I think the importance of what they found is overstated. The fact that a murderer's patterns fit a power law is not particularly helpful in really pinning down the time of the next murder. "The expected time of the next murder is a distribution of odds along this curve" is not particularly useful in trying to stop a single crime. Power laws are more useful predictors when applied across populations.
While unlikely to ever be predictive, this result is more interesting from a more academic perspective. It could help illuminate what might be going on in the brain of a serial murderer. Learning how damaged brains function (or fail to function) has long been a means of studying how non-damaged brains may work.
So this might provide some insight into how a compulsive thought builds up in the brain, but it's unlikely to ever allow a profiler to say "stake out this intersection on this night".
I don't think they meant "we shouldn't hold the vendors accountable if the equipment doesn't work right".
I think they meant "we shouldn't expect that just because the vendor says it works, that it does".
Google has the benefit of size. If Google calls up Cisco and say "please fix this problem that exists in the thousands of routers we buy from you", it'll get fixed. If you or I call up Linksys and say "please fix this problem that exists in this one router I bought from you"... well... don't hold your breath.
I always thought the expression was saying the exact opposite. I've always heard it used in a similar manner as "even a broken clock is right twice a day". That not every genius-looking outcome required genius-level input. In other words, rather than being about unlikelihood, it is about inevitableness.
I agree. I made a similar post above, but thought I'd comment here as well.
These guys (and even the competitor you mentioned) have all missed the boat on this one. The only way to have significant cost savings from this is if many/most empties are handled this way. If you imagine hundreds of empties a day needing to be collapsed, the idea of any system that isn't entirely automated quickly becomes ludicrous. Watching the video of how Staxxon containers collapse and imagining trying to handle hundreds of those a day makes me laugh. Even for the competitor you mention, I can't see how it scales at all. What they really need is a big machine, located at the port, that will collapse/nest the containers automatically. Trucks with empties pull right up to the machine, a crane lifts off the empties, machine takes care of the whole thing, with the collapsed/nested empties coming out the other side.
From the perspective of port operations very little would need to change. Trucks pulling containers are already routed around by the computer. Empties often get stacked over to one side anyway. They just need to add this machine between the truck and the stacking phases. With empties coming off trains same logic applies -- the crane or forklift carrying an empty takes it to the machine instead of directly to the empties stack.
Finally, you need a similar machine to reverse the process at the other end, but I guess that almost goes without saying. Preferably a machine could be designed that could basically be run in reverse to un-nest and un-collapse the containers. That way smaller ports (like inland waterways and rail intermodal yards) could have a way to both collapse and un-collapse while only buying a single machine.
Two other comments, sort of asides:
1) The other nice thing about a machine is that you know the container is getting handled properly every time. Not only would this reduce potential damage from operators pushing or pulling something too hard, but it would also eliminate the potential for an operator to forget to insert a pin or turn a latch.
2) Probably makes the most sense for someone to come up with a single standard for collapsible containers. It wouldn't make sense for ports to have different collapsing machines for different models containers (although you might need a 20-foot and a 40-foot version).
I think you missed the point. They are not trying to reduce the number of container ship movements, they are trying to reduce the number of container movements.
They are trying to reduce the time and energy associated with moving containers around the port. Containers get moved from a staging area, to near the ship, then onto the ship, then off the ship (but still near the ship), then out to a staging area again. And on top of that, many cargo routes include multiple ports on each continent, so ships are re-stacked multiple times -- containers that are not destined for a particular port may still need to be moved around the ship or even offloaded then reloaded.
The energy costs associated with container moves isn't covered in the same way by your analysis. I would summarize your analysis as saying that empty containers "dead head" on their trip back to Asia: -- the ship is going back to Asia anyway, so the baseline cost of moving the ship is not a factor, weight is the overwhelming determiner of marginal fuel consumption, therefore it doesn't matter how much space the containers take up, only how much weight.
But this is not the same for container moves in port, as they are not "dead heads". For these moves, we do have to include the baseline cost of the crane moving (since it wasn't otherwise going to move from this stack to that stack). Therefore, it does, indeed, take less energy to lift five collapsed containers onto a ship in one move than to lift five separately, because you save all the extra baseline energy associated with crane moving four more times.
The time savings could be an even more significant contributor to cost savings. Because it's not just the wages of the guys working the port. If you had enough of these collapsibles in the system that you could reliably reduce the length of a port call, then every item on the ship would spend less time in transit (savings to the shipper) and each ship could complete more round trips in a year (savings to the cargo line).
