My father was the editor for the local paper when i was a kid. I would come running into the living room with an interesting story i had read in a science mag or similar. Show him how cool it was.. he would then sit there critically analyze it and then pay out the flaws in the article for 1 or 2 minutes and then tell me to go read up on it. He was a cynical old bastard but he taught me something, would have been a good slashdotter!
My favorite times at high school where when we were asked to critically analyze information, such as book reviews or in chemistry (I remember comparing whether PVC or polyethylene would make a better car battery case), or physics experiments where you actually didn't know what the result was suppose to be. It is such a wonderful thing to find the solution to the problem yourself, and i believe it is an important part of any childhood.
4:27 i could probably do it faster if i had a more solid chin-up bar. Have been tempted to post photos of my gym to the BrandX forum it is a nerds/motorcyclists/crossfiters dungeon! =D
I design substations for a living. Most suburban substations have the bare minimum security to keep Animals and Children and most vandals out, but obviously wont stop someone who is determined.
I just finished designing a 500kV substation (Don't want to say location). But It has security cameras (which feed back into a centra monitoring location), electronic gates. Security flood lights that activate when someone enters the switchyard. 14 foot high razorwire fences. There is quite a considerable distance between the fence and the Equipment. We use silicon composite insulators rather than ceramic (In the specification it actually says bullet resistant).
Also the protection scheme in most substations is extremly fast for faults located inside the substation. This is especially true for anything above 132kV!
Lets say a hacker did somehow get into the SCADA system. The problem is that most systems have failsafes. So worst they could do is trip some circuit breakers (which is disable from remote in this substation i designed). It wouldn't take long for a technician to go out to site and restore power.
I use to work in a transformer factory, i doubt bullets would do much to one.. (Plus in most HV substations these days they partially enclose them to reduce noise pollution)
Just though i would point out that the ability for a motorcycle to brake faster than a car or truck is a myth. If you have a car or truck setup with the same quality tyres and brakes as a performance motorcycle you will find they stop in the same or less distance (Due to certain circumstances where a larger contact patch is benificial such as braking on dirt etc). (I am a motorcyclist also =p).
Sure they lost about 2kgs but they might have also have built up 1kg of muscle which would make them feel a little bit stronger etc. I can fit into size 32 Jeans, yet i weight 85kgs. Mainly because i do lots of weights and short distance sprints. I am basically wearing the same size cloths as a guy who weights about 70kgs. The difference would be muscle. I enjoy knowing that i can do anything i want and i wont be held back physically and mental relaxation it provides doing intense training. I am really glad i found crossfit http://www.crossfit.com/
And even though they sometimes are required to be complex to cover all bases, the less complex the contract is the stronger it can be enforced. If both entities are entering into a symbiotic relationship that should benefit both, this would be the strongest type of contract as the goal is extremely clear and usually simple. Its when one entity is doing the bidding of the other entity such as in a engineering contract firm that contracts become complex, as then they become about risk mitigation and games between the two entities.
I can completely agree. I ride a high performance motorcycle and it is extremely easy to ride unpredictably around other motor vehicles. So when i am riding in traffic i just cruise along like a grandma. The size and acceleration of a motorcycle make it extremely unpredictable to car drives which just increases the chances of an accident.
I figure the extra 10 minutes in traffic doesn't matter as i can still park right outside the place i want to visit instead of parking 3 blocks away and i would rather come home at night in once piece =p
I have found the best practice to be to wait until the traffic comes to a complete stop and then filter to the front and take off quickly once i am sure no one is going to run a red light. I can easily cover 200-300m before the cars have even crossed the intersection and then i can just go back to grandma mode once i catch the next lot of traffic.
It would only take one person to purchase the movie with a stolen credit card, and then release it.. then it wouldn't matter what watermarks there where embedded into the film.
