". One "battery" generally needs to have several "battery cells" inside. The voltage of the battery "cell" is determined by chemistry and can not be changed. To make higher voltages, you need to use more cells or a different chemistry. The simplest example is a 9V (PP3) battery. Alkaline chemistry gives a per-cell output of abour 1.5v, so to get 9v you need 6 cells. Usually this comes in the form of 6 AAAA batteries inside.
Google 'Short Term Operating Reserve' , the lights will be kept on using thousands of back up diesel generators. Don Quiote must be spinning in his grave.
It is pretty easy to have a situation where the emergency diesels are insufficient. Connecticut has reached that point in 2 of the last 7 years due to very hot summers. No new power stations, several retirements, and the bulk of the power comes from Ontario/New Brunswick. When the high voltage lines from Canada get saturated, there isn't enough power to go around and large customers start getting calls telling them to shut down operations.
The emergency units have no emissions controls and are therefore limited to around 96 hours of operation per year in any event.
That's what I was thinkng also! Then again, it is a very interesting way of damage control. Simply bring equipment which can only measure up to the damage level we want. I cannot understand how a company can make such a mistake. This is the most severe radioactive problem at the moment, threatening to change a country for the next decades. They know how important this is, and fail to bring along the right equipment? Unbelievable...
In the measuring instrument business, you generally size the instrument to have a scale which is 50-80% of its range. So, for example, a speedometer for a Honda Civic might go to 140mph even though the vehicle is capable of only 115mph. It is bad to only use a very small % of the range of a measuring device for many reasons. If you have a speedometer in your Honda that goes to 5,000MPH, the accuracy at normal speeds is likely to suffer. If these were instruments for measuring leakage out of a storage tank, then 100 millisieverts seems entirely appropriate to me. If they used an instrument with a larger range, the sensitivity at low levels would be lacking.
Using an instrument with a small range is not the problem here. Perhaps they should have had a second instrument with a larger range in the same location. Maybe there was a procedure which stated that "if the instrument maxes out, assume the dosage is very high and don't go anywhere near it". Since there is no story about how Worker X was exposed and has 10 days to live, it could very well be that such a procedure was in place.
Every time we lose a an engineer, we suffer a noticeable loss of engineering capacity. It can take 2 to 6 months to find a suitable replacement and then 6 months to a year before they settle in and really get productive. Yet our top management thinks it's OK to have 6 percent turnover in our technical staff.
6% turnover isn't bad from my perspective. It means that the average employee lasts 7 years before moving on. That's a pretty decent stint.
I worked at a company where the sales force had roughly a 25-30% attrition rate. At one point, the most senior one (out of a group of 7) had less than 2 years in the company. Their manager and their manager's manager have since been promoted twice.
Doesn't mean that "gamers" won't buy this stuff... People are stupid when it comes to buying components. Only have 1 video card? Not overclocking your CPU? Only one hard drive? Yeah let's just get this 750W supply just in case.
A 750W power supply isn't that ridiculous. I had a system with 2 hard drives, a mid-level medium-power video card, and a dual-core processor (45W TDP). It had a 450W power supply from a reputable brand, which should have been more than plenty. However, when I switched out the processor to a 6-core one with a 95W TDP, stability went out the window. No overclocking, all BIOS settings on "safe", but it would freeze about every 30 minutes or so. I was going crazy trying to figure it out. I reformatted Windows, but no good. It was crashing using some Linux CD diagnostics tools so it had nothing to do with the software. I even RMA'd the CPU and got a new one.
Eventually I bought a new 550W power supply and all the problems went away. Maybe the "reputable brand" of my 450W power supply wasn't actually reputable, or maybe some element inside had degraded over time, but power supply problems are the most frustrating kinds of problems to solve if you are assuming that X watts should be enough. I'm not made of money, but I'm going to buy the best power supply I can afford in the future.
But I hope he's wrong. Chances of anyone in government coming together for long enough to get something like this done again are slim, especially without a military reason.
I think he is wrong. The statement "Space is dangerous. It's expensive. There are unquantified risks. Combine all of those under one umbrella; you cannot establish a free market capitalization of that enterprise" seems a little harsh considering the history of risky endeavors. In the 1700s, building and operating a ship was risky, expensive, and had unknown risks. There were plenty of non-government owned ships though.
Government has its place in this kind of industry. For hundreds of years, governments have built lighthouses, made maps, created navigational calculation devices and systems, made rules for designing and operating ships, etc. These are things which the private industry can not do, or struggles to do by themselves. Space rockets should be no different. Government can supply some helpful tools (maybe access to relay stations, communications networks, locating systems, basic research etc), but there is no reason why private enterprises can't build and operate rockets and spacecraft.