Where your analysis continues to be effective, however, is in the portwarehouse portion of the trip. There really is no cost savings to having these things collapsed at the warehouse. Every truck that goes to the warehouse needs to come back to the port to pick up the next container. And if you collapse the container, the chassis (wheels/undercarriage that the container goes on) needs to come back to the port anyway. Frankly, this would be a nightmare to try to do this at the warehouse, since the warehouses are almost universally NOT set up to even take the containers of the chassis in the first place.
So I think the guys in the article (and the few competitors mentioned in the comments here) have all missed the boat. What they need to develop is a super-efficient way to collapse containers. Not a system that is pretty efficient for one or two guys to do, but one is done automatically by some big machine that would be located at the port. Trucks pulling empties would pull right up in front of this machine. A crane integrated into the machine would take the container off the chassis and everything would be automated from there. The containers would be collapsed, nested and come out the other side ready to be handled like any other container. The only way collapsing empty containers creates real cost savings is if many/most of the empties are handled this way, and you're going to offset all of those savings if you've got guys manually collapsing these things using forklifts.
I disagree. Plenty of things have actual, measurable value. Just to pick something extremely basic -- the value of fertilizer is that a given amount of land will yield more crops.
Not possible. Even for sound they can only get destructive interference to reduce apparent volume, not create silence. And that's with waves travelling a fraction of the speed of light (i.e. the waves travel pretty slowly compared to the time it takes to process the sound, calculate the inverse and send impulses to the speaker). You could interfere with a radio signal enough to make it unintelligible. Impossible to make it disappear altogether.
There is no federal act requiring companies to accept a passport as ID for purposes of paying by check. Companies can set their own policies as to whether and under what circumstances they accept checks (as long as they are not discriminating based on race, creed, sex, etc.)
The article got it wrong. There's a PowerPoint linked at the bottom that explains it better. The infected machine spoofs the server. A client looking for the OS X server instead authenticates to the infected machine. The infected machine now has one user's credentials, so can do whatever that user can (including, I guess, act as man-in-the-middle passing legitimate requests to/from the server so that the user perceives not problem with the network).
In the PowerPoint, they show the infected machine getting admin credentials through this transaction, but that might just be the worst-case scenario. Or, they could mean that a clever hacker might program the infected machine to wait until it received admin credentials before doing anything (else) out of the ordinary. In the PowerPoint, the infected machine uses the admin credentials to fix the original spoof, at which point it has free rein of the network without having to keep up its man-in-the-middle role.
Because of the way Apple's server protocols work, spoofing is very easy, it's fixing the spoof that's hard. A well-behaved Bonjour machine will give up it's name if another computer claims it. So all the infected machine has to do is claim it already has the server's name (maybe "OS X Server", as an example). Then the server will dutifully change it's name to "OS X Server-2". Now any computer looking for "OS X Server" finds the infected machine instead of the real server. When the infected machine wants out of its man-in-the-middle position (maybe fearing discovery if too much network activity is routed through it), it uses its newly acquired admin credentials to ask the server to change its name back from "OS X Server-2" to "OS X Server". If it doesn't change the name back, it could still stop announcing itself as "OS X Server", but the real server would then be unavailable and that might cause network admins to start poking around.
Which raises a potential issue: what if the infected computer never receives admin credentials? At what point does it become noticeable that all the Mac network traffic that should be going to "OS X Server" is instead going to this random workstation? And if that workstation periodically stops spoofing the server (for fear of the traffic being noticed), without the ability to force the server to change its name back, would anyone become suspicious that "OS X Server" occasionally (and seemingly spontaneously) changes its name to "OS X Server-2"?
But at that point, even if it has never been able to get admin credentials, the infected machine may have had access to all kinds of data/services on the network.
I can almost guarantee that the cost of goods analysis is wrong. There is no way in today's tablet market that Samsung wouldn't mark down it's price below the iPad if it could afford to.
The Apple Stores are great for Apple, but not because of the cost savings. The electronics retailers may operate with healthy mark-ups, but little of that money is flowing to the bottom line. All of the things that cost Best Buy money still cost Apple money -- warehousing, shipping, rent, employees, insurance, etc.
