Basically, the problem can be almost entirely blamed on FirstEnergy of Ohio. They had, in a matter of hours:
- A software bug in the monitoring tool.
- No backup monitoring, so when the first one wasn't started properly there was no way of knowing there was a problem.
- A plant shutdown due to poor maintenance.
- Multiple power lines failures due to not cutting back trees as they were supposed to.
- Alarm systems breaking, that were simply ignored.
- Utterly failing to notify nearby states that there was a problem so they could prevent it from spreading.
You'll notice that almost all of these problems would not have happened had they not cut corners wherever they thought they could get away with it. And if the US electric grid is in trouble, I'd have every reason to expect that it was other electric companies doing the same sort of thing.
I can tell you that the industry has really taken this event to heart and learned from it. The linked articles are based on some awfully shoddy conclusions- the scientific article is about interconnected networks in a theoretical sense, and not one of the references has anything to do with the electrical grid. The other link is from "somebody" making conclusions about the power grid based on the scientific article. The grid today is not the same grid we had in 2003. For the last 10 years, NERC has been throwing down standards and requirements for electrical production and distribution based on the lessons learned in 2003. NERC's website may make them seem like "recommendations", but for many parts of the country, an power station or transmission company must follow their standards if they wish to do business.
A failure of the type experienced in 2003 is unlikely to happen. Even if a company such as FirstEnergy makes colossal screwups, rules are in place which make the other parts of the grid more robust to that kind of problem. The chance of a large-scale blackout is reduced in the last 10 years (as opposed to the articles arguments that it is the same, or greater than ever before).
Think about it. Unless you live on the end of a low-population road, your electricity is probably more reliable than any other service you have. The average electric customer in the US loses service for about 8 hours a year. That is 99.9% reliability. The average Japanese electric customer has 5 minutes of outage per year. That 99.999% reliability sounds great, but those extra 9's cost them dearly. The average TEPCO customer pays about 26-32 cents per KWH. My cost in Connecticut is about 8 cents per KWH. I don't want to pay 3-4 times as much for electricity just to have five 9 reliability. Do you?
So you wanted to give money away, fine. But you then asked the project to lie about it and potentially put themselves at risk for fraud by asking them to make up some sort of invoice for a service that they weren't prepared to provide, like "support".
Also, the fact that many open source projects are basically volunteer efforts means that they aren't really setup to pay people for their work. They would have to work out the taxes and it could end up being a relatively huge amount of effort for a fairly small payoff ($5,000 covers a developer for maybe a month).
That said, there are some big projects that should have been able to figure out something. Apache for instance has their own foundation. So does X (although they apparently aren't very good at doing taxes), Mozilla, and some others. However, none of them are likely to want to talk to you once you start prattling on about fake invoices. If you want to donate, just donate. That way you can write it off of your taxes as well. If management doesn't like that, then that's their problem. You shouldn't have to do something shady and possibly illegal to support open source.
Perhaps the company phrased things the wrong way, or didn't think of the project's situation. If they had Function X on their wishlist for Software Y, why can't they write a check for $5000 for a developer of the project to work on that issue? Perhaps the project could estimate that creating such a function and testing it would take approximately 120 man-hours (for example), and invoice accordingly. Isn't that a completely legitimate use of a 1099 contractor? I am not entirely familiar with 1099 employees, but I am under the impression that all tax liabilities are the responsibility of the contractor, and that the paperwork for both parties is relatively straightforward and commonly done.
Bullshit. I just want my country to stay out of other people's affairs.
If they're world affairs, like WWII, I get it, but Syria's internal politics are their own responsibility.
Syria does not exist in a vacuum. Millions of refugees have crossed borders into Jordan and into Turkey.
Jordan isn't a particularly rich country, and had piles of their own problems before this happened. The King of Jordan is also about as western as you can get while still having an arabic name. Jordan's economy is mostly held together with some toothpicks and bubble gum, and was in peril even before this crisis. A couple million refugees might make the whole system come crashing down. Turkey is in a similar boat with regards to the economy.
If any of those countries goes down, their neighbors will feel it too. Egypt is already a basket case, Libya seems to be doing well enough to stay out of the headlines (but not great), and Iraq and Afghanistan are still problematic (but not the US' problem for much longer). Having 2 of our close allies, Jordan and Turkey, economically collapse would be a disaster. Keeping people well-fed and employed is the best defense against radical ideas. A widespread regional crisis in the middle east is not in the US' best interest.
They will not allow photography without a flash because 90% of people who thought they were not using the flash would find it fired anyway in the dimly lit viewing room.
If a photographer on museum property can show conspicuous black tape over the camera's flash, the only reason I can think of to restrict photography is monopoly protection.
Have you ever been some place where they request "no flash photography"? People use their flashes anyway. Maybe they don't know how to turn off the flash, or maybe they just don't respect the rule. Arguably each flash damages the painting in a small way, so it is easier to just ban all photography. If they made exceptions for "trustworthy people who super pinkie swore they wouldn't use a flash", they would have to make an exception for everyone.
... There was a design flaw in there - although there were four seperate means of powering the cooling system and full redundency in the switching, both that switching and the redundant backup were located in the main turbine hall, a room that the tsunami flooded.
