"I mean, it's my understanding that an employer can terminate an employee for almost any reason imaginable, or no reason at all... and if none is given, wouldn't the onus fall on the employee to prove that the actual reason was one that is illegal?"
Yes. True. And it's hard to prove. But if they don't disclose the reason, then you get your unemployment benefits. If they disclose the reason and it's not that you committed an actual crime, then you get your benefits. If they disclose the reason and it's on the list of prohibited reasons (even in at at-will state there are reasons that they are not allowed to use to terminate employees) then you clean their clock, most likely without going to court once the company attorney reads the complaint. Been there, done that, paid off the mortgage early. Then got a job with other grownups.
"If you were to take the 3 million solar mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way, and plop it into the solar system where the sun is, the Schwartzchild radius would be well within the orbit of Mercury. We wouldn't lose a single planet, though an earth "year" would shrink to roughly 2 hours."
How high would the tides be? Would the tide just fall into space? Would Earth be outside the Roche radius, or would it disintegrate? If Earth is orbiting at 44% of the speed of light, the meteor shower on the leading face should be pretty intense. Pretty gamma rays instead of pretty lights?
"Many if not all of the cars involved in unintended acceleration incidents had keyless ignition"
It's odd that they are not required to have a kill switch on such cars. My motorcycle has a kill switch. The lathe at work has a kill switch (aka E-stop).
" If Chinese solar companies started raping us with price, then a new company (located in EU, US, India, Korea, or even China itself) will rise-up and sell the panels for less"
Except for time delays and barriers to entry. The Rockefellers and Carnegies did exactly that back in the robber baron days, as did the railroad tycoons. The Chinese did the exact same thing to the US rare-earth mining industry only a decade ago.
Building a replacement for the now-overpriced good or service takes years and costs million/billions. And at the end of your investment, the monopolist can drops prices and crush the newcomer again.
"Five years from now, they will have a lot less money, and when they try to jack up the prices, we will be competitive again."
Except that it takes three to five years to build the factory, so they have a window of opportunity to gouge while you ramp up. By way of example, they are trying to restart RE production at the mine in CA. It should be going again in a couple more years.
"So infertile people don't deserve to get married? "
You noticed that little problem with "it's for the children" too. Besides infertile people, you also prevent any woman past 50 from getting remarried.
And those infertile people would have to be tracked in a registry to make sure they did not marry. And logically, any couple who failed to produce children after say 5 years would have have to have a fertility test, and if they failed, the marriage would be annulled. The infertile one would then be put on the registry.
I actually have no problem with marriage being defined as for the purpose of having children, but I will insist that those getting the benefits actually holding up their end of the contract. And some of the consequences are not so gentle.
"The latter can only be addressed through diligent and costly surveillance of the vessel throughout its lifetime... just the sort of thing that tends not to survive bean counters."
And this is different from every other pressure vessel/boiler how? At least here, every boiler/pressure vessel must be registered with the State, and inspected every two years. This comes from the hard experience at least a century and a half of blowing up boilers. The bean counters don't even get a say in this one.
I went through the AP-1000 design documents on line looking for good ideas to borrow for work. 8" thick SA-533 steel pressure vessel. No main coolant isolation valves, which is surprising. Is the risk of the valves leaking greater than the risk of a pipe failure? Could be. But nothing really remarkable in metallurgy. Still using 304LN stainless and going paranoid about chlorides as a result.
"If the Leaf has a single package that can easily connect to the home to charge and discharge, it would be a great help"
It's a good notion, but you would be paying a premium for a highly compact and portable power supply that you don't actually need to be highly compact or portable.
And don't use car batteries either, they don't like deep discharge. Use deep cycle batteries like from electric forklifts or golf carts. At the moment, lead-acid batteries are still the cheapest option.
After the initial rush, the Bakken wells settle down to about 100 barrels a day. The US uses about 18 million barrels a day. Do the arithmetic, then decide if it's even possible to drill that many wells.
I look forward to seeing "The collected and annotated sayings of K'Breel" in the bookstore someday. I hope there is an Irulan clone up there taking notes.
REC Solar is corporate Norway, just for the sake of accuracy.
Chinese competition has forced them to lay off most of their Norwegian employees as of July. The Swedish plant closed the end of last year.
Q-cells, a German company also is laying off due to Chinese competition.
The competition is brutal. Prices for PV are dropping quickly. But the Chinese intend to be the last producer standing, and achieve a monopoly. Assuming they don't collapse their own ecosystem first.
