"A burglar gets stuck in a chimney, a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away; a wild antelope knocks a man off his bike; a candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire; someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark
You mean $800.
Remember, Europe gets fucked pretty badly when it comes to prices of electronic goods.
One thing to remember is that usually you're comparing $800+VAT to 900€ with VAT-included, where the VAT can be as high as 19.6%. I'm not saying this explains it all, far from it, but it's a factor.
I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact -- acres upon acres of wooded hilltops have been deforested.
I have family who live within a mile of a wind farm. They never mentioned the contractors being obnoxious, clouds of dust, or the roads being shut down for extensive periods during the construction, and not a single tree was felled. I think someone just made a mess of things in the planning and implementation stages of your wind farm.
In my case the pump actually is changing the temperature of the water by moving it through heat exchanging coils in the gas furnace.
Hence it's not the pump that heats the water, it's the gas furnace's exchanging coils.
The heat pump is just moving heat around, just like the water recirculation system in my gas furnace based system.
You don't know how heat pumps work. In a heat pump it's the pump itself that heats the fluid by compressing it. There are then two exchangers, one to heat the house and one outside to return the now very cold fluid back to the outside temperature.
Also, aren't there transportation and conversion losses from burning something for heat just as there are with electric heating?
Ok. Here I'm really confused. [...] The original poster was the one claiming that electricity generation has transportation and conversion losses and that heating by burning something does not [...] why does it matter how the _electricity_ is generated?
While your argument about the extraction, refining and transportation losses was correct, you missed the point of the original poster which is that the big source of inefficiency for electricity is in its production from fossil fuels (as explained in my post). That's what makes the "fossil fuel -> electricity -> toasters -> heat" chain so bad comparted to '"fossil fuel -> heat". It's interesting to note that replacing the 'toasters' by heat pumps is just enough to get one back to roughly the same efficiency as using fossil fuels for heating directly.
And the method of production is important because in the case of photoelectric, wind, and hydro there is quite obviously no wasted heat in the electricity production. Also it's not as if you could cut out the electricity step to heat yourself directly from wind or hydro (in the case of solar you actually could to some extent but the efficiency gain is not that big). Of course in that sense it would still make sense to use heat pumps to get more out of your electricity.
You do have a point that not all boilers are of a modern efficient design. However even conventional designs are 70-80% efficient, which you have to compare to the fossil fuel -> electricity production step alone which is typically only 35-40% efficient, and still only 60% efficient in the very most advanced plants.
In any case, my principal gripe was the whole question of heat pumps, including the bizarre claim that most electric heating is done with heat pumps. They're expensive to install and not very widespread and lots of people supplement their heating with various types of portable heater making that a very dubious claim.
I quite agree with you on the part of heat pumps not being more expensive to install and not that widespread. I'm pretty skeptical about your implication that heat pumps must be supplemented with portable heaters. Seems like an incorrectly dimensioned installation or people getting conned by crooks.
Get your head out of your ass. Most electric heating is done with heat pumps.
Please provide sources and figures because from where I stand it really does no look that way. There's a report that says heat-pumps account for only 10% of the market, electric furnaces for 12% and various fossil fuels 62%. And that's for the US which I expect to have more heat-pumps because a bunch of them are probably reversible air conditionners. In other parts of the world I would expect the heat-pump market share to be much smaller unfortunately.
Can you really qualify heating done with heat pumps as electric heating?
Yes.
My house is heated with hot water from a gas furnace recirculated using an electric pump. By your definition of electric heating, wouldn't that make my house electrically heated?
In your case the pump is not changing the temperature of the water. It's the gas furnace that's heating the water so it's a gas heater. In the heat pump case it's the electricity driven pump that heats whatever fluid is being used. So they are electric heaters.
Also, aren't there transportation and conversion losses from burning something for heat just as there are with electric heating?
It depends how the electricity is generated. But for most cases (coal, fuel, gas, even nuclear) you incur the same kind of extraction, refining and transport costs that you would get when you get gas or fuel delivered to your house (just a bit less because in bulk). But on top of that electricity production wastes about 60% of the heat right in the power plant(*). So you then only get to convert the remaining 40% or less to heat your house.
(*) The most recent and advanced plants that use a combined cycle manage to only waste about 45% of the heat but it's not the majority of the installed production capacity by far. Co-generation plants do better but only because they combine heating buildings with producing electricity. And they cannot heat individual houses (cost issue).
