Mass-transit cost calculations depend heavilly on the route, and sometimes on how far out you book. I was thinking about going Milwaukee->Vancouver sometime this fall. Amtrak is around $220 depending on the date (one-way). The fuel bill for my motorcycle (48mpg) would come out to perhaps $200 one way (I would take a lot of side roads and detours). Both would be an equally cool adventure. I consider the price to be a dead heat, and Amtrack probably comes out ahead since I would have to stay in hotels or buy camping gear. If only there was an inexpensive option to ship a motorcycle that kind of distance. Too bad the Autotrain is on the east coast only.
If you had 2 people in a 25mpg car, it is still about equal for the above trip. Once you start loading 3+ people into a car though, most mass transit in the world starts to look bad. Even in Japan where cars are crazy expensive ($40 tolls are not uncommon) and mass transit will take you wherever you want to go, there is a certain point where a car full of people is cheaper.
You'll note that they are only required to treat emergencies and stabilize people. If you've got hepatitis, cancer, or Lupus, you get to die on the street.
We need to get away from that. Its better to have everyone on a government plan than the uninsured going to the ER every time they have a cold. Even though they don't have to treat that, it still takes time and money for a hospital to triage and check the person out.
I was going to recommend Walgreens also. They quality is good and they offer matte prints. I strongly prefer matte finish over glossy. I have noticed that Walgreens uses exactly the same interface as Snapfish. Not sure if they are affiliated or just using the same software packages.
Walgreens is pretty expensive compared to other online printers, but they have sales all the time. A quick trip to RetailMeNot will usually save you 40-50% on Walgreens prints, and if they don't have a good sale this week, take note of when the current coupon codes expire and check back then. Walgreens also doesn't play games with their shipping prices either. I recently shopped around to get 600 4x6 prints, and many other places had a lower per-print price than Walgreens, but after you uploaded them all and got to Checkout, they added $21 for shipping (for 600 prints). Walgreens shipping was free.
I recently came to a similar conclusion- even though my pictures folder is mirrored and backed up to 2 different computers via CrashPlan.com, these are the memories of my life and my child's life. I want them around in 60 years just like I have photos of my mother's childhood. Prints have been proven to last. Besides flooding or fire, there is not much that can destroy them. They degrade very slowly and are still "readable" after decades. They can't be corrupted. Electronic data is much more fragile.
Now that they put water back in, it's stabilizing.
That doesn't seem to be true. The graph doesn't go to the present day, but we are taking the heat out of the area. No amount of water injection is going to make the production in the Geysers go back to what it used to be.
We aren't drilling in the Yellowstone Caldera for various reasons, including the fact that the majority of it is inside a national park. People don't take kindly to this in their parks.
Geothermal isn't even that clean. You need to drill wells all over the damn place, chasing the steam around as you suck the heat out of the ground. Not to mention the arsenic, antimony, and boron that comes up with the steam. It has to be separated out and disposed of.
I'm not an expert on Geothermal, but I am not clueless either. One of my company's biggest customers is Calpine, and we have 2 of my work buddies at The Geysers right now. I have visited geothermal sites in the US and in the Philippines. Geothermal is not clean.
There is not an electric grid on the planet that uses wind or geothermal as base loads,
This statement is not true. [wikipedia.org]
Even if you do believe that if comes with a lot of caveats. 1.5GW in California is a drop in the bucket, a small percentage of the power and not really a base load, even if the units are operated 24/7. The same wikipedia article you linked to says that the capacity of The Geysers has been declining for years. Don't you think that if they could drill a few more wells and make more power and thus more money they would? The Geysers is one of the best geothermal sites in the US (half of the geothermal power in the US is there), and yet the total output is less than a typical nuclear site. If we find another site like the Geysers, by all means let us drill there for steam. But it it can't be a significant part of the energy mix because the amount of steam we need isn't there.
I see a good post but no proposal on what you would recommend. It looks like you are slanted towards Geothermal but unless you live in a small-population country with a LOT of geothermal potential (Iceland being the only real example), it can't supply a significant portion of the power. Geothermal isn't as green as many people think it is, either. There are some nasty chemicals involved (including arsenic and other bad things), and you can't just drill a well and forget about it. The steam pressure and temperature degrades fairly quickly so you always need to be drilling more wells, chasing the steam. It's similar to drilling for oil in that regard. The concern for cooling down the onsens is not unfounded, since you are removing the geothermal heat from localized areas.
I may not be unbiased (working for a japanese company that has invested billions into Nuclear in the last few years) but nuclear needs to be part of Japan's energy mix. Importing millions of tons of coal a year from Australia and millions of cubic feet of natural gas a year from south Asia is not a long-term solution. After the earthquake, Japan restarted a bunch of hydro turbines which had been shut down because they were notorious for blendering fish. They also restarted some oil plants which had been shut down for being dirty and uneconomical. These are short-term bandaids. Renewable electricity can be part of the energy mix, but you need a base to stand on. If Nuclear was a "stop gap" as you say, it was a pretty good one. The current policy is much worse.
