Current transistors use phosphorous, and it is not a problem. The phosphorous bonds to silicon atoms. But in the long term reactions will still happen. So all current chip dies have "die passivation", where the die is covered with something like silicon dioxide (glass), silicon nitride (ceramic), or maybe other things. It's a very effective hermetic seal.
This is a case of two men being guilty of crimes. Simple.
In the case of the employee, his violent crime was a result of a hostile work environment which is an extenuating circumstance which will factor in his favor for determination of guilt and sentencing.
In the case of the manager he created a hostile work environment through consistent long-term sexual harassment, driving an employee to violence.
What the employee did is a crime, but the manager is also guilty of a crime and will hopefully face the appropriate civil and criminal penalties.
Cooling things in space is easy. Cooling things in space is hard. The rest of your post is correct though, assuming at least that your radiator is completely insulated from solar radiation.
The thing is, radiation takes a very, very long time to transfer energy because it is very slow until you get up to much higher temperatures, like where incandescent bulbs operate. It's a T^4 process, so as as the temperature halves, the rate of energy transfer decreases by a factor of 16. If you try to get to 4K directly from a radiator the energy transfer will slow down to almost nothing, and it will probably be balanced out by the sun's incoming radiation before it hits 4K unless you have superb insulation.
What would need to be done is use some kind of refrigerant system, or thermoelectric, so that you can constantly keep the radiator at a high temperature to quickly exhaust heat to space. This allows you to cool the gases down to the liquid points, but means that for reasonable processing throughput you need a huge surface area (insulated from the sun), very high temperature, or both.
Gee, sounds simple. Except that rockets generally run on -liquid- oxygen. You are going to need one hell of an infrastructure to manufacture/store LOX, even more so for liquid hydrogen. Theory and practice are pretty far apart on this idea, to the point where I would call it impractical.
To get good fuel density they will generally want liquid fuel. But getting it to liquid is just an engineering problem. Space of course is rather cold, but there is no air for convection transfer, and few solid bodies for conduction transfer. Which ordinarily leaves just radiation, which mainly takes a very large size to be effective, so it's hard to dispose of a lot of heat at once.
But the ship is parked on top of a frozen asteroid. If I were them I would might use the deep frozen water ice to cool the extracted gases to get them closer to liquid. It simultaneously melts the ice for processing. Two birds, one stone. Getting the extracted gases the rest of the way to liquid might be hard and inefficient. The speed will be limited by the size of the radiator and solar cells. I suspect they would send up a fuel processor in advance of a mission needing the fuel. The speed of processing needed is dictated by the mission lead time.
A 1 sentence analysis is no substitute for an actual study of the engineering problems and mission tradeoffs by qualified individuals. It seems a bit brash to discard an idea that may be a great boon to future manned and unmanned exploration of our solar system.
Well, if they had to pass a clarifying law "since", then there must've been a way to make such a claim earlier -- when Sarah Palin was making it.
Thanks for the confirmation.
That's a logical fallacy. It is entirely possible and reasonably that what Palin was doing was illegal at the time she did it, regardless of what the Alaskan legislature did or did not pass after the fact.
It may have fallen in a slightly grey area which was enough for a powerful person, the state governor to get off the hook. This law could have been passed precisely to eliminate such wiggle room for powerful politicians. Quick quiz: who appoints the Alaskan attorney general? The Alaskan governor.
Legal or not, I would conclude that her actions were outside the spirit of the laws concerning official government correspondence.
If you're generating more energy than you can use, find a use for it. Use the off-peak time to fill up some hydrogen fuel cells or something.
In exchange for massive capital outlay and some operating expenses, hydrogen fuel cells, compressed air, flywheels, hydroelectric dams, and so on can store excess base load power to provide peaking power later on. This is well known.
Luckily the utility companies are clever, and they realize that by implementing a "smart" power infrastructure they can save money because they don't need to build as many hydrogen fuel cells. This is a win win win situation since power demand is met, utility companies make more money, and consumers pay less for their power. Building fuel cells is just a win since it only does the first of those.
It's a good idea but it solves a slightly different problem.
Nuclear plants are base load. This air conditioning throttling system, which is in use already in many power markets, helps the power companies minimize the peak load, a large portion of which comes from a bunch of workers across an entire region coming home and turning on the A/C. The power from peaking generators which can turn on and off quickly like gas turbines is necessary to avoid brownouts and blackouts from this variable load condition.
Adding more base load doesn't help you when everybody turns their AC on at once, because you can't turn off the base load plants once power consumption drops back to the average.