Just to clarify, a main turbine hall is not one big room. Every power station is different, but the general arrangement is usually similar.
Generally, the lowest level has the pumps, the drivers for the pumps (small steam turbines, or electric motors), oil tanks, water/oil filters, and heat exchangers systems for smaller equipment. Some of the MCC (motor control center) equipment is located here- electrical switching, power feed, and control for the various motors in the plant. The main electrical transformer is generally directly outside the turbine building on the ground, so there are often high-voltage lines in the ceiling of the lowest level.
The middle level of a turbine building usually has more electrical equipment (usually the majority of electrical equipment), and some larger heat exchangers related directly to the steam turbine. The steam turbine condenser protrudes into this level.
The top level of a turbine building has the turbine itself. There may or may not be a few heat exchangers on this level related to the steam turbine. For a nuclear plant, the cyclone steam separators are located here. In most cases, the control room is located at this elevation (but not necessarily in the same building), which makes this a good place to put the turbine controller (a couple of electrical cabinets).
At Fukushima, the turbine building experienced 5 meters of flooding. This would put the lowest level completely underwater but the 2nd level should have been safe (turbine building levels are usually around 20ft high). However, this is enough to cripple a plant that was not designed accordingly.
Incidentally, several large coal power stations on the coast were also flooded and similarly out of commission for many months. In Japan in 2011, 30% of the power was supplied by nuclear reactors. Add a few large coal power stations being offline and you have a serious power shortage crisis on your hands. When I first went to Tokyo in 2009, many parts of the city looked like Times Square. The last time I went (2012), those parts were pretty dark. Industry is still restricted on power consumption in the summer months.
They really need to come up with a new insecticide for bed bugs.
When I was a kid, bed bugs were some sort of myth, they just didn't exist anymore, like smallpox.
That just may have been because I grew up in BFE, though, with almost no immigration and little international travel. Now they are widespread through Canadian cities, not just flophouses either.
Bedbugs are actually more likely to be found in higher-end hotels than flophouses. They get brought in by international travelers and then prove tough to get rid of. The one thing that should probably be done is to change all hotel room floors to tile or engineered "wood".
If I had a truly self-driving car, I would rent it out 23/7. My own personal taxi company. After all, I only need my car for about an hour a day on average. Maybe RelayRides will expand to accommodate this business model- I block out times when I need my car, and when someone books it for a ride, it drives off, takes them where they want to go, then comes back and parks in my spot. Or maybe I decide that since I only need a car for an hour a day, I personally don't need a car at all, and can rent one from the pool of public cars if I need to go somewhere.
We might not have flying cars, but the driverless car is now a legal problem, not a problem of unreasonable expense or technological ability. We have the technology to build them now, and mass-produced, probably for less than $60,000 a piece. We also have systems for issuing commands remotely over the internet ("car, come here") and systems for renting of personal vehicles (Relayrides, GetAround, Lyft). It is only a matter of time before someone ties them all together and forces the law to change, or the law changes and the floodgates open.
where is there to go for the next 50 years with this person ?
Three words: retail dynamic biometrics. On entering a store, she'll find the salesdroid who approaches her is just a little hotter, a little more convincing, and has just the right sense of timing to make the sale. Oh, and she'll be wearing an earpiece...
This is a poor example if you are trying to respond to the GP question of "Once you know someone is a liberal... lesbian.... where is there to go for the next 50 years with this person." There is no new information needed required for this kind of marketing. You knew the lady was a lesbian, but that is something that probably won't change over time.
A far better example is immediate targeted marketing based on fresh data. For example, I go to a NAPA auto parts store on a Saturday morning, and run my credit card to pay for the purchase. If I was hit with an SMS offering discounted coffee/donuts at a nearby store, before I even got back into my car, that is some valuable advertising. The new information of "he bought something at an auto parts store 30 seconds ago, the time of day is morning" is an urgent marketing opportunity brought about by a very recent action. This is far more valuable information than "this person is X", where X is unlikely to change over time.
The "HOW" part isn't that hard... They could switch to a video on demand model allowing you to choose only the individual shows you want, when you want them and available worldwide at the same time.
The problem isn't "how" to compete, it's the realization that they have to compete... that's the part they haven't got to yet.
AMC is trying their darndest to do this with Breaking Bad. Episodes available on their website the same day of broadcast release, worldwide simultaneous release on broadcast networks, behind-the-scenes videos, full catalog of all seasons available for free watching, etc. They are even pushing same-day episode discussions on their website to try to make watching the episode the same day it is released more desirable (pushback against timeshifting). It is difficult for me to think of anything reasonable they could do to make their product more easily accessible.
What do they get for all this trouble? Breaking Bad is still one of the most pirated TV shows. I can't check ThePirateBay from work, but I think it may even be #1 most pirated.
No notice is probably the biggest middle finger you can give a company and still remain within the bounds of the law.
There are probably other ways, but my personal favorite is to resign in January (with notice) after spending all the FSA money for the year. Perfectly legal and the people who you worked for, and with, directly probably won't even find out.
