"The only thing they seem to actually care about is how much money they can make,"
Not so. They seem to be obsessed with the possibility that one or more passengers might eat or drink something. They CARE about preventing that.
That said, I live out in the boonies nowadays and haven't experienced the DC metro for 8 or 10 years. But I recall it as being no worse than, and possibly a bit better than the Boston MTA, NYC subways, PATH, the Japanese subway and train systems, or the London underground. Has it changed?
"If we all had flying cars this would not be a problem"
My guess is that if we all had flying cars, they would be items one, four, and seven on our personal list of problems. Among the issues:
1. Broken cars STOP. Broken aircraft DROP 2. Ignoring the Check Engine light in a flying car until you have time/money to deal with it is likely to be a fatal strategy. 3. Many drivers have substantial difficulty navigating safely in two dimensions. Another dimension is unlikely to make things any easier. 4. Insurance on those beauties is likely to be an eye opener. 5. If we ALL have them, where do you expect to park them in our rather densely packed cities? 6. Given the poor energy density of batteries, won't flying cars perpetuate the roll of hydrocarbon fuels? Not green. Not remotely green. 7. If you think car bombs are a problem now...
I should think that the easiest time to attack a jet aircraft is while it is sitting on the taxiway awaiting clearance to position itself and take off. As all airline passengers know all too well, that aircraft likely isn't going anywhere for a while. At least not very far or fast.
Been reading The Guardian again, have we? By all means read it. They do some excellent reporting on a lot of things. But their reporting on climate issues is truly atrocious.
Increase in hurricanes? Not happening. Really. Here's a chart http://policlimate.com/tropica... The vertical axis is ACE -- Accumulated Cyclone Energy which is what the cool kids use nowadays. It gives greater weight to stronger/longer lasting storms. But the number of storms isn't increasing either. Why isn't the number increasing? No one knows. Maybe more wind shear offsets more warm water.
Severe drought? No real increase. BTW, the worst drought condition is probably the Sahara. It didn't rain a lot there before, but it quit raining there almost completely about 4000 years ago. No one knows why.
Extreme snowfall? Probably not, but the older records are not very good. Possibly the worst snowfall event on the US East Coast was the blizzard of 1888 but it's hard to compare it with modern events because reporting is different now.
BTW, there isn't any recent event that compares to things like the Summer of 1814 (The "year without a Summer"), the dustbowl drought. The severe droughts in the American West in the 1300s, the 1938 New England Hurricane, etc, etc, etc.
I don't think a drone could fly into the rear of a jet engine. Lots of air moving real fast coming out of there. The front of the engine, however...
I would expect that there are a number of folks in the Middle East devoting some of their spare time to working out how to do that. My guess is that in a contest between a $1000 drone and a $60,000,000 jet aircraft, both lose.
Then there's the broader problem of remotely controlled Molotov cocktails.
And what happens if your face in damaged in accident, or you have a stroke, or you die? How do you/your caregivers/the executor of your will, etc get access to information on your phone/computer if it is well protected? Heck, how do you call 911 in an emergency, if your phone decides that you aren't an authorized user? I suspect that digital secrecy and easily accessible encryption may introduce a plethora of problems that no one is paying much attention to.
"Siri. There's a manic with an axe breaking down my door. Call the police."
"I'm sorry 'Dave' or whoever you think you are. I don't think I can do that without your passphrase and an image. Turn up the lights and try again."
BTW, if I understand the situation correctly, the reason that we need IPv6 is so that we can all enjoy this and similar advanced technologies and can control our household lighting and curtains from anywhere on the planet.
The 1960s are looking better and better.(excepting that Vietnam thing of course).
Apparently back in the day, core memory actually was a bit difficult to manufacture. Back in the 1960s, they wired the cores by hand and that apparently required quite a bit of manual dexterity. The first digital computer I ever saw was SWAC at UCLA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAC_(computer)). 256 37 bit words of Cathode Ray Tube memory. I have no real idea how it worked, but I recall that on days when it chose to work, there were a bunch of CRTs displaying an 8x8 matrix of zeros and ones. The professor in charge of the thing told us in his rather thick European accent that they were trying to augment the CRT memory with core, but that so far his graduate student(s) hadn't been able to thread the core wires well enough.