And in many ways, Apple operates at a higher cost. Apple Stores are in high-rent locations with expensive build-outs. Apple's employees are better trained and paid than the typical electronics chain employees. The only thing that may be keeping the per-unit cost down for Apple is the ridiculous volume they do through the stores (dividing any fixed costs across more units). But that says more about Apple's successful products than their successful stores.
I disagree with your comment about dedicated ebook readers, at least as it relates to ones with eInk screens. I believe there will continue to have a niche for those because they will be much cheaper and have better screens for reading (but not for other things). You might carry a $140 Kindle to the beach, but you are unlikely to carry a $500 iPad to the beach. This is not just because of the cost difference, but also because the LCD on any tablet is just not really usable in full sunlight. (And there is no impending technology to fix the screen problem.) Until smaller/lighter tablets come out, also, the Kindle is really a better form factor for carrying around.
This is totally anecdotal and informal: I was on a flight last week from the west coast. When I walked back to go to the bathroom, I saw more people using iPads than laptops.* Also, no one in senior management at my company carries a laptop anymore (and they all used to carry laptops just slightly larger than would be classified as netbooks) -- they all carry iPads now.
*Eventually, I expect I will be writing such a sentence using "media tablet" in place of "iPad", but for now they really all did have iPads. Oh, and there were a bunch of Kindles, which I believe will continue to have a niche as a lighter/lower-cost/better-screened e-book reader. You might carry a $140 Kindle to read at the beach, but you're unlikely to carry your $500 iPad to read at the beach -- both because of cost but also because you really can't read an LCD screen comfortably at the beach.
"Recipe for science fail: conduct 30 studies looking for some type of harm done by a random controversial bogey man. Don't publish the 29 that fail to reject the null hypothesis. Publish the one that does."
I know people of various ideological positions complain about bias in science, but if there is truly a systemic problem in contemporary science, this is it. Even meta-analysis studies have problems dealing with this, because the authors of the meta-study may not even know about the unpublished studies, or may only know about a fraction of them.
Even if this turns out to be a reproducible phenomenon, it's not clear that EMF would be the cause. A potentially more likely cause would be that if you wear your cell phone on your hip, you are slightly less likely to be bumping that hip into things. Slight damage from bumps and falls are known to increase bone density, so protecting one hip would potentially result in reduced bone density in that hip. I'm not saying this is an extrememly likely scenario, but at least it represents a known causal effect.
You don't think it makes sense to sit down ahead of time and think of appropriate wording for an emergency email before an actual emergency occurs? Quick... where should we tell them to go? or should we tell them to stay put? What's the best way to word this to get their attention, but without creating too much panic?
In an actual emergency, you wouldn't want to take even 5 seconds to think of those answers.
This was not an ID10T error. This was bad human interface design.
The user had two choices: "Save" and "Submit". My first reaction to seeing that was "what's the hell is the difference between Save and Submit?"
Apparently: "Save" = update the template "Submit" = send out the alert
IMHO, that's a terrible choice of verbs. You could almost reverse the two and still have them make just as much sense. How about "Update" and "Send"? Or this might even be one of those rare times when you want to use longer button names -- "Update Template" and "Send Out Alert". Much less likely for a mix-up like this if those were the button titles.
Mostly true. But hardly war-changing. Unlike with tanks, it's probably not true to say "the U.S. was outclassed in machine guns and only made up for it by significantly higher production volume". Probably closer to the truth to say "U.S. machine guns were probably inferior, but not fatally so".
Also, just note that cyclic rate is the least important of the advantages of the MG 42 and may have even been a disadvantage. Once the cyclic rate reaches a certain point, the extra firing rate really just represents wasted ammunition. I don't know exactly what rate that might be, but at 1,200 rounds per minute, MG 42 was almost certainly beyond that point. MG42's more important features in providing a high volume of suppressing fire were its reliability, durability and quick-change barrel. In other words, it's more important that a machine gun can keep firing throughout the battle, than that it can squeeze more bullets out per burst.
The German infantry's reliance on the machine gun was not entirely related to having such an excellent weapon. It was also related to having non-repeating rifles. U.S. infantry had more flexibility in tactics because they did not have to rely as much on the machine gun for suppressive fire. Even though the M1 Garand only had an 8-round clip, it could maintain a rate of fire that was an order of magnitude higher than German bolt-action rifles could. Also, in general the Germans were excellent tacticians (especially the veteran units). It is probable that the success of German machine-gun-centric infantry relied more on good tactics than the superior qualities of the MG 42. They probably would have been just about as effective with the inferior, but still very good, M1919.