I'm not sure what method you can possibly imagine for pumping heat out of your house that doesn't consume energy.
You missed the point by a wide margin. Re-read the original message carefully.
That brings home another benefit of picking a high efficiency power supply: generally a much higher quality and specs that you can actually trust. For instance compare the review of the Coolmax 750W with that of the Corsair VX450W. The el-cheapo 750W PSU blew up twice after they pulled just 500W while the 450W one managed to provide a stable 572W before it shutdown cleanly due to over load protection! So before buying a power supply it's worth reading a proper review of it, even if you only read the conclusionpage.
So just looking at much is saved on electricity is missing the big picture.
Time to train flocks of pigeons to fly in the path of the microwave links? That's sure to disrupt their latency when they have to retransmit due to packet loss... One could call this Flock Of Pigeons Denial Of Service.
On the other hand, if it is about deleting data *you* uploaded to a site/service, how about just using sites/services which up front offer a "delete all me data" option?
Except that currently the Delete button may not really do allthatmuch. And to me this what all this is about.
Most of the transistors used in a CPU actually goes towards the cache - when you're talking about 16+ MB of pure L1/L2/L3 cache, implemented as 6T SRAM cells, that's 100M transistors right there (and that doesn't include the cache line tag logic and CAM).
More than you think: 16 MB * 1048576 bytes/MB * 8 bits/byte * 6 transistors/bit = 805 million transistors
As far as I can tell the Kiva warehouses could probably be said to use some form of cahotic storage too. The advantages they cite to using robots are: much higher productivity, less walking for employees, safer and more ergonomic environment, less 'shrinkage' (theft) due to most of the warehouse being robot-only, lower power usage due to greatly reduced need for climate control and lighting (again thanks to the large robot-only area) and lack of conveyor belts running all the time.
That said the Amazon warehouse stores much more diverse merchandise in terms of format, packaging type and weight. Also it has multiple stories, much higher shelves in some areas and generally seems much larger. That may have an impact on whether the Kiva robots would be workable. Or maybe it just means some adjustments would be needed.
How much retransmit/error correction is there in DSL? I personally wouldn't think that's valid to charge, but the argument could be made.
What costs money to an ISP is mostly traffic on interconnections with other networks because in most cases they have a lot more downloads than uploads (due to Youtube, etc), and thus end up paying by the byte / 95th percentile on Mbps. Another source of cost is when they have to add more capacity on their internal network connecting all their customers. However adding capacity is easy: no need to run more fiber, just put faster routers at both ends; tens of thousands of dollars instead of millions. Also, once they have link in place, it costs them the same whether it's used or not. So if it's not used their interest is to add new services to make use of the available bandwidth to differenciate themselves from the competition. That's why some ISPs don't include their own video-on-demand services into the data caps. That said if they rent fiber for their internal networks instead of owning it they may again end up paying by the byte and if so they are stupid.
But what really does not cost them anything is data that travels no further than the DSLAM like DSL retransmits and error correction. Any traffic there does not eat any shared resource and it couldn't even increase power consumption more than 5W (~$5/year), and that's if their DSLAMs even has an idle power saving mode. So there's really no justification for billing any of that traffic.
Wikipedia's energy efficiency in transportation page has useful data on this. In particular it says the average car occupancy rate goes from 1.3 in the Bay Area to 1.59 in the UK. That that range seems to be confirmed by the DoE. So your car does 39 to 47.7mpg (4.9 to 6 l/100km/passenger). Now planes don't always travel full either but I'd expect them to be 60 to 80% full which would give them 54 to 73 mpg according to the above calculation. But luckily for us Wikipedia also indicates that the average fuel consumption for planes is 4.8 l/100km/passenger which is as good as or better than what can be expected from your sample car.
Wonder what percentage of users would rather be tracked by default.
According to a 2012 Pew Internet study, 73% of search engine users said they were against tracking by the search engines, and 68% were against targeted advertising.
The corollary is that respecting DNT even for IE 10 matches what over 70%(*) of the users want, while ignoring it only satisfies the wishes of 28%(**) of the users.