. An extreme example of these devices’ usefulness is that of Ralph Harvey, a research scientist who uses a solar charger on his PowerBook in the Antarctic where power’s clearly at a premium. [...]
My understanding is that there is plenty of power at the antarctic.
If gun control gets effective then gun printing will become a lot more popular...
Why? Gun control is about keeping guns away from people who shouldn't have guns. If it becomes effective I can't imagine that Bob the liquor store thief will invest in a 3d printer, learn how to run one, and carefully print out his gun before he heads out and knocks over a store or two. If there is somebody printing out guns en-masse to sell to such people, they might as well make them out of metal. If a skilled worker can make a gun in his backyard with no complicated equipment, it is trivial for such people to make LOTS of guns using a couple of lathes and some milling machines (CNC or manually-operated). 3d printing of guns is a solution looking for a problem that doesn't, and never will, exist.
My guess is it is really a statement about gun rights- if they become trivially easy to manufacture than banning the sale and ownership of guns will be pointless.
You can make a trivially easy to manufacture firearm if you designed a bunch of innocuous-looking metal pieces too.
First you design a thick-walled tube which uses a specific grade of steel, with threaded ends. You could call it a pressure-washer lance if you wanted. You could specify tight tolerances on the diameter so that "the water flow pattern normalizes." For obvious reasons, you would have to go without rifling, but I'm sure many companies would be willing to make this, no questions asked.
Then you design yourself a device capable of making an indentation on another piece of metal. Obviously it would need some sort of lever to operate. Maybe you call this a hardness-testing device. You could make the sampling end of it threaded "to thread onto test pieces". A bit more complicated, but I'm sure somebody would make it for you.
Etc. Gun parts only look like gun parts because they are very specialized to be gun parts. And guns look like guns because obfuscation is not a consideration, but ergonomics is. You could easily design a bunch of obfuscated gun parts which result in a functional gun, but the individual parts do not look like gun parts. It would probably be a funny-looking gun but it would avoid all the inherent safety problems of making guns out of plastics.
This seems a very strange explanation, and exactly opposite the normal explanation from gun supporters I have heard. At that time "militia" meant an army of normal citizens, there was no way to distinguish the militia from the people. The militia, besides helping to defend the country against evil, would not be controlled enough by the government that it could not turn on it.
Militia implies some level of organization of people into groups for the common goal of defending against something. "there was no way to distinguish the militia from the people" is a ridiculous argument, of course you can distinguish between them. A member of a militia meets regularly or irregularly with fellow citizens for the purpose of of mounting a defense against something or someone using weapons. At the time the constitution was written, organization was at a local level, and then the local organizations joined up with other local organizations as needed to form larger groups.
"the people" should refer to ordinary citizens going about their business. "The people" can belong to a militia, but a militia is not "the people"; it is an organized group of "the people".
how is it faster than typing on a proper keyboard? I cannot speak as quickly as I can type.
You probably can and do speak significantly quicker than you type unless you have some sort of speak impediment. Most people can comfortably speak at around 150 words per minute which is far faster than most can type. Dictating however does take some practice so you quite likely would be slower at first until you get comfortable dictating.
If everyone dictated, the noise in most offices would be unbearable.
Hell, if ONE person dictates all the time, it is unbearable.
But we have figured out what to do with it. Bury it in Yucatan. However, once again, government and society have gotten in the way.
The nuclear industry is getting pretty irritated about this. They (and their electric ratepayers) have paid into a disposal fund for decades. That money was supposed to be used to dispose of their waste. But if they decommission their plant, they get stuck with the disposal bill and have to store the materials on site for decades.
Yeah, it's one thing to be righteously fighting for principles against the Man, but it's a whole different ball game when you got mouths to feed. Or an fresh, empty resume to build. Or a mountain of loans to pay. Then you can't be so picky when trying to secure a decent source of income.
I would disagree. There are so many hoops to jump through to work for an agency like NASA or a 3-letter agency that if I was in desperate need of a job, I would put them on the bottom of the list. Government hiring decisions take forever. Background checks take time. Work conditions are somewhat restrictive.
Working for a for-profit company is the path of least resistance. Hiring processes may be slow, but they are much faster than the government. If you add salary+benefits, government jobs *might* pay a little better, but maybe not. It is a wash in my line of work. I can't say about who would be more likely to hire a fresh graduate, but if I was really stuck, there are plenty of companies out there with lowball salaries which would put *something* on my resume before moving on.
Ran some numbers to check, and with some assumptions your estimate seems pretty close.
The modern standard "postscript point" is 1/72 in, so a 7-point font has a height 7/72 inches. The stroke distinguishing the 6 from the 8 is maybe 1/4 of the height, so let's say ~0.025 inches. If the print/scan cycle roundtrips at somewhere in the range 75-150 dpi, that's 2-4 pixels. If you can manage a professional-standard 300 dpi, you get more like 7-8 pixels, but that's a fairly optimistic case.
Why wouldn't you use at least 300dpi?
Most "serious" office printers print at 600dpi or better, so the information is there. Even my $100 brother laser printer defaults to 600dpi. Every recent office multifuntion I have seen can scan at 200, 300, or 600dpi, but every single one defaults to 200dpi. 200dpi scans are hard on the eyes. I always scan at 600dpi, the file size isn't bad in the age of 300GB laptop hard drives, and if I need to send it to someone external to the company, I can always reduce the size.