But units wouldn't need to be labeled if everybody used the same system. The continued existence of the zombie Imperial system is the root cause of the problem.
No, you should always label your units. My company's (Japanese-based) engineering document system usually lists material stock dimensions in mm. Except for the times that it lists it in meters. And sometimes it is ambiguous where the decimal point should be since that isn't listed (and we often work in 100ths of a mm). There is plenty of confusion because some idiot Japanese designer didn't list his units, and imperial units aren't involved.
What about the DLC that's created after the game has gone gold because the asset creators are just sitting there twiddling our thumbs waiting for Metacritic scores to keep us from getting fired while the pre-production guys finish ironing out the details of the next game?
That is a problem, but it shouldn't be the consumer's problem. In the customer's eyes, it looks really bad, regardless of the reason. Start the preproduction guys sooner, or make a completely different indie-sized game while you are waiting. It is like delivering a TV without digital TV capability the day after the analog stations go dark. You can make a buck, sure, but the customers' opinion of you isn't going to be good.
Both Half-Life 2 and Portal 2 have unskippable cutscenes. Portal 2 was the most annoying when you're going back through to collect missing achievements. Yes, Wheatley, shut the fuck up and open the fucking door already!
Usually the HL2 cut scenes had interesting things to do while you were waiting. The long lab cutscene right after you get the HEV suit, for example, and physics objects to play with, a miniteleporter to break (and get an achievement for after achievements were added), and lots of other little elements to waste your time. You could pick things up, toss them around, and look at the interesting things lying around. Free movement, even if in a locked room, is far better than "sit back and watch this prerendered scene".
I'm glad someone raised this point. Even today, with crazy spray-on polymer packaging and protective films designed to evaporate at a certain temperature, the practical lifetime of most preservative coatings is about 5 years. Its a bit of a problem when you sell parts for machines which have major overhauls every 8 years. After the coating breaks down, rusting begins. Rubber and other rubber-substitute products have a finite lifetime, even today. Even with good airframes they have a big restoration job ahead of them. Planes under the great lakes or in swamps may be of similar condition when it is all said and done.
We all know Hitler hated Jews. Germany blamed Jews for the losses of WW1, as they cut the flow of money from their banks. It wasn't hard to demonize them, but probably should've been done from the perspective that they were Bankers, not Jews. That's like hating ICEEs because Muslims seem to own 7-11 corp.
Germany got screwed by banks in WW1, and bankers are stereotypically jews. So Germany blamed Jews.
Your analogy is just odd though odd. A better one would be hating Muslims because you got a bad brainfreeze from an ICEE and Muslims generally work at convenience stores.
No, it's not. It's supposed to make the screen feel like it has a higher contrast ratio than it actually does..
That helps but it can't eliminate one problem. The human eye is lazy and is attracted to black. Black text on white is easy to read. White text on black is hard because your eye always wants to look at the black. There was a good example of this in a Calvin and Hobbes strip- the first 3 frames were daytime and the last was nighttime (black). It was hard to read the strip from the beginning because your eyes wanted to jump right to the last frame. I can't seem to find it however.
Only to a certain extent. You don't turn on and off furnaces on a coal/gas plant just because demand dropped. Most of those plants burn fuel (a ton of it) regardless of their production being in active use or not.
This is true at a plant-level but is misleading when you consider the whole grid. In many jurisdictions in the US, the different power stations bid on the price of electricity. In a simplified case, if Bob will sell you 100MW at $0.04 and Tom will sell you 80MW at $0.06, but 150MW is needed, then you buy all of Bob's power and then 50MW of Tom's. If the load drops to just 80MW, then you stop buying from Tom altogether, and Tom probably shuts his machine down. There are complications to this scheme including power-purchasing agreements, spinning reserve requirements, etc, but that is basically how it works.
The grid operator knows how much power they will need to within a pretty good margin of error. It is very predictable depending on the outside temperature and the time of day. Most people have a daily routine of electricity use and in the aggregate, the electricity use of a population is very stable and predictable. 10,000 people going home at 5PM and turning on their electric stove is predictable. Large users of electricity are often required to notify the grid operator in advance so a huge machine coming online doesn't cause problems on the grid. So if the grid operator knows they will only need 5GW for the next week (because of cooler temperatures or whatnot) but have 8GW of generating capacity, they give notice to the unneeded stations that they probably won't be buying their power for a while. If nobody is buying your power then you shut the plant down (with the following exceptions).
Hydro plants aren't as restricted in water flow as you might think. Most dams have multiple (even dozens of) turbines so the just shut one down completely. The bigger problem is that they need to keep a certain flow rate because otherwise the downstream river would dry up. This is why hydro plants are usually the cheapest power around when demand is low. The water needs to flow downstream anyway.
