The usage of "United States of America" as either singular or plural has shifted over the years. The guidelines you provide are good for the general case of collected objects, but "USA" seems to be a particular case that (sometimes, maybe, mostly) breaks the rule.
I realize this is heresy, but even though I've been working with PCs on a daily basis for THIRTY YEARS, not everything needs to be computerized.
The advantage of introducing computers into the voting process is in making the ballot preparation easier, more flexible, and more accessible. Want the same ballot and instructions in 10 different languages? It is expensive to generate the different paper versions, and impossible to estimate how many of which type you'll need. But it is trivial with a computer. Want a "spoken" ballot for the blind? Done. Want a ballot with 200-point font? You're limited only by the computer screen size. Want to include nice big pictures, along with party-affiliation graphics, for the illiterate? Pretty cheap to do on a computer. For 80% of the population, you can still utilize hand-filled paper ballots, which will be faster and cheaper in most cases, but having machines makes it easier for the other 20% to exercise their right.
But I agree with the earlier posts - use the technology only for generating the ballot. The actual piece of paper is what is important. If you want to add mechanized/computerized tallying of the ballots (i.e., optical scanning or barcoding) to make things easier in the 90% of races where a 2% counting error doesn't matter, fine. But keep those paper ballots and do randomized, hand-counted auditing, and have thresholds that trigger automatic hand counts in close cases.
People go into business to make money. If they can do it providing a bullshit product that's fucking useless to government for huge skips full of cash, they will.
Is that what gets you out of bed each morning, or do you have a shred of professional dignity? Sure, there are people who will do the minimum possible for that payday, but there actually are people who give a damn whether they do their job well or not, and care about what happens after the next payday.
Probably these guys didn't get into this industry just to waste money. I would imagine that most of the people actually working on this are 1) motivated by the potential profits of mastering and proliferating this technology and/or 2) have a genuine desire to develop more sustainable energy sources and/or 3) masochistic engineers that love a good challenge. All three classes of people would be disappointed with failure, and really jazzed with success. I think that they care about succeeding greatly.
I wish I could dredge up some examples, but I seem to remember seeing some things which some of the astronauts said in the middle of a crisis which made them sound like it was just a little thing, when the rest of us would all be screaming "we're all gonna die we're all gonna die".
"Houston, we have a problem" when an oxygen tank has just exploded and practically ripped the service module in half. Yup, that seems like a good start.
You can but that costs many billion dollars. To do a continent wide HVDC network with some limited energy storage (compared to what would ideally be needed) you're looking at many hundred billions $$$ or EUR
Compared to a regional economy that measures €15 trillion annually, an investment of several €100 billion over the next decade or two is not unbearable. Indeed, if it means that power supply and distribution is more resilient, and you don't need to expend several €trillion in energy imports over the same time period, it seems like a worthwhile investment in infrastructure.
I've seen this before, in the movie Sleep Dealer. The U.S. / Mexico border is completely sealed, but folks in the U.S. still want cheap labor. So: they hire Mexicans, working in Mexico, as drone operators.
Particularly when using CAPSLOCK, please be sure to use the correct term. Chip and Pin. Most English speakers are lazy enough in their pronunciation that it comes out as a homophone. But even if you couldn't hear the difference between "in" and "and", you ought to be able to work it out from context: you've got a chip, and you've got a pin; the chip does not reside in the pin.
Oh, yes, I am sure that the choice of CAD programs has something to do with the launch failure, or points to some sort of cultural deficiency at Orbital. Really, you get a touch of shadenfreude over that? How petty are you?
There are enough blood donors around the world, and the testing on their blood is comprehensive enough, that one can make statistical conclusions about the prevalence of certain blood types in the general population. In other words - there's a large enough sample set (hundreds of millions, if not billions, or units tested to date, coming from tens or hundreds of millions of donors) that the (statistical) error bars are very small.
The higher skilled workers will also see their pay fall, as the excess labor pool in general grows
That assumes that the excess labor pool is able to do the job of a skilled worker. If 10,000 formerly-employed McDonalds cashiers lined up outside to try and get the $120,000 System Architect's job at SomeCompany, does that suddenly push the salary being offered down to $40,000?
Reminds me a bit of this scene from Joe vs. The Volcano
Sure, some company would have to re-manufacture the parts that couldn't be made at home
Thankfully, a lot of the early computers used commodity parts that are still manufactured, such as the 7400 series of discrete logic gates (e.g. 7400 = quad NAND gate, 7404 = hex inverter, etc.). The Apple I's 8-bit microprocessor, the MOS 6502, is still commercially available, too.
Don't tow the "Climate Change" line, don't get funded.
