I think you forgot the actual energy distribution part of your equation. Electricity is far easier to distribute than other forms of energy: lpg, petrol, diesel, etc. The infrastructure is also easier to maintain than the other forms.
Not to mention the distributed maintenance costs would be higher when stuff breaks.
Then there is the sharing benefits where a group has less peak demand than the combined peak demands of each so you need to produce less energy in the first place.
Distributed solar I guess comes close to competing against centralized solar. But even here, I can't see it beating the centralized monitoring, cleaning, maintenance, sun tracking, and bulk purchasing benefits.
Yes paper can be destroyed, replaced, and added to, impacting the outcome. But the impact will be at most ONE small district. And you would need to do this at multiple voting centers. There are 435 districts in the US. Great path if you want to rig your very local election.
But going to major cities or state levels... the amount of money you would need to spend to significantly impact such elections would be a waste of funds and a high risk for capture through multiple attempts. It would be far more cost effective to spend that on ads to sway public opinion or a candidate directly.
At the federal level... easier to buy out the Electorial College. That may seem difficult but nothing compared to what you propose.
With electronics, you have a centralized, standardized, single target. But this target would have multiple stages to attack, any of which can yield control of the entire system.
It is possible to create a good enough electronic voting system but we just don't have anyone nearly competent enough to do so. Our current system of hundreds of thousands of cogs watching each other is more than good enough at the moment.
I know the parent post is there to just get a pointless raise out of everyone and release some pent up stress the poster has, but for the foreigners who also may not know the history of the US (what the poster is really referring to).
The US geographical part of the Americas in its 500 years of recognized history has NEVER been anything the parent implies. In many aspects it was the exact opposite. The US has been the most prosperous nation since the early 1800s (overtaking Britain I think) and has pretty much stayed at the top since... even with the Great Depression and Great Recession.
Where the posters notion comes from is product advertisements of a "happy nuclear family" (Male & female parents with one boy & girl; all white) from the 1950s. All of fake-them were called Father, Mother/Wife, Jonny, & Mary/Suzy.
No, people are stupid and too lazy to use Google. Deductions and credits are one of the simpler things to understand in the tax system. Once you think in terms of "taxable income" both make total sense.
The complexity isn't the terms themselves but the shear number of them and the rules for qualification. The concepts themselves aren't bad. They encourage market & resource direction. But I think they have long ago become nothing more than chips in the political lobby poker table.
My bet is on Aluminum batteries for the long run. Nearly perfect charge storage. Plenty of it. Totally recyclable. Lightweight. Won't corrode the container. Doesn't lose charge over time (much).
Wow, it hadn't even been a decade since the innovative crash of 2008. Let's make the same banks that gave out all those loans and left the tab with the tax payers bigger & more powerful because they weren't biggest enough to fail back then. We have finally recovered from the Great Recession so it's time for that same kind of innovation again!
It would be nice if in the day of digitization, a distributed work becomes public domain if said distribution laps for more than 10 years. Distribution should include utility (i.e.: you can't charge $300 for something that you mass sold for $50, or turn off the validation server). It's really not hard nor expensive to provide a public copy for the term of the copyright.
If an owner can't keep providing his work for 10 years nor fund it for such, then it wasn't really worth much and they failed in the agreement with the public. The loss to the public was far greater than the gain to the owner.
It would be more valuable being part of the public base that all can build upon.
Calcium-45 means it absorbed 4 neutrons. Highly unlikely considering there are 3 stable isotopes before it, 1 stable after it, and 41 isn't highly radioactive. Plus the few such isotopes that are created would be gone in 18 months. Now 48 would be bad... but again that's highly unlikely given 47 decays fast, the environment, and other stuff in it. You probably can't pick it out of the background radiation.
Manganese-54 means you have neutrons being knock OFF. It is stable at 55. If you knock down one more you have slight radiation. Knock off one more and it now disappears in 2 weeks. Chances that you knock off just ONE and not make it up is unlikely.
Silicium-32 needs 3-4 neutrons added to get to. Highly unlikely given all the other stuff that is eating. You get to 31 and it is gone within a day.
