Think about the amount of care pack animals requires on a day to day basis and you'll start to see the advantage of a robot like this. It's not like there's nice pasture and clean water available where ever there's a need for something like this.
When not in use pack animals still need to be cared for. That means feeding and watering, cleaning the area they're stabled in, and veterinary care. I assume when these robots aren't in use they just need to be stored in an appropriate container. My guess is that it would be easier to get one of these robots into a remote area by air than a pack animal. And if a leg goes bad on one of these robots only the leg needs to be replaced. If a leg goes bad on a pack animal it probably needs to be put down, and then you have to bring in a whole new pack animal.
The guy is a citizen of Hungary. He did the illegal intrusion and attempted blackmail while in Hungary. He was arrested when he arrived in the US for a 'job interview'. Hungary's economy is more fucked up than the US economy, and they did it all on their own.
Outside of the oil embargo of 1973, through good times and bad, the Saudis have kept the oil flowing to the west, and that's the ball game that matters. The gulf oil countries didn't care too much about Al Qaeda before 9/11. At least they really didn't seem to care very much if their private citizens funded it. Since then, and especially after 2003, they've come down pretty hard on al-Qaeda, associated organizations, and their supporters.
Seriously, try one of Apple's products. It's not hard to see why they're so popular. And for Linux devs - try to make your stuff more like Apple's products.
How close can they make it to Apple's products before they get a letter from Apple's legal department to cease and desist because they infringed on Apple's perceived IP?
Yes, 'cause supermarket employees are surprisingly no slaves. But, there are small stores in europe like 7-11 open 24h (for example in Sweden). However, why should a large supermarket be open 24/7? Makes no sense.
Since large supermarkets need to run 24/7 regardless of whether they serve shoppers during off hours, why not keep a checkout lane staffed to service those people who prefer shopping in the wee hours of the morning? In my area all the large supermarkets that are open 24/7 have a skeleton crew at night that does things like maintenance and restocking that are best done when there are fewer people in the store. Since the store is needs to have lights on and heating and cooling running for all these activities, why not have a checkout lane available for people who want to shop during off hours? In my experience there's usually only one checkout lane open, and when the person staffing it isn't running a register they're performing some other task in the register area that's best done when there are fewer people in the store.
Around where I live (central NY) you pay more than what the insurance companies pay. The insurance companies negotiate special rates with all the in network providers.
These trains already exhibit 25% more accidents than trains with engineers aboard according to one law firm. In some cities, unmanned trains are allowed to cross roads and bridges. So even while confined to their own tracks they do interact with human operated vehicles.
The law firm whose page you site is fishing for business. They say their statistics come the the Federal Railroad Administration, but never really say exactly where the information can be found. I found the FRA's final report titled "Safety of Remote Control Locomotive (RCL) Operations". On page 7 in the section titled "RCL vs. Conventional Operations - Safety Statistics", they it says the following.
the accident rate for both types of operations [human operated and remote control] is virtually identical for those major railroads that made extensive use of both types of operations.
I'm curious, what sort of accounting gimmicks are they using that would land anyone else in jail? From what I can tell there's not much that a major corporation, GM or otherwise, can do that will land someone in jail at the executive level.
SOPA and PIPA got this far because their supporters were rushing them through hoping they could pass before opposition against them coalesced. US senators and representatives are rethinking their support for PIPA and SOPA because they're getting flooded by emails and phone calls from their constituents who are opposed these pieces of legislation. Money certainly does speak loudly, but politicians do listen to their constituents if enough of them send a strongly worded messages of support or opposition on an important issue. Don't be so defeatist. Let your representatives know how you feel on issues and vote. It doesn't always make a difference, but you'd be surprised at how often it does.
You do of course realize that cows currently do not have horns, right?
Have you ever been to a farm?
Let me give you a hint: if it has horns, don't milk the long teat.
Cows in the US don't have horns because they can't grow them, but because they get debudded or dehorned. Cows are dehorned on dairy farms when they're calves, so when you see them as adults they are hornless. A farm up the road from me used to have some cows with trimmed horns. This picture shows a cow that hasn't been dehorned.
How ever do you hold on to your birth certificate or SSN card then???
I don't, and I've never had a problem. I've never been asked for a copy of my SS card. I lost the last one I had over forty years ago. When I last needed a copy of my birth certificate I ordered a copy from the state I was born in. Some documents I worry about, like my passport and insurance policies, and I keep those in a safe deposit box at a bank.