Well, if they're going to force me to tow something, maybe I don't want to have that kind of funding. I "toe the line" that towing is hard work, and I'm allergic to hard work!
A variety of people have been working on solar airplanes that collect sufficient energy during the daylight hours that, through a combination of electrical storage (batteries, reversible fuel cells, etc.) and mechanical storage (going to higher altitude during the day, then losing some at night) you can provide continuous operation. This isn't a new idea, and practical realizations of it are tantalizinglyclose.
and for most of that 98%, existing wireline technologies work too
In the United States, a lot of/.ers like to gripe about how the existing wireline providers (DSL and cable) are monopolistic and provide poor service at high cost. They'd love to see more choice, but the barriers to entry (i.e., deploying a parallel network, including the last mile) are so high that only other megacorporations (Google Fiber, Verizon FiOS) can hope to break in, and even then it is very slow. Result: everyone gripes, but everyone eventually buys the service that's available, and nothing really changes. As you point out: it "works", but not that doesn't mean everyone is happy with the situation - lots of people hope for greater competition resulting in better options.
The actual situation is a lot more complicated and nuanced than the preceding paragraph, but it is a sufficient synopsis to now tie into this article. High altitude drones could provide that parallel network at sufficiently lower (capital) cost that a lot more players can take a crack at it.
If you have solar panels on a rooftop that would otherwise be cooked by the sun, aren't you also saving on the amount of power required for air conditioning?
If you're trying to heat the building - not so much.
In the case of a datacenter, I don't think that heating the building is that much of a concern.
Your datacenter takes 1 MW/h. You receive roughly 8 hours of usable sunlight, so you need 3MW/h capacity of solar panels to produce the power you need
Whatever the soundness of your arguments, you immediately discredit yourself by using "MW/h" as a unit of power. That's like saying that your new car is rated at 500 horsepower/minute, or has a fuel consumption of 32 mpg/hour. What are those even supposed to mean?
And, no, the corrected unit is not MWh, or "megawatt-hour". That is a unit of energy (a bulk quantity), not power (the rate of energy production or consumption). The proper unit for referring to the size of a PV array, or any electrical generation facility, is "watts" or some SI-prefix thereof.
Some kinds of criminality would be harder. If you have to move, say, €10 million in cash, whether you do it in €500 bills or €50 bills makes a large difference. In the first case, you only have to move 20,000 pieces of "paper" (a stack about 2 m tall). If you are constrained to €50 bills, you have to move 10x as much cash. Now, instead of a single briefcase that can easily be carried onto a railcar, you need a few duffel bags.
Not that this is an insurmountable obstacle to criminals - it just makes certain transactions harder to execute and hide.
Slashdot Mirror
The usage of "United States of America" as either singular or plural has shifted over the years. The guidelines you provide are good for the general case of collected objects, but "USA" seems to be a particular case that (sometimes, maybe, mostly) breaks the rule.
Well played, but wrong continent entirely.
The advantage of introducing computers into the voting process is in making the ballot preparation easier, more flexible, and more accessible. Want the same ballot and instructions in 10 different languages? It is expensive to generate the different paper versions, and impossible to estimate how many of which type you'll need. But it is trivial with a computer. Want a "spoken" ballot for the blind? Done. Want a ballot with 200-point font? You're limited only by the computer screen size. Want to include nice big pictures, along with party-affiliation graphics, for the illiterate? Pretty cheap to do on a computer. For 80% of the population, you can still utilize hand-filled paper ballots, which will be faster and cheaper in most cases, but having machines makes it easier for the other 20% to exercise their right.
But I agree with the earlier posts - use the technology only for generating the ballot. The actual piece of paper is what is important. If you want to add mechanized/computerized tallying of the ballots (i.e., optical scanning or barcoding) to make things easier in the 90% of races where a 2% counting error doesn't matter, fine. But keep those paper ballots and do randomized, hand-counted auditing, and have thresholds that trigger automatic hand counts in close cases.
Oh, I don't know. Eventually we'll have so many hard drives dedicated to it that it'll collapse into a black hole.
Or - wait for it - the computing power requirements scale so large that the only way to keep the whole enterprise going is to build a Dyson sphere.
Maybe the universe won't care even then, but we'll at least come closer to leaving our mark!
Is that what gets you out of bed each morning, or do you have a shred of professional dignity? Sure, there are people who will do the minimum possible for that payday, but there actually are people who give a damn whether they do their job well or not, and care about what happens after the next payday.
Probably these guys didn't get into this industry just to waste money. I would imagine that most of the people actually working on this are 1) motivated by the potential profits of mastering and proliferating this technology and/or 2) have a genuine desire to develop more sustainable energy sources and/or 3) masochistic engineers that love a good challenge. All three classes of people would be disappointed with failure, and really jazzed with success. I think that they care about succeeding greatly.