Yes, concrete gets radioactive. But that is mostly from the disintegrated shell being imbedded into it and the decay of which keeps lighting up the secondary elements above.
Anyway, the 1mile around the glass bowl will certainly be radioactive for years to come. That's not my point. Nukes aren't "clean", they just aren't the "End of the World", "Nuclear Winter", "Millions of acres of wasteland", etc that people think.
Um... no. A much as Trump appears crazy and as disfunctional as Congress appears to be. We are no where close to losing it. There a many many safe guards and checks in place before a nuclear launch happens. Much more so than in the past because of the mishaps that have happened. The President can't even get an immigration ban that lasts more than a week. He has tried 3 times now. A political party can't even agree on a single healthcare overhaul initiative, nor can they seem to bring down the current system in place. If those minor topics have enough checks and balances, yes the nuclear path has plenty of checks and balances... internationally.
All people are seeing thus far is grand standing and one-upmanship. It will HAVE to be NK to successfully nuke someone else's property before a nuclear retaliation. However, if they mess up, it is still game over for them... just in a traditional sense.
Yes, this is true. HOWEVER, to create long lasting radioactive fallout, you generally need to excite really big atoms. Like Uranium or Plutonium. Which isn't exactly in abundance in soil. Almost all of the neutrinos will actually be absorbed by the casing which will vaporize and become the majority of the fallout. That small shell spread across a 2.5 mile radius or fall across a 100 miles by 10 miles in the direction of the wind... isn't exactly equivalent to the Elephant foot.
The rest of the "free" neutrinos and secondary emitters will be absorbed by the most abundant elements in nature... carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, aluminum, iron, etc. Almost all of which decay to normal stuff within 30 minutes. Yes, if you somehow survived temperatures as hot as the sun, the 1st 5 seconds will irradiate you enough to boil you. Swapping out the casing is how you convert a high yield HBomb to a high yield Neutron bomb... whose primary focus is to kill of organic life and neutralize U and Pu weapons while leaving the general infrastructure with little damage and be usable at a later time.
If the fallout of nukes were as bad as people guessed, the state of Nevada and surrounding states would be the most radioactive place in the world. That is in the middle of the US! There have been almost 1000 nuclear tests done there. Yes, their water table in the testing area is totally screwed, but outside that site, things are pretty normal.
Also, your first sentence, is why the Japan drops were such shit compared to today.
The US would never pre-emptively use a nuclear strike against anyone. The economic, social, and political fallout for decades would cause more damage than NKs nuke.
NK would need to purposely, successfully, and with merciless intent hit a populated area with a nuke before anyone retaliates. And if they do, it won't just be the US that will hit back. Also, anything along that path but short of that finality will result in immediate invasion by multiple countries and removal of all leaders and current administration.
What are you talking about? Need a citation. The original bombs were inefficient and produced more radioactive material that was embedded into everything.
This would be an Hydrogen bomb. It would have less radioactive material to blanket everything. It's not a neutron bomb that intends to produce a neutron blast.
Also, the radioactive materials produced by the few free neutrons won't get far and mostly create a lot of short lived radioactive material. You will probably get isotopes of oxygen, carbon, aluminum, iron, silicon, and nitrogen. All but carbon will decay out in 30 minutes. The nuclear heat will stick around much longer. I doubt the charred shadows of the dead will care much for either. And carbon-14 isn't dangerious to living things.
But... there is no point in doing what you are saying. Sure we might send one HBomb to level a C&C city. But not for bases. That would be a standard precision cruise missile from the local Navy.
Also, the fallout from the HBomb wouldn't be anywhere as bad as what fell on Japan. Those initial two were weak, inefficient, and poorly designed.
However, it would still make people the world over mad at the US. Because we would have crossed a line. A lot of goodwill will take quite a hit. The US will pay economically and social for a few years to come. But the disgust will be tapered by the fact it was NK that was taken out. People will realize that they shouldn't have been such a squeaky wheel.
No it's not binary. But the world doesn't work the way you are thinking. Those who have chosen not to do business with one or both sides are a minority. The rest of us make the decisions to keep doing business and move on.
