Excellent explanation. It at least sounds pretty good. Hopefully it reflects a correct understanding, and that I have understood it correctly - it at least matches my vague understanding of the issues.
The Monty Hall problem is an interesting example - as it is entirely unfocussed on thinking about probabilities about our knowledge of something that really is not probabilistic at all - the prizes and locations are established before the show. The reality is that one door has a prize (100%) and the other doors do not have prizes (0%) - but the contestant does not know which door is which, so can only assign a probability to the doors based on their ignorance. Coin flips, dice rolls, and quantum results are more properly probabilistic, as there is nobody with the knowledge of what their actual values are until after the fact.
This has to be the worst idea I have ever heard. As a California citizen, why in the holy hell should I care how OTHER states voted in determining how the electoral votes of my state are assigned?
You might feel that the electoral college system as currently practiced (winner take all at the state level) does not match how you want the system to work. If you want the system to work on a country-wide majority, this is a nifty way around the requirement of constitutional amendment to enact a popular vote change to the electoral college. Currently it is almost 50% enacted, and California is a state that has passed it into law. Certainly, I could see why California Republicans might think it was better than the current manner in which their vote effects the outcome of the election.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states. States passing this interstate compact have agreed to replace their current rules regarding the apportionment of presidential electors with rules guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. The agreement is to go into effect only when the participating states that have joined the compact together have an absolute majority in the Electoral College. In the subsequent presidential election, the participating states would award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, who as a result would win the presidency by winning more than half of electoral votes. Until the compact is joined by states with a majority of electoral votes, all states will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner.
This is a nifty way around the requirement of constitutional amendment to enact a popular vote change to the electoral college. Currently it is almost 50% enacted:
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states. States passing this interstate compact have agreed to replace their current rules regarding the apportionment of presidential electors with rules guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. The agreement is to go into effect only when the participating states that have joined the compact together have an absolute majority in the Electoral College. In the subsequent presidential election, the participating states would award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, who as a result would win the presidency by winning more than half of electoral votes. Until the compact is joined by states with a majority of electoral votes, all states will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner.
This is a nifty way around the requirement of constitutional amendment to enact a popular vote change to the electoral college. Currently it is almost 50% enacted:
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states. States passing this interstate compact have agreed to replace their current rules regarding the apportionment of presidential electors with rules guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. The agreement is to go into effect only when the participating states that have joined the compact together have an absolute majority in the Electoral College. In the subsequent presidential election, the participating states would award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, who as a result would win the presidency by winning more than half of electoral votes. Until the compact is joined by states with a majority of electoral votes, all states will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner.
If you were Seagate and your biggest competitor was pricing their product at $x and you COULD price yours at $x/2, but were able to sell all of your capacity at $x/(0.99), why would you charge the lower price?
To put my competition out of business.
I suppose that going down to half price might drive them out of business faster, but you are already undercutting their price (by a tiny bit), and you are working at max capacity, so until they do go out of business, dropping your price would only cost you money up to the point when they pack it in and you can raise your prices again.
Yes. 100% agreed. But the one that was hit most severely was WD. Seagate not so much. Yet, seagate and WD are priced accordingly. How come?
If you were Seagate and your biggest competitor was pricing their product at $x and you COULD price yours at $x/2, but were able to sell all of your capacity at $x/(0.99), why would you charge the lower price?
Theoretically, in a "perfect" market, the price of a product would be just a smidgen less than the price charged by the second-cheapest producer, at least until there is only one producer, who can then raise their price to a level to maximize profit in light of demand.
Living on $50k/year... you must be in middle America. Sorry but that won't even feed us for a year.
$50,000 a year is about $137 a day. I don't know who you mean by "us," but even in NYC or San Francisco, you should easily be able to feed a family of 6 on that.