Don't make measles sound worse than it is. 103 F fever for 3 or four days, rash, sensitivity to light.
I had it, as did my brother, and we are both fine. My friends had it, there were fine. None of us went to the hospital either. Granted we were all descended from Northern Europe and pretty resistant to it.
Now polio is whole different matter. Although most people who got it did make a full recovery, including my uncle, the fraction who didn't were anywhere from partially paralyzed to living an iron lung.
Nor do compasses. One of next week's projects is to take my daughter out into the National Forest with a map and compass and teach her to navigate, or orienteer as they used to call it.
"The Willamette Valley in Oregon is nice. River running down it so no droughts, mountains to the west so no tsunamis, mountains to the east so it's protected from the winds/weather from the east, there's places that are pretty safe from flooding (up on hills) and there hasn't seemed to be very many earthquakes. "
Those mountains to the east are volcanos. And to the west of you is the Cascadia Subduction zone. The tsunami won't get you, and the frequency of those earthquakes is low, but that makes them bigger when they do finally happen. The Willamette Valley and Puget Sound, as well as the jog in the Columbia River between Portland and Longview are the direct result of the subducting plate. There will be earthquakes, it's only matter of when.
The root question is how much safety margin do you do you really need? If the unit was designed for 600 psi, and you have found you now operate at 500 psi, you have more safety margin than originally planned.
This happens quite a lot on plants that were a bit experimental when they were first built full-scale. The designers left bigger than needed margins as they were sure exactly how things would settle out. Much later on, you find out you never push some of those limits, so that excess margin can be traded for something else.
There are engineering companies that specialize in this, as it can be rather arcane.
"My nearest eReader is five feet away from any connected power cord, which is the primary means of propagation for EMP, right?"
Ah, no. the EMP does not need the power cord to transmit enough energy into your e-reader cpu to fry it. The memory may well be fine but without the cpu, you have a paperweight.
"Kind of funny that it ran into a timely detour because it hit a spot that WASN'T solid rock."
Actually, "incompetent rock" is a long-standing problem in mining. Definition 4
incompetent adj 1. not possessing the necessary ability, skill, etc. to do or carry out a task; incapable 2. marked by lack of ability, skill, etc. 3. (Law) Law not legally qualified an incompetent witness 4. (Earth Sciences / Geological Science) (of rock strata, folds, etc.) yielding readily to pressure so as to undergo structural deformation
Wikipedia lacks an article for this. This is another thing that is dealt with much better in newer plants that it was in the '70s. There was a lot of reserve in the design because neutron embrittlement as not well understood, but eventually that safety margin will be used up.
Another reason to scrap old plants and build new ones, assuming we are going to stay with nuclear power.
"Jesus, there was another one of those? How many does that make for humanity?"
I'm doing a small portion of His light work today...
It depends on where you live.
"The multiple flood hypothesis was first proposed by R.B. Wiatt, Jr., in 1980. Wiatt argued for a sequence of multiple floods â" 40 or more.[11][12][13] Wiatt's proposal was based mainly on analysis from glacial lake bottom deposits in Ninemile Creek and the flood deposits in Burlingame Canyon. His most compelling argument for separate floods was that the Touchet bed deposits from two successive floods were found to be separated by two layers of volcanic ash (tephra) with the ash separated by a fine layer of windblown dust deposits, located in a thin layer located between sediment layers ten rhythmites below the top of the Touchet beds (see picture)."
"You may have to accept personal liability for any accident you are involved in if you are manually driving a car once this technology become more commonplace."
You do realize this is already true. That is why you are required to carry liability insurance. (Note that I am assuming you are in the US, if not, never mind.)
By the way, wake me up when these wonder cars can drive on a road covered in a smooth layer of snow.
Slashdot Mirror
" I know businesses just getting their first Win 7 machines"
Just like us. Wim 7 rollout is scheduled for sometime this summer, except for certain critical machines that will presumably get upgraded next year.
"But if they find out they can make your work life rough on you."
Yes indeed. But that is documentable, and quickly crosses the line to harassment. Which is actionable.
Written records are your friends.
"I mean, it's my understanding that an employer can terminate an employee for almost any reason imaginable, or no reason at all... and if none is given, wouldn't the onus fall on the employee to prove that the actual reason was one that is illegal?"
Yes. True. And it's hard to prove. But if they don't disclose the reason, then you get your unemployment benefits. If they disclose the reason and it's not that you committed an actual crime, then you get your benefits. If they disclose the reason and it's on the list of prohibited reasons (even in at at-will state there are reasons that they are not allowed to use to terminate employees) then you clean their clock, most likely without going to court once the company attorney reads the complaint. Been there, done that, paid off the mortgage early. Then got a job with other grownups.