That's not what the signature is for either. The article is just another clueless poster who doesn't know how credit cards work. It starts off just plain wrong. The signature is a very simple security measure for the SELLER to verify that you are the owner of said card at time of sale. The seller is supposed check if your signature matches what is on the card. Whether they choose to or not is up to them. The risk of the sale being disputed is on them so it is up to them to check.
What most medium to large retailers have found out is that the time (money) spent to do that check wasn't worth the very very small cost of the disputes. MC for the longest time made the signature a requirement as part of the transaction. They themselves have had no use for it. Then they made it optional for amounts less than a dollar value.
MC did a study and found out that no one uses the signature; it just slows down the overall process. So now they are just making it optional for all transactions. So a POS can implement a MC transaction without signature. There is actually very little news here.
Why does it matter what I or anyone else personally believes in this situation? A large government organization has basically banned a vendor. The reason they gave is irrelevant if you want to be involved in any business with said government. And most large organizations... are involved with this government.
Additionally there is the market liability part of this equation if you do any business in the US. Let's say the Russians ARE spying through the AV software and a company's customer data ends up being used there and traced back to said spying. Forget the last part. Can you even begin to imagine the legal fallout of that situation? Your defense lawyer can't argue your post to a federal judge. "Oh your honor, we thought we would be fools to listen to an intelligence agency."
People aren't as stupid as you think. They just have a better understanding of how the real world works.
Why is this ridiculous?!? A country believes they discovered another country's (adversarial one) spy vector. And YOU think it's perfectly sane to not say or do anything about it?
So what exactly is your point? Since the US does it, they should stay silent on the Russians doing them? A "I know you are spying on me, but that's OK because I spy on you too?"
NO. Fall is the best. I am from the South East. We all agree Winter sucks (and #3 on your list) so won't go into it.
Summer... is too HOT. People think of swimming pools and ice cream. No one thinks about the smell of sweat, sun burn, and melted ice cream. Spring is when everything is trying to procreate. We get tons of pollen messing up everyone's sinuses. We have yellow streams running down sidewalks. Rain in both seasons are hot, humid, and icky. Both seasons have tons of bugs, mosquitoes, and gnats!
Fall has nice cool breezes, warm sun, and you don't need to water the lawn 2x a week. Its small showers are nice and cool. The only thing negative (and #3 above) about Fall is all the leaf clutter that sticks around for 3 weeks.
Ummm, no. Its the number of hours below certain temperatures. For many trees not in really cold regions, that would add up over the nights (ie: ~400 chill hr Cherries in Georgia). Cherries with high chill hours (900+) won't yield in the southern states. Warmer winters for both end up with little to no yields the coming year.
Although I agree with you in priciple, that's just the way the world is. I don't consider it neither good nor bad... like gravity. Perception is just as, if not more, important than reality.
If reality says an investment has a 10% APY, but perception is less than that, you won't get the startup funding to engage that endeavor. Thus fulfilling the perception.
I am being US centric here: The most effective insurance I have seen thus far is either FDIC or home insurance. Health insurance is horrible. The labor costs are high, the equipment costs are high, there is a lot of labor involved, and the overall system is extremely inefficient. Yet the prices are almost arbitrary. It is very difficult to assess if the insurance fees are worth the inflated pricing. Plus, effective insurance is meant for the one off disaster costs. They are meant to off load the risk of a high bill. That the average fees will more than cover the low probability it happens. Not for milestones you hit in life.
Sorry, I had it in reverse. They detected the gaps in the light left from the Big Bang. Basically shadows of the gas particles. The lukewarm gas itself doesn't emit anything detectable. Put together a bunch of pictures of microscopic gaps and you can build up a shadow of a mass in the shape of a thread.
You should really read the article. This isn't two independent groups scanning and suddenly discovering new pieces of the universe. It's basically a common data aggregating process applied to massive amounts of data to brighten faint emissions. Considering every star gazer with $5000 worth of equipment and a Mac does this every week, how many papers does that need to prove itself?
Of course the next step is to test it across more spots in the universe to hopefully find anomolies.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you forgot the actual energy distribution part of your equation. Electricity is far easier to distribute than other forms of energy: lpg, petrol, diesel, etc. The infrastructure is also easier to maintain than the other forms.