(*) I'm starting with the 'targeted ads' numbers which are the more conservative ones. The survey shows 28% of the users want them and 68% oppose them. Furthermore another study shows that, when they have to manually hunt and set DNT, 5 to 6% of the overall population turns it on. Given that we know 68% favor DNT that means 7 to 9% of the users will go through the hassle. So if DNT is on by default on IE 10 we can expect 7 to 9% of the I-want-targeted-ads crowd to turn it back off which translates to 2 to 2.5%. So if DNT is honored for IE 10 these 2 to 2.5% users will get what they want as well as the 68% who are fine with the default setting, yielding a total of 70 to 70.5% users getting what they want.
(**) Or, conversely, going against the wishes of 68% of the users (the remaining 4% don't know what they want).
though that's really what 90% of the users want anyway.
Citation needed?
I'll bite. So according to a study, 73% users said they were against tracking by the search engines, and 68% were against targeted advertising.
So it's not as high as 90%. But still, what's best? Respecting DNT for IE 10 users and thus doing what 70%(*) of users want or ignoring it and only satisfying the wishes of 28%(**) of the users?
If you tell users, "click this checkbox to prevent people from tracking your behavior online!", yes, most users would click that checkbox. Unfortunately that promise would be a lie
Nobody said anything about wording it that way and that not how it's worded in IE's dialogs. So I'm not sure where you're getting at with you 'lying' insinuations.
Make it an informed choice, and the number of users that enable it will be less than 90%, and advertisers would have an unambiguous signal about the user's intent and no reason to not honor it.
Bullshit! I'm on a national Do-Not-Call phone registry. You cannot get on the list without explicitly asking for it. Does it mean I never get telemarketing calls? No. Does it mean telemarketers remove me from their list when I tell them not to call me again? No. Instead they hang up in my face and call again a few days later!
IE 10 is just the advertisers' latest excuse to continue doing whatever they want.
(*) I'm starting with the 'targeted ads' numbers which are more favorable to your point of view. The survey shows 28% of the users want them and 68% oppose it. Furthermore a separate study shows that, when they have to manually hunt and set DNT, 5 to 6% of the overall population turns it on. Given that we know 68% favor DNT that means 7 to 9% of the users will go through the hassle. So if DNT is on by default on IE 10 we can expect 7 to 9% of the I-want-targeted-ads crowd to turn it back off which translates to 2 to 2.5%. So if DNT is honored for IE 10 these 2 to 2.5% users will get what they want as well as the 68% who are fine with the default setting, yielding a total of 70 to 70.5% users getting what they want.
(**) Or, conversely, going against the wishes of 68% of the users (the remaining 4% don't know what they want).
So this also says that Apache will ignore the Do-Not-Track flag if the browser is Internet Explorer 10. I understand the argument that setting DNT:on without the explicit user consent is questionable, though that's really what 90% of the users want anyway. But how is ignoring the DNT flag of all IE 10 users without knowing whether it was set manually or not any better?
Something feels very wrong when an open-source project sides not with the general population but with big corporations out to invade their privacy in any way they can.
It's a bit sad that there's no equivalent to Slashdot in other languages, locales or on other topics.
I feel that Slashdot-like forums foster interesting discussion and thus perform a service that could be useful to discuss the news of one's country for instance. But currently it's something that non-English speaking people are locked out of.
The Moderator system seems to be really easy to game, and it's really really easy to make an autoposter that reposts the +5 comments to the dupes to get into the moderation pool. Read at -1 and look at the insane amount of spam that get's on the site.
That spam ends up at -1 shows the moderation system at least does something useful. There are other sites I read regularly that also allow comments but none let you score or filter comments. Every time I wish they had a moderation system like Slashdot (to be fair they have far shorter comment threads and maybe they would not have enough moderators per thread to achieve meaningful scores).
There are TONS of factors that will affect how intoxicated or not a driver is under the influence of the drug: How quickly they drank, what they ate,
This will only impact how fast the alcohol passes into the blood stream and whether its concentration forms a narrow peak or a wider lower spike. In any case the limits are based on the resulting blood concentration not on the number of glasses you drink. So the above are irrelevant.
how accustomed to the drug are they,
See other post.
how much they weigh,
Alcohol, more specifically ethanol, affects the central nervous system, that is the brain and spinal cord. All that matters is that these are fed blood spiked with 0.08% of alcohol by volume. So all their weight, and hence increased blood volume, gains them is that they can drink a bit more before their blood reaches 0.08% of alcohol by volume.
genetics, mental state, what other chemicals have they ingested and how much/when, how tired they are, etc.
