The problem with this position is that they have HAD a bad reputation for stealing IP for over 20 years now. And it hasn't changed anything.
Hasn't changed anything? Are you insane. One small example is Russia won't sell the Chinese ANY advanced weapons. After the Chinese copied some older model Soviet weapons the Russians refused to sell them ANY advanced weapon systems. This little detail has crippled Chinese weapon advancement for more than a decade, and only recently after realizing they can't create the same 50 years of Russian innovation on their own they are only now at the point of a new arms deal with the Russians with guarantees that the designs will not be copied. Even with firm contractual guarantees the Russians are still not sure they want to execute the contract because they don't trust them. I'd wager the contract is about 50/50 that it will ever happen.
Wholesale theft of IP has harmed China in almost as many ways as it has helped them and they have started to realize the damage they've done.
And yet companies keep coming back. Even Toshiba is giving IP to China for their latest design nuclear reactor. Toshiba, a company which obtained much of their steam turbine knowledge from licensing deals from GE in the 1970's and has come to have near-domination of new large steam turbines in the US. Toshiba took GE's steam turbine knowledge and used their weak currency to move in on the market. GE was seriously weakened in the steam turbine market from the IP deals, and has nearly given up trying to sell new steam turbines. Toshiba knows this history well, and yet they repeat it. The allure of a market of a billion people is too strong. Executives will always hop on these licensing deals for quick cash. By the time it all crashes down the executive has moved on or moved up.
Even if a company learns their lesson, there will always be another company to step into their place for a quick buck. Even if they are selling China the rope which will be used to hang them.
The only blowback from China's policies I see is that their quality is known to be suspect. I see plenty of specs which specifically require that NO parts come from China. Full stop. Chinese supply used to be acceptable if the factory was certified, inspected, etc., but corruption is so rampant that these papers are known to mean nothing now. By the time you do your diligence and make sure that the factory is OK, you might as well have bought from a more reliable country. And you still can't be 100% sure that the chinese part is OK since they might completely change as soon as you are satisfied with your samples and the inspector is out the door.
Land using rocket boots. Nope. 90% death rate for that one. the Human body does NOT have the strength to handle controlling and vectoring thrust with the legs. Anyone trying this will simply die. And it's a very stupid idea. A parachute works great, I'd rather have that than a giant tank of rocket fuel on my back.
Do they have to have extraordinary strength? If the deceleration from ~120mph to 0 (or near 0) takes 25-27 seconds, that is only about 2g. Most people who are in good condition could probably handle that. If you are going to all the trouble of making rocket boots, you might as well go to the extra trouble of putting the thrust controlling and vectoring in the boots. Its still a terrible idea but I believe it is a possible idea.
All of this information is in the initial filing, which wired posted here, including the fact that the government figured out partial patterns to his passwords. You should read the filing, though I warn you, you will want to retch by the end of it:
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/04/fedswantdecryption.pdf
After reading the request, I am amazed that the judge issued the first ruling at all. The download logs clearly showed entries that graphically describe pedophilia being written to a secure disk. I think the agents freaked out a bit, and assumed the disks would self destruct (as far as I know, the maxtor disks don't in fact do so).
I know it's unpopular to say on slashdot, but the government has a job to do, and is doing it well.
Regardless of the circumstances, ordering someone to decrypt a hard drive should be against the 5th amendment. I look at this the same way as any other "evidence is in a very hard place to get" situation.
If I lock evidence in a locker or a house, the authorities are going to break my lock or break down the door. They can't order me to give them the key if the location of the key is unknown to them. If I have an electronic keypad, they can't order me to give them the passcode.
If I kill someone and, having decided that a "shallow grave" is likely going to get me caught, bury the body in a 1000ft grave (suppose I own a drilling company), they can't make me dig up that body. It is upon them to dig it up. If I weigh someone down and dump them in the ocean, they can't force me to tell them the exact latitude/longitude. They can gather evidence all day long through any legal means, but forcing someone to actively incriminate themselves has never been, and should not be, legal in the US.
The fact that we now have locks that are effectively unpickable and unbreakable is unfortunate for law enforcement, but that doesn't change the 5th amendment.
There should be no exceptions. The nature of the crime or the amount of other evidence doesn't matter to the 5th amendment.
On the one hand it is great that Linux allows people to innovate, and fork when the need arises. On the other hand the Linux desktop has reached the point that I simply don't want to choose between the myriad of desktops and window managers any more.
This probably stems from the fact that it is far more interesting (to most people) to create something, rather than fix something that someone else made which is broken.
There also may be some professors out there who make projects like "write me an rudimentary Z from scratch", then the person just keeps working on the project until it becomes a usable piece of software. I am not a code writer, but in my few computer classes "make me a Z!" was a far more common homework than "Here is a Y, which Bob wrote in ridiculous spaghetti code and has bugs A, B, and C, please fix it".
While the second is arguably a more common skill, I can easilly imagine that the first is much easier to grade and/or detect cheating.
You would be far better served by getting a plumber, a roofer, a HVAC tech, and a general contrator to look at the place. It would not cost you anymore either. The home inspector is just there to rubber stamp the house so you can get a mortgage. Anyone who is not willing to take some liability might as well not look at the place at all.
Or possibly worse, the home inspector can go on a markup rampage, flagging absolutely everything and marking everything as "very serious" or "safety hazard" even when the problem is very minor. All to cover his own butt. The inspection is then basically worthless.
Thus my interpretation is that this camera model's hardware specs were deemed insufficient by the manufacturer for this specific capability, and considering that it can only do burst mode up to $X$ frames before capping out its memory buffer, the manufacturer may have been correct. So my interpretation is not that they "re-enabled a purposely disabled core" but rather that they added functionality which the manufacturer had decided that this hardware was not capable of performing well.
