All four common options for energy -- BTU, Joule, Calorie, Kilocalorie leave something to be desired. The problem is that the Joule and Calorie are too small to be convenient for a lot of real world stuff. Kilocalories would be better except that folks are prone to leave the "kilo" off and they then get confused with calories. (e.g. the "calories" in food are actually kilcalories) Often it's easier to just work with BTUs (roughly a quarter of a kilocalorie) which are a convenient size and aren't ambiguous.
"Ironically, to go to the moon they used the metric system."
Quite possibly not. A lot of the early space work in the US was done in imperial units or a mixture of Imperial and SI. I actually worked with military space programs in the 1960s and 1970s and while I'm comfortable with metric units, I don't recall using them much professionally back then.
Because of transaction fees, I think it's theoretically possible for cryptocurrencies to have a negative value. If, for example, you have to sell your ultimatemagicsuretoappreciateforevercryptocoin "investment" to establish a loss for tax purposes, and if the transaction fee to rid yourself of it is higher than the price you fetch for the coin, the value will be negative.
...saw an old MG that had been converted in a similar way.
If nothing else, I'd guess that the original Lucas electronics were ripped out and replaced with something -- anything -- that actually works. That has to be a major step foward. Old Joke: "Why do the British drink warm beer?" Answer "Lucas refrigerators"
I agree. I have some doubts about this specific effort. Teslas are, to some extent, big heavy cars because they need a lot of battery space. I'm told that current Tesla batteries are approaching theoretical limits for Lithium-ion energy density. Not that that's an absolute limit on how compact car batteries can be, but it does suggest that wedging batteries into an Aston-Martin DB6 that is a foot shorter than a Tesla Model 3 and unlike the Model 3 not designed around the need for a large battery pack may be a problem. Of course, the engine, transmission, and fuel tank are no longer needed, so maybe it will work out.
And the weight distribution will likely be quite different. That's got to affect handling?
I'm not especially a car guy, so maybe I'm overestimating the problems. Or maybe I'm missing some. But anyway, it's interesting, and, I agree, kind of cool.
I could get 25/5 from comcast but it'd be $80/mo...
it's worth many,many dollars a month a month to me NOT to deal with Comcast ever again. I've been in and worked with the military, dealt with bureaucracies of all sorts, worked as an outside contractor in a government IT operation. I've never seen anything remotely like Comcast. I think Comcast staff meetings probably start and end with readings from Kafka's "The Castle". Needless to say, Comcast customer service leaves a lot to be desired.
Up 'til a decade ago, the FCC used a bizarre system where everyone in a ZIP code was assumed to have access to the highest speed connection in use by anyone in that ZIP code -- typically an expensive business line of some surt. The resulting broadband penetration numbers were described by one of the FCC's commissioners as "Stunningly Meaningless".
I believe that after being laughed at for long enough, they switched to some less ludicrous methodology. But I don't know what it is.
Forget 1992. The first version of Lotus 123 was released in 1983.
It'd be interested to see a comparison of time for moderately skilled operators to do a set of routine tasks on the current version of Office vs these new productivity apps vs Lotus 123+Word Perfect+Eudora+Power Point running on MSDOS6 vs emacs. Wouldn't surprise me at all that the "modern productivity apps" came in a distant fourth.
The problem here is "what's a subsidy?" Handing the buyer $7500 of taxpayer money for buying an expensive electric sports car is clearly a subsidy. (Tesla's subsidy will phase out soon incidentally). As is the 2.3c per kw/hr federal tax credit for renewable electricity generators. But a lot of the other "subsidies" are either problemetic or difficult to evaluate. What's the value of a loan guarantee for your start up that will make jet fuel from pistachio shells? We won't know until the company folds. (If it succeeds the subsidy is zero). And why is allowing a petroleum company to subtract foreign taxes on income a subsidy? If its a subsidy, it's a subsidy that's available to every US company in any business.
Are government grants for battery storage R&D subsidies? Probably. But would it be prudent to cancel them?
What's probably true is that value of subsides to any technology is probably substantially understated by its proponents and substantially overstated by its competitors..
the Sun and the solar system have gone round the Galaxy many times. There has been plenty of time for the stars formed at the same time and place to drift apart.