There are laws about some other chemicals. For instance smoking pot and driving can get you a citation, at least in some countries (independently from the whole war on drugs). The other conditions are essentially untestable in the field though, not by the police and, more importantly, not by the individual themselves which means they would never know whether they can drive or not.
The nuclear plant outside Phoenix produces over 3.3 GW.
I think it's the usual confusion between nuclear reactor and nuclear plant. The former typically produces between 900 and 1300 MW, while the latter often has up to four 'nuclear reactors' and thus produces up to about 5200 MW.
Evidently, since the safety problems have been identified and the facility has passed safety inspections, then the "glitch" was fixed.
So what was the debate again?
Based on the article it's not clear that the defective senior engineers who hid and ignored (i.e. did not fix) the problem have been replaced. As long as that's the case the reactor safety is still compromised: the human component is the weakest link in the security chain (it's the cause of Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fuckushima).
Couple that with all the energy spent fighting each of them for what ever reason. Just think how safe and efficient 2020 nuclear power plants could be. A new nuclear plant hasn't been built in the US since what the 80's. Thats 30 YEARS. Just think of the improvements and innovations we could make or had made had we pursued it.
Nuclear safety is more of a human issue than a technology one. Just look at the factors in the main three nuclear accidents of the past 30 years:
I agree that 100% biological humans should not be affected by this. However I wonder what effect it could have on people wearing pacemakers or implantable defibrillators. They are already told to avoid arc welding, MRIs, or placing some headset too close to the pacemaker. Not that it's a big issue as long as Halo chargers are only placed in a few homes and parking spots. People who may be affected can just avoid those. However Qualcom's dreams seem to be to charge cars as they drive by installing Halo modules into the road itself. That would make whole roads unsafe for pacemaker and defibrillator wearers which would be wrong.
This really shows how efficient these video protection(*) cameras are at deterring and preventing crime. It also show how helpful they are at solving them when they do happen: now the police are looking for four smurfs who escaped from their comic book. No doubt they will have caught them within hours!
(*) 'Video protection' is the new double-plus-good term for 'video surveillance'.
Slashdot Mirror
"A burglar gets stuck in a chimney, a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away; a wild antelope knocks a man off his bike; a candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire; someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark
Links or it did not happen
You mean $800. Remember, Europe gets fucked pretty badly when it comes to prices of electronic goods.
One thing to remember is that usually you're comparing $800+VAT to 900€ with VAT-included, where the VAT can be as high as 19.6%. I'm not saying this explains it all, far from it, but it's a factor.
I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact -- acres upon acres of wooded hilltops have been deforested.
I have family who live within a mile of a wind farm. They never mentioned the contractors being obnoxious, clouds of dust, or the roads being shut down for extensive periods during the construction, and not a single tree was felled. I think someone just made a mess of things in the planning and implementation stages of your wind farm.
In my case the pump actually is changing the temperature of the water by moving it through heat exchanging coils in the gas furnace.
Hence it's not the pump that heats the water, it's the gas furnace's exchanging coils.
The heat pump is just moving heat around, just like the water recirculation system in my gas furnace based system.
You don't know how heat pumps work. In a heat pump it's the pump itself that heats the fluid by compressing it. There are then two exchangers, one to heat the house and one outside to return the now very cold fluid back to the outside temperature.
Also, aren't there transportation and conversion losses from burning something for heat just as there are with electric heating?
Ok. Here I'm really confused. [...] The original poster was the one claiming that electricity generation has transportation and conversion losses and that heating by burning something does not [...] why does it matter how the _electricity_ is generated?
While your argument about the extraction, refining and transportation losses was correct, you missed the point of the original poster which is that the big source of inefficiency for electricity is in its production from fossil fuels (as explained in my post). That's what makes the "fossil fuel -> electricity -> toasters -> heat" chain so bad comparted to '"fossil fuel -> heat". It's interesting to note that replacing the 'toasters' by heat pumps is just enough to get one back to roughly the same efficiency as using fossil fuels for heating directly.
And the method of production is important because in the case of photoelectric, wind, and hydro there is quite obviously no wasted heat in the electricity production. Also it's not as if you could cut out the electricity step to heat yourself directly from wind or hydro (in the case of solar you actually could to some extent but the efficiency gain is not that big). Of course in that sense it would still make sense to use heat pumps to get more out of your electricity.
