Nauseating smell even in minute quantities - Check!
Uses significantly more energy to produce than it releases when oxidized - Check!
Cannot be mined - Check!
For those of you not familiar with ammonia synthesis, we make it by reacting nitrogen with hydrogen under high pressure and temperature. The predominant sources of hydrogen these days are natural gas and oil. So, why do we need to go trough all this trouble if we can burn the natural gas in the existing car engines? Have we really run out of stupid fuel sources so we have to consider ammonia?
This is aimed for internal consumption in Russia only. Bolstering patriotism and such.
In terms of economic impact on US it is pretty toothless. ULA has already stated that they have two year supply of RD-180 engines and that they are perfectly capable of manufacturing the engines themselves. The reasons for buying these engines from Russia are mostly political - US supports Russian engineers so they don't go and build rockets in Iran. On the other hand Elon Musk must be laughing out loud. The Russians just created the perfect political environment for the congress to act and allow SpaceX to compete with ULA for military satellite launches, something that only few days back was made impossible by a court decision. Good job Ruskies, you just open the door for your most aggressive competitor.
As far as the shutting down GPS ground stations in Russia goes, this will only impact the accuracy of the system on Russian territory. So the only way somebody in US may feel pain is if they fall off their chairs laughing.
Instead I want to set up one test machine for users to try it and ask THEM if they like it.
This experiment will have a predetermined outcome: the users will not going to like it (if they even bother to try it) because its is different. Don't do it unless you realy need an excuse not to transition to linux.
If I were you I would do a gradual change:
1. Before you do anything else, do your homework. Make sure you can run everything you need for your business on linux. This means checking with everybody and his sister in the company and going over every single app and document that is being generated or used. Put your findings in writing. Develop plan for the transition, that includes a pilot transition of small number of desktops. Show your findings and your plan to the management and make sure you have their approval in writing.
2. Start the pilot by transitioning only the PCs with the now obsolete windows XP. Do it one at a time, allowing enough time for the main user of the machine to transition, while he/she has your full attention. Use this to iron out any transition problems. Stuff like compatibility issues between file formats and software. Leave the newer windows versions that are supported as is, but start gradually adapting the users to the free software they will have to use on linux (switch MS office to Libre Office for example, but keep the windows OS). This way the shock of the transition and the backlash will not be as bad.
As far as distro's come, the obvious choice is to do it with the distro that you are most familiar with. Alternatively use a distro that will be supported for years to come, even if you are no longer with the company.
Last time I checked the average body of a living human was fairly worm and a pretty bright IR source. Anyone wearing IR contact lenses will be blinded by the heat of their own eyeballs. That is unless they are zombies. Are we expecting a zombie pandemic anytime soon?
First, read the TFA. Building infrastructure (new plants and pipelines) does not make much economic sense for regions producing oil or gas from shale. The reason is that the production from shale wells tends to drop down sharply, so the infrastructure is likely to become underutilized before it has payed for itself. Second, explain how shipping through a pipeline addresses the problem with volatile gases being present at higher amounts than they should be in the crude oil? Wouldn't this make the pipeline more likely to blow too? Besides volatile gases separating from the liquid phase in a pipeline opens a whole new can of worms related to hydraulic shock.
Here’s the scenario: when the boss sees co-workers having a quiet conversation, he wants to know what is being said (it’s mostly work related). He has his designated “snitches” and expects them to keep him apprised of all the office gossip – even calling them at home and expecting a run-down! This puts the “designees” in a really awkward position; plus, we’re all afraid any offhand comment or anything said in confidence might be either repeated or misrepresented.
Needless to say, this creates a certain amount of tension between team members who normally would get along well, and adds stress in an already stressful atmosphere. There is also an unspoken belief that he will move people to different desks to break up what he perceives as people becoming too “chummy.” (It’s been done under the guise of “creating teams.”)
We used to be able to joke around a little or talk about our favorite “Idol” contestant to break the tension, but now we’re getting more and more skittish about even the most mundane general conversations (“Did you have a good weekend?”). This was once a very open, cooperative group who worked well together. Now we’re more suspicious of each other and teamwork is becoming harder. Do you think this was the goal?
Silenced in SID
Holy s**!. They have an old school spying operation within their new fangled hi-tech enterprise. This is how every single commie regime including the one in my old country used to operate. Everyone around you could be a snitch and something as innocent as an anecdote told to a friend could get you in trouble. You have to love the irony!
Implementing what you suggest will most definitely piss the hell out of the limo's customers. If you are absolutely sure that this is what you want, then here is my two cents:
Smoke machine + IR camera. Dense fog will disrupt any attempt of your passengers to take pictures of themselves and flash photography will make things worse for them. Very close distance pictures may still work, but those will not be very desirable. On the other hand you will be prepared with IR camera that will be less affected by the fog.