"And while the company was not required to admit wrongdoing, it has agreed to hire a chief information security officer."
Wow, Golly Gee. A Chief Information Security Officer!!! That should do the trick right there.
Am I the only person on this planet that thinks that our current public communications and computing technology is completely incapable of securing anything?
I further think that the proposed solutions -- complex unique passwords, multi-factor authentication, BioID, ( http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh... ) etc aren't going to work. Anybody with me on that?
And I think that, yes, all that is likely to be a bit of a societal problem. Anybody else?
"Nice data you folks had there, If you want to see it again, you'll be making 7 cash transfers of $9998 each to the following account at the Bank of Kiev... and soon. If the transfers have not cleared by 1400 GMT tomorrow, we will be forced to delete your information and use the space freed up to record tomorrow's episode of Days of Our Lives. Have a nice day"
"At least when a real currency suffers a terminal crash, you can melt down the coins for scrap metal,"
And you can use it to pay taxes... at least you probably can as long as the government chooses to try to maintain the fiction that the currency is sound and is merely suffering a temporary setback caused by the actions of vile and disgusting currency speculators.
AFAICS, most people who think they understand statistics don't. What they understand is how to apply some rote rules to data that all too often shouldn't have those particular rules used on it. If we're going teach anything in that domain a survey of probability would likely be a lot more useful.
It's been half a century and perhaps I misremember, but I think a course built around Darrell Huff's "How To Lie With Statistics" might be a lot more useful to most High School Students than a standard mathematical treatment. And it'd certainly be a lot less mind-numbing.
"you must have a human being as the final unimpeachable failsafe system, and in an over-the-road vehicle, that means you must have a full set of manual controls"
Absolutely!!! At least for the next decade or two. Maybe eventually, car autonomy will reach the point where a crappy joystick or touchscreen or voice interface will be OK for the once in a decade situation where you need to navigate around a fallen tree and where vehicles without qualified operators simply pull over, stop safely and start screaming "Help,Help,Help..." when confronted with a bad situation.
But for now, steering wheels, brakes, and accelerators belong in all cars.
"Most probably she was just distracted and made up that story."
Perhaps.
But It's also entirely possible that her brake master cylinder failed. It happened to me once not all that many years ago. The brake finally worked about the third time I pumped the pedal.. Drive long enough and it may happen to you.
OTOH, she was probably following too closely and not paying a lot of attention and quite possibly driving too fast... because that's the way many (it seems like most) people drive.
Given luck, in the long run, you may end up with something a bit more flexible and perhaps more satisfactory for you. Something along the line of in rural areas, you can drive if you wish and optionally have the vehicle keep you informed about what's happening around the upcoming curves. In urban areas, automatic control is mandatory except in emergencies or when the vehicle pulls over and tells you "I give up. You handle this situation".
Why mandatory automatic control in cities? Because in principle, automatic cars operating cooperatively probably can move more cars through a city more safely and in less time than can tens of thousands of drunks, crazies, adolescents(of all ages), geezers, etc,etc,etc.
Of course it might not work like that at all. We could end up with something as fundamentally screwed up as today's personal computing domain.
"Fossils are mineral replacements of bones, either through mineralization or sediment filling in the void opened as the organic material decayed."
Sometimes. Sometimes not. Wood, leaves, enamel, bone, and especially Calcium Carbonate and Calcium Phosphate shell material can last an impressive amount of time unaltered. Proteins and DNA not so much. But even there the oldest known DNA used to be 15 million years or so from leaves preserved in clay in Idaho. I wouldn't be surprised that someone has found older material since.
I urge you to quickly patent your idea of covering a light source (not just a "bulb" -- keep it as broad as possible) with PV material. Remember, you can patent any notion that's not a perpetual motion machine -- stupid or not... and it's FIRST TO FILE BABY...
There are hundreds of miles of limestone caves in Kentucky. We can line the walls of those caverns with these cells and produce more power than Niagara Falls. Kentucky can be the Saudi Arabia of green electric power. Electricity too cheap to meter... Wazzat? They need SOME light?... DRAT.... Cancel the IPO.