Your analysis is a little bit of an overstatement.
First, there were probably only a few technologies where the Germans were really that far ahead. Rocketry was one of them. However, while the V2 was great technology, without a more potent warhead (i.e. nuclear or chemical) and/or significantly better guidance it was nothing more than a tactically/strategically insignificant terror weapon.
The U.S. and Britain were pretty far along on jet technology. However, a full-scale roll-out of a jet fighter would have probably been the hardest to counter technological threat that the Germans could have come up with. Good thing they starved the program until it was too late.
The M1 Garand was THE superior rifle on all WWII fronts until the Germans rolled out the Sturmgewehr 44. However, the Garand was later developed into the M14. In the face of a broad roll-out of the Sturmgewehr, the U.S. could have easily accelerated a program to convert the Garand into a fully-automatic, box-magazine fed weapon. Would have been a much more expensive program than the M14 ended up being, but no technological leap would have been required.
The Sherman tank represents a trade-off between firepower, armor and transportability. Remember, it had to be shipped into theater from the U.S., and the planning was that they would often need to do so using improvised port facilities. In retrospect they probably should have made a trade that resulted in a lot more firepower, little more armor and was harder to transport, but it really wasn't a technology problem.
Aside from jet technology, by the middle of the war the U.S. had caught up in air power and had the best planes in all categories -- fighters, escorts and bombers.
The Luger is not really a fantastic weapon compared to the American M1911. The reason it was so popular with GIs was because it was such a distinctive souvenir, not because they wanted it for combat.
The report may not use the word "negligence", but if you read it, you'll see they come down pretty hard on the balloon program for not taking the proper precautions to avoid an accident. How that differs from negligence, I have no idea. Here are just a few of the findings that led to that conclusion:
- Suggestions developed from the investigation of a crash in 2002 were ignored.
- NASA's requirement to have a range safety officer independent of the program were ignored.
- A variety of other safety guidelines were ignored.
- Culture in the balloon program was that balloon launches are straightforward and nothing could go wrong, in spite of a history of mishaps.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the importance of what they found is overstated. The fact that a murderer's patterns fit a power law is not particularly helpful in really pinning down the time of the next murder. "The expected time of the next murder is a distribution of odds along this curve" is not particularly useful in trying to stop a single crime. Power laws are more useful predictors when applied across populations.
While unlikely to ever be predictive, this result is more interesting from a more academic perspective. It could help illuminate what might be going on in the brain of a serial murderer. Learning how damaged brains function (or fail to function) has long been a means of studying how non-damaged brains may work.
So this might provide some insight into how a compulsive thought builds up in the brain, but it's unlikely to ever allow a profiler to say "stake out this intersection on this night".
$199 tablet not as good as $499 tablet. News at 11:00.
I don't think they meant "we shouldn't hold the vendors accountable if the equipment doesn't work right".
I think they meant "we shouldn't expect that just because the vendor says it works, that it does".
Google has the benefit of size. If Google calls up Cisco and say "please fix this problem that exists in the thousands of routers we buy from you", it'll get fixed. If you or I call up Linksys and say "please fix this problem that exists in this one router I bought from you"... well... don't hold your breath.
If you RTFA...
Flying in formation
Aerial refueling
Aircraft carrier landings
Depends on the acquisition price.
I always thought the expression was saying the exact opposite. I've always heard it used in a similar manner as "even a broken clock is right twice a day". That not every genius-looking outcome required genius-level input. In other words, rather than being about unlikelihood, it is about inevitableness.
I agree. I made a similar post above, but thought I'd comment here as well.
These guys (and even the competitor you mentioned) have all missed the boat on this one. The only way to have significant cost savings from this is if many/most empties are handled this way. If you imagine hundreds of empties a day needing to be collapsed, the idea of any system that isn't entirely automated quickly becomes ludicrous. Watching the video of how Staxxon containers collapse and imagining trying to handle hundreds of those a day makes me laugh. Even for the competitor you mention, I can't see how it scales at all. What they really need is a big machine, located at the port, that will collapse/nest the containers automatically. Trucks with empties pull right up to the machine, a crane lifts off the empties, machine takes care of the whole thing, with the collapsed/nested empties coming out the other side.
From the perspective of port operations very little would need to change. Trucks pulling containers are already routed around by the computer. Empties often get stacked over to one side anyway. They just need to add this machine between the truck and the stacking phases. With empties coming off trains same logic applies -- the crane or forklift carrying an empty takes it to the machine instead of directly to the empties stack.