Sounds stupid? Well look at the question before complaining.
Things like polluted air and water, sugary drinks, strychnine, high crime rate, police state, etc. could also be good for you. Except that they are not.
The regulation is hardly aggressive. According to the regulators for now all the companies need to show is a good faith effort to come in compliance. The article headline is obviously misleading.
But if you don't have a bank, how can you establish a banking record? Once you get to a certain age, it becomes a Catch-22. Can't bank because don't have credit record. Don't have credit record because can't use bank.
You show up in the bank with some money and tell them that you want to make a deposit. Couple of hundred bucks would do it. Banks love money. If on the other hand you show up with no money and ask for a credit, well than this is a different story. Did I say that banks love money?
To me it seems he was too optimistic. He got the technology part pretty well. What he underestimated was the dickishness of the average human:
1. Global governance: why not, we badly needed. The only problem is that people on any given spot of the world think the guys across the border are out to get them.
2. Base on the moon. No problem from technical standpoint, but then again who is going to spend money on that when a war makes for a better photo-op and comes handy during elections.
3. Distributing fairly the productivity gains from automation. Yeah right! You are fired, go flip burgers. Oh and by the way you have to know that flipping burgers is not a carrier, so we are going to pay you less than it would cost us to put a robot there. You see we are doing you good here by providing a stimulus for you to achieve your dreams.
Like the OpenSuse laptop this and the previous posts were made?
I have done my fair share of reading on the NSA and a linux machine will not help you, unless you become your own ISP and maintain your own mail server, DNS, tor node, etc. This however will cover only part of their entry points. You still have a phone and you also communicate with other people who are less skilled or just don't give that much thought about securing their communications. Even if you spend the time and effort to secure both ends of your communications, you still stand no chance if you are targeted. Read more on the technique they call 'Quantum Insert'.
The most practical solution involves making sufficient number of US citizens to actually act as citizens and exert pressure on changing the current law and instituting proper supervision. Here I also have done my part by calling my senator. Hopefully US corporations loosing business opportunities will work better than the US citizens suddenly starting to make educated decisions about how their country is ran.
Short of being a citizen you can make the NSA's job a little more challenging by using encryption whenever possible and generating large volumes of garbage data for them to dig trough.
Because most of them are in the homes of people who shop at walmart, and reading your post you rarely visit such places. Nevertheless they are a huge market.
I bought a samsung chromebook for the kids and it is still with the original ChromeOS. Perfect for what they need - web browsing, simple document creation. Even I occasionally pick it up. I will likely buy one later this year for my parents to replace an old Windows XP Netbook. Again it is going to do all they need to do and at the same time require a lot less maintenance than Windows. I think google has found a nearly perfect balance here. The only drawback is the somewhat finicky printing.
Let's face it the operating system has become a cheap commodity, as far as the the average consumer is concerned. For consumers the hardware and the OS are inseparable parts of the same package, and the nature of the OS is a little concern for most of them. In this mindset the price takes a lead in the purchase decision and windows hardware with its price premium for the OS is bound to loose. And before you jump up and start telling me how much more windows and MS office can do, let me make clear that we are not talking about business PCs. The chromebook primary market is the home users.
I specked an "equivalent" at newegg and crucial (newegg didn't have the 16GB RAM DDR3 1866 ECC chips that apple uses). It comes between $9800 and $12000 depending on what SSD you are going to stick in. $14K is a bit excessive. Apple's price is in the ballpark, considering that they save quite a bit on whole sale prices and large scale manufacturing, but have invested considerable amount of money in a design for a niche market.
What is more interesting is their effort to "encapsulate" the workstation the same way they did with the laptop and the desktop. I am really curios how the so called "professional" users will react to not being allowed to upgrade the internals. Making upgrades possible only using external attachments is pretty transparent effort to create a market for expensive accessories. I am curios how this will turn out.
Go to lowes or home depot and look for dimmable LED bulbs. I have had better lick with those than with dimmable CFLs, which indeed require you to upgrade the dimmer switch. Having said this unless you insist of having dimmable light in your bath, I would suggest just to get a 70 cent light switch and replace the dimmer.
"Even though production of 75W and 100W incandescent lamps were phased out earlier this year, many U.S. consumers remain blissfully unaware of The Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007
They will happily swap the burned out bulbs with whatever is available in the store and most of them wouldn't notice much difference. Couple will find that some of the stuff they bought does not work with dimmer switches or some bulbs tend to be a bit bulky and don't fit in certain very tight enclosures. All of those will be swapped for free back in the store with suitable replacements. So what's the point of preparing in advance for the switch or knowing about it?
Now, the people hoarding incandescent bulbs are a bit more puzzling. Some of them probably have a get-rich-quick plan kicking into action and all I can say is good for them. The ones that are actively trying to avoid switching away from incandescent bulbs are completely different story. WTF people? What's the point of massively inconveniencing yourself with the storage of fragile items only to pay higher electric bills.