That depends on where in NYC you live. My rent is $65/day for a 600sq ft. apartment. And I'm rent stabilized (most of my neighbors are paying ~$75/month). Six people could conceivably sleep here, but contention for the bathroom would be a killer. That would leave $65/day for taxes, food, clothes, transportation, utilities, etc., etc., etc. For a family of six, assuming you eat only ramen (buy it on Amazon or at Kam Man three meals a day (one pack of ramen per person), that's $9/day, two-way subway fare for three (assuming three of the kids have bus/train passes) is $13/day, wash clothes once a week (say four loads of laundry) $4/day, who needs toothpaste, shampoo or soap? using electricity is overrated, but ConEd will charge you $3/day or so in base charges if you have an account, just in case you decide you want some lights. Shaving is definitely overrated. You may want to have some bowls to eat your ramen in, so you'll need dish soap to wash the dishes. But wait. If you need to cook the ramen, you'll need to use gas (on the stove) or electricity for the microwave.
Let's not forget medical and dental expenses. Of course, no one needs a telephone. Or Internet access. Assuming four kids of varying ages, you have to buy clothes for three and give the younger kids hand-me-downs.
So, I guess you could do it. If you want to live like paupers.
Sometimes it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool....
Regardless of what your rent, etc is, as the poster was replying to the idea that $50k/year wouldn't feed "us" for a year, all that is moot. You raise many good points about the cost of many services, but it seems as though you foolishly were not actually replying to the stated point - namely that $137 a day is a lot to pay for food.
With that said, I would not be surprised to find that many people who don't cook for themselves and "eat out" for every meal can start to approach that level of spending.
It's really important not to eat into your principal, because you want to make sure that you still have $5 million in the bank when you're dead.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but it certainly is a valid point that part of your future planning should be to decide how much you want to have when you depart these mortal coils. No sense leaving a bunch in the bank, but you also don't want to mess things up by reaching ninety and running out of money. Maybe an investment in a Tontine would be a good hedge.
250K pre tax. And where are you going to get 5% for 5 measly million right now? If you have 5 Billion then you might get 5%, or even 6.
You might be able to cut the initial tax burden a bit by taking the payment over a multi-year time frame, or by taking stock rather than straight cash or things like that. Assuming you can get 5 million
You don't need to get 5% right now, you need to get a 5% average over the next 70ish years.
A "measly" 5 million will last 20 years if you take 250k from it every year and you earn 0% by investing it. If you earn 1%, it will last about 22 years. If you earn 2% it will last about 25 years, while 3% it will last about 31 years and at 4% it will last about 41 years. At 4.5% it lasts about 52 years and at 5% or more it lasts indefinitely.
Historically, stocks have given real returns above 5%
In any case, if someone (or a family) is not able to live comfortably with 5million in the bank, they are doing something wrong. Considering that only about 15% of American households earn 100K or more, and less than 2% of households earn 250K or more, by any sane measurement, 5 million in the bank should be easy to live off of.
Imagine you're in NYC. Power is out, the place is flooded and your apartment is destroyed.
Without relying on "your fucking cell phone or having access to any phone at all" and only relying on yourself, how the hell are you going to find a place to stay?
Have fun figuring that out. Everyone else is going to use the payphone to call their friends and relatives and they'll have a couch to sleep on while you're still hunting for a dry cardboard box to sleep in.
Maybe talking to your neighbours would be a good first step? Being a bit social and meeting them before the disaster strikes might be a good idea.
Most recently, they ran me around for 45 minutes over a $0.75 charge for a three-way call that couldn't possibly have been made from my phone, repeatedly claiming that "the computer says the call was made and that proves it was."
You should take heart in the thought that your call cost them way more than $0.75 to deal with, even if they did not reverse the charges. You provided a public service to the rest of us by your actions. I sometimes get a good feeling when I get a robo-call and put it on speaker phone while I do something else until their system hangs up - the longer they are on line with me, the higher their cost-per-call is, and the less time to they have to use their system calling others.
I agree that the system could be secure, but it is not
In the case of boarding passes I don't think it ever can be. If you want to access the gates, but not fly, just buy a fully-refundable ticket and don't board the flight. This trick is used from time to time by frequent flyers who want to access an airline lounge for an airline they're not flying on a given day.
You can also get a "gate pass" to accompany people to the gate - often done with young family members or people with mobility or other health issues. It is probably not difficult to use some "social engineering" skills to get one of those printed up for you by the airline in situations where it is not actually warranted.
I've heard that packing in meat is effective because sniffer dogs are effectively taught/not/ to respond to the smell of meat. I'm unsure if they train them on drugs+meat combinations.