I've decided to keep my old car until I can replace it with an electric vehicle.
This has almost everything I need, range is great - my daily drive is 30km, so it'll be fine for that and a fair bit more. Performance looks excellent for the type of vehicle and while I'm not a BMW fan, I expect it'll be reasonably well constructed. If the price is really 40k, it'll be high, but acceptable given the lower running costs, though I expect by the time it lands in Australia, it'll be double or triple the price in rest of the world...
But then as you say, its looks are...special.
From the side, you'd think the designer had his/her elbow jolted while they were sketching the doorline, and the corresponding rear roofline dip is likewise utterly horrible. It has that kitschy little wedge just behind the front wheels to make sure it looks dated and busy instead of clean and efficient. And that wedge-shaped black fillet from the underbody to make it look like it's braking hard while standing still. Why?
The front isn't totally despicable, though the twee fake blanked off radiator intakes should have been binned and the person suggesting them slapped on the head with a (steel) tyre iron. It's ELECTRIC, you idiots. Not keen on the contrast colour sideburn headlight droopy bits either, but I could live with them.
The back looks bulky, saggy and committee-designed, not nice, but not appalling either, while the interior is generic enough to be ok, provided you can option out the baby-poo mustard yellow and soviet-bloc concrete grey contrast trim.
I mean, I want an electric car that does what this one does. But I sure as hell don't want this one. Mercedes? Volkswagen? Opel? Ford? Are you listening?
It seems to me that visibility out the back of this car will be terrible as well.
First thing to do when someone tries to collect a debt from you is to ask for a "bill of particulars". This is a legal term which means itemized bill, and it generally sends the collection agent running away since they probably don't have one- if a collection actually goes to court, they don't get their commission.
Then you ask for a signed copy of the original contract. It is pretty unlikely for them to be able to get ahold of this.
If they have misspelled your name, no matter how slightly, you can claim that you are not the person they are trying to reach and you don't know who that person is. This is much more common that you might think- I have seen it on 3 out of 4 of my last attempted collections.
State that you do "dispute the validity of any debt and disavow any responsibility" in accordance with THE FAIR DEBT COLLECTION PRACTICES ACT OF 1996 and any local laws (state laws usually have some section which mirrors this law).
State that you do not wish to be contacted by telephone or by email in accordance with THE FAIR DEBT COLLECTION PRACTICES ACT OF 1996.
If they are operating outside your residence state, and especially if they are operating outside the state where the debt was first owed, demand they provide proof that they can collect in your state. A good clause is "Since your office is out of state, any future correspondence must include your proof of license and license number allowing operations in Connecticut in accordance with Connecticut Title 36A. Failure to include this will result in this matter being reported to the State Attorney General of Connecticut." This may not be completely helpful or a completely legally valid point, but it implies lawyers, and collections agents lose their commissions if the collection goes to a lawyer.
If they have contacted you at work, specifically mention this, and that that it is not acceptable according to the THE FAIR DEBT COLLECTION PRACTICES ACT OF 1996, and if they do it again, you will report them.
Write all this up in a paper letter, sign it, make a couple copies, and send it certified mail. If they harass you again you can sue THEM in most cases.
I am not a lawyer but this has been very effective in making the collections agents go away.
It's important that important people be shielded from consequences. Without exception, the Important People, and their talking heads, that I see on TV assure me that this is so.
The concept of this is well-intentioned. Golden parachutes are supposed to encourage risk-taking and pursuing new products or strategies which may or may not pay off. The idea is that managers won't be so worried about keeping their job (salary) that they just clam up and don't do anything which might rock the boat. Management paralysis is not a good thing.
The good intentions of the golden parachute are counteracted and overpowered by massive bonuses creating very short term incentives, stock options which create another short-term incentive, and the practice of hiring executives based on "he had a big salary at X company, he must be good" philosophy.
This is why ships still have gyros. GPS is too handy not to use, but I'm pretty sure most large oceangoing vessels also have navigation gyros. The question then is, what happens when GPS gets spoofed...does the system/crew assume the GPS is broken or the gyro broken?
If it was only spoofed a little, GPS would probably be assumed to be correct. If there was a big difference maybe I would send someone outside with a magnetic compass- to the best location where ship interference would be minimalized.
Spoofing "just a little" would actually be more dangerous. You could make a ship run aground in narrow channel if nobody was paying attention. However, when ships come into port or through narrow channels, a Pilot from the port comes on board the ship and guides it in. The idea is that the Pilot knows all about the local conditions, and the captain knows how his ship will react to helm changes. At that point, you are relying on channel markers, other buoys, and other distance cues so the GPS and gyrocompass are not that important.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, the problem can be almost entirely blamed on FirstEnergy of Ohio. They had, in a matter of hours: - A software bug in the monitoring tool. - No backup monitoring, so when the first one wasn't started properly there was no way of knowing there was a problem. - A plant shutdown due to poor maintenance. - Multiple power lines failures due to not cutting back trees as they were supposed to. - Alarm systems breaking, that were simply ignored. - Utterly failing to notify nearby states that there was a problem so they could prevent it from spreading.