I can completly agree that helmets help, the one time that i came off my bike i was sideswiped by a car. I remember sliding along the road after smacking my head really hard thinking "gee this helmet works well". Am really glad i was wearing leathers/kevlar and a helmet. Didn't have a scratch on me after coming off at 80km\h. Just had a corked thigh and a few small burns from the heat of the kevlar rubbing on the road.
Jumped up after, took off my helmet and chased my bike down the road thinking oh god my baby!!
One of the things i do for a living is design wind farms. There is nothing wrong with having them in a remove location so long as it is near a HV line to distribute the power that has spare capacity. The turbines are divided up into groups that all come back to a small substation for each group. These substations come back to a larger switching station which then runs back to the HV line, where we build a small switchyard to cut the lines into the existing HV line.
The most expensive part of the wind farm is usually the cost of building the turbine service roads (as they have to be flat and straight enough that a massive truck carrying the turbine can get up them, and turbines are normally placed in hilly areas). And the other expensive cost is laying the cable underground for connecting up the turbines (to appease the locals as it looks prettier but is very expensive). The actual turbines themselves don't seem so expensive in comparison.
Only thing i will say is that since i started designing wind turbines its the first time i can describe part of my job to a girl and she will think its "cool".
OK, what the hell is wrong with you people? Here's reality : studio artists make albums, sell albums, make money. Yet in two thirds of Slashdot's distorted mind, they should stop doing that and look for "a real job instead". What the fuck is wrong with you people? Do I have to explain a bunch of libertarians how the market basically works?! You have a bunch of people willing to buy what you want to sell, so why on Earth should you give up on that and give it up for free??
We are not saying you should give it up for free. What we are saying is that the government granted monopoly of copyright should be reduced to a reasonable time frame that allows the artist to recover a profit while at the same time allowing works to eventually fall into public domain. The time frame for a copyright work is "life + 75 years" this is far to long a period. What makes producing a song\movie\painting so special that you deserve government granted protection for that long... The patent that my dad holds is only valid for 20 years even though he spent about 8 years developing the product.
Patents like copyright are government granted monopolies and governments realize that by releasing it eventually into public domain they provide an incentive for entrepreneurs to create the idea, while eventually allowing the idea to benefit society, why is music and movies treated differently. Personally for that matter i do not understand why all copyright is treated the same. If i write a textbook why is it treated the same as a movie or a song etc etc....
Its funny because i have all of those books sitting in my bookshelf right now collecting dust, i was lucky enough to have a book scholarship through all of my university so i have quite a good library, but the idea of renting out some of the books would be kinda cool...
Where i live each year they kill a large percentage of the population while they are still in the larvae stage. Wondering how this system is better than just doing this? Using lasers etc sounds like an overly complicated way of killing mosquitoes especially seeming that the side effects of larvicide are minimal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larvicide
Actually rather than building superconducting links they would be better off building HVDC links across the country, not only do they suffer from far less losses than AC over large distances (or underwater) but they also don't suffer from stability problems like HVAC links suffer from, also you can interconnect unsynchronized systems. Europe has been using these to interconnect a large number of underwater links and unsynchronized systems and this has allowed France to become a large energy exporter (thanks largely to there continual use of nuclear power). And also helps keep the power grid stable as when there is massive demand different plants are able to pick up the slack by switching on an interconnect.
Except that the disadvantage of distributed power generation is that it becomes harder (read very very expensive) to maintain voltage regulation. As normally voltage regulation is done at the substation by controlling things like reactive power using shunt inductors or capacitors, or by using autotransformers. Then more voltage might be put along a line at necessary intervals. The problem is the voltage rise or fall is calculated with power flowing in one direction and in a distributed system it can flow in multiple directions. Also if you had a distributed system in a suburb you would also then need distributed protection. Because if you had a protection system that tripped and between the fault and the protection system someone was supplying power to the grid they will increase the fault currents substantially. So you then need individual high quality protection for the grid on each tiny distributor which would be massively expensive, and very very complicated to implement in real life.