There are plenty of measurements of sea level rise. Trouble is, they are all different. There are hundreds of tidal gauges, some of which have centuries of data (most of them more like 50-100 years). Trouble is that since they are located at/near seashores they not well distributed across the planet. And many are in places where various forces are lifting/depressing the ground at rates comparable to sea level rise. There are also satellite altimeters that measure sea level with radar. They have some problems as well (e.g. variable ionospheric delays, orbital uncertainties equal to several years worth of sea level change, etc.). The IPCC assessment reports address all that. I'd suggest tackling the actual chapters on sea level rise, not the sea level rise information in other chapters. AR5 Chapter 13 is the most recent, but I find it difficult to follow. I think AR4 Chapter 5 is easier going, but maybe that's just me.
Same thing as now. The Global warming alarmists will pick the largest number, claim it is "Science" and ignore all other estimates. BTW, the article has no numbers other than "thirtyfold" increase -- which I'm guessing means thirtyfold MORE data, not thirtyfold BETTER data. I looked around the internet a bit. The R in GNSS-R apparently stands for Reflectometry. Couldn't find a figure for accuracy, but my initial impression is that it will be limited by two sets of ionospheric delays. It's not clear that's all that much use for sea level rise which needs measurements to a fraction of a mm per year.
I gather GNSS-R is expected to be useful for sensing surface winds, wave heights and similar stuff worldwide from orbit. That sure sounds desirable. Not at all sure about its applicability to sea level rise
Why not? Winters can be a bit nippy up here in Vermont and the prospect of freezing my derierre off for hours while I nurse the battery (which produces no waste heat and doesn't work so well in really cold weather anyway) on my occasional visits to civilization doesn't appeal. Might consider a hybrid when and if my 17 year old Camry dies.
Slashdot Mirror
"The only thing they seem to actually care about is how much money they can make,"
Not so. They seem to be obsessed with the possibility that one or more passengers might eat or drink something. They CARE about preventing that.
That said, I live out in the boonies nowadays and haven't experienced the DC metro for 8 or 10 years. But I recall it as being no worse than, and possibly a bit better than the Boston MTA, NYC subways, PATH, the Japanese subway and train systems, or the London underground. Has it changed?
"If we all had flying cars this would not be a problem"
My guess is that if we all had flying cars, they would be items one, four, and seven on our personal list of problems. Among the issues:
1. Broken cars STOP. Broken aircraft DROP ...
2. Ignoring the Check Engine light in a flying car until you have time/money to deal with it is likely to be a fatal strategy.
3. Many drivers have substantial difficulty navigating safely in two dimensions. Another dimension is unlikely to make things any easier.
4. Insurance on those beauties is likely to be an eye opener.
5. If we ALL have them, where do you expect to park them in our rather densely packed cities?
6. Given the poor energy density of batteries, won't flying cars perpetuate the roll of hydrocarbon fuels? Not green. Not remotely green.
7. If you think car bombs are a problem now
I should think that the easiest time to attack a jet aircraft is while it is sitting on the taxiway awaiting clearance to position itself and take off. As all airline passengers know all too well, that aircraft likely isn't going anywhere for a while. At least not very far or fast.
Been reading The Guardian again, have we? By all means read it. They do some excellent reporting on a lot of things. But their reporting on climate issues is truly atrocious.
Increase in hurricanes? Not happening. Really. Here's a chart http://policlimate.com/tropica... The vertical axis is ACE -- Accumulated Cyclone Energy which is what the cool kids use nowadays. It gives greater weight to stronger/longer lasting storms. But the number of storms isn't increasing either. Why isn't the number increasing? No one knows. Maybe more wind shear offsets more warm water.
Severe drought? No real increase. BTW, the worst drought condition is probably the Sahara. It didn't rain a lot there before, but it quit raining there almost completely about 4000 years ago. No one knows why.
Extreme snowfall? Probably not, but the older records are not very good. Possibly the worst snowfall event on the US East Coast was the blizzard of 1888 but it's hard to compare it with modern events because reporting is different now.