Nuclear power stations don't really fit into your argument because they start up, run continuously for months or years, and then shut down for maintenance. Their biggest cost is personnel. Fuel is only a tiny fraction of their expenses so it makes no sense to shut a nuclear machine down unless maintenance is required.
Everyone knows that the solar panels consume far more energy in their production than they ever produce in their lifetime
Except that can't be true.
1. Solar panels eventually pay for themselves in electricity. It might take a while depending on the climate, but they do have a payback period. 2. Companies selling solar panels want to make a profit. 3.Companies selling electricity on the grid using non-solar methods want to make a profit.
If solar panels never produced more energy than they consume to manufacture, the solar panel companies couldn't make them at a price point which had a payback period. They would either not sell them, or the paypack period would be infinitely long (no payback).
Disclaimer- I work for Toshiba but not in this division
You can't predict the future. Integrated POS systems might even become more prevalent as stores shift to self-checkout and fire most of their staff (Looking at you, Home Depot). 40 years ago steam turbines were considered a mature technology for power generation. The Gas turbine looks like it is going to be a promising new cash cow. GE turns their R&D attention to the gas turbine and licenses their steam turbine technology to Toshiba for some short-term cash. Toshiba puts a decent amount of money into the R&D of their newly-aquired technology. Today Toshiba is the #1 supplier of steam turbines (by MW) in the US, and has held that title for the past 9 years. Without GE's technology transfer 40 years ago Toshiba could never have done that much with the steam turbine.
I don't really know what Toshiba is up to since I don't work in that division. The smart thing to do would be to leverage the new acquisition in order to bring Japanese-style payment options to the US. Toshiba already has mobile phone-based payment systems, and various other payment methods that are always "3 years away" from widespread adoption in the US. They could take this torch and completely run away with it, making billions. Or the POS market could collapse in 3 years- sometimes Toshiba's management makes questionable decisions. I'll wait and find out what happens before I laud this as a great strategy by IBM. American companies selling out to foreign companies never seems to work out well for the American company.
Growing up in Maine close to the border, the CBC TV and radio stations were often stronger than the local US stations. I liked the CBC then, and I like it now. The news especially is much better than US news. CBC news doesn't view events as Black vs White, doesn't get distracted by "lost white girl" stories for long periods of time, and doesn't oversensationalize things. I have never heard the CBC say "Will X kill you? The answer may be surprising. Tune in at 10". CBC is good journalism in the way that it used to be 30 years ago.
I would pay to recieve CBC, but it is basically impossible. Satellite TV and Cable doesn't carry it, and only a limited amount of programming is usually available online.
Would you really do away with the CBC and their Hockey Night in Canada? Isn't that considered treason?
I just checked to make sure that Don Cherry is still doing Hockey Night in Canada. Damn that guy is old. My mother used to watch him on Hockey Night in Canada when she was a kid.
You joke but they do this in the Philippines, you know, where there actual Muslim extremists trying to kidnap and/or kill people. The Wikipedia page lists dozens of attacks in the last 20 years. They must be doing something right though, as only one of those incidents involves an airplane or an airport.
There is a guy with a metal detector at the airport door, and he gives you an extremely brief patdown. The patdown is similar to "movie-style" patdowns where they just go down your torso on the left and right of your body. It takes about 10 seconds to clear someone. After you are inside, you have to go through the real security which involves cheap metal detectors, profiling, and possibly bomb-sniffing dogs. There is plenty of corruption in the Philippines, but even so, they are probably spending 1/100th of what the US spends on a per person basis.
"Hide the decline" refers to the fact that temperatures inferred from tree ring sizes in the last couple decades haven't matched actual temperature readings (possibly because of other human influence on tree growth). When presenting tree ring data, they replace very recent data with actual temps, usually using a different color or something to indicate that it has been swapped out.
I don't buy that as a legitimate methodology. In any other field, people would cry foul.
I had a recent case at my job where the efficiency of one of our machines is suspect. There is a known issue with the product and the customer has been looking out for degraded efficiency. They sent us a trend of efficiency over the last 18 months. The problem is, halfway through the data a thermocouple broke and they had to replace it. Even if you do a rolling average over very large periods, there is an obvious jump in the data. The new thermocouple might not have the same linearity as the old one, and is probably calibrated slightly different. Unfortunately because of this we can not draw any real conclusions from the data.
Plotting data like this using 2 different systems of measurement is fishy. If you're going to use ice cores, use ice cores. If you are going to use tree rings, then use tree rings. If you want to look at how much rivers have flooded over time and if you can prove that it relates to temperature, then use that. If you switch in the middle then you can't draw a real conclusion. It would be like converting a record album to MP3 and changing turntables halfway through a song. You can try to account for the differences between the turntables but even if you fixed it, it wouldn't be correct.