Not to mention the distributed maintenance costs would be higher when stuff breaks.
Then there is the sharing benefits where a group has less peak demand than the combined peak demands of each so you need to produce less energy in the first place.
Distributed solar I guess comes close to competing against centralized solar. But even here, I can't see it beating the centralized monitoring, cleaning, maintenance, sun tracking, and bulk purchasing benefits.
Yes paper can be destroyed, replaced, and added to, impacting the outcome. But the impact will be at most ONE small district. And you would need to do this at multiple voting centers. There are 435 districts in the US. Great path if you want to rig your very local election.
But going to major cities or state levels... the amount of money you would need to spend to significantly impact such elections would be a waste of funds and a high risk for capture through multiple attempts. It would be far more cost effective to spend that on ads to sway public opinion or a candidate directly.
At the federal level... easier to buy out the Electorial College. That may seem difficult but nothing compared to what you propose.
With electronics, you have a centralized, standardized, single target. But this target would have multiple stages to attack, any of which can yield control of the entire system.
It is possible to create a good enough electronic voting system but we just don't have anyone nearly competent enough to do so. Our current system of hundreds of thousands of cogs watching each other is more than good enough at the moment.
I know the parent post is there to just get a pointless raise out of everyone and release some pent up stress the poster has, but for the foreigners who also may not know the history of the US (what the poster is really referring to).
The US geographical part of the Americas in its 500 years of recognized history has NEVER been anything the parent implies. In many aspects it was the exact opposite. The US has been the most prosperous nation since the early 1800s (overtaking Britain I think) and has pretty much stayed at the top since... even with the Great Depression and Great Recession.
Where the posters notion comes from is product advertisements of a "happy nuclear family" (Male & female parents with one boy & girl; all white) from the 1950s. All of fake-them were called Father, Mother/Wife, Jonny, & Mary/Suzy.
No, people are stupid and too lazy to use Google. Deductions and credits are one of the simpler things to understand in the tax system. Once you think in terms of "taxable income" both make total sense.
The complexity isn't the terms themselves but the shear number of them and the rules for qualification. The concepts themselves aren't bad. They encourage market & resource direction. But I think they have long ago become nothing more than chips in the political lobby poker table.
Are we still talking about Twitter or people's 401k, savings, SSN, mortgage, etc accounts?
My bet is on Aluminum batteries for the long run. Nearly perfect charge storage. Plenty of it. Totally recyclable. Lightweight. Won't corrode the container. Doesn't lose charge over time (much).
Wow, it hadn't even been a decade since the innovative crash of 2008. Let's make the same banks that gave out all those loans and left the tab with the tax payers bigger & more powerful because they weren't biggest enough to fail back then. We have finally recovered from the Great Recession so it's time for that same kind of innovation again!
It would be nice if in the day of digitization, a distributed work becomes public domain if said distribution laps for more than 10 years. Distribution should include utility (i.e.: you can't charge $300 for something that you mass sold for $50, or turn off the validation server). It's really not hard nor expensive to provide a public copy for the term of the copyright.
If an owner can't keep providing his work for 10 years nor fund it for such, then it wasn't really worth much and they failed in the agreement with the public. The loss to the public was far greater than the gain to the owner.
It would be more valuable being part of the public base that all can build upon.
None of those are as dangerious as you think.
Calcium-45 means it absorbed 4 neutrons. Highly unlikely considering there are 3 stable isotopes before it, 1 stable after it, and 41 isn't highly radioactive. Plus the few such isotopes that are created would be gone in 18 months. Now 48 would be bad... but again that's highly unlikely given 47 decays fast, the environment, and other stuff in it. You probably can't pick it out of the background radiation.
Manganese-54 means you have neutrons being knock OFF. It is stable at 55. If you knock down one more you have slight radiation. Knock off one more and it now disappears in 2 weeks. Chances that you knock off just ONE and not make it up is unlikely.
Silicium-32 needs 3-4 neutrons added to get to. Highly unlikely given all the other stuff that is eating. You get to 31 and it is gone within a day.