You do have a point that not all boilers are of a modern efficient design. However even conventional designs are 70-80% efficient, which you have to compare to the fossil fuel -> electricity production step alone which is typically only 35-40% efficient, and still only 60% efficient in the very most advanced plants.
In any case, my principal gripe was the whole question of heat pumps, including the bizarre claim that most electric heating is done with heat pumps. They're expensive to install and not very widespread and lots of people supplement their heating with various types of portable heater making that a very dubious claim.
I quite agree with you on the part of heat pumps not being more expensive to install and not that widespread. I'm pretty skeptical about your implication that heat pumps must be supplemented with portable heaters. Seems like an incorrectly dimensioned installation or people getting conned by crooks.
Get your head out of your ass. Most electric heating is done with heat pumps.
Please provide sources and figures because from where I stand it really does no look that way. There's a report that says heat-pumps account for only 10% of the market, electric furnaces for 12% and various fossil fuels 62%. And that's for the US which I expect to have more heat-pumps because a bunch of them are probably reversible air conditionners. In other parts of the world I would expect the heat-pump market share to be much smaller unfortunately.
Can you really qualify heating done with heat pumps as electric heating?
Yes.
My house is heated with hot water from a gas furnace recirculated using an electric pump. By your definition of electric heating, wouldn't that make my house electrically heated?
In your case the pump is not changing the temperature of the water. It's the gas furnace that's heating the water so it's a gas heater. In the heat pump case it's the electricity driven pump that heats whatever fluid is being used. So they are electric heaters.
Also, aren't there transportation and conversion losses from burning something for heat just as there are with electric heating?
It depends how the electricity is generated. But for most cases (coal, fuel, gas, even nuclear) you incur the same kind of extraction, refining and transport costs that you would get when you get gas or fuel delivered to your house (just a bit less because in bulk). But on top of that electricity production wastes about 60% of the heat right in the power plant(*). So you then only get to convert the remaining 40% or less to heat your house.
(*) The most recent and advanced plants that use a combined cycle manage to only waste about 45% of the heat but it's not the majority of the installed production capacity by far. Co-generation plants do better but only because they combine heating buildings with producing electricity. And they cannot heat individual houses (cost issue).
I'm not sure what method you can possibly imagine for pumping heat out of your house that doesn't consume energy.
You missed the point by a wide margin. Re-read the original message carefully.
That brings home another benefit of picking a high efficiency power supply: generally a much higher quality and specs that you can actually trust. For instance compare the review of the Coolmax 750W with that of the Corsair VX450W. The el-cheapo 750W PSU blew up twice after they pulled just 500W while the 450W one managed to provide a stable 572W before it shutdown cleanly due to over load protection! So before buying a power supply it's worth reading a proper review of it, even if you only read the conclusion page.
So just looking at much is saved on electricity is missing the big picture.
Time to train flocks of pigeons to fly in the path of the microwave links? That's sure to disrupt their latency when they have to retransmit due to packet loss... One could call this Flock Of Pigeons Denial Of Service.
On the other hand, if it is about deleting data *you* uploaded to a site/service, how about just using sites/services which up front offer a "delete all me data" option?
Except that currently the Delete button may not really do all that much. And to me this what all this is about.
Most of the transistors used in a CPU actually goes towards the cache - when you're talking about 16+ MB of pure L1/L2/L3 cache, implemented as 6T SRAM cells, that's 100M transistors right there (and that doesn't include the cache line tag logic and CAM).
More than you think: 16 MB * 1048576 bytes/MB * 8 bits/byte * 6 transistors/bit = 805 million transistors
I just read this article about how GAP and Zappos are using Kiva robots in their warehouses which makes a nice contrast. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/retailrobots/
As far as I can tell the Kiva warehouses could probably be said to use some form of cahotic storage too. The advantages they cite to using robots are: much higher productivity, less walking for employees, safer and more ergonomic environment, less 'shrinkage' (theft) due to most of the warehouse being robot-only, lower power usage due to greatly reduced need for climate control and lighting (again thanks to the large robot-only area) and lack of conveyor belts running all the time.
That said the Amazon warehouse stores much more diverse merchandise in terms of format, packaging type and weight. Also it has multiple stories, much higher shelves in some areas and generally seems much larger. That may have an impact on whether the Kiva robots would be workable. Or maybe it just means some adjustments would be needed.
Another option is eu.org which was created by a founder of Gandi when .org domains stopped being free.