"If you were to take the 3 million solar mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way, and plop it into the solar system where the sun is, the Schwartzchild radius would be well within the orbit of Mercury. We wouldn't lose a single planet, though an earth "year" would shrink to roughly 2 hours."
How high would the tides be? Would the tide just fall into space? Would Earth be outside the Roche radius, or would it disintegrate? If Earth is orbiting at 44% of the speed of light, the meteor shower on the leading face should be pretty intense. Pretty gamma rays instead of pretty lights?
"Many if not all of the cars involved in unintended acceleration incidents had keyless ignition"
It's odd that they are not required to have a kill switch on such cars. My motorcycle has a kill switch. The lathe at work has a kill switch (aka E-stop).
My car has a clutch, which also qualifies.
" If Chinese solar companies started raping us with price, then a new company (located in EU, US, India, Korea, or even China itself) will rise-up and sell the panels for less"
Except for time delays and barriers to entry. The Rockefellers and Carnegies did exactly that back in the robber baron days, as did the railroad tycoons. The Chinese did the exact same thing to the US rare-earth mining industry only a decade ago.
Building a replacement for the now-overpriced good or service takes years and costs million/billions. And at the end of your investment, the monopolist can drops prices and crush the newcomer again.
"Five years from now, they will have a lot less money, and when they try to jack up the prices, we will be competitive again."
Except that it takes three to five years to build the factory, so they have a window of opportunity to gouge while you ramp up.
By way of example, they are trying to restart RE production at the mine in CA. It should be going again in a couple more years.
"So infertile people don't deserve to get married? "
You noticed that little problem with "it's for the children" too. Besides infertile people, you also prevent any woman past 50 from getting remarried.
And those infertile people would have to be tracked in a registry to make sure they did not marry. And logically, any couple who failed to produce children after say 5 years would have have to have a fertility test, and if they failed, the marriage would be annulled. The infertile one would then be put on the registry.
I actually have no problem with marriage being defined as for the purpose of having children, but I will insist that those getting the benefits actually holding up their end of the contract. And some of the consequences are not so gentle.
"The latter can only be addressed through diligent and costly surveillance of the vessel throughout its lifetime ... just the sort of thing that tends not to survive bean counters."
And this is different from every other pressure vessel/boiler how? At least here, every boiler/pressure vessel must be registered with the State, and inspected every two years. This comes from the hard experience at least a century and a half of blowing up boilers. The bean counters don't even get a say in this one.
I went through the AP-1000 design documents on line looking for good ideas to borrow for work. 8" thick SA-533 steel pressure vessel. No main coolant isolation valves, which is surprising. Is the risk of the valves leaking greater than the risk of a pipe failure? Could be. But nothing really remarkable in metallurgy. Still using 304LN stainless and going paranoid about chlorides as a result.
"If the Leaf has a single package that can easily connect to the home to charge and discharge, it would be a great help"
It's a good notion, but you would be paying a premium for a highly compact and portable power supply that you don't actually need to be highly compact or portable.
And don't use car batteries either, they don't like deep discharge. Use deep cycle batteries like from electric forklifts or golf carts. At the moment, lead-acid batteries are still the cheapest option.
After the initial rush, the Bakken wells settle down to about 100 barrels a day. The US uses about 18 million barrels a day. Do the arithmetic, then decide if it's even possible to drill that many wells.
I look forward to seeing "The collected and annotated sayings of K'Breel" in the bookstore someday. I hope there is an Irulan clone up there taking notes.
REC Solar is corporate Norway, just for the sake of accuracy.
Chinese competition has forced them to lay off most of their Norwegian employees as of July. The Swedish plant closed the end of last year.
Q-cells, a German company also is laying off due to Chinese competition.
The competition is brutal. Prices for PV are dropping quickly. But the Chinese intend to be the last producer standing, and achieve a monopoly. Assuming they don't collapse their own ecosystem first.
Don't make measles sound worse than it is. 103 F fever for 3 or four days, rash, sensitivity to light.
I had it, as did my brother, and we are both fine. My friends had it, there were fine. None of us went to the hospital either. Granted we were all descended from Northern Europe and pretty resistant to it.
Now polio is whole different matter. Although most people who got it did make a full recovery, including my uncle, the fraction who didn't were anywhere from partially paralyzed to living an iron lung.
"Maps and street signs don't need batteries."