Canada Post must have a lot of weird inefficiencies and idiosyncrasies. It is well known that it is slow, and in my mother's town, which is a border town on the US side, a majority of the US post office boxes are rented by Canadian citizens. It is faster and more convenient for them to travel across the border to get their mail than wait for it to be delivered.
But a further oddity is that Canadian citizens mailing letters to another location in Canada post it from the US. It is somehow faster for the letter to be delivered to the border, clear customs, and then make its way through the Canada Post system, than if it started out in the Canada Post system to begin with. The reason behind this I would like to know.
Grocery stores restock at around 2AM. If they can get 20 guys to show up in a truck every night to unload and restock the shelves in a SINGLE store... I should think the city should be able to fill some god damn pot holes in the wee hours of the night.
They do this in Japan. I am still not sure how. I would walk from my apartment to the train station and back, and every morning some of the pavement would be new. Then one time I was out late and came back home in the very early morning. I found a whole crew digging up the street, laying some cable, and then paving over it. I don't know where they stored their equipment or how they managed to do this, but every morning they were gone and the road was filled in and paved over.
I suspect this is also the reason that some roads near Fukushima were completely restored and repaved a week after being wrecked by the earthquake.
Which is why you need to heed warnings about deadlines well in advance - these SCADA issues wouldn't have been a problem if planning had started two years ago rather than now.
We did. But it takes time. It isn't our fault that Microsoft waited from 2001 (XP released) until 2009 (Windows 7 released) to make a new operating system worthy of businesses using it. Would you install Windows Vista on anything? Companies saw what a turd Vista was and avoided it for Windows 7.
Windows 7 was released in October 2009. That is only 2-1/2 years ago. My company waited 6-8 months to see if Windows 7 sucked or not. They also investigated switching to Linux, but with the massive code investment and serious code tie-ins with the inner workings of Windows, they decided against it.
So that leaves us with around 2 years of time until now. We had to account for a lot of changes within Windows 7 and work around them. There are new NERC* requirements that we had to understand, figure out best practices, and comply with. We had to get hardware which is industrial-grade computers (IPC) with the right drivers, which is outside of our control. We had to test the software extensively over months- it is controlling multimillion dollar machines which generate millions of dollars a day in profit so we can not make a mistake that causes downtime.
We are now rolling out our control systems with Windows 7 and have been for a couple of months. Did we take too much time to do so? Maybe. But we are a conservative company and don't like to rush out buggy software, and some of the delays were outside our control.
*These NERC requirements say that certain power stations must not run outdated and unsupported software. In the future, all power stations may need to comply with this also. So it is a good time to be selling control equipment.
The recent sinking of a cruise ship with loss of life has led to the discovery that modern passenger ships also lack sufficient lifeboats - and are also horribly unstable once they start shipping water, leading to half the lifeboats they do have being unusable
The instability is intentional. The more unstable a ship is, the more comfortable it is to be on (up to a point when the roll angles become uncomfotable). Imagine a ship in calm water. Something pushes the ship into a roll. If it rolls to 5 degrees and back in 10 seconds, that's not uncomfortable. It may not even be noticable if you are below decks. If it does this in 1 second, it is noticable and possibly uncomfortable. It is similar to the difference between soft car suspension and hard sporty suspension. The soft suspension is more comfortable but cornering performance is reduced.
Many ships do have very high stability. Navy ships for example. Wartime survivability is more important than crew comfort.
I'm not excusing modern passenger ships performing so poorly in incidents, or the assumption that all lifeboats will be servicable, but if we made the ship as stable as possible nobody would want to ride on it. There are requirements for safety written by the IMO (International Maritime Organization) and by various government regulations in the US Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). And different countries may have slightly different requirements also. If the requirements are not sufficient, they should be changed. Any ship wanting to buy insurance needs to follow at least some of the international requirements and some country-specific ones, and nobody sends large ships out to sea without insurance because ports require insurance.
Joking aside, the value of the Canadian Tire discount coupons given to the customer during a sale are tied to a percentage of the sale. (The coupon rate earned was initially 5% of the eligible purchase price, but was subsequently lowered to 3%, then 1.4%, and now is 0.4%.) This means that as the Canadian dollar depreciates, the Canadian Tire discount coupons depreciate also. Additionally, since the Canadian Tire rebate percent has decreased over time, the total purchasing power of all Canadian Tire discount coupons has decreased substantially over the years.
Its an interesting topic, and one that is pretty much exclusive to Canada. I'm not aware of any retailer this large having a discount program like this for such a length of time that the discount coupons are considered a permanent part of Canadian culture. I'm sure some Canadian economics students could come up with a variety of thesis' on Canadian Tire money, if they have not already.