If you are traveling however, this will just get you caught by the meat sniffing dogs who are trying to stop people from smuggling meat products into our out of regions that are under various agricultural quarantines.
In reality, police don't teach their dog this sort of thing precisely because it would completely undermine and destroy any subsequent legal action stemming from a search with the dog if the defendant could trivially ask the courts to demand prove that the dog's actions were legit.
It is not necessary that the dog be taught this type of thing, but only that they learn this type of thing. The dog can be great at finding stuff, but if also has significant times when it finds things that are not there (the false-positive rate), for whatever reason, then that is a problem, open to abuse, even if unintended.
Lack of consistent regular training clearly makes dog units less reliable than they potentially could be according to this source:
The funny part is, those corporate researchers that I've met -- and it would be dozens over the years -- all use cell phones, and buy them for their spouses and children. What cold-hearted bastards! Or ignorant fools! Or both!
Or the researchers understand that even if their studies are correct, virtually all of them indicate the increased risk is SMALL, and usually consistent with zero increased risk. If the increased risk from the cell phone is comparable (or smaller) to other increased risks we expose ourselves to (crossing in the middle of the street, not washing our hands before eating, or just driving across town in a car) than it is probably not worth changing our behaviour in that instance.
The last sentence suggests that I should come up with a frothing political conspiracy theory; but I don't know which one I'm supposed to latch on to...
Are the jackbooted Obamunist gestapo making a last-ditch move to irradiate freedom loving Real Americans in order to ensure their demographic victory even in the event of electoral defeat? Or are the jackbooted Rethuglicans of the police state amping up the fear machine in order to increase the effectiveness of traditional 'democrats are weak on terror, especially ones that are secretly kenyan muslims' messages?
You're looking at this incorrectly. This is a method to recover energy that would otherwise be going to waste. Currently, much of the energy that is produced, particularly during off-peak hours, simply goes away without getting used. By instead putting it to use on something like this, power plants could recover some of that energy by creating fuel. Yes, it's probably not efficient, but capturing at even 1% efficiency (I have no idea how efficient it actually is) is better than not capturing anything at all while still spending that energy.
I don't think any significant amount of electrical power is "wasted" at non-peak times due to lack of demand - otherwise non-peak spot prices for electricity would be much lower than it is. When demand is low, the power people turn off generating capacity rather than run the generators and waste the resulting output - sources that are difficult to turn off (nuke plants for example) do present challenges, but I don't think it is common for the load to drop by so much that they would need to be shut down.
If you have overbuilt your generation capacity, this could be a problem, and for things like wind where you don't get to decide when the power is available, there can be times when you have excess capability and this type of "chemical storage" can be attractive, but to run it off of a "regular" generation system is not at all efficient compared to just turning off the generator when not needed for electrical production.
Obviously. But the only thing off the shelf in an agricultural GPS unit is the GPS receiver module, so it doesn't have to be so. That's the route the ag industry chose.
Beyond the fact that the "GPS reciever module" is a pretty significant piece of technology with production and development costs amortized over a gizzillion other users, not installing a local transmitter likely is a whole lot cheaper and easier to support. Needing either the farmer or someone else to provide that type of "infrastructure" support when you can get it free from the GPS people is a "no-brainer".
That's like asking why you drive on roads instead of using an ATV for all your transit needs -- you use a car because it's cheaper, easier, faster and more reliable than the alternatives
But using GPS as opposed to terrestrial beacons is neither faster nor more reliable.
It's probably way cheaper to buy off the shelf receivers than buy receivers and then also erect terrestrial beacons.
So you're saying you'd need someone to make the bomb and another completely different person to carry it to the airport? There's no way a terrorist organization could pull off that kind of complex operation! I feel safer already.
Hey, I'm not saying I think it would actually improve safety to any meaningful extent. I'm just saying that not bringing your boarding pass to the rifle range probably won't help much.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia has a nice writeup:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
California has already passed this bill.
Excellent explanation. It at least sounds pretty good. Hopefully it reflects a correct understanding, and that I have understood it correctly - it at least matches my vague understanding of the issues.