This is why when building things like wind farms normally they will build lets say 50 turbines and then have basic protection between the wind turbine and the pad mount transformer and then protection between the small pad mount transformer and the Substation and then supply it out to HV lines. This way you aren't duplicating the voltage regulation and fast switching protection equipment for each turbine.
There are a few cool ideas that are out there though in terms of distributed generation they would require a massive effort to setup though. One was if everyone had solar cells you could have them communicated with the Utility, and have them provide reactive power to the grid for voltage regulation when necessary, another was if everyone had electric vehicles and they had a connection to the utility, if there was a blackout they could potentially fix it in the short term by drawing back power from the cars. Both heaps cool ideas but probably impractical in the short term.
I don't understand why people compare the two, the types of tackles between Union and American Football are completly diffrent and they have completly diffrent rules. Hence why one has helmets and padding and the other one doesn't.
An interesting story i remember is a small pottery company booking only 10K in advertising during the morning segment just for a week when a lot of home owners are driving to work, one of those ads were the announcer makes it sound like he actually uses the product. Two days later they rang up and booked 80K in advertising as they had been so inundated with people they had apparently made much more in profit than the cost of the advertising in just those two days due to all the customers!
What bugs me is that his is not a new concept; my father has worked in the radio industry for more than 40 years, he use to be an announcer but these days' works in marketing for one of the big stations down under. I remember him telling me even when i was little how when the salesmen sold ads they targeted the specific ad to a certain audience and income level. As the station was part of a larger network the salesman would go out sell a $50K advertising package and give the customer some broad details. And then come back and then tailor it to the right stations during the right programs etc so that the customer got what would maximise the effectiveness of the ads. Hell the big stations would deny advertisers because they didn't want there station too look tacky and instead run there ads on one of there FM music stations.
Slashdot Mirror
My father was the editor for the local paper when i was a kid. I would come running into the living room with an interesting story i had read in a science mag or similar. Show him how cool it was.. he would then sit there critically analyze it and then pay out the flaws in the article for 1 or 2 minutes and then tell me to go read up on it. He was a cynical old bastard but he taught me something, would have been a good slashdotter!
My favorite times at high school where when we were asked to critically analyze information, such as book reviews or in chemistry (I remember comparing whether PVC or polyethylene would make a better car battery case), or physics experiments where you actually didn't know what the result was suppose to be. It is such a wonderful thing to find the solution to the problem yourself, and i believe it is an important part of any childhood.
4:27 i could probably do it faster if i had a more solid chin-up bar. Have been tempted to post photos of my gym to the BrandX forum it is a nerds/motorcyclists/crossfiters dungeon! =D
I design substations for a living. Most suburban substations have the bare minimum security to keep Animals and Children and most vandals out, but obviously wont stop someone who is determined.
I just finished designing a 500kV substation (Don't want to say location). But It has security cameras (which feed back into a centra monitoring location), electronic gates. Security flood lights that activate when someone enters the switchyard. 14 foot high razorwire fences. There is quite a considerable distance between the fence and the Equipment. We use silicon composite insulators rather than ceramic (In the specification it actually says bullet resistant).
Also the protection scheme in most substations is extremly fast for faults located inside the substation. This is especially true for anything above 132kV!
Lets say a hacker did somehow get into the SCADA system. The problem is that most systems have failsafes. So worst they could do is trip some circuit breakers (which is disable from remote in this substation i designed). It wouldn't take long for a technician to go out to site and restore power.
I use to work in a transformer factory, i doubt bullets would do much to one.. (Plus in most HV substations these days they partially enclose them to reduce noise pollution)
Just though i would point out that the ability for a motorcycle to brake faster than a car or truck is a myth. If you have a car or truck setup with the same quality tyres and brakes as a performance motorcycle you will find they stop in the same or less distance (Due to certain circumstances where a larger contact patch is benificial such as braking on dirt etc). (I am a motorcyclist also =p).