You'll notice that almost all of these problems would not have happened had they not cut corners wherever they thought they could get away with it. And if the US electric grid is in trouble, I'd have every reason to expect that it was other electric companies doing the same sort of thing.
Can we get Morgan Freeman on the case?
I can tell you that the industry has really taken this event to heart and learned from it. The linked articles are based on some awfully shoddy conclusions- the scientific article is about interconnected networks in a theoretical sense, and not one of the references has anything to do with the electrical grid. The other link is from "somebody" making conclusions about the power grid based on the scientific article. The grid today is not the same grid we had in 2003. For the last 10 years, NERC has been throwing down standards and requirements for electrical production and distribution based on the lessons learned in 2003. NERC's website may make them seem like "recommendations", but for many parts of the country, an power station or transmission company must follow their standards if they wish to do business.
A failure of the type experienced in 2003 is unlikely to happen. Even if a company such as FirstEnergy makes colossal screwups, rules are in place which make the other parts of the grid more robust to that kind of problem. The chance of a large-scale blackout is reduced in the last 10 years (as opposed to the articles arguments that it is the same, or greater than ever before).
Think about it. Unless you live on the end of a low-population road, your electricity is probably more reliable than any other service you have. The average electric customer in the US loses service for about 8 hours a year. That is 99.9% reliability. The average Japanese electric customer has 5 minutes of outage per year. That 99.999% reliability sounds great, but those extra 9's cost them dearly. The average TEPCO customer pays about 26-32 cents per KWH. My cost in Connecticut is about 8 cents per KWH. I don't want to pay 3-4 times as much for electricity just to have five 9 reliability. Do you?
So you wanted to give money away, fine. But you then asked the project to lie about it and potentially put themselves at risk for fraud by asking them to make up some sort of invoice for a service that they weren't prepared to provide, like "support". Also, the fact that many open source projects are basically volunteer efforts means that they aren't really setup to pay people for their work. They would have to work out the taxes and it could end up being a relatively huge amount of effort for a fairly small payoff ($5,000 covers a developer for maybe a month). That said, there are some big projects that should have been able to figure out something. Apache for instance has their own foundation. So does X (although they apparently aren't very good at doing taxes), Mozilla, and some others. However, none of them are likely to want to talk to you once you start prattling on about fake invoices. If you want to donate, just donate. That way you can write it off of your taxes as well. If management doesn't like that, then that's their problem. You shouldn't have to do something shady and possibly illegal to support open source.
Perhaps the company phrased things the wrong way, or didn't think of the project's situation. If they had Function X on their wishlist for Software Y, why can't they write a check for $5000 for a developer of the project to work on that issue? Perhaps the project could estimate that creating such a function and testing it would take approximately 120 man-hours (for example), and invoice accordingly. Isn't that a completely legitimate use of a 1099 contractor? I am not entirely familiar with 1099 employees, but I am under the impression that all tax liabilities are the responsibility of the contractor, and that the paperwork for both parties is relatively straightforward and commonly done.
Bullshit. I just want my country to stay out of other people's affairs.
If they're world affairs, like WWII, I get it, but Syria's internal politics are their own responsibility.
Syria does not exist in a vacuum. Millions of refugees have crossed borders into Jordan and into Turkey.
Jordan isn't a particularly rich country, and had piles of their own problems before this happened. The King of Jordan is also about as western as you can get while still having an arabic name. Jordan's economy is mostly held together with some toothpicks and bubble gum, and was in peril even before this crisis. A couple million refugees might make the whole system come crashing down. Turkey is in a similar boat with regards to the economy.
If any of those countries goes down, their neighbors will feel it too. Egypt is already a basket case, Libya seems to be doing well enough to stay out of the headlines (but not great), and Iraq and Afghanistan are still problematic (but not the US' problem for much longer). Having 2 of our close allies, Jordan and Turkey, economically collapse would be a disaster. Keeping people well-fed and employed is the best defense against radical ideas. A widespread regional crisis in the middle east is not in the US' best interest.
They will not allow photography without a flash because 90% of people who thought they were not using the flash would find it fired anyway in the dimly lit viewing room.
If a photographer on museum property can show conspicuous black tape over the camera's flash, the only reason I can think of to restrict photography is monopoly protection.
Have you ever been some place where they request "no flash photography"? People use their flashes anyway. Maybe they don't know how to turn off the flash, or maybe they just don't respect the rule. Arguably each flash damages the painting in a small way, so it is easier to just ban all photography. If they made exceptions for "trustworthy people who super pinkie swore they wouldn't use a flash", they would have to make an exception for everyone.
... There was a design flaw in there - although there were four seperate means of powering the cooling system and full redundency in the switching, both that switching and the redundant backup were located in the main turbine hall, a room that the tsunami flooded.
Just to clarify, a main turbine hall is not one big room. Every power station is different, but the general arrangement is usually similar.