The Monty Hall problem is an interesting example - as it is entirely unfocussed on thinking about probabilities about our knowledge of something that really is not probabilistic at all - the prizes and locations are established before the show. The reality is that one door has a prize (100%) and the other doors do not have prizes (0%) - but the contestant does not know which door is which, so can only assign a probability to the doors based on their ignorance. Coin flips, dice rolls, and quantum results are more properly probabilistic, as there is nobody with the knowledge of what their actual values are until after the fact.
This has to be the worst idea I have ever heard. As a California citizen, why in the holy hell should I care how OTHER states voted in determining how the electoral votes of my state are assigned?
You might feel that the electoral college system as currently practiced (winner take all at the state level) does not match how you want the system to work. If you want the system to work on a country-wide majority, this is a nifty way around the requirement of constitutional amendment to enact a popular vote change to the electoral college. Currently it is almost 50% enacted, and California is a state that has passed it into law. Certainly, I could see why California Republicans might think it was better than the current manner in which their vote effects the outcome of the election.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact [wikipedia.org]
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states. States passing this interstate compact have agreed to replace their current rules regarding the apportionment of presidential electors with rules guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. The agreement is to go into effect only when the participating states that have joined the compact together have an absolute majority in the Electoral College. In the subsequent presidential election, the participating states would award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, who as a result would win the presidency by winning more than half of electoral votes. Until the compact is joined by states with a majority of electoral votes, all states will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner.
This is a nifty way around the requirement of constitutional amendment to enact a popular vote change to the electoral college. Currently it is almost 50% enacted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact [wikipedia.org]
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states. States passing this interstate compact have agreed to replace their current rules regarding the apportionment of presidential electors with rules guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. The agreement is to go into effect only when the participating states that have joined the compact together have an absolute majority in the Electoral College. In the subsequent presidential election, the participating states would award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, who as a result would win the presidency by winning more than half of electoral votes. Until the compact is joined by states with a majority of electoral votes, all states will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner.
This is a nifty way around the requirement of constitutional amendment to enact a popular vote change to the electoral college. Currently it is almost 50% enacted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states. States passing this interstate compact have agreed to replace their current rules regarding the apportionment of presidential electors with rules guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. The agreement is to go into effect only when the participating states that have joined the compact together have an absolute majority in the Electoral College. In the subsequent presidential election, the participating states would award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, who as a result would win the presidency by winning more than half of electoral votes. Until the compact is joined by states with a majority of electoral votes, all states will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner.
To put my competition out of business.
I suppose that going down to half price might drive them out of business faster, but you are already undercutting their price (by a tiny bit), and you are working at max capacity, so until they do go out of business, dropping your price would only cost you money up to the point when they pack it in and you can raise your prices again.
Yes. 100% agreed.
But the one that was hit most severely was WD. Seagate not so much. Yet, seagate and WD are priced accordingly. How come?
If you were Seagate and your biggest competitor was pricing their product at $x and you COULD price yours at $x/2, but were able to sell all of your capacity at $x/(0.99), why would you charge the lower price?
Theoretically, in a "perfect" market, the price of a product would be just a smidgen less than the price charged by the second-cheapest producer, at least until there is only one producer, who can then raise their price to a level to maximize profit in light of demand.
$50,000 a year is about $137 a day. I don't know who you mean by "us," but even in NYC or San Francisco, you should easily be able to feed a family of 6 on that.
That depends on where in NYC you live. My rent is $65/day for a 600sq ft. apartment. And I'm rent stabilized (most of my neighbors are paying ~$75/month). Six people could conceivably sleep here, but contention for the bathroom would be a killer. That would leave $65/day for taxes, food, clothes, transportation, utilities, etc., etc., etc. For a family of six, assuming you eat only ramen (buy it on Amazon or at Kam Man three meals a day (one pack of ramen per person), that's $9/day, two-way subway fare for three (assuming three of the kids have bus/train passes) is $13/day, wash clothes once a week (say four loads of laundry) $4/day, who needs toothpaste, shampoo or soap? using electricity is overrated, but ConEd will charge you $3/day or so in base charges if you have an account, just in case you decide you want some lights. Shaving is definitely overrated. You may want to have some bowls to eat your ramen in, so you'll need dish soap to wash the dishes. But wait. If you need to cook the ramen, you'll need to use gas (on the stove) or electricity for the microwave.