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge
Sure they lost about 2kgs but they might have also have built up 1kg of muscle which would make them feel a little bit stronger etc. I can fit into size 32 Jeans, yet i weight 85kgs. Mainly because i do lots of weights and short distance sprints. I am basically wearing the same size cloths as a guy who weights about 70kgs. The difference would be muscle. I enjoy knowing that i can do anything i want and i wont be held back physically and mental relaxation it provides doing intense training. I am really glad i found crossfit http://www.crossfit.com/
Most modern office towers have backup power systems. Better to spend $10,000 on diesel or hydrogen than it is to send a workforce home for the day.
And even though they sometimes are required to be complex to cover all bases, the less complex the contract is the stronger it can be enforced. If both entities are entering into a symbiotic relationship that should benefit both, this would be the strongest type of contract as the goal is extremely clear and usually simple. Its when one entity is doing the bidding of the other entity such as in a engineering contract firm that contracts become complex, as then they become about risk mitigation and games between the two entities.
I can completely agree. I ride a high performance motorcycle and it is extremely easy to ride unpredictably around other motor vehicles. So when i am riding in traffic i just cruise along like a grandma. The size and acceleration of a motorcycle make it extremely unpredictable to car drives which just increases the chances of an accident. I figure the extra 10 minutes in traffic doesn't matter as i can still park right outside the place i want to visit instead of parking 3 blocks away and i would rather come home at night in once piece =p I have found the best practice to be to wait until the traffic comes to a complete stop and then filter to the front and take off quickly once i am sure no one is going to run a red light. I can easily cover 200-300m before the cars have even crossed the intersection and then i can just go back to grandma mode once i catch the next lot of traffic.
It would only take one person to purchase the movie with a stolen credit card, and then release it.. then it wouldn't matter what watermarks there where embedded into the film.
I can completly agree that helmets help, the one time that i came off my bike i was sideswiped by a car. I remember sliding along the road after smacking my head really hard thinking "gee this helmet works well". Am really glad i was wearing leathers/kevlar and a helmet. Didn't have a scratch on me after coming off at 80km\h. Just had a corked thigh and a few small burns from the heat of the kevlar rubbing on the road. Jumped up after, took off my helmet and chased my bike down the road thinking oh god my baby!!
One of the things i do for a living is design wind farms. There is nothing wrong with having them in a remove location so long as it is near a HV line to distribute the power that has spare capacity. The turbines are divided up into groups that all come back to a small substation for each group. These substations come back to a larger switching station which then runs back to the HV line, where we build a small switchyard to cut the lines into the existing HV line. The most expensive part of the wind farm is usually the cost of building the turbine service roads (as they have to be flat and straight enough that a massive truck carrying the turbine can get up them, and turbines are normally placed in hilly areas). And the other expensive cost is laying the cable underground for connecting up the turbines (to appease the locals as it looks prettier but is very expensive). The actual turbines themselves don't seem so expensive in comparison. Only thing i will say is that since i started designing wind turbines its the first time i can describe part of my job to a girl and she will think its "cool".
I've worked out its cheapest to just buy the best bang for buck graphics card each year than it is to get the best card and hold onto it.
OK, what the hell is wrong with you people? Here's reality : studio artists make albums, sell albums, make money. Yet in two thirds of Slashdot's distorted mind, they should stop doing that and look for "a real job instead". What the fuck is wrong with you people? Do I have to explain a bunch of libertarians how the market basically works?! You have a bunch of people willing to buy what you want to sell, so why on Earth should you give up on that and give it up for free??
We are not saying you should give it up for free. What we are saying is that the government granted monopoly of copyright should be reduced to a reasonable time frame that allows the artist to recover a profit while at the same time allowing works to eventually fall into public domain. The time frame for a copyright work is "life + 75 years" this is far to long a period. What makes producing a song\movie\painting so special that you deserve government granted protection for that long... The patent that my dad holds is only valid for 20 years even though he spent about 8 years developing the product. Patents like copyright are government granted monopolies and governments realize that by releasing it eventually into public domain they provide an incentive for entrepreneurs to create the idea, while eventually allowing the idea to benefit society, why is music and movies treated differently. Personally for that matter i do not understand why all copyright is treated the same. If i write a textbook why is it treated the same as a movie or a song etc etc....