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Mass-transit cost calculations depend heavilly on the route, and sometimes on how far out you book. I was thinking about going Milwaukee->Vancouver sometime this fall. Amtrak is around $220 depending on the date (one-way). The fuel bill for my motorcycle (48mpg) would come out to perhaps $200 one way (I would take a lot of side roads and detours). Both would be an equally cool adventure. I consider the price to be a dead heat, and Amtrack probably comes out ahead since I would have to stay in hotels or buy camping gear. If only there was an inexpensive option to ship a motorcycle that kind of distance. Too bad the Autotrain is on the east coast only.
If you had 2 people in a 25mpg car, it is still about equal for the above trip. Once you start loading 3+ people into a car though, most mass transit in the world starts to look bad. Even in Japan where cars are crazy expensive ($40 tolls are not uncommon) and mass transit will take you wherever you want to go, there is a certain point where a car full of people is cheaper.
You'll note that they are only required to treat emergencies and stabilize people. If you've got hepatitis, cancer, or Lupus, you get to die on the street.
We need to get away from that. Its better to have everyone on a government plan than the uninsured going to the ER every time they have a cold. Even though they don't have to treat that, it still takes time and money for a hospital to triage and check the person out.
I was going to recommend Walgreens also. They quality is good and they offer matte prints. I strongly prefer matte finish over glossy. I have noticed that Walgreens uses exactly the same interface as Snapfish. Not sure if they are affiliated or just using the same software packages.
Walgreens is pretty expensive compared to other online printers, but they have sales all the time. A quick trip to RetailMeNot will usually save you 40-50% on Walgreens prints, and if they don't have a good sale this week, take note of when the current coupon codes expire and check back then. Walgreens also doesn't play games with their shipping prices either. I recently shopped around to get 600 4x6 prints, and many other places had a lower per-print price than Walgreens, but after you uploaded them all and got to Checkout, they added $21 for shipping (for 600 prints). Walgreens shipping was free.
I recently came to a similar conclusion- even though my pictures folder is mirrored and backed up to 2 different computers via CrashPlan.com, these are the memories of my life and my child's life. I want them around in 60 years just like I have photos of my mother's childhood. Prints have been proven to last. Besides flooding or fire, there is not much that can destroy them. They degrade very slowly and are still "readable" after decades. They can't be corrupted. Electronic data is much more fragile.
Now that they put water back in, it's stabilizing.
That doesn't seem to be true. The graph doesn't go to the present day, but we are taking the heat out of the area. No amount of water injection is going to make the production in the Geysers go back to what it used to be.
We aren't drilling in the Yellowstone Caldera for various reasons, including the fact that the majority of it is inside a national park. People don't take kindly to this in their parks.
Geothermal isn't even that clean. You need to drill wells all over the damn place, chasing the steam around as you suck the heat out of the ground. Not to mention the arsenic, antimony, and boron that comes up with the steam. It has to be separated out and disposed of.
I'm not an expert on Geothermal, but I am not clueless either. One of my company's biggest customers is Calpine, and we have 2 of my work buddies at The Geysers right now. I have visited geothermal sites in the US and in the Philippines. Geothermal is not clean.
There is not an electric grid on the planet that uses wind or geothermal as base loads,
This statement is not true. [wikipedia.org]
Even if you do believe that if comes with a lot of caveats. 1.5GW in California is a drop in the bucket, a small percentage of the power and not really a base load, even if the units are operated 24/7. The same wikipedia article you linked to says that the capacity of The Geysers has been declining for years. Don't you think that if they could drill a few more wells and make more power and thus more money they would? The Geysers is one of the best geothermal sites in the US (half of the geothermal power in the US is there), and yet the total output is less than a typical nuclear site. If we find another site like the Geysers, by all means let us drill there for steam. But it it can't be a significant part of the energy mix because the amount of steam we need isn't there.
I see a good post but no proposal on what you would recommend. It looks like you are slanted towards Geothermal but unless you live in a small-population country with a LOT of geothermal potential (Iceland being the only real example), it can't supply a significant portion of the power. Geothermal isn't as green as many people think it is, either. There are some nasty chemicals involved (including arsenic and other bad things), and you can't just drill a well and forget about it. The steam pressure and temperature degrades fairly quickly so you always need to be drilling more wells, chasing the steam. It's similar to drilling for oil in that regard. The concern for cooling down the onsens is not unfounded, since you are removing the geothermal heat from localized areas.
I may not be unbiased (working for a japanese company that has invested billions into Nuclear in the last few years) but nuclear needs to be part of Japan's energy mix. Importing millions of tons of coal a year from Australia and millions of cubic feet of natural gas a year from south Asia is not a long-term solution. After the earthquake, Japan restarted a bunch of hydro turbines which had been shut down because they were notorious for blendering fish. They also restarted some oil plants which had been shut down for being dirty and uneconomical. These are short-term bandaids. Renewable electricity can be part of the energy mix, but you need a base to stand on. If Nuclear was a "stop gap" as you say, it was a pretty good one. The current policy is much worse.