The Canon 50D was announced on 26 August 2008. The very first DSLR to have video recording was the Nikon D90, which was announced 27 August 2008. Maybe Canon suspected (or knew) that Nikon would announce their video-capable DSLR the next day after their announcement. Maybe Canon should have had the foresight to introduce the first video-recording DSLR. DSLRs with video recording were not a common thing back then. In fact, they didn't even really exist. Designing a DSLR that doesn't record video, at a time when NO DSLR records video, isn't really an oversight.
I understand his advice, if followed, and if you work your way, either through trade school or apprenticeship, to journeyman, and then to master, you can expect a $80K+ a year income.
Is this the end-all, be-all of human existence?
A high salary is not why I went into the sciences - I went in with a passion for knowledge and knowing how things work, and why, and how to build things that, because they were barely within the boundaries of the rules, did amazing and astonishing things. A high salary resulted because I was successful at pursuing this passion.
I would instead advise people to try to find three things for which they feel passion, and are good at, and then find someone willing to pay you to do one of them.
If you can only find one thing for which you have passion, if you can still find someone to pay you to do it, then you are ahead of the game, compared to what Bloomberg suggest, if it happens that none of your objects of passion include plumbing.
There are plenty of people who look at the top end paychecks available in a profession, and choose a profession on that basis. Those who do will never reach the top end of that pay range if they do not posses a passion for the profession; they will always be middle tier, and they will watch the clock until it is time to check out from their job, and "get back to their 'real' life". This is where a lot of unemployed IT "professionals" come from.
For those clock watching 8 hours of their day, they will be miserable, working at something for which they have no passion, having intentionally turned their soul off for those eight hours in exchange for money. They will sell half their waking life into misery to benefit the other half of their waking life. And at the end of the day in their "real life", they will find they can not take joy in their "real life", as they anticipate, after sleeping, returning to their job for the next 8 soulless hours of work.
Do something you love, and for which you have passion; reclaim your soul for those lost 8 hours of your life.
I have done different things in my career, some of which interests me, and some which did not. Doing "something I love" has not really helped me live a pleasant life and sleep well at night. The main drivers for me are more like:
1. Job is important and has an impact on someone or some thing. There is a purpose which makes me feel needed.
2. Job has progress milestones which are achievable with some work. A job with no noticeable progress is miserable monotony. Likewise, a job with unachievable goals is frustrating.
3. Job has the right mix of travel, hands-on work, desk work, etc for ME.
4. Boss who is fair, sets clear expectations, and is interested in having a "rising tide lift all boats".
5. Being financially secure. This includes good health insurance. I sleep a lot better at night now that my income is significantly more than my needs. I can worry about the things that matter and not the fluctuations in my bank account.
The first 4 have been proven over and over in psychology studies to make people happier. Doing "something you love" means that I make my hobbies into a job. It is a good way to become sick of both and then be miserable.
I teach engineering at a maritime academy and it dazzles me that so many students pay through the nose and suffer through 4+ years of regimented academics for a license that they could get by just sailing as a paid vessel assistant for a few years after high school and taking a Coast Guard examination. This is a practice called hawsepiping and used to be the norm for the profession. Marine engineers are really (for the most part) mechanics, and much simpler vocational school would be more than adequate for these jobs.
Admittedly the students also get a "marine engineering degree" over and above the training for the license that is transferrable to a lot of shore-side professions, but most of that is lost on the students. All they care about is getting the license and many whine and cry about having to read, write, do math, and take engineering coursework. I do think that degree is worth what they pay, but it really a form of insurance so they can remain employed after they come ashore, and getting 20 year old boys who aspire to be sailors to think about what they are going to do later in life (hell, later in the *day*) is hard.
Better tighten that onion on your belt. Meeting the STCW-95 requirements would be really tough without a dedicated educational/hand-on program. Working your way up from AB or wiper is for masochists. It could be done, but it is a far harder path for the same result. It is a throwback to the time when people had careers and pensions. Now people have jobs and need to change companies frequently. The marine industry is no different than any other industry today- no company wants to pay to train anybody, they want to hire someone who has all the certifications and experience already, and they don't want to pay a dime more than they have to in salary.
I do think that the standard 3rd mate/3rd engineer track could be shortened to 3 or even 2 years, but at that point it becomes Training rather than an Education (and as an instructor, you should appreciate the difference). In-state Maritime Academy is one of the best purchases I ever made. It is truly a bargain when you look at all the idiots spending $40k a year to become English majors.
I really disagree with your statement that " Admittedly the students also get a "marine engineering degree" over and above the training for the license that is transferrable to a lot of shore-side professions, but most of that is lost on the students. All they care about is getting the license...". It wasn't that long ago that I was in school. 2/3 of my classmates wanted to graduate, get their license, start jobs, and get on with their lives. The license is just a tool for them to get there. Only about half of my license-bearing classmates were still shipping out after 5 years. Everybody knows that shipping out is a marriage-killer and a poor way to raise kids. The degree is not a fallback plan if the license doesn't pan out for some reason. The coast guard license opens only a handful of doors (albeit important ones). The degree is a piece of paper that opens many kinds of doors.
Re:I believe I speak for a dozen people when I say
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Amtrak Upgrades Wi-Fi
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If its picking you up in Lakewood or making other stops on the way, it's not the "high speed" you're thinking of.
I have been on the bullet trains in Japan, and the non-super-express ones stop at some fairly small stations. The key is that their trains are electrified, which allows for very fast acceleration. They also stop only long enough to let people on and off- 1 minute or less. When they changed from the 500 series to the N700 series, the acceleration was improved by about 80%. Even though the N700 has a lower top speed, it is faster to get to the destination because of the fast acceleration.