BTW, there isn't any recent event that compares to things like the Summer of 1814 (The "year without a Summer"), the dustbowl drought. The severe droughts in the American West in the 1300s, the 1938 New England Hurricane, etc, etc, etc.
I don't think a drone could fly into the rear of a jet engine. Lots of air moving real fast coming out of there. The front of the engine, however ...
I would expect that there are a number of folks in the Middle East devoting some of their spare time to working out how to do that. My guess is that in a contest between a $1000 drone and a $60,000,000 jet aircraft, both lose.
Then there's the broader problem of remotely controlled Molotov cocktails.
And what happens if your face in damaged in accident, or you have a stroke, or you die? How do you/your caregivers/the executor of your will, etc get access to information on your phone/computer if it is well protected? Heck, how do you call 911 in an emergency, if your phone decides that you aren't an authorized user? I suspect that digital secrecy and easily accessible encryption may introduce a plethora of problems that no one is paying much attention to.
"Siri. There's a manic with an axe breaking down my door. Call the police."
"I'm sorry 'Dave' or whoever you think you are. I don't think I can do that without your passphrase and an image. Turn up the lights and try again."
Luddite!
BTW, if I understand the situation correctly, the reason that we need IPv6 is so that we can all enjoy this and similar advanced technologies and can control our household lighting and curtains from anywhere on the planet.
The 1960s are looking better and better.(excepting that Vietnam thing of course).
"Neither cable insulation nor CC's are made of PET"
"Life, uh ... finds a way" The imaginary Dr Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park.
Apparently back in the day, core memory actually was a bit difficult to manufacture. Back in the 1960s, they wired the cores by hand and that apparently required quite a bit of manual dexterity. The first digital computer I ever saw was SWAC at UCLA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAC_(computer)). 256 37 bit words of Cathode Ray Tube memory. I have no real idea how it worked, but I recall that on days when it chose to work, there were a bunch of CRTs displaying an 8x8 matrix of zeros and ones. The professor in charge of the thing told us in his rather thick European accent that they were trying to augment the CRT memory with core, but that so far his graduate student(s) hadn't been able to thread the core wires well enough.
"And while the company was not required to admit wrongdoing, it has agreed to hire a chief information security officer."
Wow, Golly Gee. A Chief Information Security Officer!!! That should do the trick right there.
Am I the only person on this planet that thinks that our current public communications and computing technology is completely incapable of securing anything?
I further think that the proposed solutions -- complex unique passwords, multi-factor authentication, BioID, ( http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh... ) etc aren't going to work. Anybody with me on that?
And I think that, yes, all that is likely to be a bit of a societal problem. Anybody else?
"Nice data you folks had there, If you want to see it again, you'll be making 7 cash transfers of $9998 each to the following account at the Bank of Kiev ... and soon. If the transfers have not cleared by 1400 GMT tomorrow, we will be forced to delete your information and use the space freed up to record tomorrow's episode of Days of Our Lives. Have a nice day"
Answer your question.?
"At least when a real currency suffers a terminal crash, you can melt down the coins for scrap metal,"
And you can use it to pay taxes ... at least you probably can as long as the government chooses to try to maintain the fiction that the currency is sound and is merely suffering a temporary setback caused by the actions of vile and disgusting currency speculators.
But how do you use bitcoin to blow cocaine?
AFAICS, most people who think they understand statistics don't. What they understand is how to apply some rote rules to data that all too often shouldn't have those particular rules used on it. If we're going teach anything in that domain a survey of probability would likely be a lot more useful.
It's been half a century and perhaps I misremember, but I think a course built around Darrell Huff's "How To Lie With Statistics" might be a lot more useful to most High School Students than a standard mathematical treatment. And it'd certainly be a lot less mind-numbing.
"you must have a human being as the final unimpeachable failsafe system, and in an over-the-road vehicle, that means you must have a full set of manual controls"
Absolutely!!! At least for the next decade or two. Maybe eventually, car autonomy will reach the point where a crappy joystick or touchscreen or voice interface will be OK for the once in a decade situation where you need to navigate around a fallen tree and where vehicles without qualified operators simply pull over, stop safely and start screaming "Help,Help,Help..." when confronted with a bad situation.