But units wouldn't need to be labeled if everybody used the same system. The continued existence of the zombie Imperial system is the root cause of the problem.
No, you should always label your units. My company's (Japanese-based) engineering document system usually lists material stock dimensions in mm. Except for the times that it lists it in meters. And sometimes it is ambiguous where the decimal point should be since that isn't listed (and we often work in 100ths of a mm). There is plenty of confusion because some idiot Japanese designer didn't list his units, and imperial units aren't involved.
What about the DLC that's created after the game has gone gold because the asset creators are just sitting there twiddling our thumbs waiting for Metacritic scores to keep us from getting fired while the pre-production guys finish ironing out the details of the next game?
That is a problem, but it shouldn't be the consumer's problem. In the customer's eyes, it looks really bad, regardless of the reason. Start the preproduction guys sooner, or make a completely different indie-sized game while you are waiting. It is like delivering a TV without digital TV capability the day after the analog stations go dark. You can make a buck, sure, but the customers' opinion of you isn't going to be good.
Both Half-Life 2 and Portal 2 have unskippable cutscenes. Portal 2 was the most annoying when you're going back through to collect missing achievements. Yes, Wheatley, shut the fuck up and open the fucking door already!
Usually the HL2 cut scenes had interesting things to do while you were waiting. The long lab cutscene right after you get the HEV suit, for example, and physics objects to play with, a miniteleporter to break (and get an achievement for after achievements were added), and lots of other little elements to waste your time. You could pick things up, toss them around, and look at the interesting things lying around. Free movement, even if in a locked room, is far better than "sit back and watch this prerendered scene".
I'm glad someone raised this point. Even today, with crazy spray-on polymer packaging and protective films designed to evaporate at a certain temperature, the practical lifetime of most preservative coatings is about 5 years. Its a bit of a problem when you sell parts for machines which have major overhauls every 8 years. After the coating breaks down, rusting begins. Rubber and other rubber-substitute products have a finite lifetime, even today. Even with good airframes they have a big restoration job ahead of them. Planes under the great lakes or in swamps may be of similar condition when it is all said and done.
We all know Hitler hated Jews. Germany blamed Jews for the losses of WW1, as they cut the flow of money from their banks. It wasn't hard to demonize them, but probably should've been done from the perspective that they were Bankers, not Jews. That's like hating ICEEs because Muslims seem to own 7-11 corp.
Germany got screwed by banks in WW1, and bankers are stereotypically jews. So Germany blamed Jews. Your analogy is just odd though odd. A better one would be hating Muslims because you got a bad brainfreeze from an ICEE and Muslims generally work at convenience stores.
No, it's not. It's supposed to make the screen feel like it has a higher contrast ratio than it actually does..
That helps but it can't eliminate one problem. The human eye is lazy and is attracted to black. Black text on white is easy to read. White text on black is hard because your eye always wants to look at the black. There was a good example of this in a Calvin and Hobbes strip- the first 3 frames were daytime and the last was nighttime (black). It was hard to read the strip from the beginning because your eyes wanted to jump right to the last frame. I can't seem to find it however.
Only to a certain extent. You don't turn on and off furnaces on a coal/gas plant just because demand dropped. Most of those plants burn fuel (a ton of it) regardless of their production being in active use or not.
This is true at a plant-level but is misleading when you consider the whole grid. In many jurisdictions in the US, the different power stations bid on the price of electricity. In a simplified case, if Bob will sell you 100MW at $0.04 and Tom will sell you 80MW at $0.06, but 150MW is needed, then you buy all of Bob's power and then 50MW of Tom's. If the load drops to just 80MW, then you stop buying from Tom altogether, and Tom probably shuts his machine down. There are complications to this scheme including power-purchasing agreements, spinning reserve requirements, etc, but that is basically how it works.
The grid operator knows how much power they will need to within a pretty good margin of error. It is very predictable depending on the outside temperature and the time of day. Most people have a daily routine of electricity use and in the aggregate, the electricity use of a population is very stable and predictable. 10,000 people going home at 5PM and turning on their electric stove is predictable. Large users of electricity are often required to notify the grid operator in advance so a huge machine coming online doesn't cause problems on the grid. So if the grid operator knows they will only need 5GW for the next week (because of cooler temperatures or whatnot) but have 8GW of generating capacity, they give notice to the unneeded stations that they probably won't be buying their power for a while. If nobody is buying your power then you shut the plant down (with the following exceptions).
Hydro plants aren't as restricted in water flow as you might think. Most dams have multiple (even dozens of) turbines so the just shut one down completely. The bigger problem is that they need to keep a certain flow rate because otherwise the downstream river would dry up. This is why hydro plants are usually the cheapest power around when demand is low. The water needs to flow downstream anyway.