Yes, concrete gets radioactive. But that is mostly from the disintegrated shell being imbedded into it and the decay of which keeps lighting up the secondary elements above.
Anyway, the 1mile around the glass bowl will certainly be radioactive for years to come. That's not my point. Nukes aren't "clean", they just aren't the "End of the World", "Nuclear Winter", "Millions of acres of wasteland", etc that people think.
Um... no. A much as Trump appears crazy and as disfunctional as Congress appears to be. We are no where close to losing it. There a many many safe guards and checks in place before a nuclear launch happens. Much more so than in the past because of the mishaps that have happened. The President can't even get an immigration ban that lasts more than a week. He has tried 3 times now. A political party can't even agree on a single healthcare overhaul initiative, nor can they seem to bring down the current system in place. If those minor topics have enough checks and balances, yes the nuclear path has plenty of checks and balances... internationally.
All people are seeing thus far is grand standing and one-upmanship. It will HAVE to be NK to successfully nuke someone else's property before a nuclear retaliation. However, if they mess up, it is still game over for them... just in a traditional sense.
Yes, this is true. HOWEVER, to create long lasting radioactive fallout, you generally need to excite really big atoms. Like Uranium or Plutonium. Which isn't exactly in abundance in soil. Almost all of the neutrinos will actually be absorbed by the casing which will vaporize and become the majority of the fallout. That small shell spread across a 2.5 mile radius or fall across a 100 miles by 10 miles in the direction of the wind... isn't exactly equivalent to the Elephant foot.
The rest of the "free" neutrinos and secondary emitters will be absorbed by the most abundant elements in nature... carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, aluminum, iron, etc. Almost all of which decay to normal stuff within 30 minutes. Yes, if you somehow survived temperatures as hot as the sun, the 1st 5 seconds will irradiate you enough to boil you. Swapping out the casing is how you convert a high yield HBomb to a high yield Neutron bomb... whose primary focus is to kill of organic life and neutralize U and Pu weapons while leaving the general infrastructure with little damage and be usable at a later time.
If the fallout of nukes were as bad as people guessed, the state of Nevada and surrounding states would be the most radioactive place in the world. That is in the middle of the US! There have been almost 1000 nuclear tests done there. Yes, their water table in the testing area is totally screwed, but outside that site, things are pretty normal.
Also, your first sentence, is why the Japan drops were such shit compared to today.
The US would never pre-emptively use a nuclear strike against anyone. The economic, social, and political fallout for decades would cause more damage than NKs nuke.
NK would need to purposely, successfully, and with merciless intent hit a populated area with a nuke before anyone retaliates. And if they do, it won't just be the US that will hit back. Also, anything along that path but short of that finality will result in immediate invasion by multiple countries and removal of all leaders and current administration.
What are you talking about? Need a citation. The original bombs were inefficient and produced more radioactive material that was embedded into everything.
This would be an Hydrogen bomb. It would have less radioactive material to blanket everything. It's not a neutron bomb that intends to produce a neutron blast.
Also, the radioactive materials produced by the few free neutrons won't get far and mostly create a lot of short lived radioactive material. You will probably get isotopes of oxygen, carbon, aluminum, iron, silicon, and nitrogen. All but carbon will decay out in 30 minutes. The nuclear heat will stick around much longer. I doubt the charred shadows of the dead will care much for either. And carbon-14 isn't dangerious to living things.
But... there is no point in doing what you are saying. Sure we might send one HBomb to level a C&C city. But not for bases. That would be a standard precision cruise missile from the local Navy.
Also, the fallout from the HBomb wouldn't be anywhere as bad as what fell on Japan. Those initial two were weak, inefficient, and poorly designed.
However, it would still make people the world over mad at the US. Because we would have crossed a line. A lot of goodwill will take quite a hit. The US will pay economically and social for a few years to come. But the disgust will be tapered by the fact it was NK that was taken out. People will realize that they shouldn't have been such a squeaky wheel.
No it's not binary. But the world doesn't work the way you are thinking. Those who have chosen not to do business with one or both sides are a minority. The rest of us make the decisions to keep doing business and move on.