Now compare to bitcoin. If we assume 1 billion ("the world will have plenty") people use it, then we have (21 million * 100 million)/1 billion or 2,100,000 currency units (Satoshi) per person.
But wait, shouldn't we compare apples to apples? Let's include ALL USD, including all USD that are electronic. That's the M2 indicator, which is currently around $10trillion. If we assume that 1 billion people all over the world are sharing USD currency, that comes out to 1,000,000 currency units per person. So the Satoshi has only about double the curency units per person (assuming 1 billion people) that the USD has. BUT the US creates more money, and Bitcoin "loses" money over time (it is deleted, forgotten, hard drive crash, etc).
Bitcoin as it currently stands is the IPv4 of currency. If it becomes popular, I can easily imagine not having enough divisible units to go around.
The clip is great. Here's what I don't get: WHY do people keep using that shit, when so many seem to hate it so much?
I hate broccoli. You know what? I don't eat it every day and then bitch about how horrible it is. Why would anyone keep using a service that they seem to dislike as much as they do?
Are they insane, or masochists, or what? I mean, it isn't like people were talking with other people, keeping up to date, and planning things to do together with friends, on the internet for decades before FB came along, or anything... Or is it that they believe they need a for-profit data-harvester in the middle, in order to talk to people?
Seriously, WTF?
O
Back in the day, everybody hated AT&T too. They were a monopoly, they charged too much, never innovated, etc etc. They were still a more convenient option for communicating compared to USPS so people used them anyway.
Seriously, do you and other people in the US really think they're the world's police, the last bastion for freedom, etc? Is this a common mentality?
Regardless of what Americans think, there is no other superpower who wants or tries to be the world's police. So other countries expect the US to be the world's police. Just look at all the pressure we are getting on Syria.
As for myself, I don't think we should do serious intervening, even in Syria. But I do think that we could quietly put our thumb on the scale and tilt it one way or another. The war needs to end- hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing across the border to western-friendly Turkey, our BFF Jordan, and already-unstable Egypt. Turkey is not a particularly rich country, but at least it is decently large. Jordan is not a rich country and is quite small. Egypt is kind of a basket case right now. If any of them crack under the strain of all these poor and jobless immigrants, nothing good will come of it. The biggest risk here is not terrorists, it is the crippling economic burden of millions of refugees. Having 1 failed state in the region is bad enough. We don't need a handful of lawless regions.
I'll eat pretty much anything. I've had Japanese colleagues play "take the gaijin to the izakaya and gross him out with weird foods"....
Why is this such a popular game in Japan? Most Japanese colleagues I met love this game, but I knew a couple guys who really took it to extremes. It almost made me want to order a 28oz steak for them when they visited the US.
Even if we ignored the impossibility to assemble 40 people to do it since everyone who is raiding with the "elite" doesn't give half a poop (unlike when it was new), how exciting do you think it is to start at the bottom? Even if you COULD find people to play, would you WANT to? Would you want to play an 8 year old game and dig your path up for the next 8 years just to be where everyone is today? And then you're 8 years behind AGAIN. Provided the game lasts that long...
Add some spreadsheets, and I think you just described this new ultra-realistic RPG that I've been playing for the last few couple decades. Death is permanent, and it is really difficult to move up and requires a lot of grinding. Plus there are loads of hackers, but only if you know the right 1% of people.
Bitcoin has not fluctuated anywhere near 1000% in the past month. At most you could say 530%, comparing the low of 50 on April 16 to the high of 266 on April 10th. And excluding that bubble-and-pop (which very much still happens in USD-denominated assets), the exchange rate has remained relatively stable in the 90-120 range.
There are only a handful of legitimate industries that have a profit margin higher than 10%. Notably real estate, lawyers, healthcare, and defense contractors. If a grocery store had a currency fluctuation of 20% in one month, they would probably be ruined, since they typically run on margins of 1-5%. Price stability is a good thing. Price stability means you know basically what something costs today, and tommorow, and the next day. If you don't know what something costs, how do you conduct transactions? 1% change a month is disastrous (about 12.7% a year!). How any sane person can argue that a 30% shift in exchange rate is "stable" is completely beyond me.
Instant access to the web is resulting in a culture shift from making stuff up to looking it up, and Wikipedia is the most important place where people go to do that.
So, yes, even though Wikipedia is a repository of groupthink (and the critics are right that we mustn't forget that), it's groupthink that takes into account the views of a much larger number of contributors, and is much more accurate than the groupthink of a small, isolated group of people.
Unless you are reading a subject which is "owned" by one individual, who furiously defends it against changes they don't agree with. You don't even have to get to an obscure subject to find this, just a non-controversial subject that might not be that much fun to write about for most people. If you come across this, it isn't groupthink- it is just people "making stuff up".
Nobody cares what you (or anybody else) did in elementary school. I'm sure the teachers work hard, but K-12 is more about making sure someone can be a productive member of society rather than teaching anything in particular. K-12 is a test, just like passing the GED is a test. If you pass it, for the rest of your life you can say with some confidence that you are not a complete failure, no matter how much of a failure you might become.
This is just one more reason why Microsoft needs to provide GPU performance indications in Taskmgr.exe. GPU's used to be somewhat specialty hardware, and only serious gamers, somewhat serious gamers, or professional graphic or CAD users had powerful ones. Nowadays with the new APU-type chips even the cheapest computers can have a reasonably powerful graphics processor.
Most of the burned garbage is used to feed central heating systems. Same with a lot of other cities in Scandinavia. A few large central furnaces and a big network of hot water pipes.