Nuclear power stations don't really fit into your argument because they start up, run continuously for months or years, and then shut down for maintenance. Their biggest cost is personnel. Fuel is only a tiny fraction of their expenses so it makes no sense to shut a nuclear machine down unless maintenance is required.
Everyone knows that the solar panels consume far more energy in their production than they ever produce in their lifetime
Except that can't be true.
1. Solar panels eventually pay for themselves in electricity. It might take a while depending on the climate, but they do have a payback period.
2. Companies selling solar panels want to make a profit.
3.Companies selling electricity on the grid using non-solar methods want to make a profit.
If solar panels never produced more energy than they consume to manufacture, the solar panel companies couldn't make them at a price point which had a payback period. They would either not sell them, or the paypack period would be infinitely long (no payback).
Disclaimer- I work for Toshiba but not in this division
You can't predict the future. Integrated POS systems might even become more prevalent as stores shift to self-checkout and fire most of their staff (Looking at you, Home Depot). 40 years ago steam turbines were considered a mature technology for power generation. The Gas turbine looks like it is going to be a promising new cash cow. GE turns their R&D attention to the gas turbine and licenses their steam turbine technology to Toshiba for some short-term cash. Toshiba puts a decent amount of money into the R&D of their newly-aquired technology. Today Toshiba is the #1 supplier of steam turbines (by MW) in the US, and has held that title for the past 9 years. Without GE's technology transfer 40 years ago Toshiba could never have done that much with the steam turbine.
I don't really know what Toshiba is up to since I don't work in that division. The smart thing to do would be to leverage the new acquisition in order to bring Japanese-style payment options to the US. Toshiba already has mobile phone-based payment systems, and various other payment methods that are always "3 years away" from widespread adoption in the US. They could take this torch and completely run away with it, making billions. Or the POS market could collapse in 3 years- sometimes Toshiba's management makes questionable decisions. I'll wait and find out what happens before I laud this as a great strategy by IBM. American companies selling out to foreign companies never seems to work out well for the American company.
Team Fortress 2 is not a team-based FPS, despite the impression that the FPS minigame gives. TF2 is a hat simulator.
Growing up in Maine close to the border, the CBC TV and radio stations were often stronger than the local US stations. I liked the CBC then, and I like it now. The news especially is much better than US news. CBC news doesn't view events as Black vs White, doesn't get distracted by "lost white girl" stories for long periods of time, and doesn't oversensationalize things. I have never heard the CBC say "Will X kill you? The answer may be surprising. Tune in at 10". CBC is good journalism in the way that it used to be 30 years ago.
I would pay to recieve CBC, but it is basically impossible. Satellite TV and Cable doesn't carry it, and only a limited amount of programming is usually available online.
Would you really do away with the CBC and their Hockey Night in Canada? Isn't that considered treason?
I just checked to make sure that Don Cherry is still doing Hockey Night in Canada. Damn that guy is old. My mother used to watch him on Hockey Night in Canada when she was a kid.
You joke but they do this in the Philippines, you know, where there actual Muslim extremists trying to kidnap and/or kill people. The Wikipedia page lists dozens of attacks in the last 20 years. They must be doing something right though, as only one of those incidents involves an airplane or an airport.
There is a guy with a metal detector at the airport door, and he gives you an extremely brief patdown. The patdown is similar to "movie-style" patdowns where they just go down your torso on the left and right of your body. It takes about 10 seconds to clear someone. After you are inside, you have to go through the real security which involves cheap metal detectors, profiling, and possibly bomb-sniffing dogs. There is plenty of corruption in the Philippines, but even so, they are probably spending 1/100th of what the US spends on a per person basis.
"Hide the decline" refers to the fact that temperatures inferred from tree ring sizes in the last couple decades haven't matched actual temperature readings (possibly because of other human influence on tree growth). When presenting tree ring data, they replace very recent data with actual temps, usually using a different color or something to indicate that it has been swapped out.
I don't buy that as a legitimate methodology. In any other field, people would cry foul.
I had a recent case at my job where the efficiency of one of our machines is suspect. There is a known issue with the product and the customer has been looking out for degraded efficiency. They sent us a trend of efficiency over the last 18 months. The problem is, halfway through the data a thermocouple broke and they had to replace it. Even if you do a rolling average over very large periods, there is an obvious jump in the data. The new thermocouple might not have the same linearity as the old one, and is probably calibrated slightly different. Unfortunately because of this we can not draw any real conclusions from the data.
Plotting data like this using 2 different systems of measurement is fishy. If you're going to use ice cores, use ice cores. If you are going to use tree rings, then use tree rings. If you want to look at how much rivers have flooded over time and if you can prove that it relates to temperature, then use that. If you switch in the middle then you can't draw a real conclusion. It would be like converting a record album to MP3 and changing turntables halfway through a song. You can try to account for the differences between the turntables but even if you fixed it, it wouldn't be correct.