Sort of? This is **REALLY** beyond my pay grade. But I think the situation may be that small differences in the velocity vectors of stars formed close together cause the stars to diverge as the stars move around the galactic center until their mutual distance reaches a maximum at a point (sort of) opposite their starting points relative to the galactic center. Then they converge toward their original relationships as the stars rotate back to their original position with respect to the galactic center. It's really hard to describe and I may be dead wrong.
**IF** that's the case (big IF), the distance between the stars depends not only on how fast the stars were moving apart when they formed, but on where they are in their orbits around the galactic center.
"That way providers will hit the low hanging fruit first."
Yep. Everyone in the country seat within 600 meters of the provider's office will get access to high speed internet. And the corporate officers will get a bonus
"And then come back for the hard ones..."... Sometime in the Summer of 4692 BCE..
Using public records is a good idea, but driving around tells you what was actually built, rather than what was planned. If you base your maps only on plans there is a risk that your maps will describe Plan C whereas what's actually out there is Plan D which got misfiled. Or Plan B because Plan C was dropped after approval, but before construction. Or Plan None which was built in 1993 as a temporary construction feature and never removed.
Lost in all this is the fact that Ms Trump's use of personal eMail is entirely legal. As was Ms Clinton's mostly. There is, and was in Ms Clinton's day, a requirement that the emails be archived and accessible to the public. Nowadays, there is a requirement that the archiving be done within a time limit (20 days?). In Ms Clinton's day there was no such time limit. GWB's first term Secretary of State Colin Powell still hasn't gotten around to archiving HIS 2001-2005 emails.
And yes, commingling of official and personal eMails is OK. Only the official stuff has to be archived.
The issue of classified material on Ms Clinton's server is a separate issue -- complicated by the fact that as Secretary of State, Ms Clinton has considerable power to reclassify stuff. For all I or anyone else around here knows, a formal hearing would determine that Ms Clinton actually declassified the material in question, but didn't properly mark it. That's a parking ticket level misdemeanor offense at best. Not something people are locked up for even in America.
The outrageous conduct of Donald Trump and his crazed supporters seriously clouds the issue of course. And Democrats can smile and laugh for a few days about this. But really, there's apparently no fire and damn little smoke here.
"Why? Do you think they're going to drive 300 miles to a fire?"
That actually happens sometimes. But the problem is that in the case of major disasters like California's wildfires a truck may be on the firelines literally for days. And if it's pumping water, it'll go through a lot of fuel. It is much better to bring the fuel to the truck than to pull the truck offline to recharge it.
Same with military vehicles BTW
Ambulances, not so much. They need to return to base often anyway. But the long recharge time of current batteries might be a problem in a real disaster.
CNG does produce less CO2 per BTU/joule/calorie than gasoline. However Natural Gas powered engines tend to run hot which means more NO2. Unlike CO2, NO2 is visible and fairly toxic. Even with compression, Natural Gas tends to take up a lot of volume -- which often mean somewhat less payload space. One other drawback is that Natural Gas is probably more likely to catch fire in an accident than gasoline or diesel.
Presumably all that can be dealt with.
But all in all CNG is probably a perfectly OK vehicle fuel. It's widely used only in Iran and Pakistan I think.
====== Israel isn't very big -- about the size of New Jersey, and it's neighbors aren't very friendly, so the problem of recharging pure EVs on long trips possibly will be minimal. Israeli's likely won't be taking long trips any time soon?
Maybe this plan isn't as ditzy as it sounds.
But I personally would be a lot happier if my fire trucks were powered by liquid hydrocarbons that can be refueloed from a can or barrel.
Exactly. For the past 30 years or so, I've made a point of asking folks of all sorts how they like their computer systems -- what's good and what's bad. Pretty much across the board -- doctors, dentists, support people, retail, government, banks... you name it. They have two complaints. The big one -- the user interfaces suck. The questions are obscure. The feedback is poor. Discoverability is worse. They can't figure out how to do what they want/need to do. The computer that is supposed to help them do things, too often makes the job harder, not easier.
The lesser complaint. The damn things are too slow -- especially to boot up. That hasn't been so common late. Maybe some progress is being made on that front.