There could be a sufficiently large molecular resonance for some important organic molecule, either DNA itself or maybe a protein or enzyme which will interact with the DNA. An example of this is lactose which has a resonance at 530GHz, well known to terahertz researchers. Complicated organic molecules which have very complex shapes, bonds, and mass distributions have multiple frequencies at which they resonate, with varying Q factors, which is very hard to derive. Proteins and DNA in particular I think take many shapes, they "fold", and even the biologists don't have a complete understanding of it.
I'm not saying there is a risk here, even if there is a significant resonance, only that this is a plausible mechanism which may or may not have already been examined by other researchers.
It'd be a much more green initiative to replace the plastic case with a paper and card case that could include basic controls printed on it's various surfaces. They could even go all out and switch to all digital distribution.
He reached for a phone and called a lot of Apple numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the right person, but no luck. No one took him seriously and all he got for his troubles was a ticket number.
He thought that eventually the ticket would move up high enough and that he would receive a call back, but his phone never rang. What should he be expected to do then? Walk into an Apple store and give the shiny, new device to a 20-year-old who might just end up selling it on eBay?
So the guy tried to return it to Apple, then got impatient since they couldn't escalate the issue to the right people. Then he said "fuck it" and sold it to Gizmodo.
Would you say then that Thomas Tamm should be fined or imprisoned for illegally blowing the whistle on the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program? From a position of blindly following the law, he should be, because he revealed classified information to the media. But he exposed illegal government activities that had been classified to hide them from the public, and I would say that he was simply following his civic duty to reveal corruption.
It's hard to interpret this Drake case, because we have little information. If however the speculation is true that he was only revealing information on billions of dollars the NSA wasted in failed programs which was then covered up, there is certainly a strong argument in my opinion that this revelation is of net benefit to the US public. I don't see (yet) that any significant operation knowledge was exposed, but his actions could bring the oversight needed to prevent the continued waste of our taxpayer dollars. If he reported through appropriate channels there is not much guarantee it would ever escape the black hole of classified information, and he would have been an immediate suspect if he then tried to escalate by leaking to the media. And it could have easily resulted in "workforce punishment" e.g. get assigned boring tasks, get passed over for promotions if he pressed the issue through official channels.
Of course if you disagree with me and think that Tamm should be prosecuted for his whistle blowing, then there is no reason for you to give Drake the benefit of doubt in this case.
Wasn't there a slashdot article about US companies getting in trouble with labor laws for not paying interns? It seems horribly unethical to create and perpetuate a system where young people trying to get into a certain industry think that it's necessary and okay to work without pay, or with incredibly small pay. You might say that the interns are okay with it, because they are pursuing their dreams or something. But I bet that they would be even more okay with it if they got paid.
Incidentally, I am an engineer. All of my engineering and software development friends, like me, were reasonably well-paid in our internships, at a minimum of about 1.5x minimum wage, up to about 3x.
Not to mention the capital investment of such a complex system which requires heaters and probably full-time oversight benefits significantly from economy of scale.
There certainly is an "old-fashioned" side to amateur radio, but there are many amateurs out there on the forefront of digital and millimeter wave technology.
MICHAEL I wish we had never done this. What are we going to do? You know what I can't figure out? How is it that all these stupid, Neanderthal, Mafia guys can be so good at crime and smart guys like us can suck so badly at it?
SAMIR We're new to it, though. If we had more experience -
MICHAEL No. No. Y'know what I think? I think we're screwed. There's evidence all over that building to link it to us. Even if we could launder money, I wouldn't want to. If we're caught while laundering money, we're not going to go to white-collar-resort-prison. No, no, no. We're gonna go to federal-reserve-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison.
Eating foods high in glucose spikes your blood sugar (glucose is blood sugar), which then spikes insulin levels, causes your body to store more of the energy you just consumed as fat, and increases risk of diabetes. Pure glucose has just about the highest glycemic index possible. So while glucose is perfectly natural and fine to eat in small quantities, it's a bit disingenuous to say its not harmful and blame everything on fructose. In fact, purely from the blood sugar perspective, fructose is better than glucose. You need to have a most of your glucose coming from more complex carbohydrates which are processed by your body into glucose, this takes time and prevents the blood sugar spike.
NASA engineers expect to receive paychecks. They're funny that way. Hobbyists working in their spare time don't get paid.
