The brain gets lots of sensory input. It has evolved some kind of input validation procedure. The inner ears are sending information about which direction is up and which is down. We are also getting visual input, from which you can deduce the "up" direction. The trees and shrubs in the jungle, pillars, walls of the building etc tell the "up" direction. The brain expects them to be in synch. When they contradict one another, it could be due to some poisonous thing one has eaten. So throwing up is a reasonable reaction.

Of course as with any evolutionary biology explanation, the brain did not reason it out. It the past the bodies that had a nausea response to contradiction between visual and inner-ear cues of direction of gravity survived better and passed on their genes to us.

All those people who can make a difference have are all gone, pushed out, cashed out or burnt out. It is PHBs all the way up and all the way down. What salary they save will be paid out as bonuses to the executives. It was going nowhere with N people, now it will get there faster with (N - 18000) people.

I apply ROT-13 encryption on my passwords TWICE, and write down the resulting string in a post it note and paste it to the *underside* of the key board. Ha, ha, I am really safe. I can use this technique on all the sites, high value... low value... no value... INBD.

oops hit submit too soon.

The flare pot looks nice and it might improve heat transfer. If the interior is also fluted, it would be very difficult to keep clean. The exterior flukes have nice large radius of curvature so should be easy to clean, but still not as easy to clean as the regular smooth pans. Food in contact with the wall might heat up too quickly and not transfer the heat to rest of the food. Food away from the wall might be undercooked and the food in contact with the wall might char. It is probably suitable for soups and broths. But for cooking rice and such not very liquidy food, heating the wall too rapidly would be a problem.

Back in my undergrad days I worked on a ducted windmill and my friend worked on improving the firewood stoves used by typical rural south Indian womenfolk. A circle of stones with an aluminium pot on top was what he was trying to "improve". Did some clay based sealing of gaps and nice clay ring to set the pot on top with carefully created vents. All using plain stones and clay. Was able to raise the efficiency of heat transfer to the pot. No material to buy at all, just stones and clay.

Well, field trials revealed that he was too good and raised the temperature to nearly the melting point of aluminium! The flue gases and soot abraded the bottom of the pots and they started leaking in just a few sessions. The older inefficient method wasted firewood, but the pots lasted longer.

Then the right thing to do is to realize that the company is too big to manage and split it into smaller pieces. That is the job of the board of directors. But the board and the CEO form a conspiracy to milk the corporation instead of providing true value to their customers. They give huge pay to CEOs, who in turn spend lavishly on the board. They nominate each other for directorships. This is corruption at the highest levels, and it is all legal because they are all private entities. Till the board is sued by the share holders for malpractice and held accountable they will not change.

Small investors like you and I may not have the resources to sue. But these giant mutual funds that own significant parts of these companies too give them too much of a latitude. If the giant mutual funds, Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab and a few more join together to form a Corporate Governance Auditing Board or something and hold the directors' feet to the fire, and fire them for incompetence and sue them for malpractice, then things might change.

Pointy Haired Bosses. Dilbert reference.

This is precisely why higher the CEO pay results in poorer performance by the company. All that pay, blinds the CEO, makes them think they are invincible, if the market is shoving that many billion dollars their way, they must be doing everything right. It sets up the eco system where flatterers, sycophants and yes men thrive insulating the CEO from real news and real feedback.

To think one man, with some initiative can change the culture of a company the size of Microsoft, with entrenched interests, history of turf warfare and empire building is blowing smoke. That company went through spectacular expansion and growth in the 1990s. All those very capable people, the ones who have the vision and ability and the guts to skate too close to or even past the edges of legal behavior have all cashed out, burnt out or pushed out. As the able ones leave, the fraction of PHBs who are clueless when there is not a de-facto monopoly increases. They are playing the same game that used to be effective when there was a WinTel monopoly on desktops, and desktops had the monopoly on computing.

A truly visionary CEO will realize this, break the company into pieces that will once again compete or perish and resign. But Satya Nadella is no Michail Gorbachev.

There is no question it is an amazing technology. As an engineer I can only say, wow!.

But as a taxpayer ...

And each bullet costs just two times the GDP of the entire village the terrorist is hailing from! And we will make up for it in volume too!

Some times I wonder if it would be cheaper to feed, cloth, provide healthcare and house all the Afghans than what we spent on military over there. Afghanistan hardly has 30 million people. Per capita income is 500$ a year. Just 15 billion dollars total. We spent 1 trillion dollars in the war over there. Our government is borrowing at historically low rate, 10 year t-bills go at 2.5%, the interest charges on that debt alone is 25 billion dollars a year!

I don't know if it would have worked. But the idea goes like, take a large well defended perimeter. Free food, clothing, hospitals and homes inside. Let people in after disarming them. Expand the area as more and more people move in. We might be able to take in 90% of the population inside, standing obediently at the breadline and the hospital waiting rooms. I don't know. May be an idiot slashdot keyboard warrior.

No need to wait for Fourth of July any more. Once this technology is fully deployed in all airports by TSA you would be seeing this. . The large donut and the thick pillar are parts of the Van de Graff generator.

Even dogs don't have hearing acute enough to tell the difference. It is as idiotic as asking for certificate of authenticity for the weasel-poop coffee. If you can't tell the difference in taste, why bother drinking poop coffee? If you need an oscilloscope to tell the difference what is big point in buying this sound card?

That bug is so stupid it shows up 14 years late to the party. Geez.

When these politicians give tax payer money to private companies to create "jobs" the tax payers get such a raw deal.

If we just put the trillion in the bank at 4% interest rate, you would get 40 billion dollars a year, It could pay 1 million people 40K a year. None of these projects ever create even a large fraction of a million jobs. Even if it uses the money to hire half million people to dig a trench and the other half to close it up it would provide greater economic impact to the economy than such boondongles.

Most delivery fleets can go electric, they have predictable routes, a home base, time to charge and the range is not very critical to them.

Solar panel prices are falling through the roof, scratch that, there is no damage to the roof. Some studies show that SolarPV might deliver electricity cheaper than grid in 25 states in just two years. Energy storage price break through is likely to happen first to homes than cars because storage for home does not have weight, volume and crashworthiness constraints. Already utility companies are worried and doing what they do best. Lobby the local government and utility commissions.

But one sure fire way to keep their customers tied to the grid is to encourage electric cars. If every home is charging two or three cars overnight they might not be able to ditch the grid. Since night load for the utilities is just 66% to 70% of peak day time load they can serve this market without additional investment in power plants.

Peeling off a large customer base from gasoline companies to the grid would be in the long term interests of the electric utilities. Why aren't they doing it?