Generally, the lowest level has the pumps, the drivers for the pumps (small steam turbines, or electric motors), oil tanks, water/oil filters, and heat exchangers systems for smaller equipment. Some of the MCC (motor control center) equipment is located here- electrical switching, power feed, and control for the various motors in the plant. The main electrical transformer is generally directly outside the turbine building on the ground, so there are often high-voltage lines in the ceiling of the lowest level.
The middle level of a turbine building usually has more electrical equipment (usually the majority of electrical equipment), and some larger heat exchangers related directly to the steam turbine. The steam turbine condenser protrudes into this level.
The top level of a turbine building has the turbine itself. There may or may not be a few heat exchangers on this level related to the steam turbine. For a nuclear plant, the cyclone steam separators are located here. In most cases, the control room is located at this elevation (but not necessarily in the same building), which makes this a good place to put the turbine controller (a couple of electrical cabinets).
At Fukushima, the turbine building experienced 5 meters of flooding. This would put the lowest level completely underwater but the 2nd level should have been safe (turbine building levels are usually around 20ft high). However, this is enough to cripple a plant that was not designed accordingly.
Incidentally, several large coal power stations on the coast were also flooded and similarly out of commission for many months. In Japan in 2011, 30% of the power was supplied by nuclear reactors. Add a few large coal power stations being offline and you have a serious power shortage crisis on your hands. When I first went to Tokyo in 2009, many parts of the city looked like Times Square. The last time I went (2012), those parts were pretty dark. Industry is still restricted on power consumption in the summer months.
They really need to come up with a new insecticide for bed bugs.
When I was a kid, bed bugs were some sort of myth, they just didn't exist anymore, like smallpox. That just may have been because I grew up in BFE, though, with almost no immigration and little international travel. Now they are widespread through Canadian cities, not just flophouses either.
Bedbugs are actually more likely to be found in higher-end hotels than flophouses. They get brought in by international travelers and then prove tough to get rid of. The one thing that should probably be done is to change all hotel room floors to tile or engineered "wood".
If I had a truly self-driving car, I would rent it out 23/7. My own personal taxi company. After all, I only need my car for about an hour a day on average. Maybe RelayRides will expand to accommodate this business model- I block out times when I need my car, and when someone books it for a ride, it drives off, takes them where they want to go, then comes back and parks in my spot. Or maybe I decide that since I only need a car for an hour a day, I personally don't need a car at all, and can rent one from the pool of public cars if I need to go somewhere.
We might not have flying cars, but the driverless car is now a legal problem, not a problem of unreasonable expense or technological ability. We have the technology to build them now, and mass-produced, probably for less than $60,000 a piece. We also have systems for issuing commands remotely over the internet ("car, come here") and systems for renting of personal vehicles (Relayrides, GetAround, Lyft). It is only a matter of time before someone ties them all together and forces the law to change, or the law changes and the floodgates open.
where is there to go for the next 50 years with this person ?
Three words: retail dynamic biometrics. On entering a store, she'll find the salesdroid who approaches her is just a little hotter, a little more convincing, and has just the right sense of timing to make the sale. Oh, and she'll be wearing an earpiece...
This is a poor example if you are trying to respond to the GP question of "Once you know someone is a liberal ... lesbian.... where is there to go for the next 50 years with this person." There is no new information needed required for this kind of marketing. You knew the lady was a lesbian, but that is something that probably won't change over time.
A far better example is immediate targeted marketing based on fresh data. For example, I go to a NAPA auto parts store on a Saturday morning, and run my credit card to pay for the purchase. If I was hit with an SMS offering discounted coffee/donuts at a nearby store, before I even got back into my car, that is some valuable advertising. The new information of "he bought something at an auto parts store 30 seconds ago, the time of day is morning" is an urgent marketing opportunity brought about by a very recent action. This is far more valuable information than "this person is X", where X is unlikely to change over time.
The "HOW" part isn't that hard... They could switch to a video on demand model allowing you to choose only the individual shows you want, when you want them and available worldwide at the same time. The problem isn't "how" to compete, it's the realization that they have to compete... that's the part they haven't got to yet.
AMC is trying their darndest to do this with Breaking Bad. Episodes available on their website the same day of broadcast release, worldwide simultaneous release on broadcast networks, behind-the-scenes videos, full catalog of all seasons available for free watching, etc. They are even pushing same-day episode discussions on their website to try to make watching the episode the same day it is released more desirable (pushback against timeshifting). It is difficult for me to think of anything reasonable they could do to make their product more easily accessible.
What do they get for all this trouble? Breaking Bad is still one of the most pirated TV shows. I can't check ThePirateBay from work, but I think it may even be #1 most pirated.
No notice is probably the biggest middle finger you can give a company and still remain within the bounds of the law.
There are probably other ways, but my personal favorite is to resign in January (with notice) after spending all the FSA money for the year. Perfectly legal and the people who you worked for, and with, directly probably won't even find out.
. An extreme example of these devices’ usefulness is that of Ralph Harvey, a research scientist who uses a solar charger on his PowerBook in the Antarctic where power’s clearly at a premium. [...]
My understanding is that there is plenty of power at the antarctic.
I would presume that while the field is quite robust, that the rate of alternation will be either absurdly fast, or very slow.
RTFA - or at least look at the pictures (it's in the caption of one): Feed to the coils in the road is 20 kHz, 200A.