Finally, you need a similar machine to reverse the process at the other end, but I guess that almost goes without saying. Preferably a machine could be designed that could basically be run in reverse to un-nest and un-collapse the containers. That way smaller ports (like inland waterways and rail intermodal yards) could have a way to both collapse and un-collapse while only buying a single machine.
Two other comments, sort of asides:
1) The other nice thing about a machine is that you know the container is getting handled properly every time. Not only would this reduce potential damage from operators pushing or pulling something too hard, but it would also eliminate the potential for an operator to forget to insert a pin or turn a latch.
2) Probably makes the most sense for someone to come up with a single standard for collapsible containers. It wouldn't make sense for ports to have different collapsing machines for different models containers (although you might need a 20-foot and a 40-foot version).
I think you missed the point. They are not trying to reduce the number of container ship movements, they are trying to reduce the number of container movements.
They are trying to reduce the time and energy associated with moving containers around the port. Containers get moved from a staging area, to near the ship, then onto the ship, then off the ship (but still near the ship), then out to a staging area again. And on top of that, many cargo routes include multiple ports on each continent, so ships are re-stacked multiple times -- containers that are not destined for a particular port may still need to be moved around the ship or even offloaded then reloaded.
The energy costs associated with container moves isn't covered in the same way by your analysis. I would summarize your analysis as saying that empty containers "dead head" on their trip back to Asia: -- the ship is going back to Asia anyway, so the baseline cost of moving the ship is not a factor, weight is the overwhelming determiner of marginal fuel consumption, therefore it doesn't matter how much space the containers take up, only how much weight.
But this is not the same for container moves in port, as they are not "dead heads". For these moves, we do have to include the baseline cost of the crane moving (since it wasn't otherwise going to move from this stack to that stack). Therefore, it does, indeed, take less energy to lift five collapsed containers onto a ship in one move than to lift five separately, because you save all the extra baseline energy associated with crane moving four more times.
The time savings could be an even more significant contributor to cost savings. Because it's not just the wages of the guys working the port. If you had enough of these collapsibles in the system that you could reliably reduce the length of a port call, then every item on the ship would spend less time in transit (savings to the shipper) and each ship could complete more round trips in a year (savings to the cargo line).
Where your analysis continues to be effective, however, is in the portwarehouse portion of the trip. There really is no cost savings to having these things collapsed at the warehouse. Every truck that goes to the warehouse needs to come back to the port to pick up the next container. And if you collapse the container, the chassis (wheels/undercarriage that the container goes on) needs to come back to the port anyway. Frankly, this would be a nightmare to try to do this at the warehouse, since the warehouses are almost universally NOT set up to even take the containers of the chassis in the first place.
So I think the guys in the article (and the few competitors mentioned in the comments here) have all missed the boat. What they need to develop is a super-efficient way to collapse containers. Not a system that is pretty efficient for one or two guys to do, but one is done automatically by some big machine that would be located at the port. Trucks pulling empties would pull right up in front of this machine. A crane integrated into the machine would take the container off the chassis and everything would be automated from there. The containers would be collapsed, nested and come out the other side ready to be handled like any other container. The only way collapsing empty containers creates real cost savings is if many/most of the empties are handled this way, and you're going to offset all of those savings if you've got guys manually collapsing these things using forklifts.
I disagree. Plenty of things have actual, measurable value. Just to pick something extremely basic -- the value of fertilizer is that a given amount of land will yield more crops.
Not possible. Even for sound they can only get destructive interference to reduce apparent volume, not create silence. And that's with waves travelling a fraction of the speed of light (i.e. the waves travel pretty slowly compared to the time it takes to process the sound, calculate the inverse and send impulses to the speaker). You could interfere with a radio signal enough to make it unintelligible. Impossible to make it disappear altogether.
There is no federal act requiring companies to accept a passport as ID for purposes of paying by check. Companies can set their own policies as to whether and under what circumstances they accept checks (as long as they are not discriminating based on race, creed, sex, etc.)
The article got it wrong. There's a PowerPoint linked at the bottom that explains it better. The infected machine spoofs the server. A client looking for the OS X server instead authenticates to the infected machine. The infected machine now has one user's credentials, so can do whatever that user can (including, I guess, act as man-in-the-middle passing legitimate requests to/from the server so that the user perceives not problem with the network).