Really? Because it's kind of in the summary:
This covers the data storage, the camera, and in a pinch or out of necessity you can do the editing on the device itself.
It's likely not going to be your primary place to do processing on the video, but it will cover your storage needs and give you some editing as well.
Yes but why is this needed?? According to the website for the camera they are using,
With it's low-noise, high-dynamic range sensor, over 10 f-stops of dynamic range are freely manipulatable with user generated Iridas look files, and IT-friendly connectivity through open PC platforms, battery-powered operation, and up to 4-hours of continuous shooting on a 160GB notebook hard drive round out an impressive array of digital cinema firsts in the industry.
. This looks like a very serious camera, maybe on par or somewhat in the same segment as the Red cameras (I am not an expert on high-end videocameras however). Most cameras in this segment have some system of high-capacity SSD or spinning drive storage, usually with replaceable storage cartridges. I don't understand why they felt the need to build the camera in the article. In fact, the SI-2k (not mini) looks an awful lot like what they have built, and seems to use the same sensor as the SI-2K mini.
I think crisp video and microphones that eliminate background noise and breathing would go a long way. How many times have you had a video conference and been utter exhausted from filtering out all of the echos, cuts, and scratches?
My company's equipment has the opposite problem. The noise filtering is too aggressive, causing people to fade in and out unless they are nearly shouting. It is embarrassing how crappy phone quality is these days.
I use a SIP service at home and pay for premium routing. The difference in call quality is pretty astounding, even when calling the other side of the planet.
Why would I want 3D?
I am not sure if 3D is the answer, but we need more realistic immersive technology. We consume millions of barrels of oil every day to physically move people to the same location as other people, so they can interact and collaborate. Telecommuting with current technology just doesn't work well for most people. We need some sort of holodeck that allows people to be fully immersed in their work environment without being physically present.
We need a system where I look at someone's image in the eye, and from their perspective they are looking at me in the eye. This is basically impossible to do with current technology. You can try to fake it in various ways, but the illusion is never perfect. Until this happens videoconferencing will always be an inferior means of communication.
If someone could figure out how to embed cameras in a display panel, that would be the best solution. A stopgap solution is to have a very small camera on a small tripod and putting it directly infront of the other person's face on the screen, but this isn't a great solution.
Come on.. 8 hours without power outage IS bad for a industrial country that has a whole economy relying on electricity.
And as I didn't pull out the 17min out of thin air, it's quite feasible.
8 hours without power over an entire year isn't bad at all. Situations where power is out for more than a few minutes usually coincide with major weather events where businesses, schools, and government are shut down anyway. Oftentimes, roads are impassible and/or it is not safe for linemen to be working on the lines. Maybe the weather is more mild where you live.
The source of the second one is the "World Development Indicators database". So it makes sense that 1st world countries are not completely represented in that data. The US average of 8 hours (0.33 days) compares fairly well with a similarly geographically large country such as Russia (2.73 days), or a well-developed industrial power such as Germany (0.23 days).
Where did you get those 0.23 days for Germany from? Because that's exactly what I looked up and found my 17 minutes.
http://www.verivox.de/nachrichten/pro-jahr-im-durchschnitt-157-minuten-stromausfall-65179.aspx
And I start to question the reliability of those statistics. BOTH. 6 hours vs 1/4 hour for the SAME ITEM?
Your previous http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_out_day-energy-electrical-outages-days link lists Germany at 0.23 days in 2005.
Getting statistics on this is an error prone process anyhow. The US alone has several regional electric grids with minimal ties between them. Then each regional grid feeds into hundreds of local/regional utilities who actually deliver (and sometimes generate) the power. I am a little doubtful that these utilities collect information on every single outage, and especially in a common format. Querying all the utility companies in the US seems implausible. Perhaps they polled a sample of customers, but then they are relying on customer memory which seems like a stupid way to collect this kind of data.
Other countries often have national grid operators so getting this kind of data might be easier.
What happens when the cheap American gas runs out, or demand begins to become large enough to influence the price? The US would then be saddled with hundreds of power stations using a fuel which is suddenly 3-4 times more expensive than it used to be. The consequences for the economy will be disastrous.
You make it sound like someone is going to turn off the spigot one day. When prices become unbearable, we'll go back to the cheaper options; even nuclear if it's viable.
This is already happening in certain cases. There have been several instances of power stations in the Northeast failing to start when dispatched because the pipeline company could not supply enough gas. This gets a bit of attention within the industry, but not much press in the wider media. Here is one example.