Assume an engineering makes $50k/year (rather low actually). That comes out to $25/hour ignoring benefits. Spending a mere 16 hours (two days, not much) planning, getting approval, building, executing, and reporting the results the project's direct labor comes to $400. Add benefits, overhead for office space, tools, transportation, and you're looking at something like $1,000 + parts. If it's done by a private contractor add 5-10% to the top in profit.
It comes up every time some college kid or hobbyist makes a cool project on a budget $xxx. The headlines always include the $xxx. And invariably the $xxx excludes the the labor and overhead which is usually the most expensive part in the real world. Sure large government organizations tend to be inefficient, but it's not a fair comparison.
Another commenter further up who helped test the pilot system in Alaska said it wouldn't remove all radar. I don't know.
But it's not easy to jam aircraft across a very wide area. It already requires a fair amount of power since you're on the ground and far from the aircraft, thus the aircraft's GPS antenna will receive little power from that angle and range. So you need a focused antenna, OR a ton of power, OR both, depending on various factors. If you did put out enough power to jam people in a wide area then you will easily be detected by definition because of how much power you are putting out. And the penalties for this are pretty severe. Plus the people who design these systems are more aware of the problems than you are, and know how to fix them. It's just a matter of money.
People can already jam airport radars, if they want to. While they are higher power than GPS, they are fixed in position so you can use a very high gain antenna. Heck, get a high powered rifle with a scope and you can disable an airport radar, depending on local geography if you can get close enough. So there's no additional danger. And there are always backup plans for when instruments go out.
3, Dangers from jamming, How hard will it be to jam the GPS signal or worse spoof it near an airport?
This one depends. They are going to design this system with the antenna's reception pattern mostly between the horizontal plane of the aircraft, and straight up. Which means to get any jamming signal in, you'll need to be at about the same height as the aircraft. At that point jamming is semi-trivial. Spoofing is far more difficult, but it's certainly a possibility. Of course if you throw enough power into a jammer it can work even at very poor angles. This is more significant for a small aircraft since they don't have as much width or height blocking a signal from the ground.
But there are lots of techniques that can be used to alleviate this, anti-jam GPS is hardly a new topic, it's all a matter of money. Since at the airport there will be transponders and radars still, it may not be worth spending a whole lot of money preventing this possibility.
This is really weird reasoning. If saws are so safe that such a device is really unnecessary, then the cost each time it triggers (which requires contact of finger and blade) is irrelevant, because it will almost never trigger. And if it does trigger, $170 is cheap compared to the likely medical bill if you didn't have it.
False positive rate my friend. Decision theory (signal processing) says that since the cost of a false negative is high, the decision point to trigger an action must be placed conservatively, which will increase the false positive rate. For a skilled user this means the decision matrix will be biased against their benefit. Not everyone is skilled, they can buy the $1600 Saw Stop table saw if they're worried. In fact the Saw Stop system is known to trigger on damp wood - electrically its not too different from human flesh.
And no, table saws are definitely NOT safe, but few useful things are completely safe. At least not if you want them, cheap, light, and compact. I want a sharp kitchen knife, a mandolin slicer, butane torch, and a drawing compass that doesn't have frickin' safety points on it. There's a difference between a blatant safety flaw, like a car tire that blows out if you go 80mph, and something that must simply be treated with caution.
It's nice to have safe options, which is why, for example, I drive a car instead of a motor cycle. But a car is more expensive, uses more gas, and has higher insurance. But I'm okay with that. Not a 100% good example I know, because I also need to occasionally move heavy things in it, but I think it makes a point.
The guys insurance company hired the lawyer to file the lawsuit (in TFA). It makes sense for them, they have to pay out the nose every time somebody who doesn't know what they're doing cuts a finger off, they want another party to share the financial burden.
It's not a consumer product safety standard and Ryobi shouldn't be held liable for making table saws the same way they've been made for decades. If the customer wanted a more expensive saw with which was safer he should have bought one. Instead he bought a Ryobi saw but apparently he has buyer's remorse since he is suing them for selling exactly what he wanted to buy.
This system apparently adds ~$150 to the purchase price of the saw, plus $170 every time it triggers (new brake and new blade), so it's hardly a foregone conclusion that all saws should have it, given that most people never injure themselves on their power tools. To be fair a table saw is often regarded as the most dangerous common power tool, but that's why you always treat it very carefully and follow certain safety rules like using a "push stick" instead of putting your hand near the blade. It's a lot like using a vertical bandsaw.