In the PowerPoint, they show the infected machine getting admin credentials through this transaction, but that might just be the worst-case scenario. Or, they could mean that a clever hacker might program the infected machine to wait until it received admin credentials before doing anything (else) out of the ordinary. In the PowerPoint, the infected machine uses the admin credentials to fix the original spoof, at which point it has free rein of the network without having to keep up its man-in-the-middle role.
Because of the way Apple's server protocols work, spoofing is very easy, it's fixing the spoof that's hard. A well-behaved Bonjour machine will give up it's name if another computer claims it. So all the infected machine has to do is claim it already has the server's name (maybe "OS X Server", as an example). Then the server will dutifully change it's name to "OS X Server-2". Now any computer looking for "OS X Server" finds the infected machine instead of the real server. When the infected machine wants out of its man-in-the-middle position (maybe fearing discovery if too much network activity is routed through it), it uses its newly acquired admin credentials to ask the server to change its name back from "OS X Server-2" to "OS X Server". If it doesn't change the name back, it could still stop announcing itself as "OS X Server", but the real server would then be unavailable and that might cause network admins to start poking around.
Which raises a potential issue: what if the infected computer never receives admin credentials? At what point does it become noticeable that all the Mac network traffic that should be going to "OS X Server" is instead going to this random workstation? And if that workstation periodically stops spoofing the server (for fear of the traffic being noticed), without the ability to force the server to change its name back, would anyone become suspicious that "OS X Server" occasionally (and seemingly spontaneously) changes its name to "OS X Server-2"?
But at that point, even if it has never been able to get admin credentials, the infected machine may have had access to all kinds of data/services on the network.
I can almost guarantee that the cost of goods analysis is wrong. There is no way in today's tablet market that Samsung wouldn't mark down it's price below the iPad if it could afford to.
LOL... I was gonna make the same comment. Took me 30 seconds to log in first, or I'd have beaten you to it.
The Apple Stores are great for Apple, but not because of the cost savings. The electronics retailers may operate with healthy mark-ups, but little of that money is flowing to the bottom line. All of the things that cost Best Buy money still cost Apple money -- warehousing, shipping, rent, employees, insurance, etc.
And in many ways, Apple operates at a higher cost. Apple Stores are in high-rent locations with expensive build-outs. Apple's employees are better trained and paid than the typical electronics chain employees. The only thing that may be keeping the per-unit cost down for Apple is the ridiculous volume they do through the stores (dividing any fixed costs across more units). But that says more about Apple's successful products than their successful stores.
I disagree with your comment about dedicated ebook readers, at least as it relates to ones with eInk screens. I believe there will continue to have a niche for those because they will be much cheaper and have better screens for reading (but not for other things). You might carry a $140 Kindle to the beach, but you are unlikely to carry a $500 iPad to the beach. This is not just because of the cost difference, but also because the LCD on any tablet is just not really usable in full sunlight. (And there is no impending technology to fix the screen problem.) Until smaller/lighter tablets come out, also, the Kindle is really a better form factor for carrying around.
This is totally anecdotal and informal: I was on a flight last week from the west coast. When I walked back to go to the bathroom, I saw more people using iPads than laptops.* Also, no one in senior management at my company carries a laptop anymore (and they all used to carry laptops just slightly larger than would be classified as netbooks) -- they all carry iPads now.
*Eventually, I expect I will be writing such a sentence using "media tablet" in place of "iPad", but for now they really all did have iPads. Oh, and there were a bunch of Kindles, which I believe will continue to have a niche as a lighter/lower-cost/better-screened e-book reader. You might carry a $140 Kindle to read at the beach, but you're unlikely to carry your $500 iPad to read at the beach -- both because of cost but also because you really can't read an LCD screen comfortably at the beach.
"Recipe for science fail: conduct 30 studies looking for some type of harm done by a random controversial bogey man. Don't publish the 29 that fail to reject the null hypothesis. Publish the one that does."
I know people of various ideological positions complain about bias in science, but if there is truly a systemic problem in contemporary science, this is it. Even meta-analysis studies have problems dealing with this, because the authors of the meta-study may not even know about the unpublished studies, or may only know about a fraction of them.
Even if this turns out to be a reproducible phenomenon, it's not clear that EMF would be the cause. A potentially more likely cause would be that if you wear your cell phone on your hip, you are slightly less likely to be bumping that hip into things. Slight damage from bumps and falls are known to increase bone density, so protecting one hip would potentially result in reduced bone density in that hip. I'm not saying this is an extrememly likely scenario, but at least it represents a known causal effect.