How much retransmit/error correction is there in DSL? I personally wouldn't think that's valid to charge, but the argument could be made.
What costs money to an ISP is mostly traffic on interconnections with other networks because in most cases they have a lot more downloads than uploads (due to Youtube, etc), and thus end up paying by the byte / 95th percentile on Mbps. Another source of cost is when they have to add more capacity on their internal network connecting all their customers. However adding capacity is easy: no need to run more fiber, just put faster routers at both ends; tens of thousands of dollars instead of millions. Also, once they have link in place, it costs them the same whether it's used or not. So if it's not used their interest is to add new services to make use of the available bandwidth to differenciate themselves from the competition. That's why some ISPs don't include their own video-on-demand services into the data caps. That said if they rent fiber for their internal networks instead of owning it they may again end up paying by the byte and if so they are stupid.
But what really does not cost them anything is data that travels no further than the DSLAM like DSL retransmits and error correction. Any traffic there does not eat any shared resource and it couldn't even increase power consumption more than 5W (~$5/year), and that's if their DSLAMs even has an idle power saving mode. So there's really no justification for billing any of that traffic.
Wikipedia's energy efficiency in transportation page has useful data on this. In particular it says the average car occupancy rate goes from 1.3 in the Bay Area to 1.59 in the UK. That that range seems to be confirmed by the DoE. So your car does 39 to 47.7mpg (4.9 to 6 l/100km/passenger). Now planes don't always travel full either but I'd expect them to be 60 to 80% full which would give them 54 to 73 mpg according to the above calculation. But luckily for us Wikipedia also indicates that the average fuel consumption for planes is 4.8 l/100km/passenger which is as good as or better than what can be expected from your sample car.
Wonder what percentage of users would rather be tracked by default.
According to a 2012 Pew Internet study, 73% of search engine users said they were against tracking by the search engines, and 68% were against targeted advertising.
The corollary is that respecting DNT even for IE 10 matches what over 70%(*) of the users want, while ignoring it only satisfies the wishes of 28%(**) of the users.
(*) I'm starting with the 'targeted ads' numbers which are the more conservative ones. The survey shows 28% of the users want them and 68% oppose them. Furthermore another study shows that, when they have to manually hunt and set DNT, 5 to 6% of the overall population turns it on. Given that we know 68% favor DNT that means 7 to 9% of the users will go through the hassle. So if DNT is on by default on IE 10 we can expect 7 to 9% of the I-want-targeted-ads crowd to turn it back off which translates to 2 to 2.5%. So if DNT is honored for IE 10 these 2 to 2.5% users will get what they want as well as the 68% who are fine with the default setting, yielding a total of 70 to 70.5% users getting what they want.
(**) Or, conversely, going against the wishes of 68% of the users (the remaining 4% don't know what they want).
though that's really what 90% of the users want anyway.
Citation needed?
I'll bite. So according to a study, 73% users said they were against tracking by the search engines, and 68% were against targeted advertising.
So it's not as high as 90%. But still, what's best? Respecting DNT for IE 10 users and thus doing what 70%(*) of users want or ignoring it and only satisfying the wishes of 28%(**) of the users?
If you tell users, "click this checkbox to prevent people from tracking your behavior online!", yes, most users would click that checkbox. Unfortunately that promise would be a lie
Nobody said anything about wording it that way and that not how it's worded in IE's dialogs. So I'm not sure where you're getting at with you 'lying' insinuations.
Make it an informed choice, and the number of users that enable it will be less than 90%, and advertisers would have an unambiguous signal about the user's intent and no reason to not honor it.
Bullshit! I'm on a national Do-Not-Call phone registry. You cannot get on the list without explicitly asking for it. Does it mean I never get telemarketing calls? No. Does it mean telemarketers remove me from their list when I tell them not to call me again? No. Instead they hang up in my face and call again a few days later!
IE 10 is just the advertisers' latest excuse to continue doing whatever they want.
(*) I'm starting with the 'targeted ads' numbers which are more favorable to your point of view. The survey shows 28% of the users want them and 68% oppose it. Furthermore a separate study shows that, when they have to manually hunt and set DNT, 5 to 6% of the overall population turns it on. Given that we know 68% favor DNT that means 7 to 9% of the users will go through the hassle. So if DNT is on by default on IE 10 we can expect 7 to 9% of the I-want-targeted-ads crowd to turn it back off which translates to 2 to 2.5%. So if DNT is honored for IE 10 these 2 to 2.5% users will get what they want as well as the 68% who are fine with the default setting, yielding a total of 70 to 70.5% users getting what they want.