Well, damn! And here I thought going to 11 was really something.
"Houston, we have a problem" when an oxygen tank has just exploded and practically ripped the service module in half. Yup, that seems like a good start.
Compared to a regional economy that measures €15 trillion annually, an investment of several €100 billion over the next decade or two is not unbearable. Indeed, if it means that power supply and distribution is more resilient, and you don't need to expend several €trillion in energy imports over the same time period, it seems like a worthwhile investment in infrastructure.
I've seen this before, in the movie Sleep Dealer. The U.S. / Mexico border is completely sealed, but folks in the U.S. still want cheap labor. So: they hire Mexicans, working in Mexico, as drone operators.
Particularly when using CAPSLOCK, please be sure to use the correct term. Chip and Pin. Most English speakers are lazy enough in their pronunciation that it comes out as a homophone. But even if you couldn't hear the difference between "in" and "and", you ought to be able to work it out from context: you've got a chip, and you've got a pin; the chip does not reside in the pin.
Oh, yes, I am sure that the choice of CAD programs has something to do with the launch failure, or points to some sort of cultural deficiency at Orbital. Really, you get a touch of shadenfreude over that? How petty are you?
There are enough blood donors around the world, and the testing on their blood is comprehensive enough, that one can make statistical conclusions about the prevalence of certain blood types in the general population. In other words - there's a large enough sample set (hundreds of millions, if not billions, or units tested to date, coming from tens or hundreds of millions of donors) that the (statistical) error bars are very small.
And a diet coke, but hold the fries - just to keep them guessing.
That assumes that the excess labor pool is able to do the job of a skilled worker. If 10,000 formerly-employed McDonalds cashiers lined up outside to try and get the $120,000 System Architect's job at SomeCompany, does that suddenly push the salary being offered down to $40,000?
Reminds me a bit of this scene from Joe vs. The Volcano
Thankfully, a lot of the early computers used commodity parts that are still manufactured, such as the 7400 series of discrete logic gates (e.g. 7400 = quad NAND gate, 7404 = hex inverter, etc.). The Apple I's 8-bit microprocessor, the MOS 6502, is still commercially available, too.
Well, if they're going to force me to tow something, maybe I don't want to have that kind of funding. I "toe the line" that towing is hard work, and I'm allergic to hard work!
A variety of people have been working on solar airplanes that collect sufficient energy during the daylight hours that, through a combination of electrical storage (batteries, reversible fuel cells, etc.) and mechanical storage (going to higher altitude during the day, then losing some at night) you can provide continuous operation. This isn't a new idea, and practical realizations of it are tantalizingly close.
In the United States, a lot of /.ers like to gripe about how the existing wireline providers (DSL and cable) are monopolistic and provide poor service at high cost. They'd love to see more choice, but the barriers to entry (i.e., deploying a parallel network, including the last mile) are so high that only other megacorporations (Google Fiber, Verizon FiOS) can hope to break in, and even then it is very slow. Result: everyone gripes, but everyone eventually buys the service that's available, and nothing really changes. As you point out: it "works", but not that doesn't mean everyone is happy with the situation - lots of people hope for greater competition resulting in better options.
The actual situation is a lot more complicated and nuanced than the preceding paragraph, but it is a sufficient synopsis to now tie into this article. High altitude drones could provide that parallel network at sufficiently lower (capital) cost that a lot more players can take a crack at it.
So, what you are saying is...
"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be a Mars-shattering kaboom?"
Stop making my brain hurt!
In the case of a datacenter, I don't think that heating the building is that much of a concern.
Don't tell that to Fox news - everyone knows that Germany gets LOTS of sunshine.
Whatever the soundness of your arguments, you immediately discredit yourself by using "MW/h" as a unit of power. That's like saying that your new car is rated at 500 horsepower/minute, or has a fuel consumption of 32 mpg/hour. What are those even supposed to mean?
And, no, the corrected unit is not MWh, or "megawatt-hour". That is a unit of energy (a bulk quantity), not power (the rate of energy production or consumption). The proper unit for referring to the size of a PV array, or any electrical generation facility, is "watts" or some SI-prefix thereof.
Some kinds of criminality would be harder. If you have to move, say, €10 million in cash, whether you do it in €500 bills or €50 bills makes a large difference. In the first case, you only have to move 20,000 pieces of "paper" (a stack about 2 m tall). If you are constrained to €50 bills, you have to move 10x as much cash. Now, instead of a single briefcase that can easily be carried onto a railcar, you need a few duffel bags.
Not that this is an insurmountable obstacle to criminals - it just makes certain transactions harder to execute and hide.