Let's not forget medical and dental expenses. Of course, no one needs a telephone. Or Internet access. Assuming four kids of varying ages, you have to buy clothes for three and give the younger kids hand-me-downs.
So, I guess you could do it. If you want to live like paupers.
Sometimes it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool....
Regardless of what your rent, etc is, as the poster was replying to the idea that $50k/year wouldn't feed "us" for a year, all that is moot. You raise many good points about the cost of many services, but it seems as though you foolishly were not actually replying to the stated point - namely that $137 a day is a lot to pay for food.
With that said, I would not be surprised to find that many people who don't cook for themselves and "eat out" for every meal can start to approach that level of spending.
It's really important not to eat into your principal, because you want to make sure that you still have $5 million in the bank when you're dead.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but it certainly is a valid point that part of your future planning should be to decide how much you want to have when you depart these mortal coils. No sense leaving a bunch in the bank, but you also don't want to mess things up by reaching ninety and running out of money. Maybe an investment in a Tontine would be a good hedge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine
250K pre tax.
And where are you going to get 5% for 5 measly million right now? If you have 5 Billion then you might get 5%, or even 6.
You might be able to cut the initial tax burden a bit by taking the payment over a multi-year time frame, or by taking stock rather than straight cash or things like that. Assuming you can get 5 million
You don't need to get 5% right now, you need to get a 5% average over the next 70ish years.
A "measly" 5 million will last 20 years if you take 250k from it every year and you earn 0% by investing it. If you earn 1%, it will last about 22 years. If you earn 2% it will last about 25 years, while 3% it will last about 31 years and at 4% it will last about 41 years. At 4.5% it lasts about 52 years and at 5% or more it lasts indefinitely.
Historically, stocks have given real returns above 5%
http://monevator.com/us-historical-asset-class-returns/
In any case, if someone (or a family) is not able to live comfortably with 5million in the bank, they are doing something wrong. Considering that only about 15% of American households earn 100K or more, and less than 2% of households earn 250K or more, by any sane measurement, 5 million in the bank should be easy to live off of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
Imagine you're in NYC. Power is out, the place is flooded and your apartment is destroyed.
Without relying on "your fucking cell phone or having access to any phone at all" and only relying on yourself, how the hell are you going to find a place to stay?
Have fun figuring that out. Everyone else is going to use the payphone to call their friends and relatives and they'll have a couch to sleep on while you're still hunting for a dry cardboard box to sleep in.
Maybe talking to your neighbours would be a good first step? Being a bit social and meeting them before the disaster strikes might be a good idea.
Most recently, they ran me around for 45 minutes over a $0.75 charge for a three-way call that couldn't possibly have been made from my phone, repeatedly claiming that "the computer says the call was made and that proves it was."
You should take heart in the thought that your call cost them way more than $0.75 to deal with, even if they did not reverse the charges. You provided a public service to the rest of us by your actions. I sometimes get a good feeling when I get a robo-call and put it on speaker phone while I do something else until their system hangs up - the longer they are on line with me, the higher their cost-per-call is, and the less time to they have to use their system calling others.
I agree that the system could be secure, but it is not
In the case of boarding passes I don't think it ever can be. If you want to access the gates, but not fly, just buy a fully-refundable ticket and don't board the flight. This trick is used from time to time by frequent flyers who want to access an airline lounge for an airline they're not flying on a given day.
You can also get a "gate pass" to accompany people to the gate - often done with young family members or people with mobility or other health issues. It is probably not difficult to use some "social engineering" skills to get one of those printed up for you by the airline in situations where it is not actually warranted.
I've heard that packing in meat is effective because sniffer dogs are effectively taught /not/ to respond to the smell of meat. I'm unsure if they train them on drugs+meat combinations.
If you are traveling however, this will just get you caught by the meat sniffing dogs who are trying to stop people from smuggling meat products into our out of regions that are under various agricultural quarantines.