You don't think it makes sense to sit down ahead of time and think of appropriate wording for an emergency email before an actual emergency occurs? Quick... where should we tell them to go? or should we tell them to stay put? What's the best way to word this to get their attention, but without creating too much panic?
In an actual emergency, you wouldn't want to take even 5 seconds to think of those answers.
This was not an ID10T error. This was bad human interface design.
The user had two choices: "Save" and "Submit". My first reaction to seeing that was "what's the hell is the difference between Save and Submit?"
Apparently:
"Save" = update the template
"Submit" = send out the alert
IMHO, that's a terrible choice of verbs. You could almost reverse the two and still have them make just as much sense. How about "Update" and "Send"? Or this might even be one of those rare times when you want to use longer button names -- "Update Template" and "Send Out Alert". Much less likely for a mix-up like this if those were the button titles.
You forgot softballs!
Mostly true. But hardly war-changing. Unlike with tanks, it's probably not true to say "the U.S. was outclassed in machine guns and only made up for it by significantly higher production volume". Probably closer to the truth to say "U.S. machine guns were probably inferior, but not fatally so".
Also, just note that cyclic rate is the least important of the advantages of the MG 42 and may have even been a disadvantage. Once the cyclic rate reaches a certain point, the extra firing rate really just represents wasted ammunition. I don't know exactly what rate that might be, but at 1,200 rounds per minute, MG 42 was almost certainly beyond that point. MG42's more important features in providing a high volume of suppressing fire were its reliability, durability and quick-change barrel. In other words, it's more important that a machine gun can keep firing throughout the battle, than that it can squeeze more bullets out per burst.
The German infantry's reliance on the machine gun was not entirely related to having such an excellent weapon. It was also related to having non-repeating rifles. U.S. infantry had more flexibility in tactics because they did not have to rely as much on the machine gun for suppressive fire. Even though the M1 Garand only had an 8-round clip, it could maintain a rate of fire that was an order of magnitude higher than German bolt-action rifles could. Also, in general the Germans were excellent tacticians (especially the veteran units). It is probable that the success of German machine-gun-centric infantry relied more on good tactics than the superior qualities of the MG 42. They probably would have been just about as effective with the inferior, but still very good, M1919.
Your analysis is a little bit of an overstatement.
First, there were probably only a few technologies where the Germans were really that far ahead. Rocketry was one of them. However, while the V2 was great technology, without a more potent warhead (i.e. nuclear or chemical) and/or significantly better guidance it was nothing more than a tactically/strategically insignificant terror weapon.
The U.S. and Britain were pretty far along on jet technology. However, a full-scale roll-out of a jet fighter would have probably been the hardest to counter technological threat that the Germans could have come up with. Good thing they starved the program until it was too late.
The M1 Garand was THE superior rifle on all WWII fronts until the Germans rolled out the Sturmgewehr 44. However, the Garand was later developed into the M14. In the face of a broad roll-out of the Sturmgewehr, the U.S. could have easily accelerated a program to convert the Garand into a fully-automatic, box-magazine fed weapon. Would have been a much more expensive program than the M14 ended up being, but no technological leap would have been required.
The Sherman tank represents a trade-off between firepower, armor and transportability. Remember, it had to be shipped into theater from the U.S., and the planning was that they would often need to do so using improvised port facilities. In retrospect they probably should have made a trade that resulted in a lot more firepower, little more armor and was harder to transport, but it really wasn't a technology problem.
Aside from jet technology, by the middle of the war the U.S. had caught up in air power and had the best planes in all categories -- fighters, escorts and bombers.
The Luger is not really a fantastic weapon compared to the American M1911. The reason it was so popular with GIs was because it was such a distinctive souvenir, not because they wanted it for combat.
The report may not use the word "negligence", but if you read it, you'll see they come down pretty hard on the balloon program for not taking the proper precautions to avoid an accident. How that differs from negligence, I have no idea. Here are just a few of the findings that led to that conclusion:
- Suggestions developed from the investigation of a crash in 2002 were ignored.
- NASA's requirement to have a range safety officer independent of the program were ignored.
- A variety of other safety guidelines were ignored.
- Culture in the balloon program was that balloon launches are straightforward and nothing could go wrong, in spite of a history of mishaps.