"Next it also requires that no one implements a form of encryption that quantum computers are just as useless against as classical computers, and researchers are already working on those."
Yes and No? Yes, future communications and encrypted archives using quantum computing invulnerable codes may be safe in the presence of quantum computers that are more than toys.
But No, archived existing encrypted data and communications might well become readable. That could be... ahem... embarrassing for some folks.
OTOH, I'll believe in serious quantum computers when I see one working.
Sadly, I don't think you/we have seen it all. I think this is probably only an early stage of a monumental clusterf**k. Google seems to have convinced themselves that the huddled masses (that'd be us) need help with their computer usage and that Google is just the company to mentor us. In order to help us run our lives, they need to get into our computers and they have three tools with which to do that -- android, chrome and javascript. They presumably will use all three.
The problem is that scripting in general and javascript in particular are completely and utterly incompatible with computer security. Google is not going to change its approach easily and other companies are going to try to emulate it and/or to fit themselves into poorly served niches in the Google Universe. So scripting is going to be everywhere and so probably will malicious attacks on just about every computing device connected to the internet.
This is a recipe for disaster of course. And disaster it is likely going to be.
Mind your backups. You'll probably need them. More than once... and prepare to see your financial accounts attacked repeatedly. Doesn't matter that you turn off scripting. The third parties sharing your financial information (banks, credit card companies, merchants, etc) probably won't have it turned off.
"Back 20 years ago, most people were 10 minutes early to a meeting, and the meeting didn't start until 5 minutes after the scheduled time. Because peoples clocks could be considered up to 5 minutes off"
Nonsense. Cheap, reliable, accurate watches have been widely available since Timex started stamping them out back around 1960.
Gasoline on the other hand stores roughly 34 MJ per LITER. That would seem to be about 1500 times the energy density of the 120bar-70bar cavern. Nothing against compressed gas storage. There may even be some good uses for it although personally it seems to me to be kind of scary. Pressures of many tens of bars can surely do a LOT of damage if anything goes wrong. But let's try to keep the level of the claims down to somewhere around the level of mild exaggeration.
Not only that, but if you believe the mechanic I use, Subaru won't have the knob in stock. According to him they rarely have ANYTHING in stock. It will take 3 to 5 days to get it. And, I assume the actual charge will be $57 plus shipping.
"Or.. they could just pay the corporations to use their workers?"
I expect that's what they have in mind. I think they are troubled that a lot of government in house IT projects have large cost and schedule overruns. They presumably want to tap into Silicon Valley's vast skills at doing something or other -- ignoring the fact that large cost and schedule overruns by tech companies are not unknown or even uncommon.
This may or may not be exacerbated by the fact that the current administration has relatively few folks at any level who are anything other than completely clueless about how governments actually work.
Anyway, I think they are hoping to avoid things like the 2014 healthcare.gov debacle. If borrowing folks from Google, et.al. can help with that, it's probably not a bad idea.
My first question would be what, if anything, the GAO thinks about this notion. The second would be whether the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFDRCs) -- Thats, Rand Corp, MITRE labs, Lawrence-Livermore, etc can do the job or whether perhaps a new FFRDC is needed specifically for government IT.
Anyway, my take is -- nowhere near as crazed as much of what goes on in Washington nowadays. But still, I'd like to know a lot more about it and the alternatives before I bought into it.
You're absolutely correct that bidding on a government contract is complex and difficult. The last government bid proposal I worked on decades ago required that we promise compliance with many millions of words of procurement specifications and about 60 pages of pro forma promising not to pollute the environment, subcontract to foreign companies, discriminate in any way in hiring, etc,etc, etc. I would guess that things have only gotten more complicated.
A bond might work in some cases, but overall, I'm skeptical. In my experience, government Requests For Proposal (RFPs) for complex items are far from perfect and by the time all the discrepancies and major flaws are ironed out, it's pretty hazy to what degree apparent non-performance is due to contractor ineptitude/malfeasance and what is due to the government asking for the wrong thing.