Not so much to produce electricity. Most of the electricity in Scandinavia is water power or nuclear with a few coal/oil burners that are used for backup in case the current production is insufficient. Add to it a number of windmills but their contribution is small.
There is quite a lot of cogen too. If you are burning the fuel anyway, it makes a lot of sense to use the high-temperature combustion gasses to boil water at high temperature and then run a steam turbine. The steam needed for heating houses, running laundromats, heating businesses, etc is extracted at some point in the turbine.
Why? We can burn a fuel at several thousand degrees F. However, the best pipes we can make can only stand about 1100F (600C) and 3500psi, and these are very expensive and problematic. (For reliability, usually most power plants run at 1000F, 1050F and 2400psi, or sometimes slightly higher). Even at these lower conditions, pipes in the boiler still burst quite frequently (and pipes outside the boiler require wall thickness of several inches). Having high-pressure, high temperature, and high-cost steam pipes running all over town is both prohibitively costly and a safety hazard. So we run the steam turbine, and use cheap piping to houses at much lower pressure and temperature. WE Energies in Milwaukee, for example, tries to run their system between 1 and 200psi, with temperatures near the saturation point.
If you bothered to RTFA, CO2 emissions was the only metric used in the report. Hence the context.
It is still a misleading and inflammatory statement, both in the article and the summary:
But in a recent speech to the Clean Energy Ministerial, International Energy Agency Executive Director, Maria van der Hoeven, had some bad news: “The drive to clean up the world’s energy system has stalled. Despite much talk by world leaders, and despite a boom of renewable energy over the last decade, the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago.”
SO2, CO, NOx, particulates, mercury, and all the other nasty stuff has been almost eliminated from fossil plant emissions, at least in all first-world countries (US, Canada, Japan, Europe, UK). Most coal plants have clear or near-clear emissions now. This has happened in the last 30 years. CO2 is a problem, but if you burn anything you get CO2. It is an unavoidable product of burning something. Plus power stations are much more efficient nowadays, increasing in efficiency from an average of maybe 40% to 60%+ today. So less fuel is burned per MW, and less CO2 is emitted per MW.
If I had the choice of living in a 1980 energy world or in a 2013 energy world (ignoring all other technological advancements) I would chose 2013 every time. To say that "the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago” is not only misleading, it is wrong. It is propaganda.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design.
*Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.
I don't like replying to my own posts, but I forgot to add that air-cooled condensers are avoided as much as possible. They use far less water, but use a lot more power to run the air fans. And the cooling surface must be much larger which also adds cost. And the entire cycle is less efficient with an air-cooled condenser because evaporative cooling can always reach a lower temperature (Carnot-type thermodynamics). In summary, cooling towers use more water per MW, but air-cooled condensers burn more fuel per MW.
If you can get the water permit, cooling towers are the way to go. Recently, I have seen air-cooled condensers becoming more popular for both desert applications and to satisfy permitting concerns.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design.
*Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.
True, and Usenet could be handy. But basically it became a spam forest, and you'd have to wade thru 200 spam emails for one on the topic. Maybe if they would have developed filters for it, it could have gone on further.
Spam filters for Usenet seems like a much more difficult problem to me than spam filters for Email. This is a medium with no functional delete function network-wide. If your message makes it in, it is basically there and not going anywhere. The only way is for each server to filter the incoming data, in real time (or close to it) and decide what is Spam and what is not. If a message is rejected, the spammer can easilly know about it, because they can easilly check the group and see that their message isn't there! Then they can modify the Spam and keep retrying until it makes it past the filters.
Compare this to email, where we have all sorts of various tricks to trap the email after it is flagged as Spam. It can be quarrantined, dropped silently, etc. The Spammer (should) not know if they beat the filter or not, since there is no confirmation and no way for them to see mailbox contents to confirm that the message is there. Filters remain effective a lot longer, so filtering is useful.
You can profit from bitcoin in four different ways:
1. Have a special asic rig that is custom made for mining bitcoins.
2. Have a botnet that you put to work mining bitcoins using other peoples electricity.
3. Speculate in bitcoins and bet that they will go up or down in value.
4. Hack someone else that has bitcoins.
You forgot FX trading. There isn't enough volume (or the time to complete a trade is too long?) in bitcoin to ensure that the different BTC->currency rates are the same ratio as other currency->currency ratios.
For example, if I have $1 USD and can buy $1.10CAD, then use my $1.10CAD to buy 1.15 Swiss Francs, then use my 1.15 Swiss Francs to buy $1.05 USD, I'll keep making trade that way all day long until the ratios come back into order with each other. With real money, there are plenty of people who try to do this and the amount of money to be made is very small. There aren't enough people doing this in Bitcoin so the ratios are out of whack and often favorable to trade around.
Could we have a small generator in a creak powering a few local home?
You sure could. The problem is you need a 0 or near-0 head (water height) turbine to do it. The only option is really an undershot water wheel or possibly a Pelton wheel. You will never get a permit to build a dam nowadays, or if you could, the permitting cost would be prohibitive. So you have to have a damless design. The problem with this is that water falling from a high level to a lower level has MUCH more energy than water flowing horizontally at typical naturally-occurring streams and rivers. In fact, in most non-pedantic physics problems, the water horizontal speed is usually ignored completely since it is so small!
These 0 or very low head (damless) machines can be "efficient" in that they can convert a lot of the energy that is available. However, compared to a system that uses water height (dams), there just isn't much energy that is available.