FTA: "They didn’t know it at the time, but a fuel line had become clogged. The blockage “was most likely caused by a small piece of cloth inadvertently left in the line during the manufacturing process,” according to the Government Accountability Office." (bolding mine).
So no, we don't know that a dirty rag caused a two billion dollar satellite to fail. We think a fuel line became clogged, and some government bean-counter pulled the dirty-rag hypothesis straight out of their derriere so they could sign off on this one and go home.
The GAO was probably basing its conclusion on statements from Lockheed itself. According to this it was Lockheed that concluded the problem was some cleaning material left in the line.
"It should not have happened,” Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space Programs Richard McKinney said. “It was a quality mistake and we took steps to make sure it does not happen again,” he said. “It was obviously a very serious error.”
“It appears that there was a blockage in one of the fuel lines,” McKinney said. Lockheed thinks “it was caused by some cleaning material that was used in a line that was not properly vacated when they went through production.”
This article thinks that shutting the Straits of Hormuz won't have the impact that it might have ten years ago. Oil could be transported by highway across the Arabian peninsula to ports in Oman. The US also has a reserve of five to six weeks of petroleum in it's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Not saying that shutting down the straits wouldn't have an impact, but I don't know that life would grind to a halt in two weeks, either.
If everything seems to be going fine at an injection well, the waste is flowing and there are no visible problems on the surface, how is it determined if the pipe through which the waste water is being pumped did or didn't leak before the waste got to the desired depth?
What I've noticed is that different types of establishments are more likely to have their handicapped spots utilized than others. The grocery store I frequent and the big box retailers like Target or Walmart are more likely to have people using their handicap spaces than a hardware store like Home Depot or Lowes. But even still, I do frequently notice people in the handicapped spaces at Home Depot and Lowes, so it's not like they're not used, just usually not filled. But just like the number of non-disabled spaces available are almost always more than enough, it seems reasonable that the number of disabled spaces should have some excess for the rare times when there's high demand. It doesn't bother me in the least that some people might have to walk an extra fifty feet to insure that a small number of spaces are available for the disabled.
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In the US, healthcare isn't about getting people better, it's about maximising profits. So, on that basis, it's perfectly okay to keep people alive and suffering terribly as long as there's still a few dollars to be squeezed out of them. Patient dignity and welfare doesn't come into it - the hospital administrator needs a new Jaguar!
In my opinion it's not hospital administrators that keep people alive indefinitely, it's patients and their families. I base this on what I've heard from my wife, who has been an oncology nurse for 37 years in a variety of hospitals. She's literally cared for hundreds of people as they were dying. Many were her patients for weeks and months and she got to them and their families quite well. There are just some people that even when told there's no hope still want everything done. Either they can't let go or they think they're the one who will experience a miracle. My wife has not seen a miracle in 37 years. If a person is not a DNR - Do Not Resuscitate - if they code it sets in motion an incredibly expensive process to revive and stabilize them. All so they can die in the ICU in a semi-lucid state a week later. She's had any number of people tell her they never would have pressed for all the care and the DNR status if they thought it would end like it did. They were told, but they couldn't accept it. On occasion she's had to deal with angry relatives who want to know why more couldn't have been done.
One thing she's noticed is that people who are the most reluctant to let go tend to be the most religious. Not always, but more likely. They have faith that God is going to deliver a miracle. They've prayed and they've heard it can happen. I've always wondered why they think God needs the intervention of all that medical technology to work a miracle. One time she was caring for a woman who was dying. Her husband and brother would show up daily to pray at the woman's bedside. One evening they asked if they should be asking for God to rescue specific organs. One of the reasons I couldn't do my wife's job is I would have started laughing at that point. My wife didn't. She thought about which organs were failing and suggested they pray for the kidneys. The husband and brother set to praying for the kidneys. Before leaving the room my wife noticed that the catheter tube was kinked. She unkinked the line and urine started flowing into the bag. The husband and brother heard the trickle of urine flowing into the bag, but they were unaware why it started flowing. They were sure God had answered their prayer. My wife didn't have the heart to tell them her role in the miracle. They prayed and prayed, but no other organs were rescued.
So, while I'm sure there are cases of mean cruel hospital bureaucrats keeping people on life support just for profit, in most cases I think think it's the patients and their families. Oh, and my wife, she's a saint.
More of an explanation than an apology. Sort of how a child will explain that they're not at fault for hitting someone with a stick they were swinging about because they didn't mean for it to happen.