Slashdot Mirror
All four common options for energy -- BTU, Joule, Calorie, Kilocalorie leave something to be desired. The problem is that the Joule and Calorie are too small to be convenient for a lot of real world stuff. Kilocalories would be better except that folks are prone to leave the "kilo" off and they then get confused with calories. (e.g. the "calories" in food are actually kilcalories) Often it's easier to just work with BTUs (roughly a quarter of a kilocalorie) which are a convenient size and aren't ambiguous.
"Ironically, to go to the moon they used the metric system."
Quite possibly not. A lot of the early space work in the US was done in imperial units or a mixture of Imperial and SI. I actually worked with military space programs in the 1960s and 1970s and while I'm comfortable with metric units, I don't recall using them much professionally back then.
Does it change state when someone does look at it?
No, but it kills half the cats within 100 meters of any component of the network
Because of transaction fees, I think it's theoretically possible for cryptocurrencies to have a negative value. If, for example, you have to sell your ultimatemagicsuretoappreciateforevercryptocoin "investment" to establish a loss for tax purposes, and if the transaction fee to rid yourself of it is higher than the price you fetch for the coin, the value will be negative.
...saw an old MG that had been converted in a similar way.
If nothing else, I'd guess that the original Lucas electronics were ripped out and replaced with something -- anything -- that actually works. That has to be a major step foward. Old Joke: "Why do the British drink warm beer?" Answer "Lucas refrigerators"
This is actually kind of cool
I agree. I have some doubts about this specific effort. Teslas are, to some extent, big heavy cars because they need a lot of battery space. I'm told that current Tesla batteries are approaching theoretical limits for Lithium-ion energy density. Not that that's an absolute limit on how compact car batteries can be, but it does suggest that wedging batteries into an Aston-Martin DB6 that is a foot shorter than a Tesla Model 3 and unlike the Model 3 not designed around the need for a large battery pack may be a problem. Of course, the engine, transmission, and fuel tank are no longer needed, so maybe it will work out.
And the weight distribution will likely be quite different. That's got to affect handling?
I'm not especially a car guy, so maybe I'm overestimating the problems. Or maybe I'm missing some. But anyway, it's interesting, and, I agree, kind of cool.
I could get 25/5 from comcast but it'd be $80/mo ...
it's worth many,many dollars a month a month to me NOT to deal with Comcast ever again. I've been in and worked with the military, dealt with bureaucracies of all sorts, worked as an outside contractor in a government IT operation. I've never seen anything remotely like Comcast. I think Comcast staff meetings probably start and end with readings from Kafka's "The Castle". Needless to say, Comcast customer service leaves a lot to be desired.
Up 'til a decade ago, the FCC used a bizarre system where everyone in a ZIP code was assumed to have access to the highest speed connection in use by anyone in that ZIP code -- typically an expensive business line of some surt. The resulting broadband penetration numbers were described by one of the FCC's commissioners as "Stunningly Meaningless".
I believe that after being laughed at for long enough, they switched to some less ludicrous methodology. But I don't know what it is.
Forget 1992. The first version of Lotus 123 was released in 1983.
It'd be interested to see a comparison of time for moderately skilled operators to do a set of routine tasks on the current version of Office vs these new productivity apps vs Lotus 123+Word Perfect+Eudora+Power Point running on MSDOS6 vs emacs. Wouldn't surprise me at all that the "modern productivity apps" came in a distant fourth.
The problem here is "what's a subsidy?" Handing the buyer $7500 of taxpayer money for buying an expensive electric sports car is clearly a subsidy. (Tesla's subsidy will phase out soon incidentally). As is the 2.3c per kw/hr federal tax credit for renewable electricity generators. But a lot of the other "subsidies" are either problemetic or difficult to evaluate. What's the value of a loan guarantee for your start up that will make jet fuel from pistachio shells? We won't know until the company folds. (If it succeeds the subsidy is zero). And why is allowing a petroleum company to subtract foreign taxes on income a subsidy? If its a subsidy, it's a subsidy that's available to every US company in any business.
Are government grants for battery storage R&D subsidies? Probably. But would it be prudent to cancel them?
What's probably true is that value of subsides to any technology is probably substantially understated by its proponents and substantially overstated by its competitors..
It's complicated
I'd suggest the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... as a starting point for anyone who wants to learn more.
the Sun and the solar system have gone round the Galaxy many times. There has been plenty of time for the stars formed at the same time and place to drift apart.