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Hasn't changed anything? Are you insane. One small example is Russia won't sell the Chinese ANY advanced weapons. After the Chinese copied some older model Soviet weapons the Russians refused to sell them ANY advanced weapon systems. This little detail has crippled Chinese weapon advancement for more than a decade, and only recently after realizing they can't create the same 50 years of Russian innovation on their own they are only now at the point of a new arms deal with the Russians with guarantees that the designs will not be copied. Even with firm contractual guarantees the Russians are still not sure they want to execute the contract because they don't trust them. I'd wager the contract is about 50/50 that it will ever happen.
Wholesale theft of IP has harmed China in almost as many ways as it has helped them and they have started to realize the damage they've done.
And yet companies keep coming back. Even Toshiba is giving IP to China for their latest design nuclear reactor. Toshiba, a company which obtained much of their steam turbine knowledge from licensing deals from GE in the 1970's and has come to have near-domination of new large steam turbines in the US. Toshiba took GE's steam turbine knowledge and used their weak currency to move in on the market. GE was seriously weakened in the steam turbine market from the IP deals, and has nearly given up trying to sell new steam turbines. Toshiba knows this history well, and yet they repeat it. The allure of a market of a billion people is too strong. Executives will always hop on these licensing deals for quick cash. By the time it all crashes down the executive has moved on or moved up.
Even if a company learns their lesson, there will always be another company to step into their place for a quick buck. Even if they are selling China the rope which will be used to hang them.
The only blowback from China's policies I see is that their quality is known to be suspect. I see plenty of specs which specifically require that NO parts come from China. Full stop. Chinese supply used to be acceptable if the factory was certified, inspected, etc., but corruption is so rampant that these papers are known to mean nothing now. By the time you do your diligence and make sure that the factory is OK, you might as well have bought from a more reliable country. And you still can't be 100% sure that the chinese part is OK since they might completely change as soon as you are satisfied with your samples and the inspector is out the door.
Land using rocket boots. Nope. 90% death rate for that one. the Human body does NOT have the strength to handle controlling and vectoring thrust with the legs. Anyone trying this will simply die. And it's a very stupid idea. A parachute works great, I'd rather have that than a giant tank of rocket fuel on my back.
Do they have to have extraordinary strength? If the deceleration from ~120mph to 0 (or near 0) takes 25-27 seconds, that is only about 2g. Most people who are in good condition could probably handle that. If you are going to all the trouble of making rocket boots, you might as well go to the extra trouble of putting the thrust controlling and vectoring in the boots. Its still a terrible idea but I believe it is a possible idea.
All of this information is in the initial filing, which wired posted here, including the fact that the government figured out partial patterns to his passwords. You should read the filing, though I warn you, you will want to retch by the end of it: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/04/fedswantdecryption.pdf
After reading the request, I am amazed that the judge issued the first ruling at all. The download logs clearly showed entries that graphically describe pedophilia being written to a secure disk. I think the agents freaked out a bit, and assumed the disks would self destruct (as far as I know, the maxtor disks don't in fact do so).
I know it's unpopular to say on slashdot, but the government has a job to do, and is doing it well.
Regardless of the circumstances, ordering someone to decrypt a hard drive should be against the 5th amendment. I look at this the same way as any other "evidence is in a very hard place to get" situation.
If I lock evidence in a locker or a house, the authorities are going to break my lock or break down the door. They can't order me to give them the key if the location of the key is unknown to them. If I have an electronic keypad, they can't order me to give them the passcode.
If I kill someone and, having decided that a "shallow grave" is likely going to get me caught, bury the body in a 1000ft grave (suppose I own a drilling company), they can't make me dig up that body. It is upon them to dig it up. If I weigh someone down and dump them in the ocean, they can't force me to tell them the exact latitude/longitude. They can gather evidence all day long through any legal means, but forcing someone to actively incriminate themselves has never been, and should not be, legal in the US.
The fact that we now have locks that are effectively unpickable and unbreakable is unfortunate for law enforcement, but that doesn't change the 5th amendment. There should be no exceptions. The nature of the crime or the amount of other evidence doesn't matter to the 5th amendment.
On the one hand it is great that Linux allows people to innovate, and fork when the need arises. On the other hand the Linux desktop has reached the point that I simply don't want to choose between the myriad of desktops and window managers any more.
This probably stems from the fact that it is far more interesting (to most people) to create something, rather than fix something that someone else made which is broken.
There also may be some professors out there who make projects like "write me an rudimentary Z from scratch", then the person just keeps working on the project until it becomes a usable piece of software. I am not a code writer, but in my few computer classes "make me a Z!" was a far more common homework than "Here is a Y, which Bob wrote in ridiculous spaghetti code and has bugs A, B, and C, please fix it".
While the second is arguably a more common skill, I can easilly imagine that the first is much easier to grade and/or detect cheating.
You would be far better served by getting a plumber, a roofer, a HVAC tech, and a general contrator to look at the place. It would not cost you anymore either. The home inspector is just there to rubber stamp the house so you can get a mortgage. Anyone who is not willing to take some liability might as well not look at the place at all.
Or possibly worse, the home inspector can go on a markup rampage, flagging absolutely everything and marking everything as "very serious" or "safety hazard" even when the problem is very minor. All to cover his own butt. The inspection is then basically worthless.
Thus my interpretation is that this camera model's hardware specs were deemed insufficient by the manufacturer for this specific capability, and considering that it can only do burst mode up to $X$ frames before capping out its memory buffer, the manufacturer may have been correct. So my interpretation is not that they "re-enabled a purposely disabled core" but rather that they added functionality which the manufacturer had decided that this hardware was not capable of performing well.
The Canon 50D was announced on 26 August 2008. The very first DSLR to have video recording was the Nikon D90, which was announced 27 August 2008. Maybe Canon suspected (or knew) that Nikon would announce their video-capable DSLR the next day after their announcement. Maybe Canon should have had the foresight to introduce the first video-recording DSLR. DSLRs with video recording were not a common thing back then. In fact, they didn't even really exist. Designing a DSLR that doesn't record video, at a time when NO DSLR records video, isn't really an oversight.