This is where tariffs are supposed to be used to compensate for the government subsidies. The fact its not being done suggests some US politicians are being bought by Chinese interests.
I guess that's one possibility. Another might be a concern that if the US imposes tariffs on Chinese solar products China will retaliate by reducing what it imports from the US. It imports close to $90 billion a year in US goods and services. Perhaps US action on solar products will kill the sale of Boeing aircraft to China. It could be that China has signaled that if the US takes action on solar products it will be less cooperative on international issues like Iran and North Korea. I think there could be a lot of reasons why the US has not taken action.
This sort of thing isn't exactly new and isn't a Scandinavian innovation. Cornell University in very liberal Ithaca, NY, has been using water from Lake Cayuga for cooling for about ten years. It's estimated the effect of the project is equivalent to the lake being exposed to 4 to 5 hours of additional sunlight per year.
Actually, you are an environmentalist, just maybe not a radical one. There are people who will use your concern about the temperature of the returning water as an example of environmentalists who want to block all progress and would have us all living in caves without fire if they had their way. There are varying degrees of environmentalists and environmental organizations. If you were to sign a petition demanding an environmental impact statement on the effect that heated return water from a proposed facility would have on a local river, there are people who would say that the petition was an example of NIMBY environmentalism and it demonstrated that you just can't make environmentalists happy.
For people who need a low cost, high quality phone service it's frequently cheaper and/or better quality than either a cell phone or a VOIP. At least that's true for many of the people I work with. Almost everyone I work with works from home. When we have phone conferences people using VOIP have problems much more frequently than people using landlines. I've used both Skype and Vonage, and had enough problems with both that I've stuck with my land line. My land line only costs about $30 per month for unlimited minutes, it's always up, and the quality is excellent. I've got a mobile for personal use or when I'm traveling, but for business from home I use a land line.
There's this 1987 EPA report. And there's this report saying fracking likely caused ground water contamination in Wyoming. And then there are the storage ponds that leak. And what about Dimmock, PA? Industry claims that there are no documented instances of groundwater pollution from fracking are a bit like cigarette companies claiming that cigarettes don't cause cancer in the 1950s and 1960s.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about the amount of care pack animals requires on a day to day basis and you'll start to see the advantage of a robot like this. It's not like there's nice pasture and clean water available where ever there's a need for something like this.
When not in use pack animals still need to be cared for. That means feeding and watering, cleaning the area they're stabled in, and veterinary care. I assume when these robots aren't in use they just need to be stored in an appropriate container. My guess is that it would be easier to get one of these robots into a remote area by air than a pack animal. And if a leg goes bad on one of these robots only the leg needs to be replaced. If a leg goes bad on a pack animal it probably needs to be put down, and then you have to bring in a whole new pack animal.
The guy is a citizen of Hungary. He did the illegal intrusion and attempted blackmail while in Hungary. He was arrested when he arrived in the US for a 'job interview'. Hungary's economy is more fucked up than the US economy, and they did it all on their own.
Outside of the oil embargo of 1973, through good times and bad, the Saudis have kept the oil flowing to the west, and that's the ball game that matters. The gulf oil countries didn't care too much about Al Qaeda before 9/11. At least they really didn't seem to care very much if their private citizens funded it. Since then, and especially after 2003, they've come down pretty hard on al-Qaeda, associated organizations, and their supporters.
Seriously, try one of Apple's products. It's not hard to see why they're so popular. And for Linux devs - try to make your stuff more like Apple's products.
How close can they make it to Apple's products before they get a letter from Apple's legal department to cease and desist because they infringed on Apple's perceived IP?
>usually have such limited schedules
Yes, 'cause supermarket employees are surprisingly no slaves. But, there are small stores in europe like 7-11 open 24h (for example in Sweden). However, why should a large supermarket be open 24/7? Makes no sense.
Since large supermarkets need to run 24/7 regardless of whether they serve shoppers during off hours, why not keep a checkout lane staffed to service those people who prefer shopping in the wee hours of the morning? In my area all the large supermarkets that are open 24/7 have a skeleton crew at night that does things like maintenance and restocking that are best done when there are fewer people in the store. Since the store is needs to have lights on and heating and cooling running for all these activities, why not have a checkout lane available for people who want to shop during off hours? In my experience there's usually only one checkout lane open, and when the person staffing it isn't running a register they're performing some other task in the register area that's best done when there are fewer people in the store.
Around where I live (central NY) you pay more than what the insurance companies pay. The insurance companies negotiate special rates with all the in network providers.