If you read the article you see that the lawyer who filed this suit was hired by the user's health insurance company. So that's the real story: the health insurance company doesn't want to pay for people injuring themselves with power tools. So the user gets a settlement, the health insurance probably gets a portion of it, and the lawyer definitely gets a portion of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Current transistors use phosphorous, and it is not a problem. The phosphorous bonds to silicon atoms. But in the long term reactions will still happen. So all current chip dies have "die passivation", where the die is covered with something like silicon dioxide (glass), silicon nitride (ceramic), or maybe other things. It's a very effective hermetic seal.
This is a case of two men being guilty of crimes. Simple.
In the case of the employee, his violent crime was a result of a hostile work environment which is an extenuating circumstance which will factor in his favor for determination of guilt and sentencing.
In the case of the manager he created a hostile work environment through consistent long-term sexual harassment, driving an employee to violence.
What the employee did is a crime, but the manager is also guilty of a crime and will hopefully face the appropriate civil and criminal penalties.
Cooling things in space is easy.
Cooling things in space is hard. The rest of your post is correct though, assuming at least that your radiator is completely insulated from solar radiation.
The thing is, radiation takes a very, very long time to transfer energy because it is very slow until you get up to much higher temperatures, like where incandescent bulbs operate. It's a T^4 process, so as as the temperature halves, the rate of energy transfer decreases by a factor of 16. If you try to get to 4K directly from a radiator the energy transfer will slow down to almost nothing, and it will probably be balanced out by the sun's incoming radiation before it hits 4K unless you have superb insulation.
What would need to be done is use some kind of refrigerant system, or thermoelectric, so that you can constantly keep the radiator at a high temperature to quickly exhaust heat to space. This allows you to cool the gases down to the liquid points, but means that for reasonable processing throughput you need a huge surface area (insulated from the sun), very high temperature, or both.
Gee, sounds simple. Except that rockets generally run on -liquid- oxygen.
You are going to need one hell of an infrastructure to manufacture/store LOX, even more so for liquid hydrogen.
Theory and practice are pretty far apart on this idea, to the point where I would call it impractical.
To get good fuel density they will generally want liquid fuel. But getting it to liquid is just an engineering problem. Space of course is rather cold, but there is no air for convection transfer, and few solid bodies for conduction transfer. Which ordinarily leaves just radiation, which mainly takes a very large size to be effective, so it's hard to dispose of a lot of heat at once.
But the ship is parked on top of a frozen asteroid. If I were them I would might use the deep frozen water ice to cool the extracted gases to get them closer to liquid. It simultaneously melts the ice for processing. Two birds, one stone. Getting the extracted gases the rest of the way to liquid might be hard and inefficient. The speed will be limited by the size of the radiator and solar cells. I suspect they would send up a fuel processor in advance of a mission needing the fuel. The speed of processing needed is dictated by the mission lead time.
A 1 sentence analysis is no substitute for an actual study of the engineering problems and mission tradeoffs by qualified individuals. It seems a bit brash to discard an idea that may be a great boon to future manned and unmanned exploration of our solar system.
That's a logical fallacy. It is entirely possible and reasonably that what Palin was doing was illegal at the time she did it, regardless of what the Alaskan legislature did or did not pass after the fact.
It may have fallen in a slightly grey area which was enough for a powerful person, the state governor to get off the hook. This law could have been passed precisely to eliminate such wiggle room for powerful politicians. Quick quiz: who appoints the Alaskan attorney general? The Alaskan governor.
Legal or not, I would conclude that her actions were outside the spirit of the laws concerning official government correspondence.
If you're generating more energy than you can use, find a use for it. Use the off-peak time to fill up some hydrogen fuel cells or something.
In exchange for massive capital outlay and some operating expenses, hydrogen fuel cells, compressed air, flywheels, hydroelectric dams, and so on can store excess base load power to provide peaking power later on. This is well known.
Luckily the utility companies are clever, and they realize that by implementing a "smart" power infrastructure they can save money because they don't need to build as many hydrogen fuel cells. This is a win win win situation since power demand is met, utility companies make more money, and consumers pay less for their power. Building fuel cells is just a win since it only does the first of those.
It's a good idea but it solves a slightly different problem.
Nuclear plants are base load. This air conditioning throttling system, which is in use already in many power markets, helps the power companies minimize the peak load, a large portion of which comes from a bunch of workers across an entire region coming home and turning on the A/C. The power from peaking generators which can turn on and off quickly like gas turbines is necessary to avoid brownouts and blackouts from this variable load condition.