Canada Post must have a lot of weird inefficiencies and idiosyncrasies. It is well known that it is slow, and in my mother's town, which is a border town on the US side, a majority of the US post office boxes are rented by Canadian citizens. It is faster and more convenient for them to travel across the border to get their mail than wait for it to be delivered. But a further oddity is that Canadian citizens mailing letters to another location in Canada post it from the US. It is somehow faster for the letter to be delivered to the border, clear customs, and then make its way through the Canada Post system, than if it started out in the Canada Post system to begin with. The reason behind this I would like to know.
Grocery stores restock at around 2AM. If they can get 20 guys to show up in a truck every night to unload and restock the shelves in a SINGLE store... I should think the city should be able to fill some god damn pot holes in the wee hours of the night.
They do this in Japan. I am still not sure how. I would walk from my apartment to the train station and back, and every morning some of the pavement would be new. Then one time I was out late and came back home in the very early morning. I found a whole crew digging up the street, laying some cable, and then paving over it. I don't know where they stored their equipment or how they managed to do this, but every morning they were gone and the road was filled in and paved over.
I suspect this is also the reason that some roads near Fukushima were completely restored and repaved a week after being wrecked by the earthquake.
Which is why you need to heed warnings about deadlines well in advance - these SCADA issues wouldn't have been a problem if planning had started two years ago rather than now.
We did. But it takes time. It isn't our fault that Microsoft waited from 2001 (XP released) until 2009 (Windows 7 released) to make a new operating system worthy of businesses using it. Would you install Windows Vista on anything? Companies saw what a turd Vista was and avoided it for Windows 7.
Windows 7 was released in October 2009. That is only 2-1/2 years ago. My company waited 6-8 months to see if Windows 7 sucked or not. They also investigated switching to Linux, but with the massive code investment and serious code tie-ins with the inner workings of Windows, they decided against it.
So that leaves us with around 2 years of time until now. We had to account for a lot of changes within Windows 7 and work around them. There are new NERC* requirements that we had to understand, figure out best practices, and comply with. We had to get hardware which is industrial-grade computers (IPC) with the right drivers, which is outside of our control. We had to test the software extensively over months- it is controlling multimillion dollar machines which generate millions of dollars a day in profit so we can not make a mistake that causes downtime.
We are now rolling out our control systems with Windows 7 and have been for a couple of months. Did we take too much time to do so? Maybe. But we are a conservative company and don't like to rush out buggy software, and some of the delays were outside our control.
*These NERC requirements say that certain power stations must not run outdated and unsupported software. In the future, all power stations may need to comply with this also. So it is a good time to be selling control equipment.
The recent sinking of a cruise ship with loss of life has led to the discovery that modern passenger ships also lack sufficient lifeboats - and are also horribly unstable once they start shipping water, leading to half the lifeboats they do have being unusable
The instability is intentional. The more unstable a ship is, the more comfortable it is to be on (up to a point when the roll angles become uncomfotable). Imagine a ship in calm water. Something pushes the ship into a roll. If it rolls to 5 degrees and back in 10 seconds, that's not uncomfortable. It may not even be noticable if you are below decks. If it does this in 1 second, it is noticable and possibly uncomfortable. It is similar to the difference between soft car suspension and hard sporty suspension. The soft suspension is more comfortable but cornering performance is reduced.
Many ships do have very high stability. Navy ships for example. Wartime survivability is more important than crew comfort.
I'm not excusing modern passenger ships performing so poorly in incidents, or the assumption that all lifeboats will be servicable, but if we made the ship as stable as possible nobody would want to ride on it. There are requirements for safety written by the IMO (International Maritime Organization) and by various government regulations in the US Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). And different countries may have slightly different requirements also. If the requirements are not sufficient, they should be changed. Any ship wanting to buy insurance needs to follow at least some of the international requirements and some country-specific ones, and nobody sends large ships out to sea without insurance because ports require insurance.
Joking aside, the value of the Canadian Tire discount coupons given to the customer during a sale are tied to a percentage of the sale. (The coupon rate earned was initially 5% of the eligible purchase price, but was subsequently lowered to 3%, then 1.4%, and now is 0.4%.) This means that as the Canadian dollar depreciates, the Canadian Tire discount coupons depreciate also. Additionally, since the Canadian Tire rebate percent has decreased over time, the total purchasing power of all Canadian Tire discount coupons has decreased substantially over the years.
Its an interesting topic, and one that is pretty much exclusive to Canada. I'm not aware of any retailer this large having a discount program like this for such a length of time that the discount coupons are considered a permanent part of Canadian culture. I'm sure some Canadian economics students could come up with a variety of thesis' on Canadian Tire money, if they have not already.
It has also been shown that bubbles appear even when market participants are well-capable of pricing assets correctly.
In other words, even if everyone knows its a bubble, they will propagate it anyway.