Can somebody point to a website with information regarding the study? If it is federally funded it must be publicly posted somewhere. Such studies typically require "informed consent" from the subjects. I would really like to see how do they obtain consent from the people being pulled over and how they justify instructing the police to pull over random drivers without probable cause. It would have been a different story if they sit in a parking lot and ask for samples drivers already stopped at the parking. The whole thing with the police pulling people over seems a bit too coercive for my taste.
Slashdot Mirror
Ammonia as a fuel checklist:
For those of you not familiar with ammonia synthesis, we make it by reacting nitrogen with hydrogen under high pressure and temperature. The predominant sources of hydrogen these days are natural gas and oil. So, why do we need to go trough all this trouble if we can burn the natural gas in the existing car engines? Have we really run out of stupid fuel sources so we have to consider ammonia?
In terms of economic impact on US it is pretty toothless. ULA has already stated that they have two year supply of RD-180 engines and that they are perfectly capable of manufacturing the engines themselves. The reasons for buying these engines from Russia are mostly political - US supports Russian engineers so they don't go and build rockets in Iran. On the other hand Elon Musk must be laughing out loud. The Russians just created the perfect political environment for the congress to act and allow SpaceX to compete with ULA for military satellite launches, something that only few days back was made impossible by a court decision. Good job Ruskies, you just open the door for your most aggressive competitor.
As far as the shutting down GPS ground stations in Russia goes, this will only impact the accuracy of the system on Russian territory. So the only way somebody in US may feel pain is if they fall off their chairs laughing.
What's worse is that many of those same CEOs rarely focused/productive themselves.
There, fixed that for you.
Instead I want to set up one test machine for users to try it and ask THEM if they like it.
This experiment will have a predetermined outcome: the users will not going to like it (if they even bother to try it) because its is different. Don't do it unless you realy need an excuse not to transition to linux.
If I were you I would do a gradual change:
As far as distro's come, the obvious choice is to do it with the distro that you are most familiar with. Alternatively use a distro that will be supported for years to come, even if you are no longer with the company.
Last time I checked the average body of a living human was fairly worm and a pretty bright IR source. Anyone wearing IR contact lenses will be blinded by the heat of their own eyeballs. That is unless they are zombies. Are we expecting a zombie pandemic anytime soon?
First, read the TFA. Building infrastructure (new plants and pipelines) does not make much economic sense for regions producing oil or gas from shale. The reason is that the production from shale wells tends to drop down sharply, so the infrastructure is likely to become underutilized before it has payed for itself. Second, explain how shipping through a pipeline addresses the problem with volatile gases being present at higher amounts than they should be in the crude oil? Wouldn't this make the pipeline more likely to blow too? Besides volatile gases separating from the liquid phase in a pipeline opens a whole new can of worms related to hydraulic shock.
From he TFA:
Here’s the scenario: when the boss sees co-workers having a quiet conversation, he wants to know what is being said (it’s mostly work related). He has his designated “snitches” and expects them to keep him apprised of all the office gossip – even calling them at home and expecting a run-down! This puts the “designees” in a really awkward position; plus, we’re all afraid any offhand comment or anything said in confidence might be either repeated or misrepresented. Needless to say, this creates a certain amount of tension between team members who normally would get along well, and adds stress in an already stressful atmosphere. There is also an unspoken belief that he will move people to different desks to break up what he perceives as people becoming too “chummy.” (It’s been done under the guise of “creating teams.”)
We used to be able to joke around a little or talk about our favorite “Idol” contestant to break the tension, but now we’re getting more and more skittish about even the most mundane general conversations (“Did you have a good weekend?”). This was once a very open, cooperative group who worked well together. Now we’re more suspicious of each other and teamwork is becoming harder. Do you think this was the goal? Silenced in SID
Holy s**!. They have an old school spying operation within their new fangled hi-tech enterprise. This is how every single commie regime including the one in my old country used to operate. Everyone around you could be a snitch and something as innocent as an anecdote told to a friend could get you in trouble. You have to love the irony!
Implementing what you suggest will most definitely piss the hell out of the limo's customers. If you are absolutely sure that this is what you want, then here is my two cents: Smoke machine + IR camera. Dense fog will disrupt any attempt of your passengers to take pictures of themselves and flash photography will make things worse for them. Very close distance pictures may still work, but those will not be very desirable. On the other hand you will be prepared with IR camera that will be less affected by the fog. Sounds stupid? Well look at the question before complaining.
Things like polluted air and water, sugary drinks, strychnine, high crime rate, police state, etc. could also be good for you. Except that they are not.
The regulation is hardly aggressive. According to the regulators for now all the companies need to show is a good faith effort to come in compliance. The article headline is obviously misleading.