Sort of? This is **REALLY** beyond my pay grade. But I think the situation may be that small differences in the velocity vectors of stars formed close together cause the stars to diverge as the stars move around the galactic center until their mutual distance reaches a maximum at a point (sort of) opposite their starting points relative to the galactic center. Then they converge toward their original relationships as the stars rotate back to their original position with respect to the galactic center. It's really hard to describe and I may be dead wrong.
**IF** that's the case (big IF), the distance between the stars depends not only on how fast the stars were moving apart when they formed, but on where they are in their orbits around the galactic center.
"That way providers will hit the low hanging fruit first."
Yep. Everyone in the country seat within 600 meters of the provider's office will get access to high speed internet. And the corporate officers will get a bonus
"And then come back for the hard ones ..." ... Sometime in the Summer of 4692 BCE..
Using public records is a good idea, but driving around tells you what was actually built, rather than what was planned. If you base your maps only on plans there is a risk that your maps will describe Plan C whereas what's actually out there is Plan D which got misfiled. Or Plan B because Plan C was dropped after approval, but before construction. Or Plan None which was built in 1993 as a temporary construction feature and never removed.
"Lock her Up" For what?
Lost in all this is the fact that Ms Trump's use of personal eMail is entirely legal. As was Ms Clinton's mostly. There is, and was in Ms Clinton's day, a requirement that the emails be archived and accessible to the public. Nowadays, there is a requirement that the archiving be done within a time limit (20 days?). In Ms Clinton's day there was no such time limit. GWB's first term Secretary of State Colin Powell still hasn't gotten around to archiving HIS 2001-2005 emails.
And yes, commingling of official and personal eMails is OK. Only the official stuff has to be archived.
The issue of classified material on Ms Clinton's server is a separate issue -- complicated by the fact that as Secretary of State, Ms Clinton has considerable power to reclassify stuff. For all I or anyone else around here knows, a formal hearing would determine that Ms Clinton actually declassified the material in question, but didn't properly mark it. That's a parking ticket level misdemeanor offense at best. Not something people are locked up for even in America.
The outrageous conduct of Donald Trump and his crazed supporters seriously clouds the issue of course. And Democrats can smile and laugh for a few days about this. But really, there's apparently no fire and damn little smoke here.
"Why? Do you think they're going to drive 300 miles to a fire?"
That actually happens sometimes. But the problem is that in the case of major disasters like California's wildfires a truck may be on the firelines literally for days. And if it's pumping water, it'll go through a lot of fuel. It is much better to bring the fuel to the truck than to pull the truck offline to recharge it.
Same with military vehicles BTW
Ambulances, not so much. They need to return to base often anyway. But the long recharge time of current batteries might be a problem in a real disaster.
CNG does produce less CO2 per BTU/joule/calorie than gasoline. However Natural Gas powered engines tend to run hot which means more NO2. Unlike CO2, NO2 is visible and fairly toxic. Even with compression, Natural Gas tends to take up a lot of volume -- which often mean somewhat less payload space. One other drawback is that Natural Gas is probably more likely to catch fire in an accident than gasoline or diesel.
Presumably all that can be dealt with.
But all in all CNG is probably a perfectly OK vehicle fuel. It's widely used only in Iran and Pakistan I think.
======
Israel isn't very big -- about the size of New Jersey, and it's neighbors aren't very friendly, so the problem of recharging pure EVs on long trips possibly will be minimal. Israeli's likely won't be taking long trips any time soon?
Maybe this plan isn't as ditzy as it sounds.
But I personally would be a lot happier if my fire trucks were powered by liquid hydrocarbons that can be refueloed from a can or barrel.
Exactly. For the past 30 years or so, I've made a point of asking folks of all sorts how they like their computer systems -- what's good and what's bad. Pretty much across the board -- doctors, dentists, support people, retail, government, banks ... you name it. They have two complaints. The big one -- the user interfaces suck. The questions are obscure. The feedback is poor. Discoverability is worse. They can't figure out how to do what they want/need to do. The computer that is supposed to help them do things, too often makes the job harder, not easier.