Adding more base load doesn't help you when everybody turns their AC on at once, because you can't turn off the base load plants once power consumption drops back to the average.
There could be a sufficiently large molecular resonance for some important organic molecule, either DNA itself or maybe a protein or enzyme which will interact with the DNA. An example of this is lactose which has a resonance at 530GHz, well known to terahertz researchers. Complicated organic molecules which have very complex shapes, bonds, and mass distributions have multiple frequencies at which they resonate, with varying Q factors, which is very hard to derive. Proteins and DNA in particular I think take many shapes, they "fold", and even the biologists don't have a complete understanding of it.
I'm not saying there is a risk here, even if there is a significant resonance, only that this is a plausible mechanism which may or may not have already been examined by other researchers.
What, you think game disks are analog?
(And yes I know what you meant ;-) )
Who says he has Cable TV? You know you can watch a lot of stuff for free (ad-supported) transmitted wirelessly straight to your home.
If you read Gizmodo's account of it:
So the guy tried to return it to Apple, then got impatient since they couldn't escalate the issue to the right people. Then he said "fuck it" and sold it to Gizmodo.
Would you say then that Thomas Tamm should be fined or imprisoned for illegally blowing the whistle on the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program? From a position of blindly following the law, he should be, because he revealed classified information to the media. But he exposed illegal government activities that had been classified to hide them from the public, and I would say that he was simply following his civic duty to reveal corruption.
It's hard to interpret this Drake case, because we have little information. If however the speculation is true that he was only revealing information on billions of dollars the NSA wasted in failed programs which was then covered up, there is certainly a strong argument in my opinion that this revelation is of net benefit to the US public. I don't see (yet) that any significant operation knowledge was exposed, but his actions could bring the oversight needed to prevent the continued waste of our taxpayer dollars. If he reported through appropriate channels there is not much guarantee it would ever escape the black hole of classified information, and he would have been an immediate suspect if he then tried to escalate by leaking to the media. And it could have easily resulted in "workforce punishment" e.g. get assigned boring tasks, get passed over for promotions if he pressed the issue through official channels.
Of course if you disagree with me and think that Tamm should be prosecuted for his whistle blowing, then there is no reason for you to give Drake the benefit of doubt in this case.
Wasn't there a slashdot article about US companies getting in trouble with labor laws for not paying interns? It seems horribly unethical to create and perpetuate a system where young people trying to get into a certain industry think that it's necessary and okay to work without pay, or with incredibly small pay. You might say that the interns are okay with it, because they are pursuing their dreams or something. But I bet that they would be even more okay with it if they got paid.
Incidentally, I am an engineer. All of my engineering and software development friends, like me, were reasonably well-paid in our internships, at a minimum of about 1.5x minimum wage, up to about 3x.
Not to mention the capital investment of such a complex system which requires heaters and probably full-time oversight benefits significantly from economy of scale.
Keep in mind that there are a number of amateurs working on state of the art radio systems, like this guy who does 47GHz radio: http://mightyohm.com/blog/category/amateur-radio/
There certainly is an "old-fashioned" side to amateur radio, but there are many amateurs out there on the forefront of digital and millimeter wave technology.
(Obligatory Office Space quote)
MICHAEL
I wish we had never done this. What are we going to do? You know what I
can't figure out? How is it that all these stupid, Neanderthal, Mafia
guys can be so good at crime and smart guys like us can suck so badly
at it?
SAMIR
We're new to it, though. If we had more experience -
MICHAEL
No. No. Y'know what I think? I think we're screwed. There's evidence
all over that building to link it to us. Even if we could launder
money, I wouldn't want to. If we're caught while laundering money,
we're not going to go to white-collar-resort-prison. No, no, no. We're
gonna go to federal-reserve-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison.
Eating foods high in glucose spikes your blood sugar (glucose is blood sugar), which then spikes insulin levels, causes your body to store more of the energy you just consumed as fat, and increases risk of diabetes. Pure glucose has just about the highest glycemic index possible. So while glucose is perfectly natural and fine to eat in small quantities, it's a bit disingenuous to say its not harmful and blame everything on fructose. In fact, purely from the blood sugar perspective, fructose is better than glucose. You need to have a most of your glucose coming from more complex carbohydrates which are processed by your body into glucose, this takes time and prevents the blood sugar spike.
http://www.carbs-information.com/blood-glucose-levels.htm
NASA engineers expect to receive paychecks. They're funny that way. Hobbyists working in their spare time don't get paid.