Is the end goal of life a high salary?
I understand his advice, if followed, and if you work your way, either through trade school or apprenticeship, to journeyman, and then to master, you can expect a $80K+ a year income.
Is this the end-all, be-all of human existence?
A high salary is not why I went into the sciences - I went in with a passion for knowledge and knowing how things work, and why, and how to build things that, because they were barely within the boundaries of the rules, did amazing and astonishing things. A high salary resulted because I was successful at pursuing this passion.
I would instead advise people to try to find three things for which they feel passion, and are good at, and then find someone willing to pay you to do one of them.
If you can only find one thing for which you have passion, if you can still find someone to pay you to do it, then you are ahead of the game, compared to what Bloomberg suggest, if it happens that none of your objects of passion include plumbing.
There are plenty of people who look at the top end paychecks available in a profession, and choose a profession on that basis. Those who do will never reach the top end of that pay range if they do not posses a passion for the profession; they will always be middle tier, and they will watch the clock until it is time to check out from their job, and "get back to their 'real' life". This is where a lot of unemployed IT "professionals" come from.
For those clock watching 8 hours of their day, they will be miserable, working at something for which they have no passion, having intentionally turned their soul off for those eight hours in exchange for money. They will sell half their waking life into misery to benefit the other half of their waking life. And at the end of the day in their "real life", they will find they can not take joy in their "real life", as they anticipate, after sleeping, returning to their job for the next 8 soulless hours of work.
Do something you love, and for which you have passion; reclaim your soul for those lost 8 hours of your life.
I have done different things in my career, some of which interests me, and some which did not. Doing "something I love" has not really helped me live a pleasant life and sleep well at night. The main drivers for me are more like:
1. Job is important and has an impact on someone or some thing. There is a purpose which makes me feel needed.
2. Job has progress milestones which are achievable with some work. A job with no noticeable progress is miserable monotony. Likewise, a job with unachievable goals is frustrating.
3. Job has the right mix of travel, hands-on work, desk work, etc for ME.
4. Boss who is fair, sets clear expectations, and is interested in having a "rising tide lift all boats".
5. Being financially secure. This includes good health insurance. I sleep a lot better at night now that my income is significantly more than my needs. I can worry about the things that matter and not the fluctuations in my bank account.
The first 4 have been proven over and over in psychology studies to make people happier. Doing "something you love" means that I make my hobbies into a job. It is a good way to become sick of both and then be miserable.
I teach engineering at a maritime academy and it dazzles me that so many students pay through the nose and suffer through 4+ years of regimented academics for a license that they could get by just sailing as a paid vessel assistant for a few years after high school and taking a Coast Guard examination. This is a practice called hawsepiping and used to be the norm for the profession. Marine engineers are really (for the most part) mechanics, and much simpler vocational school would be more than adequate for these jobs. Admittedly the students also get a "marine engineering degree" over and above the training for the license that is transferrable to a lot of shore-side professions, but most of that is lost on the students. All they care about is getting the license and many whine and cry about having to read, write, do math, and take engineering coursework. I do think that degree is worth what they pay, but it really a form of insurance so they can remain employed after they come ashore, and getting 20 year old boys who aspire to be sailors to think about what they are going to do later in life (hell, later in the *day*) is hard.
Better tighten that onion on your belt. Meeting the STCW-95 requirements would be really tough without a dedicated educational/hand-on program. Working your way up from AB or wiper is for masochists. It could be done, but it is a far harder path for the same result. It is a throwback to the time when people had careers and pensions. Now people have jobs and need to change companies frequently. The marine industry is no different than any other industry today- no company wants to pay to train anybody, they want to hire someone who has all the certifications and experience already, and they don't want to pay a dime more than they have to in salary.
I do think that the standard 3rd mate/3rd engineer track could be shortened to 3 or even 2 years, but at that point it becomes Training rather than an Education (and as an instructor, you should appreciate the difference). In-state Maritime Academy is one of the best purchases I ever made. It is truly a bargain when you look at all the idiots spending $40k a year to become English majors.
I really disagree with your statement that " Admittedly the students also get a "marine engineering degree" over and above the training for the license that is transferrable to a lot of shore-side professions, but most of that is lost on the students. All they care about is getting the license...". It wasn't that long ago that I was in school. 2/3 of my classmates wanted to graduate, get their license, start jobs, and get on with their lives. The license is just a tool for them to get there. Only about half of my license-bearing classmates were still shipping out after 5 years. Everybody knows that shipping out is a marriage-killer and a poor way to raise kids. The degree is not a fallback plan if the license doesn't pan out for some reason. The coast guard license opens only a handful of doors (albeit important ones). The degree is a piece of paper that opens many kinds of doors.
If its picking you up in Lakewood or making other stops on the way, it's not the "high speed" you're thinking of.
The population of Lakewood is over 140,000 people. Not enourmous, but worth stopping at.
I have been on the bullet trains in Japan, and the non-super-express ones stop at some fairly small stations. The key is that their trains are electrified, which allows for very fast acceleration. They also stop only long enough to let people on and off- 1 minute or less. When they changed from the 500 series to the N700 series, the acceleration was improved by about 80%. Even though the N700 has a lower top speed, it is faster to get to the destination because of the fast acceleration.
With 21million BTCs dividable into 100million satoshis each I think the world will have plenty of artificial bits to spread around.
Really?
/1 billion or 2,100,000 currency units (Satoshi) per person.