Nor do compasses. One of next week's projects is to take my daughter out into the National Forest with a map and compass and teach her to navigate, or orienteer as they used to call it.
"The Willamette Valley in Oregon is nice. River running down it so no droughts, mountains to the west so no tsunamis, mountains to the east so it's protected from the winds/weather from the east, there's places that are pretty safe from flooding (up on hills) and there hasn't seemed to be very many earthquakes. "
Those mountains to the east are volcanos. And to the west of you is the Cascadia Subduction zone. The tsunami won't get you, and the frequency of those earthquakes is low, but that makes them bigger when they do finally happen. The Willamette Valley and Puget Sound, as well as the jog in the Columbia River between Portland and Longview are the direct result of the subducting plate. There will be earthquakes, it's only matter of when.
It's called "fitness for service". It's a pretty standard exercise. I've been through a couple myself in the chemical industry.
http://www.fitness4service.com/publications/pdf_downloads/ReliabilityConfJaskePaper.pdf
The root question is how much safety margin do you do you really need? If the unit was designed for 600 psi, and you have found you now operate at 500 psi, you have more safety margin than originally planned.
This happens quite a lot on plants that were a bit experimental when they were first built full-scale. The designers left bigger than needed margins as they were sure exactly how things would settle out. Much later on, you find out you never push some of those limits, so that excess margin can be traded for something else.
There are engineering companies that specialize in this, as it can be rather arcane.
"My nearest eReader is five feet away from any connected power cord, which is the primary means of propagation for EMP, right?"
Ah, no. the EMP does not need the power cord to transmit enough energy into your e-reader cpu to fry it. The memory may well be fine but without the cpu, you have a paperweight.
"http://www.empcommission.org/docs/empc_exec_rpt.pdf"
Amazon should take a kindle to the test facility and see if it survives. If it does it would be a great marketing ploy.
A mechanical engineer should know that most structures fail due to buckling, not a lack of tensile strength.
That L ^2 term in the denominator bites hard.
http://www.efunda.com/formulae/solid_mechanics/columns/columns.cfm
"Kind of funny that it ran into a timely detour because it hit a spot that WASN'T solid rock."
Actually, "incompetent rock" is a long-standing problem in mining. Definition 4
incompetent
adj
1. not possessing the necessary ability, skill, etc. to do or carry out a task; incapable
2. marked by lack of ability, skill, etc.
3. (Law) Law not legally qualified an incompetent witness
4. (Earth Sciences / Geological Science) (of rock strata, folds, etc.) yielding readily to pressure so as to undergo structural deformation
Neutron embrittlement.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=96256
Wikipedia lacks an article for this. This is another thing that is dealt with much better in newer plants that it was in the '70s. There was a lot of reserve in the design because neutron embrittlement as not well understood, but eventually that safety margin will be used up.
Another reason to scrap old plants and build new ones, assuming we are going to stay with nuclear power.
"If Sugar is bad for you, then howcome it's food?"
Like most things, it's in the dose.
I will also point out it's a preservative. It's part of the cure for ham, and it is the preservative in jams and jellies.
Some sugars are reducing agents;
"Reducing monosaccharides include glucose, fructose, glyceraldehyde and galactose. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reducing_sugar
So as a chemist, one might suspect that too much sugar is bad for you, and that Mother was right after all.
"Jesus, there was another one of those? How many does that make for humanity?"
I'm doing a small portion of His light work today...
It depends on where you live.
"The multiple flood hypothesis was first proposed by R.B. Wiatt, Jr., in 1980. Wiatt argued for a sequence of multiple floods â" 40 or more.[11][12][13] Wiatt's proposal was based mainly on analysis from glacial lake bottom deposits in Ninemile Creek and the flood deposits in Burlingame Canyon. His most compelling argument for separate floods was that the Touchet bed deposits from two successive floods were found to be separated by two layers of volcanic ash (tephra) with the ash separated by a fine layer of windblown dust deposits, located in a thin layer located between sediment layers ten rhythmites below the top of the Touchet beds (see picture)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods
"You may have to accept personal liability for any accident you are involved in if you are manually driving a car once this technology become more commonplace."
You do realize this is already true. That is why you are required to carry liability insurance. (Note that I am assuming you are in the US, if not, never mind.)
By the way, wake me up when these wonder cars can drive on a road covered in a smooth layer of snow.
"Environmentalists are more BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) than NIMBY."
Don't forget those areas nowhere near anyone have been declared Wilderness, and you can't built there either.
Looks like another hundred years of burning coal.