In reality, police don't teach their dog this sort of thing precisely because it would completely undermine and destroy any subsequent legal action stemming from a search with the dog if the defendant could trivially ask the courts to demand prove that the dog's actions were legit.
It is not necessary that the dog be taught this type of thing, but only that they learn this type of thing. The dog can be great at finding stuff, but if also has significant times when it finds things that are not there (the false-positive rate), for whatever reason, then that is a problem, open to abuse, even if unintended.
Lack of consistent regular training clearly makes dog units less reliable than they potentially could be according to this source:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-01-06/news/ct-met-canine-officers-20110105_1_drug-sniffing-dogs-alex-rothacker-drug-dog
If you've got the time and money, you might be able to file a private prosecution without the help of the Crown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution
The funny part is, those corporate researchers that I've met -- and it would be dozens over the years -- all use cell phones, and buy them for their spouses and children. What cold-hearted bastards! Or ignorant fools! Or both!
Or the researchers understand that even if their studies are correct, virtually all of them indicate the increased risk is SMALL, and usually consistent with zero increased risk. If the increased risk from the cell phone is comparable (or smaller) to other increased risks we expose ourselves to (crossing in the middle of the street, not washing our hands before eating, or just driving across town in a car) than it is probably not worth changing our behaviour in that instance.
The last sentence suggests that I should come up with a frothing political conspiracy theory; but I don't know which one I'm supposed to latch on to...
Are the jackbooted Obamunist gestapo making a last-ditch move to irradiate freedom loving Real Americans in order to ensure their demographic victory even in the event of electoral defeat? Or are the jackbooted Rethuglicans of the police state amping up the fear machine in order to increase the effectiveness of traditional 'democrats are weak on terror, especially ones that are secretly kenyan muslims' messages?
Help me out here, Slashdot!
Maybe both?
Escape Velocity Nova seems to work on modern Macs:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/
Whoops, "almost modern" might be more accurate - it only lists 10.7 support.
Escape Velocity Nova seems to work on modern Macs:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/
You're looking at this incorrectly. This is a method to recover energy that would otherwise be going to waste. Currently, much of the energy that is produced, particularly during off-peak hours, simply goes away without getting used. By instead putting it to use on something like this, power plants could recover some of that energy by creating fuel. Yes, it's probably not efficient, but capturing at even 1% efficiency (I have no idea how efficient it actually is) is better than not capturing anything at all while still spending that energy.
I don't think any significant amount of electrical power is "wasted" at non-peak times due to lack of demand - otherwise non-peak spot prices for electricity would be much lower than it is. When demand is low, the power people turn off generating capacity rather than run the generators and waste the resulting output - sources that are difficult to turn off (nuke plants for example) do present challenges, but I don't think it is common for the load to drop by so much that they would need to be shut down.
If you have overbuilt your generation capacity, this could be a problem, and for things like wind where you don't get to decide when the power is available, there can be times when you have excess capability and this type of "chemical storage" can be attractive, but to run it off of a "regular" generation system is not at all efficient compared to just turning off the generator when not needed for electrical production.
It's not an iPad. I want and iPad. (Originated from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg)
I love those scripted animations. They are great.
Obviously. But the only thing off the shelf in an agricultural GPS unit is the GPS receiver module, so it doesn't have to be so. That's the route the ag industry chose.
Beyond the fact that the "GPS reciever module" is a pretty significant piece of technology with production and development costs amortized over a gizzillion other users, not installing a local transmitter likely is a whole lot cheaper and easier to support. Needing either the farmer or someone else to provide that type of "infrastructure" support when you can get it free from the GPS people is a "no-brainer".
That's like asking why you drive on roads instead of using an ATV for all your transit needs -- you use a car because it's cheaper, easier, faster and more reliable than the alternatives
But using GPS as opposed to terrestrial beacons is neither faster nor more reliable.
It's probably way cheaper to buy off the shelf receivers than buy receivers and then also erect terrestrial beacons.
So you're saying you'd need someone to make the bomb and another completely different person to carry it to the airport? There's no way a terrorist organization could pull off that kind of complex operation! I feel safer already.
Hey, I'm not saying I think it would actually improve safety to any meaningful extent. I'm just saying that not bringing your boarding pass to the rifle range probably won't help much.