That sounds terrifically inefficient and a great way to waste energy.
These solutions will never take off- the laws of physics ensure that they will always be very inefficient, and therefore not cost effective.
If gun control gets effective then gun printing will become a lot more popular...
Why? Gun control is about keeping guns away from people who shouldn't have guns. If it becomes effective I can't imagine that Bob the liquor store thief will invest in a 3d printer, learn how to run one, and carefully print out his gun before he heads out and knocks over a store or two. If there is somebody printing out guns en-masse to sell to such people, they might as well make them out of metal. If a skilled worker can make a gun in his backyard with no complicated equipment, it is trivial for such people to make LOTS of guns using a couple of lathes and some milling machines (CNC or manually-operated). 3d printing of guns is a solution looking for a problem that doesn't, and never will, exist.
My guess is it is really a statement about gun rights- if they become trivially easy to manufacture than banning the sale and ownership of guns will be pointless.
You can make a trivially easy to manufacture firearm if you designed a bunch of innocuous-looking metal pieces too.
First you design a thick-walled tube which uses a specific grade of steel, with threaded ends. You could call it a pressure-washer lance if you wanted. You could specify tight tolerances on the diameter so that "the water flow pattern normalizes." For obvious reasons, you would have to go without rifling, but I'm sure many companies would be willing to make this, no questions asked.
Then you design yourself a device capable of making an indentation on another piece of metal. Obviously it would need some sort of lever to operate. Maybe you call this a hardness-testing device. You could make the sampling end of it threaded "to thread onto test pieces". A bit more complicated, but I'm sure somebody would make it for you.
Etc. Gun parts only look like gun parts because they are very specialized to be gun parts. And guns look like guns because obfuscation is not a consideration, but ergonomics is. You could easily design a bunch of obfuscated gun parts which result in a functional gun, but the individual parts do not look like gun parts. It would probably be a funny-looking gun but it would avoid all the inherent safety problems of making guns out of plastics.
This seems a very strange explanation, and exactly opposite the normal explanation from gun supporters I have heard. At that time "militia" meant an army of normal citizens, there was no way to distinguish the militia from the people. The militia, besides helping to defend the country against evil, would not be controlled enough by the government that it could not turn on it.
Militia implies some level of organization of people into groups for the common goal of defending against something. "there was no way to distinguish the militia from the people" is a ridiculous argument, of course you can distinguish between them. A member of a militia meets regularly or irregularly with fellow citizens for the purpose of of mounting a defense against something or someone using weapons. At the time the constitution was written, organization was at a local level, and then the local organizations joined up with other local organizations as needed to form larger groups.
"the people" should refer to ordinary citizens going about their business. "The people" can belong to a militia, but a militia is not "the people"; it is an organized group of "the people".
how is it faster than typing on a proper keyboard? I cannot speak as quickly as I can type.
You probably can and do speak significantly quicker than you type unless you have some sort of speak impediment. Most people can comfortably speak at around 150 words per minute which is far faster than most can type. Dictating however does take some practice so you quite likely would be slower at first until you get comfortable dictating.
If everyone dictated, the noise in most offices would be unbearable.
Hell, if ONE person dictates all the time, it is unbearable.
But we have figured out what to do with it. Bury it in Yucatan. However, once again, government and society have gotten in the way.
The nuclear industry is getting pretty irritated about this. They (and their electric ratepayers) have paid into a disposal fund for decades. That money was supposed to be used to dispose of their waste. But if they decommission their plant, they get stuck with the disposal bill and have to store the materials on site for decades.
Yeah, it's one thing to be righteously fighting for principles against the Man, but it's a whole different ball game when you got mouths to feed. Or an fresh, empty resume to build. Or a mountain of loans to pay. Then you can't be so picky when trying to secure a decent source of income.
I would disagree. There are so many hoops to jump through to work for an agency like NASA or a 3-letter agency that if I was in desperate need of a job, I would put them on the bottom of the list. Government hiring decisions take forever. Background checks take time. Work conditions are somewhat restrictive.
Working for a for-profit company is the path of least resistance. Hiring processes may be slow, but they are much faster than the government. If you add salary+benefits, government jobs *might* pay a little better, but maybe not. It is a wash in my line of work. I can't say about who would be more likely to hire a fresh graduate, but if I was really stuck, there are plenty of companies out there with lowball salaries which would put *something* on my resume before moving on.
Ran some numbers to check, and with some assumptions your estimate seems pretty close.
The modern standard "postscript point" is 1/72 in, so a 7-point font has a height 7/72 inches. The stroke distinguishing the 6 from the 8 is maybe 1/4 of the height, so let's say ~0.025 inches. If the print/scan cycle roundtrips at somewhere in the range 75-150 dpi, that's 2-4 pixels. If you can manage a professional-standard 300 dpi, you get more like 7-8 pixels, but that's a fairly optimistic case.
Why wouldn't you use at least 300dpi?
Most "serious" office printers print at 600dpi or better, so the information is there. Even my $100 brother laser printer defaults to 600dpi. Every recent office multifuntion I have seen can scan at 200, 300, or 600dpi, but every single one defaults to 200dpi. 200dpi scans are hard on the eyes. I always scan at 600dpi, the file size isn't bad in the age of 300GB laptop hard drives, and if I need to send it to someone external to the company, I can always reduce the size.