(**) Or, conversely, going against the wishes of 68% of the users (the remaining 4% don't know what they want).
So this also says that Apache will ignore the Do-Not-Track flag if the browser is Internet Explorer 10. I understand the argument that setting DNT:on without the explicit user consent is questionable, though that's really what 90% of the users want anyway. But how is ignoring the DNT flag of all IE 10 users without knowing whether it was set manually or not any better?
Something feels very wrong when an open-source project sides not with the general population but with big corporations out to invade their privacy in any way they can.
It's a bit sad that there's no equivalent to Slashdot in other languages, locales or on other topics.
I feel that Slashdot-like forums foster interesting discussion and thus perform a service that could be useful to discuss the news of one's country for instance. But currently it's something that non-English speaking people are locked out of.
The Moderator system seems to be really easy to game, and it's really really easy to make an autoposter that reposts the +5 comments to the dupes to get into the moderation pool. Read at -1 and look at the insane amount of spam that get's on the site.
That spam ends up at -1 shows the moderation system at least does something useful. There are other sites I read regularly that also allow comments but none let you score or filter comments. Every time I wish they had a moderation system like Slashdot (to be fair they have far shorter comment threads and maybe they would not have enough moderators per thread to achieve meaningful scores).
There are TONS of factors that will affect how intoxicated or not a driver is under the influence of the drug: How quickly they drank, what they ate,
This will only impact how fast the alcohol passes into the blood stream and whether its concentration forms a narrow peak or a wider lower spike. In any case the limits are based on the resulting blood concentration not on the number of glasses you drink. So the above are irrelevant.
how accustomed to the drug are they,
See other post.
how much they weigh,
Alcohol, more specifically ethanol, affects the central nervous system, that is the brain and spinal cord. All that matters is that these are fed blood spiked with 0.08% of alcohol by volume. So all their weight, and hence increased blood volume, gains them is that they can drink a bit more before their blood reaches 0.08% of alcohol by volume.
genetics, mental state, what other chemicals have they ingested and how much/when, how tired they are, etc.
There are laws about some other chemicals. For instance smoking pot and driving can get you a citation, at least in some countries (independently from the whole war on drugs). The other conditions are essentially untestable in the field though, not by the police and, more importantly, not by the individual themselves which means they would never know whether they can drive or not.
The nuclear plant outside Phoenix produces over 3.3 GW.
I think it's the usual confusion between nuclear reactor and nuclear plant. The former typically produces between 900 and 1300 MW, while the latter often has up to four 'nuclear reactors' and thus produces up to about 5200 MW.
Evidently, since the safety problems have been identified and the facility has passed safety inspections, then the "glitch" was fixed.
So what was the debate again?
Based on the article it's not clear that the defective senior engineers who hid and ignored (i.e. did not fix) the problem have been replaced. As long as that's the case the reactor safety is still compromised: the human component is the weakest link in the security chain (it's the cause of Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fuckushima).
Couple that with all the energy spent fighting each of them for what ever reason. Just think how safe and efficient 2020 nuclear power plants could be. A new nuclear plant hasn't been built in the US since what the 80's. Thats 30 YEARS. Just think of the improvements and innovations we could make or had made had we pursued it.
Nuclear safety is more of a human issue than a technology one. Just look at the factors in the main three nuclear accidents of the past 30 years:
Nuclear safety won't improve significantly until the human race improves in regards to greed, laziness and corruption.
I agree that 100% biological humans should not be affected by this. However I wonder what effect it could have on people wearing pacemakers or implantable defibrillators. They are already told to avoid arc welding, MRIs, or placing some headset too close to the pacemaker. Not that it's a big issue as long as Halo chargers are only placed in a few homes and parking spots. People who may be affected can just avoid those. However Qualcom's dreams seem to be to charge cars as they drive by installing Halo modules into the road itself. That would make whole roads unsafe for pacemaker and defibrillator wearers which would be wrong.
This really shows how efficient these video protection(*) cameras are at deterring and preventing crime. It also show how helpful they are at solving them when they do happen: now the police are looking for four smurfs who escaped from their comic book. No doubt they will have caught them within hours!
(*) 'Video protection' is the new double-plus-good term for 'video surveillance'.