The lesser complaint. The damn things are too slow -- especially to boot up. That hasn't been so common late. Maybe some progress is being made on that front.
"Next it also requires that no one implements a form of encryption that quantum computers are just as useless against as classical computers, and researchers are already working on those."
Yes and No? Yes, future communications and encrypted archives using quantum computing invulnerable codes may be safe in the presence of quantum computers that are more than toys.
But No, archived existing encrypted data and communications might well become readable. That could be ... ahem ... embarrassing for some folks.
OTOH, I'll believe in serious quantum computers when I see one working.
Sadly, I don't think you/we have seen it all. I think this is probably only an early stage of a monumental clusterf**k. Google seems to have convinced themselves that the huddled masses (that'd be us) need help with their computer usage and that Google is just the company to mentor us. In order to help us run our lives, they need to get into our computers and they have three tools with which to do that -- android, chrome and javascript. They presumably will use all three.
The problem is that scripting in general and javascript in particular are completely and utterly incompatible with computer security. Google is not going to change its approach easily and other companies are going to try to emulate it and/or to fit themselves into poorly served niches in the Google Universe. So scripting is going to be everywhere and so probably will malicious attacks on just about every computing device connected to the internet.
This is a recipe for disaster of course. And disaster it is likely going to be.
Mind your backups. You'll probably need them. More than once. .. and prepare to see your financial accounts attacked repeatedly. Doesn't matter that you turn off scripting. The third parties sharing your financial information (banks, credit card companies, merchants, etc) probably won't have it turned off.
"Back 20 years ago, most people were 10 minutes early to a meeting, and the meeting didn't start until 5 minutes after the scheduled time. Because peoples clocks could be considered up to 5 minutes off"
Nonsense. Cheap, reliable, accurate watches have been widely available since Timex started stamping them out back around 1960.
Gasoline on the other hand stores roughly 34 MJ per LITER. That would seem to be about 1500 times the energy density of the 120bar-70bar cavern. Nothing against compressed gas storage. There may even be some good uses for it although personally it seems to me to be kind of scary. Pressures of many tens of bars can surely do a LOT of damage if anything goes wrong. But let's try to keep the level of the claims down to somewhere around the level of mild exaggeration.
The article isn't about the cost of body work. It's about the cost of buying, installing, and (possibly) calibrating sensor devices.
Not only that, but if you believe the mechanic I use, Subaru won't have the knob in stock. According to him they rarely have ANYTHING in stock. It will take 3 to 5 days to get it. And, I assume the actual charge will be $57 plus shipping.
"Or.. they could just pay the corporations to use their workers?"
I expect that's what they have in mind. I think they are troubled that a lot of government in house IT projects have large cost and schedule overruns. They presumably want to tap into Silicon Valley's vast skills at doing something or other -- ignoring the fact that large cost and schedule overruns by tech companies are not unknown or even uncommon.
This may or may not be exacerbated by the fact that the current administration has relatively few folks at any level who are anything other than completely clueless about how governments actually work.
Anyway, I think they are hoping to avoid things like the 2014 healthcare.gov debacle. If borrowing folks from Google, et.al. can help with that, it's probably not a bad idea.
My first question would be what, if anything, the GAO thinks about this notion. The second would be whether the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFDRCs) -- Thats, Rand Corp, MITRE labs, Lawrence-Livermore, etc can do the job or whether perhaps a new FFRDC is needed specifically for government IT.
Anyway, my take is -- nowhere near as crazed as much of what goes on in Washington nowadays. But still, I'd like to know a lot more about it and the alternatives before I bought into it.
You're absolutely correct that bidding on a government contract is complex and difficult. The last government bid proposal I worked on decades ago required that we promise compliance with many millions of words of procurement specifications and about 60 pages of pro forma promising not to pollute the environment, subcontract to foreign companies, discriminate in any way in hiring, etc,etc, etc. I would guess that things have only gotten more complicated.
A bond might work in some cases, but overall, I'm skeptical. In my experience, government Requests For Proposal (RFPs) for complex items are far from perfect and by the time all the discrepancies and major flaws are ironed out, it's pretty hazy to what degree apparent non-performance is due to contractor ineptitude/malfeasance and what is due to the government asking for the wrong thing.