Mod parent up please. The post makes more sense than almost all the others here so far.
That's not what the signature is for either. The article is just another clueless poster who doesn't know how credit cards work. It starts off just plain wrong. The signature is a very simple security measure for the SELLER to verify that you are the owner of said card at time of sale. The seller is supposed check if your signature matches what is on the card. Whether they choose to or not is up to them. The risk of the sale being disputed is on them so it is up to them to check.
What most medium to large retailers have found out is that the time (money) spent to do that check wasn't worth the very very small cost of the disputes. MC for the longest time made the signature a requirement as part of the transaction. They themselves have had no use for it. Then they made it optional for amounts less than a dollar value.
MC did a study and found out that no one uses the signature; it just slows down the overall process. So now they are just making it optional for all transactions. So a POS can implement a MC transaction without signature. There is actually very little news here.
Why does it matter what I or anyone else personally believes in this situation? A large government organization has basically banned a vendor. The reason they gave is irrelevant if you want to be involved in any business with said government. And most large organizations... are involved with this government.
Additionally there is the market liability part of this equation if you do any business in the US. Let's say the Russians ARE spying through the AV software and a company's customer data ends up being used there and traced back to said spying. Forget the last part. Can you even begin to imagine the legal fallout of that situation? Your defense lawyer can't argue your post to a federal judge. "Oh your honor, we thought we would be fools to listen to an intelligence agency."
People aren't as stupid as you think. They just have a better understanding of how the real world works.
Why is this ridiculous?!? A country believes they discovered another country's (adversarial one) spy vector. And YOU think it's perfectly sane to not say or do anything about it?
So what exactly is your point? Since the US does it, they should stay silent on the Russians doing them? A "I know you are spying on me, but that's OK because I spy on you too?"
NO. Fall is the best. I am from the South East. We all agree Winter sucks (and #3 on your list) so won't go into it.
Summer... is too HOT. People think of swimming pools and ice cream. No one thinks about the smell of sweat, sun burn, and melted ice cream. Spring is when everything is trying to procreate. We get tons of pollen messing up everyone's sinuses. We have yellow streams running down sidewalks. Rain in both seasons are hot, humid, and icky. Both seasons have tons of bugs, mosquitoes, and gnats!
Fall has nice cool breezes, warm sun, and you don't need to water the lawn 2x a week. Its small showers are nice and cool. The only thing negative (and #3 above) about Fall is all the leaf clutter that sticks around for 3 weeks.
Ummm, no. Its the number of hours below certain temperatures. For many trees not in really cold regions, that would add up over the nights (ie: ~400 chill hr Cherries in Georgia). Cherries with high chill hours (900+) won't yield in the southern states. Warmer winters for both end up with little to no yields the coming year.
Although I agree with you in priciple, that's just the way the world is. I don't consider it neither good nor bad... like gravity. Perception is just as, if not more, important than reality.
If reality says an investment has a 10% APY, but perception is less than that, you won't get the startup funding to engage that endeavor. Thus fulfilling the perception.
I am being US centric here: The most effective insurance I have seen thus far is either FDIC or home insurance. Health insurance is horrible. The labor costs are high, the equipment costs are high, there is a lot of labor involved, and the overall system is extremely inefficient. Yet the prices are almost arbitrary. It is very difficult to assess if the insurance fees are worth the inflated pricing. Plus, effective insurance is meant for the one off disaster costs. They are meant to off load the risk of a high bill. That the average fees will more than cover the low probability it happens. Not for milestones you hit in life.
Sorry, I had it in reverse. They detected the gaps in the light left from the Big Bang. Basically shadows of the gas particles. The lukewarm gas itself doesn't emit anything detectable. Put together a bunch of pictures of microscopic gaps and you can build up a shadow of a mass in the shape of a thread.
You should really read the article. This isn't two independent groups scanning and suddenly discovering new pieces of the universe. It's basically a common data aggregating process applied to massive amounts of data to brighten faint emissions. Considering every star gazer with $5000 worth of equipment and a Mac does this every week, how many papers does that need to prove itself?
Of course the next step is to test it across more spots in the universe to hopefully find anomolies.