When you buy this much gas, there is a choice- guaranteed flow throughput or best-effort. Best-effort gas service is obviously cheaper, but can lead to the problem of not having the gas when it is needed the most. The article above indicates that even if the power plant bought guaranteed throughput, there wouldn't be enough gas on the pipeline if everyone else with guaranteed throughput was using their share. It is a similar problem to a cable company oversubscribing the lines. Only instead of slower internet, the electrical grid has to start calling big customers up and ask them to shut down their operations for the day.
Gas prices are also very volatile. Our ability to build power stations in a hurry can not hope to keep up with such a price swing.
Well it's a good thing hydrocarbons won't "suddenly run out"
Don't get me wrong, I think we should be seriously cutting down on the number of dead prehistoric plants that we burn for fuel, and looking at all other alternatives (nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc). My point is more that:
1) We have time to make this transition
5) Alarmism doesn't help the cause of getting off of fossil fuels. Absurd statements like "fuel suddenly costing 3-4 times what it used to" just make people disregard the real concerns of incremental inflation due to fuel costs, and climate issues to due burning fossil fuels.
The price of natural gas is incredibly volatile. Saying that the cost could triple or quadruple is not an absurd proposition. This price for this commodity has frequently doubled and halved in the space of a year. Natural gas in the US currently is overabundant- supply and demand doesn't have much effect on the price. That will change at some point. It is harder to conserve industrial natural gas (compared to automotive gasoline) since the costs trickle down to consumers over a significant period of time. Everything will get more expensive but it may not be immediately clear (to consumers) why.
Furthermore, you can't replace hundreds of power stations in a couple years. There isn't the engineering capability or millwright manpower to run all those projects, and the OEMs can't supply that many machines anyway. There are restrictions all along the supply process, from the forging delivery time/throughput to the large lathes to the large (1000ton) cranes which are required to assemble this kind of machine. None of that capability can be built up quickly, and throwing money at that problem won't provide immediate results.
Intresting chart:
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z6409butolt8la_&ctype=c&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_y=gci_2.07&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&dimp_c=country:world&idim=country:USA:JPN&ifdim=country&ind=false&icfg
According to this, the quality of the US poer grid is compareable to Slovenia.
Unfortunately, this one here doesn't have data for the US: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_out_day-energy-electrical-outages-days
But 8 hours power outage per year sounds more like a developing country to me. (Here: 17min in 2010. Drop from 18min in 2009)
The first chart appears to be an opinion survey- "How would you assess the quality of the electricity supply in your country (lack of interruptions and lack of voltage fluctuations)? [1 = insufficient and suffers frequent interruptions; 7 = sufficient and reliable]". I don't make a habit of dismissing charts completely, but this doesn't seem to be based on actual data about the power system. People in the US have an opinion of their electrical grid which is comparable to the opinion which people living in Slovenia have of their grid. This doesn't mean much to me and could be influenced by any number of factors.
The source of the second one is the "World Development Indicators database". So it makes sense that 1st world countries are not completely represented in that data. The US average of 8 hours (0.33 days) compares fairly well with a similarly geographically large country such as Russia (2.73 days), or a well-developed industrial power such as Germany (0.23 days).
... burning hydrocarbons is really cheap.
Particularly Natural Gas. For the purposes of argument, let us disregard any environmental concerns for a moment and look at what is happening in the US-
1. Natural gas is cheap in the US. Really really cheap. It is at historical lows. Not only that, but it is much cheaper compared to the rest of the world. The US natural gas price is 1/4 the price that Europe is paying (wholesale, before taxes), and 1/3 the price of even Russian natural gas. Natural Gas is stupidly, unbelievably cheap. Coal power stations are no longer competitive based on fuel costs + labor costs + relative efficiency.
2. The vast majority of new power stations (by Megawatt) in the US are, and have for the last 10 years, been natural gas. There was a "mini coal boom" in 2007-2012 but this only added a couple of gigawatts to the grid, and there are no orders for new coal power stations.
3. Nearly all natural gas used in the US is produced in the US or in Canada/Mexico. Shipping natural gas using methods other than pipelines is prohibitively expensive (for the North American market). It is energy-intensive to store, compared to oil or coal which can just be deposited on a ship. This means that if China found massive quantities of cheap natural gas, North America can not benefit from the low cost.
4. Thanks to deregulation, in most areas of the US power plants are built based on cost/KW in the near term. Subsidies are taken into account which leads to some green technologies being used, but for the most part we don't built coal-burning plants or nuclear power stations "to diversify the generation mix". The cheapest option (now) is taken. Power generating companies might worry about fuel price risk, but they aren't building coal power stations to reduce that risk.
What happens when the cheap American gas runs out, or demand begins to become large enough to influence the price? The US would then be saddled with hundreds of power stations using a fuel which is suddenly 3-4 times more expensive than it used to be. The consequences for the economy will be disastrous.