I took away exactly one thing from this game.
Q: Why did buffalo become an endangered species?
A: Because hunting buffalo is fun.
No it's significant that it has a TV tuner at all because most western tablets don't
But many asian mobile phones DO have TV tuners. It seems a natural extension that they would put them in tablets also.
worst of all... ugly as sin.
I've decided to keep my old car until I can replace it with an electric vehicle.
This has almost everything I need, range is great - my daily drive is 30km, so it'll be fine for that and a fair bit more. Performance looks excellent for the type of vehicle and while I'm not a BMW fan, I expect it'll be reasonably well constructed. If the price is really 40k, it'll be high, but acceptable given the lower running costs, though I expect by the time it lands in Australia, it'll be double or triple the price in rest of the world...
But then as you say, its looks are ...special.
From the side, you'd think the designer had his/her elbow jolted while they were sketching the doorline, and the corresponding rear roofline dip is likewise utterly horrible. It has that kitschy little wedge just behind the front wheels to make sure it looks dated and busy instead of clean and efficient. And that wedge-shaped black fillet from the underbody to make it look like it's braking hard while standing still. Why?
The front isn't totally despicable, though the twee fake blanked off radiator intakes should have been binned and the person suggesting them slapped on the head with a (steel) tyre iron. It's ELECTRIC, you idiots. Not keen on the contrast colour sideburn headlight droopy bits either, but I could live with them.
The back looks bulky, saggy and committee-designed, not nice, but not appalling either, while the interior is generic enough to be ok, provided you can option out the baby-poo mustard yellow and soviet-bloc concrete grey contrast trim.
I mean, I want an electric car that does what this one does. But I sure as hell don't want this one. Mercedes? Volkswagen? Opel? Ford? Are you listening?
It seems to me that visibility out the back of this car will be terrible as well.
This is the way to go.
First thing to do when someone tries to collect a debt from you is to ask for a "bill of particulars". This is a legal term which means itemized bill, and it generally sends the collection agent running away since they probably don't have one- if a collection actually goes to court, they don't get their commission.
Then you ask for a signed copy of the original contract. It is pretty unlikely for them to be able to get ahold of this.
If they have misspelled your name, no matter how slightly, you can claim that you are not the person they are trying to reach and you don't know who that person is. This is much more common that you might think- I have seen it on 3 out of 4 of my last attempted collections.
State that you do "dispute the validity of any debt and disavow any responsibility" in accordance with THE FAIR DEBT COLLECTION PRACTICES ACT OF 1996 and any local laws (state laws usually have some section which mirrors this law).
State that you do not wish to be contacted by telephone or by email in accordance with THE FAIR DEBT COLLECTION PRACTICES ACT OF 1996.
If they are operating outside your residence state, and especially if they are operating outside the state where the debt was first owed, demand they provide proof that they can collect in your state. A good clause is "Since your office is out of state, any future correspondence must include your proof of license and license number allowing operations in Connecticut in accordance with Connecticut Title 36A. Failure to include this will result in this matter being reported to the State Attorney General of Connecticut." This may not be completely helpful or a completely legally valid point, but it implies lawyers, and collections agents lose their commissions if the collection goes to a lawyer.
If they have contacted you at work, specifically mention this, and that that it is not acceptable according to the THE FAIR DEBT COLLECTION PRACTICES ACT OF 1996, and if they do it again, you will report them.
Write all this up in a paper letter, sign it, make a couple copies, and send it certified mail. If they harass you again you can sue THEM in most cases.
I am not a lawyer but this has been very effective in making the collections agents go away.
It's important that important people be shielded from consequences. Without exception, the Important People, and their talking heads, that I see on TV assure me that this is so.
The concept of this is well-intentioned. Golden parachutes are supposed to encourage risk-taking and pursuing new products or strategies which may or may not pay off. The idea is that managers won't be so worried about keeping their job (salary) that they just clam up and don't do anything which might rock the boat. Management paralysis is not a good thing.
The good intentions of the golden parachute are counteracted and overpowered by massive bonuses creating very short term incentives, stock options which create another short-term incentive, and the practice of hiring executives based on "he had a big salary at X company, he must be good" philosophy.
This is why ships still have gyros. GPS is too handy not to use, but I'm pretty sure most large oceangoing vessels also have navigation gyros. The question then is, what happens when GPS gets spoofed...does the system/crew assume the GPS is broken or the gyro broken?
If it was only spoofed a little, GPS would probably be assumed to be correct. If there was a big difference maybe I would send someone outside with a magnetic compass- to the best location where ship interference would be minimalized.
Spoofing "just a little" would actually be more dangerous. You could make a ship run aground in narrow channel if nobody was paying attention. However, when ships come into port or through narrow channels, a Pilot from the port comes on board the ship and guides it in. The idea is that the Pilot knows all about the local conditions, and the captain knows how his ship will react to helm changes. At that point, you are relying on channel markers, other buoys, and other distance cues so the GPS and gyrocompass are not that important.