Assume an engineering makes $50k/year (rather low actually). That comes out to $25/hour ignoring benefits. Spending a mere 16 hours (two days, not much) planning, getting approval, building, executing, and reporting the results the project's direct labor comes to $400. Add benefits, overhead for office space, tools, transportation, and you're looking at something like $1,000 + parts. If it's done by a private contractor add 5-10% to the top in profit.
It comes up every time some college kid or hobbyist makes a cool project on a budget $xxx. The headlines always include the $xxx. And invariably the $xxx excludes the the labor and overhead which is usually the most expensive part in the real world. Sure large government organizations tend to be inefficient, but it's not a fair comparison.
Who cares about fair? As long as US businesses can do profitable business with a totalitarian communist nation then they will.
Another commenter further up who helped test the pilot system in Alaska said it wouldn't remove all radar. I don't know.
But it's not easy to jam aircraft across a very wide area. It already requires a fair amount of power since you're on the ground and far from the aircraft, thus the aircraft's GPS antenna will receive little power from that angle and range. So you need a focused antenna, OR a ton of power, OR both, depending on various factors. If you did put out enough power to jam people in a wide area then you will easily be detected by definition because of how much power you are putting out. And the penalties for this are pretty severe. Plus the people who design these systems are more aware of the problems than you are, and know how to fix them. It's just a matter of money.
People can already jam airport radars, if they want to. While they are higher power than GPS, they are fixed in position so you can use a very high gain antenna. Heck, get a high powered rifle with a scope and you can disable an airport radar, depending on local geography if you can get close enough. So there's no additional danger. And there are always backup plans for when instruments go out.
This one depends. They are going to design this system with the antenna's reception pattern mostly between the horizontal plane of the aircraft, and straight up. Which means to get any jamming signal in, you'll need to be at about the same height as the aircraft. At that point jamming is semi-trivial. Spoofing is far more difficult, but it's certainly a possibility. Of course if you throw enough power into a jammer it can work even at very poor angles. This is more significant for a small aircraft since they don't have as much width or height blocking a signal from the ground.
But there are lots of techniques that can be used to alleviate this, anti-jam GPS is hardly a new topic, it's all a matter of money. Since at the airport there will be transponders and radars still, it may not be worth spending a whole lot of money preventing this possibility.
False positive rate my friend. Decision theory (signal processing) says that since the cost of a false negative is high, the decision point to trigger an action must be placed conservatively, which will increase the false positive rate. For a skilled user this means the decision matrix will be biased against their benefit. Not everyone is skilled, they can buy the $1600 Saw Stop table saw if they're worried. In fact the Saw Stop system is known to trigger on damp wood - electrically its not too different from human flesh.
And no, table saws are definitely NOT safe, but few useful things are completely safe. At least not if you want them, cheap, light, and compact. I want a sharp kitchen knife, a mandolin slicer, butane torch, and a drawing compass that doesn't have frickin' safety points on it. There's a difference between a blatant safety flaw, like a car tire that blows out if you go 80mph, and something that must simply be treated with caution.
It's nice to have safe options, which is why, for example, I drive a car instead of a motor cycle. But a car is more expensive, uses more gas, and has higher insurance. But I'm okay with that. Not a 100% good example I know, because I also need to occasionally move heavy things in it, but I think it makes a point.
The guys insurance company hired the lawyer to file the lawsuit (in TFA). It makes sense for them, they have to pay out the nose every time somebody who doesn't know what they're doing cuts a finger off, they want another party to share the financial burden.
It's not a consumer product safety standard and Ryobi shouldn't be held liable for making table saws the same way they've been made for decades. If the customer wanted a more expensive saw with which was safer he should have bought one. Instead he bought a Ryobi saw but apparently he has buyer's remorse since he is suing them for selling exactly what he wanted to buy.
This system apparently adds ~$150 to the purchase price of the saw, plus $170 every time it triggers (new brake and new blade), so it's hardly a foregone conclusion that all saws should have it, given that most people never injure themselves on their power tools. To be fair a table saw is often regarded as the most dangerous common power tool, but that's why you always treat it very carefully and follow certain safety rules like using a "push stick" instead of putting your hand near the blade. It's a lot like using a vertical bandsaw.
If you read the article you see that the lawyer who filed this suit was hired by the user's health insurance company. So that's the real story: the health insurance company doesn't want to pay for people injuring themselves with power tools. So the user gets a settlement, the health insurance probably gets a portion of it, and the lawyer definitely gets a portion of it.
Seconded. Avira gives me about one popup per day asking me to upgrade.