Its funny because i have all of those books sitting in my bookshelf right now collecting dust, i was lucky enough to have a book scholarship through all of my university so i have quite a good library, but the idea of renting out some of the books would be kinda cool...
Where i live each year they kill a large percentage of the population while they are still in the larvae stage. Wondering how this system is better than just doing this? Using lasers etc sounds like an overly complicated way of killing mosquitoes especially seeming that the side effects of larvicide are minimal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larvicide
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge"
Obligatory Relevant xkcd http://xkcd.com/386/
"Violence is the last resort of the incompetent" Isaac Asimov
Actually rather than building superconducting links they would be better off building HVDC links across the country, not only do they suffer from far less losses than AC over large distances (or underwater) but they also don't suffer from stability problems like HVAC links suffer from, also you can interconnect unsynchronized systems. Europe has been using these to interconnect a large number of underwater links and unsynchronized systems and this has allowed France to become a large energy exporter (thanks largely to there continual use of nuclear power). And also helps keep the power grid stable as when there is massive demand different plants are able to pick up the slack by switching on an interconnect.
Except that the disadvantage of distributed power generation is that it becomes harder (read very very expensive) to maintain voltage regulation. As normally voltage regulation is done at the substation by controlling things like reactive power using shunt inductors or capacitors, or by using autotransformers. Then more voltage might be put along a line at necessary intervals. The problem is the voltage rise or fall is calculated with power flowing in one direction and in a distributed system it can flow in multiple directions. Also if you had a distributed system in a suburb you would also then need distributed protection. Because if you had a protection system that tripped and between the fault and the protection system someone was supplying power to the grid they will increase the fault currents substantially. So you then need individual high quality protection for the grid on each tiny distributor which would be massively expensive, and very very complicated to implement in real life. This is why when building things like wind farms normally they will build lets say 50 turbines and then have basic protection between the wind turbine and the pad mount transformer and then protection between the small pad mount transformer and the Substation and then supply it out to HV lines. This way you aren't duplicating the voltage regulation and fast switching protection equipment for each turbine. There are a few cool ideas that are out there though in terms of distributed generation they would require a massive effort to setup though. One was if everyone had solar cells you could have them communicated with the Utility, and have them provide reactive power to the grid for voltage regulation when necessary, another was if everyone had electric vehicles and they had a connection to the utility, if there was a blackout they could potentially fix it in the short term by drawing back power from the cars. Both heaps cool ideas but probably impractical in the short term.
I don't understand why people compare the two, the types of tackles between Union and American Football are completly diffrent and they have completly diffrent rules. Hence why one has helmets and padding and the other one doesn't.
You can set the reader to open at the last place you closed it which is useful when reading Ebooks.
An interesting story i remember is a small pottery company booking only 10K in advertising during the morning segment just for a week when a lot of home owners are driving to work, one of those ads were the announcer makes it sound like he actually uses the product. Two days later they rang up and booked 80K in advertising as they had been so inundated with people they had apparently made much more in profit than the cost of the advertising in just those two days due to all the customers!
What bugs me is that his is not a new concept; my father has worked in the radio industry for more than 40 years, he use to be an announcer but these days' works in marketing for one of the big stations down under. I remember him telling me even when i was little how when the salesmen sold ads they targeted the specific ad to a certain audience and income level. As the station was part of a larger network the salesman would go out sell a $50K advertising package and give the customer some broad details. And then come back and then tailor it to the right stations during the right programs etc so that the customer got what would maximise the effectiveness of the ads. Hell the big stations would deny advertisers because they didn't want there station too look tacky and instead run there ads on one of there FM music stations.