There are about 1.18 trillion paper/coin USD in circulation. Let's estimate that 60-75% is held outside the US nowadays (this is a difficult number to calculate so it is basically an educated guess). There are about 350 million people in the US, so we have roughly (1.18 trillion *100*0.4) / 350million or 135,000 physical currency units per person ($1350.00). This seems low, but this represents physical currency, not money in bank accounts.
Now compare to bitcoin. If we assume 1 billion ("the world will have plenty") people use it, then we have (21 million * 100 million)
But wait, shouldn't we compare apples to apples? Let's include ALL USD, including all USD that are electronic. That's the M2 indicator, which is currently around $10trillion. If we assume that 1 billion people all over the world are sharing USD currency, that comes out to 1,000,000 currency units per person. So the Satoshi has only about double the curency units per person (assuming 1 billion people) that the USD has. BUT the US creates more money, and Bitcoin "loses" money over time (it is deleted, forgotten, hard drive crash, etc).
Bitcoin as it currently stands is the IPv4 of currency. If it becomes popular, I can easily imagine not having enough divisible units to go around.
The clip is great. Here's what I don't get: WHY do people keep using that shit, when so many seem to hate it so much?
I hate broccoli. You know what? I don't eat it every day and then bitch about how horrible it is. Why would anyone keep using a service that they seem to dislike as much as they do?
Are they insane, or masochists, or what? I mean, it isn't like people were talking with other people, keeping up to date, and planning things to do together with friends, on the internet for decades before FB came along, or anything... Or is it that they believe they need a for-profit data-harvester in the middle, in order to talk to people?
Seriously, WTF?
O
Back in the day, everybody hated AT&T too. They were a monopoly, they charged too much, never innovated, etc etc. They were still a more convenient option for communicating compared to USPS so people used them anyway.
Do you want us to police the world or not?
Not. Please.
Seriously, do you and other people in the US really think they're the world's police, the last bastion for freedom, etc? Is this a common mentality?
Regardless of what Americans think, there is no other superpower who wants or tries to be the world's police. So other countries expect the US to be the world's police. Just look at all the pressure we are getting on Syria.
As for myself, I don't think we should do serious intervening, even in Syria. But I do think that we could quietly put our thumb on the scale and tilt it one way or another. The war needs to end- hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing across the border to western-friendly Turkey, our BFF Jordan, and already-unstable Egypt. Turkey is not a particularly rich country, but at least it is decently large. Jordan is not a rich country and is quite small. Egypt is kind of a basket case right now. If any of them crack under the strain of all these poor and jobless immigrants, nothing good will come of it. The biggest risk here is not terrorists, it is the crippling economic burden of millions of refugees. Having 1 failed state in the region is bad enough. We don't need a handful of lawless regions.
Pretty much this.
I'll eat pretty much anything. I've had Japanese colleagues play "take the gaijin to the izakaya and gross him out with weird foods"....
Why is this such a popular game in Japan? Most Japanese colleagues I met love this game, but I knew a couple guys who really took it to extremes. It almost made me want to order a 28oz steak for them when they visited the US.
Even if we ignored the impossibility to assemble 40 people to do it since everyone who is raiding with the "elite" doesn't give half a poop (unlike when it was new), how exciting do you think it is to start at the bottom? Even if you COULD find people to play, would you WANT to? Would you want to play an 8 year old game and dig your path up for the next 8 years just to be where everyone is today? And then you're 8 years behind AGAIN. Provided the game lasts that long...
Add some spreadsheets, and I think you just described this new ultra-realistic RPG that I've been playing for the last few couple decades. Death is permanent, and it is really difficult to move up and requires a lot of grinding. Plus there are loads of hackers, but only if you know the right 1% of people.
Bitcoin has not fluctuated anywhere near 1000% in the past month. At most you could say 530%, comparing the low of 50 on April 16 to the high of 266 on April 10th. And excluding that bubble-and-pop (which very much still happens in USD-denominated assets), the exchange rate has remained relatively stable in the 90-120 range.
There are only a handful of legitimate industries that have a profit margin higher than 10%. Notably real estate, lawyers, healthcare, and defense contractors. If a grocery store had a currency fluctuation of 20% in one month, they would probably be ruined, since they typically run on margins of 1-5%. Price stability is a good thing. Price stability means you know basically what something costs today, and tommorow, and the next day. If you don't know what something costs, how do you conduct transactions? 1% change a month is disastrous (about 12.7% a year!). How any sane person can argue that a 30% shift in exchange rate is "stable" is completely beyond me.
Instant access to the web is resulting in a culture shift from making stuff up to looking it up, and Wikipedia is the most important place where people go to do that.
So, yes, even though Wikipedia is a repository of groupthink (and the critics are right that we mustn't forget that), it's groupthink that takes into account the views of a much larger number of contributors, and is much more accurate than the groupthink of a small, isolated group of people.
Unless you are reading a subject which is "owned" by one individual, who furiously defends it against changes they don't agree with. You don't even have to get to an obscure subject to find this, just a non-controversial subject that might not be that much fun to write about for most people. If you come across this, it isn't groupthink- it is just people "making stuff up".
Nobody cares what you (or anybody else) did in elementary school. I'm sure the teachers work hard, but K-12 is more about making sure someone can be a productive member of society rather than teaching anything in particular. K-12 is a test, just like passing the GED is a test. If you pass it, for the rest of your life you can say with some confidence that you are not a complete failure, no matter how much of a failure you might become.
This is just one more reason why Microsoft needs to provide GPU performance indications in Taskmgr.exe. GPU's used to be somewhat specialty hardware, and only serious gamers, somewhat serious gamers, or professional graphic or CAD users had powerful ones. Nowadays with the new APU-type chips even the cheapest computers can have a reasonably powerful graphics processor.