But for now, steering wheels, brakes, and accelerators belong in all cars.
"Most probably she was just distracted and made up that story."
Perhaps.
But It's also entirely possible that her brake master cylinder failed. It happened to me once not all that many years ago. The brake finally worked about the third time I pumped the pedal.. Drive long enough and it may happen to you.
OTOH, she was probably following too closely and not paying a lot of attention and quite possibly driving too fast ... because that's the way many (it seems like most) people drive.
Given luck, in the long run, you may end up with something a bit more flexible and perhaps more satisfactory for you. Something along the line of in rural areas, you can drive if you wish and optionally have the vehicle keep you informed about what's happening around the upcoming curves. In urban areas, automatic control is mandatory except in emergencies or when the vehicle pulls over and tells you "I give up. You handle this situation".
Why mandatory automatic control in cities? Because in principle, automatic cars operating cooperatively probably can move more cars through a city more safely and in less time than can tens of thousands of drunks, crazies, adolescents(of all ages), geezers, etc,etc,etc.
Of course it might not work like that at all. We could end up with something as fundamentally screwed up as today's personal computing domain.
Would you feel safe in a vehicle driven by Clippy?
(Once Clippy gets a few hundred million miles under his belt and get a few thousand bugs ironed out, he should be a very adequate chauffeur).
"Fossils are mineral replacements of bones, either through mineralization or sediment filling in the void opened as the organic material decayed."
Sometimes. Sometimes not. Wood, leaves, enamel, bone, and especially Calcium Carbonate and Calcium Phosphate shell material can last an impressive amount of time unaltered. Proteins and DNA not so much. But even there the oldest known DNA used to be 15 million years or so from leaves preserved in clay in Idaho. I wouldn't be surprised that someone has found older material since.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many VPNs.
I urge you to quickly patent your idea of covering a light source (not just a "bulb" -- keep it as broad as possible) with PV material. Remember, you can patent any notion that's not a perpetual motion machine -- stupid or not ... and it's FIRST TO FILE BABY ...
There are hundreds of miles of limestone caves in Kentucky. We can line the walls of those caverns with these cells and produce more power than Niagara Falls. Kentucky can be the Saudi Arabia of green electric power. Electricity too cheap to meter ... Wazzat? They need SOME light? ... DRAT. ... Cancel the IPO.
There are plenty of measurements of sea level rise. Trouble is, they are all different. There are hundreds of tidal gauges, some of which have centuries of data (most of them more like 50-100 years). Trouble is that since they are located at/near seashores they not well distributed across the planet. And many are in places where various forces are lifting/depressing the ground at rates comparable to sea level rise. There are also satellite altimeters that measure sea level with radar. They have some problems as well (e.g. variable ionospheric delays, orbital uncertainties equal to several years worth of sea level change, etc.). The IPCC assessment reports address all that. I'd suggest tackling the actual chapters on sea level rise, not the sea level rise information in other chapters. AR5 Chapter 13 is the most recent, but I find it difficult to follow. I think AR4 Chapter 5 is easier going, but maybe that's just me.
Same thing as now. The Global warming alarmists will pick the largest number, claim it is "Science" and ignore all other estimates. BTW, the article has no numbers other than "thirtyfold" increase -- which I'm guessing means thirtyfold MORE data, not thirtyfold BETTER data. I looked around the internet a bit. The R in GNSS-R apparently stands for Reflectometry. Couldn't find a figure for accuracy, but my initial impression is that it will be limited by two sets of ionospheric delays. It's not clear that's all that much use for sea level rise which needs measurements to a fraction of a mm per year.
I gather GNSS-R is expected to be useful for sensing surface winds, wave heights and similar stuff worldwide from orbit. That sure sounds desirable. Not at all sure about its applicability to sea level rise
Why not? Winters can be a bit nippy up here in Vermont and the prospect of freezing my derierre off for hours while I nurse the battery (which produces no waste heat and doesn't work so well in really cold weather anyway) on my occasional visits to civilization doesn't appeal. Might consider a hybrid when and if my 17 year old Camry dies.