Mod parent up. This is exactly right. All I can say here is thank god it is California.
I want my Klingon face now!
The five blade flint stone razor blade has not been invented yet.
But if you don't have a bank, how can you establish a banking record? Once you get to a certain age, it becomes a Catch-22. Can't bank because don't have credit record. Don't have credit record because can't use bank.
You show up in the bank with some money and tell them that you want to make a deposit. Couple of hundred bucks would do it. Banks love money. If on the other hand you show up with no money and ask for a credit, well than this is a different story. Did I say that banks love money?
At the end all these currencies will join the Euro.
To me it seems he was too optimistic. He got the technology part pretty well. What he underestimated was the dickishness of the average human:
Like the OpenSuse laptop this and the previous posts were made? I have done my fair share of reading on the NSA and a linux machine will not help you, unless you become your own ISP and maintain your own mail server, DNS, tor node, etc. This however will cover only part of their entry points. You still have a phone and you also communicate with other people who are less skilled or just don't give that much thought about securing their communications. Even if you spend the time and effort to secure both ends of your communications, you still stand no chance if you are targeted. Read more on the technique they call 'Quantum Insert'. The most practical solution involves making sufficient number of US citizens to actually act as citizens and exert pressure on changing the current law and instituting proper supervision. Here I also have done my part by calling my senator. Hopefully US corporations loosing business opportunities will work better than the US citizens suddenly starting to make educated decisions about how their country is ran. Short of being a citizen you can make the NSA's job a little more challenging by using encryption whenever possible and generating large volumes of garbage data for them to dig trough.
Because most of them are in the homes of people who shop at walmart, and reading your post you rarely visit such places. Nevertheless they are a huge market.
I bought a samsung chromebook for the kids and it is still with the original ChromeOS. Perfect for what they need - web browsing, simple document creation. Even I occasionally pick it up. I will likely buy one later this year for my parents to replace an old Windows XP Netbook. Again it is going to do all they need to do and at the same time require a lot less maintenance than Windows. I think google has found a nearly perfect balance here. The only drawback is the somewhat finicky printing. Let's face it the operating system has become a cheap commodity, as far as the the average consumer is concerned. For consumers the hardware and the OS are inseparable parts of the same package, and the nature of the OS is a little concern for most of them. In this mindset the price takes a lead in the purchase decision and windows hardware with its price premium for the OS is bound to loose. And before you jump up and start telling me how much more windows and MS office can do, let me make clear that we are not talking about business PCs. The chromebook primary market is the home users.
I specked an "equivalent" at newegg and crucial (newegg didn't have the 16GB RAM DDR3 1866 ECC chips that apple uses). It comes between $9800 and $12000 depending on what SSD you are going to stick in. $14K is a bit excessive. Apple's price is in the ballpark, considering that they save quite a bit on whole sale prices and large scale manufacturing, but have invested considerable amount of money in a design for a niche market. What is more interesting is their effort to "encapsulate" the workstation the same way they did with the laptop and the desktop. I am really curios how the so called "professional" users will react to not being allowed to upgrade the internals. Making upgrades possible only using external attachments is pretty transparent effort to create a market for expensive accessories. I am curios how this will turn out.
LEDs and halogens would do the job you describe just fine
Forgot about the dimmable halogen bulbs, which may be a better fit for you than LEDs.
Go to lowes or home depot and look for dimmable LED bulbs. I have had better lick with those than with dimmable CFLs, which indeed require you to upgrade the dimmer switch. Having said this unless you insist of having dimmable light in your bath, I would suggest just to get a 70 cent light switch and replace the dimmer.
"Even though production of 75W and 100W incandescent lamps were phased out earlier this year, many U.S. consumers remain blissfully unaware of The Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007
They will happily swap the burned out bulbs with whatever is available in the store and most of them wouldn't notice much difference. Couple will find that some of the stuff they bought does not work with dimmer switches or some bulbs tend to be a bit bulky and don't fit in certain very tight enclosures. All of those will be swapped for free back in the store with suitable replacements. So what's the point of preparing in advance for the switch or knowing about it?
Now, the people hoarding incandescent bulbs are a bit more puzzling. Some of them probably have a get-rich-quick plan kicking into action and all I can say is good for them. The ones that are actively trying to avoid switching away from incandescent bulbs are completely different story. WTF people? What's the point of massively inconveniencing yourself with the storage of fragile items only to pay higher electric bills.
Can somebody point to a website with information regarding the study? If it is federally funded it must be publicly posted somewhere. Such studies typically require "informed consent" from the subjects. I would really like to see how do they obtain consent from the people being pulled over and how they justify instructing the police to pull over random drivers without probable cause. It would have been a different story if they sit in a parking lot and ask for samples drivers already stopped at the parking. The whole thing with the police pulling people over seems a bit too coercive for my taste.