These trains already exhibit 25% more accidents than trains with engineers aboard according to one law firm. In some cities, unmanned trains are allowed to cross roads and bridges. So even while confined to their own tracks they do interact with human operated vehicles.
The law firm whose page you site is fishing for business. They say their statistics come the the Federal Railroad Administration, but never really say exactly where the information can be found. I found the FRA's final report titled "Safety of Remote Control Locomotive (RCL) Operations". On page 7 in the section titled "RCL vs. Conventional Operations - Safety Statistics", they it says the following.
the accident rate for both types of operations [human operated and remote control] is virtually identical for those major railroads that made extensive use of both types of operations.
Where does the 25% figure come from?
I'm curious, what sort of accounting gimmicks are they using that would land anyone else in jail? From what I can tell there's not much that a major corporation, GM or otherwise, can do that will land someone in jail at the executive level.
SOPA and PIPA got this far because their supporters were rushing them through hoping they could pass before opposition against them coalesced. US senators and representatives are rethinking their support for PIPA and SOPA because they're getting flooded by emails and phone calls from their constituents who are opposed these pieces of legislation. Money certainly does speak loudly, but politicians do listen to their constituents if enough of them send a strongly worded messages of support or opposition on an important issue. Don't be so defeatist. Let your representatives know how you feel on issues and vote. It doesn't always make a difference, but you'd be surprised at how often it does.
You do of course realize that cows currently do not have horns, right?
Have you ever been to a farm?
Let me give you a hint: if it has horns, don't milk the long teat.
Cows in the US don't have horns because they can't grow them, but because they get debudded or dehorned. Cows are dehorned on dairy farms when they're calves, so when you see them as adults they are hornless. A farm up the road from me used to have some cows with trimmed horns. This picture shows a cow that hasn't been dehorned.
How ever do you hold on to your birth certificate or SSN card then???
I don't, and I've never had a problem. I've never been asked for a copy of my SS card. I lost the last one I had over forty years ago. When I last needed a copy of my birth certificate I ordered a copy from the state I was born in. Some documents I worry about, like my passport and insurance policies, and I keep those in a safe deposit box at a bank.
FTA: "They didn’t know it at the time, but a fuel line had become clogged. The blockage “was most likely caused by a small piece of cloth inadvertently left in the line during the manufacturing process,” according to the Government Accountability Office." (bolding mine). So no, we don't know that a dirty rag caused a two billion dollar satellite to fail. We think a fuel line became clogged, and some government bean-counter pulled the dirty-rag hypothesis straight out of their derriere so they could sign off on this one and go home.
The GAO was probably basing its conclusion on statements from Lockheed itself. According to this it was Lockheed that concluded the problem was some cleaning material left in the line.
"It should not have happened,” Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space Programs Richard McKinney said. “It was a quality mistake and we took steps to make sure it does not happen again,” he said. “It was obviously a very serious error.”
“It appears that there was a blockage in one of the fuel lines,” McKinney said. Lockheed thinks “it was caused by some cleaning material that was used in a line that was not properly vacated when they went through production.”
This article thinks that shutting the Straits of Hormuz won't have the impact that it might have ten years ago. Oil could be transported by highway across the Arabian peninsula to ports in Oman. The US also has a reserve of five to six weeks of petroleum in it's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Not saying that shutting down the straits wouldn't have an impact, but I don't know that life would grind to a halt in two weeks, either.
If everything seems to be going fine at an injection well, the waste is flowing and there are no visible problems on the surface, how is it determined if the pipe through which the waste water is being pumped did or didn't leak before the waste got to the desired depth?
What I've noticed is that different types of establishments are more likely to have their handicapped spots utilized than others. The grocery store I frequent and the big box retailers like Target or Walmart are more likely to have people using their handicap spaces than a hardware store like Home Depot or Lowes. But even still, I do frequently notice people in the handicapped spaces at Home Depot and Lowes, so it's not like they're not used, just usually not filled. But just like the number of non-disabled spaces available are almost always more than enough, it seems reasonable that the number of disabled spaces should have some excess for the rare times when there's high demand. It doesn't bother me in the least that some people might have to walk an extra fifty feet to insure that a small number of spaces are available for the disabled.
In the US, healthcare isn't about getting people better, it's about maximising profits. So, on that basis, it's perfectly okay to keep people alive and suffering terribly as long as there's still a few dollars to be squeezed out of them. Patient dignity and welfare doesn't come into it - the hospital administrator needs a new Jaguar!