Most of the burned garbage is used to feed central heating systems. Same with a lot of other cities in Scandinavia. A few large central furnaces and a big network of hot water pipes.
Not so much to produce electricity. Most of the electricity in Scandinavia is water power or nuclear with a few coal/oil burners that are used for backup in case the current production is insufficient. Add to it a number of windmills but their contribution is small.
There is quite a lot of cogen too. If you are burning the fuel anyway, it makes a lot of sense to use the high-temperature combustion gasses to boil water at high temperature and then run a steam turbine. The steam needed for heating houses, running laundromats, heating businesses, etc is extracted at some point in the turbine.
Why? We can burn a fuel at several thousand degrees F. However, the best pipes we can make can only stand about 1100F (600C) and 3500psi, and these are very expensive and problematic. (For reliability, usually most power plants run at 1000F, 1050F and 2400psi, or sometimes slightly higher). Even at these lower conditions, pipes in the boiler still burst quite frequently (and pipes outside the boiler require wall thickness of several inches). Having high-pressure, high temperature, and high-cost steam pipes running all over town is both prohibitively costly and a safety hazard. So we run the steam turbine, and use cheap piping to houses at much lower pressure and temperature. WE Energies in Milwaukee, for example, tries to run their system between 1 and 200psi, with temperatures near the saturation point.
If you bothered to RTFA, CO2 emissions was the only metric used in the report. Hence the context.
It is still a misleading and inflammatory statement, both in the article and the summary:
But in a recent speech to the Clean Energy Ministerial, International Energy Agency Executive Director, Maria van der Hoeven, had some bad news: “The drive to clean up the world’s energy system has stalled. Despite much talk by world leaders, and despite a boom of renewable energy over the last decade, the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago.”
SO2, CO, NOx, particulates, mercury, and all the other nasty stuff has been almost eliminated from fossil plant emissions, at least in all first-world countries (US, Canada, Japan, Europe, UK). Most coal plants have clear or near-clear emissions now. This has happened in the last 30 years. CO2 is a problem, but if you burn anything you get CO2. It is an unavoidable product of burning something. Plus power stations are much more efficient nowadays, increasing in efficiency from an average of maybe 40% to 60%+ today. So less fuel is burned per MW, and less CO2 is emitted per MW.
If I had the choice of living in a 1980 energy world or in a 2013 energy world (ignoring all other technological advancements) I would chose 2013 every time. To say that "the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago” is not only misleading, it is wrong. It is propaganda.
The darn thing needs normal ground water to cool.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design. *Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.
I don't like replying to my own posts, but I forgot to add that air-cooled condensers are avoided as much as possible. They use far less water, but use a lot more power to run the air fans. And the cooling surface must be much larger which also adds cost. And the entire cycle is less efficient with an air-cooled condenser because evaporative cooling can always reach a lower temperature (Carnot-type thermodynamics). In summary, cooling towers use more water per MW, but air-cooled condensers burn more fuel per MW.
If you can get the water permit, cooling towers are the way to go. Recently, I have seen air-cooled condensers becoming more popular for both desert applications and to satisfy permitting concerns.
The darn thing needs normal ground water to cool.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design.
*Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.
True, and Usenet could be handy. But basically it became a spam forest, and you'd have to wade thru 200 spam emails for one on the topic. Maybe if they would have developed filters for it, it could have gone on further.
Spam filters for Usenet seems like a much more difficult problem to me than spam filters for Email. This is a medium with no functional delete function network-wide. If your message makes it in, it is basically there and not going anywhere. The only way is for each server to filter the incoming data, in real time (or close to it) and decide what is Spam and what is not. If a message is rejected, the spammer can easilly know about it, because they can easilly check the group and see that their message isn't there! Then they can modify the Spam and keep retrying until it makes it past the filters.
Compare this to email, where we have all sorts of various tricks to trap the email after it is flagged as Spam. It can be quarrantined, dropped silently, etc. The Spammer (should) not know if they beat the filter or not, since there is no confirmation and no way for them to see mailbox contents to confirm that the message is there. Filters remain effective a lot longer, so filtering is useful.
You can profit from bitcoin in four different ways:
1. Have a special asic rig that is custom made for mining bitcoins. 2. Have a botnet that you put to work mining bitcoins using other peoples electricity. 3. Speculate in bitcoins and bet that they will go up or down in value. 4. Hack someone else that has bitcoins.
You forgot FX trading. There isn't enough volume (or the time to complete a trade is too long?) in bitcoin to ensure that the different BTC->currency rates are the same ratio as other currency->currency ratios.
For example, if I have $1 USD and can buy $1.10CAD, then use my $1.10CAD to buy 1.15 Swiss Francs, then use my 1.15 Swiss Francs to buy $1.05 USD, I'll keep making trade that way all day long until the ratios come back into order with each other. With real money, there are plenty of people who try to do this and the amount of money to be made is very small. There aren't enough people doing this in Bitcoin so the ratios are out of whack and often favorable to trade around.
Could we have a small generator in a creak powering a few local home?
You sure could. The problem is you need a 0 or near-0 head (water height) turbine to do it. The only option is really an undershot water wheel or possibly a Pelton wheel. You will never get a permit to build a dam nowadays, or if you could, the permitting cost would be prohibitive. So you have to have a damless design. The problem with this is that water falling from a high level to a lower level has MUCH more energy than water flowing horizontally at typical naturally-occurring streams and rivers. In fact, in most non-pedantic physics problems, the water horizontal speed is usually ignored completely since it is so small!
These 0 or very low head (damless) machines can be "efficient" in that they can convert a lot of the energy that is available. However, compared to a system that uses water height (dams), there just isn't much energy that is available.