In my opinion it's not hospital administrators that keep people alive indefinitely, it's patients and their families. I base this on what I've heard from my wife, who has been an oncology nurse for 37 years in a variety of hospitals. She's literally cared for hundreds of people as they were dying. Many were her patients for weeks and months and she got to them and their families quite well. There are just some people that even when told there's no hope still want everything done. Either they can't let go or they think they're the one who will experience a miracle. My wife has not seen a miracle in 37 years. If a person is not a DNR - Do Not Resuscitate - if they code it sets in motion an incredibly expensive process to revive and stabilize them. All so they can die in the ICU in a semi-lucid state a week later. She's had any number of people tell her they never would have pressed for all the care and the DNR status if they thought it would end like it did. They were told, but they couldn't accept it. On occasion she's had to deal with angry relatives who want to know why more couldn't have been done.
One thing she's noticed is that people who are the most reluctant to let go tend to be the most religious. Not always, but more likely. They have faith that God is going to deliver a miracle. They've prayed and they've heard it can happen. I've always wondered why they think God needs the intervention of all that medical technology to work a miracle. One time she was caring for a woman who was dying. Her husband and brother would show up daily to pray at the woman's bedside. One evening they asked if they should be asking for God to rescue specific organs. One of the reasons I couldn't do my wife's job is I would have started laughing at that point. My wife didn't. She thought about which organs were failing and suggested they pray for the kidneys. The husband and brother set to praying for the kidneys. Before leaving the room my wife noticed that the catheter tube was kinked. She unkinked the line and urine started flowing into the bag. The husband and brother heard the trickle of urine flowing into the bag, but they were unaware why it started flowing. They were sure God had answered their prayer. My wife didn't have the heart to tell them her role in the miracle. They prayed and prayed, but no other organs were rescued.
So, while I'm sure there are cases of mean cruel hospital bureaucrats keeping people on life support just for profit, in most cases I think think it's the patients and their families. Oh, and my wife, she's a saint.
More of an explanation than an apology. Sort of how a child will explain that they're not at fault for hitting someone with a stick they were swinging about because they didn't mean for it to happen.
This is where tariffs are supposed to be used to compensate for the government subsidies. The fact its not being done suggests some US politicians are being bought by Chinese interests.
I guess that's one possibility. Another might be a concern that if the US imposes tariffs on Chinese solar products China will retaliate by reducing what it imports from the US. It imports close to $90 billion a year in US goods and services. Perhaps US action on solar products will kill the sale of Boeing aircraft to China. It could be that China has signaled that if the US takes action on solar products it will be less cooperative on international issues like Iran and North Korea. I think there could be a lot of reasons why the US has not taken action.
This sort of thing isn't exactly new and isn't a Scandinavian innovation. Cornell University in very liberal Ithaca, NY, has been using water from Lake Cayuga for cooling for about ten years. It's estimated the effect of the project is equivalent to the lake being exposed to 4 to 5 hours of additional sunlight per year.
Actually, you are an environmentalist, just maybe not a radical one. There are people who will use your concern about the temperature of the returning water as an example of environmentalists who want to block all progress and would have us all living in caves without fire if they had their way. There are varying degrees of environmentalists and environmental organizations. If you were to sign a petition demanding an environmental impact statement on the effect that heated return water from a proposed facility would have on a local river, there are people who would say that the petition was an example of NIMBY environmentalism and it demonstrated that you just can't make environmentalists happy.
To determine whether red light cameras are effective you have to first ask what their purpose is. What is the purpose of red light cameras?
For people who need a low cost, high quality phone service it's frequently cheaper and/or better quality than either a cell phone or a VOIP. At least that's true for many of the people I work with. Almost everyone I work with works from home. When we have phone conferences people using VOIP have problems much more frequently than people using landlines. I've used both Skype and Vonage, and had enough problems with both that I've stuck with my land line. My land line only costs about $30 per month for unlimited minutes, it's always up, and the quality is excellent. I've got a mobile for personal use or when I'm traveling, but for business from home I use a land line.
There's this 1987 EPA report. And there's this report saying fracking likely caused ground water contamination in Wyoming. And then there are the storage ponds that leak. And what about Dimmock, PA? Industry claims that there are no documented instances of groundwater pollution from fracking are a bit like cigarette companies claiming that cigarettes don't cause cancer in the 1950s and 1960s.
And what happens when the water table drops because of drought? The power plant shuts down?