LIGO is enormously more sensitive (~12 orders of magnitude), than this seismic measurement but in a different frequency band (~100Hz), so both are valuable measurements sensitive to different types of GW sources .

LIGO itself is a phenomenally difficult project, but with big payoffs. There is the basic physics of understanding how gravity works, but there are also technology spinoffs. The extremely low loss mirror technology developed for LIGO is not being used for other applications, including telecom. The high Q optical cavities are used in commercial measurement devices for measuring tiny concentrations of materials in gasses . There are likely many other spin-offs from the project.

This is an issue of allowing car companies to sell their own cars, I don't see how it matters whether or not those cars are gas, electric or nuclear powered.

There is an established (quite possibly corrupt) system, and Tesla is trying (possibly reasonably) to break it. I'm sure the dealers are happy to sell whatever makes them a profit, and of course resist any rules changes that will reduce that profit.

Anyone know the motivation behind the original law? Presumably GM would also like to be allowed to sell its own cars.

It isn't clear (at least to me) how many false alarms they got before they got the real one. The key to a good security monitoring system is not just to catch all the real threats, but to not flag imaginary or minor ones.

It took 4 days to notice this? The bizarre delay, reversals and inconsistency are what is so strange. This isn't unusual in the hours after an incident, but its REALLY unusual days later where there is time for people to have their morning coffee, and prepare careful reports. It often takes a long time to interpret the data, but such confusion on such basic information seems really strange.

That would be nice, but more likely we will just import coal from china.

The whole idea completely fails economics 101. You don't reduce demand for something by buying it.

Lets see, the government promises to buy my coal facilities. I wonder what my price will be? Then when I have my money, it seems that building new coal facilities (which have to be bought) is a pretty good investment.

So the richest 1% receive approximately 0.4% of the money. Not really surprising or interesting.

Here I have to disagree that AGW is anywhere near "settled" at the level that say Newton's laws of motion are settled. Newton's "laws" within their range of applicability (no quantum, no relativity) have been tested a huge number of times, and are indirectly being tested continuously. Same for special relativity.

AGW is very likely true, but not at the same level. It is not nearly as well defined: "warming" - is that water temperature, air temperature, total heat content, sea level etc. There is no question that human activity has *some* impact on climate, but that impact is not completely understood and predictable.

We all bet our lives on Newton's "laws" daily. Would you really bet your life that the net effect of human activity is to cause global warming?

I'm not saying that AGW is wrong, I think it is very likely correct (by most definitions of "warming"). What I am saying is that most people don't understand just how incredibly well tested things like Newtonian physics and special relativity and quantum mechanics are WITHIN THEIR RANGE OF APPLICABILITY.

That's like complaining that the Michelson-Morley failed to measure the presence of the lumineferes ether, something scientists thought was very likely to exist. Science advances when you get a surprising result, not when you see what you expected. If the statistics support this, it is a MUCH more interesting result than finding the Higgs which was pretty much were people expected it.

It should be possible in theory to create a quantum communication system that can't be tapped in any way. For it to be useful though, there is the issue of cost, reliability, error rate, bandwidth etc.

Even then if I had an absolutely perfect system - two boxes that magically communicate with each other, I still haven't solved the great majority of data loss issues. Most data loss is not from people breaking strong encryption, it is from weakness in the entire system - from data left for memory scrapers, to people with inappropriate system access, to people who write their passwords on yellow-stickeys.

Think about it - even the NSA wasn't able to protect their sensitive data.

There might be cases where this technology would help, but I suspect they are pretty rare .

Agreed. Also its not just the time spent recording the use, its the DISTRACTION - its interrupting someone doing intellectual work to make them think about something else. It also has a negative morale effect - people really hate bean-counters.

I've seen it done (since this is a public forum I won't say where), and it has resulted in a dramatic reduction in morale and productivity.

Much better to just provide an overhead rate to cover the equipment costs. If your managers think "overhead' is bad, then they don't really understand what it is and you should hire better managers.

It would seem that ideal economics would do away with discrimination, but it doesn't seem to do so. I think the problem is that the assumption of perfect decision making on the part of management is false. Especially in high tech fields, it can be very difficult to judge the real productivity of workers. With a lack of clear quantifiable metrics, managers need to fall back on their intuition. Intuition is easily skewed by bias.

If the business situation were static, over a very long time the companies that did a better job of accurately evaluating workers would succeed, but the high tech business environment is constantly changing and I think this "noise" swamps the inefficiencies from biased hiring.

There is also a "nonlinear" problem. (to make up a case for example) Lets say that women are as productive as men, but the productivity of men decreases when they work with women. In that case if you start with an all male team, adding a woman would reduce its productivity even though she was as or more productive than the men. (AGAIN THIS IS JUST FOR EXAMPLE, I'M NOT CLAIMING THIS IS THE CASE).

I didn't know that air amplifiers didn't scale, but also didn't know how efficient they were. Turbulent systems can be very non-intuitive - some airplanes have small vortex generators (tabs on the to of the wing that stick into the air flow) because they decrease drag. (they prevent boundary layer separation, but it still feels like exactly the wrong thing to do.....

At high speeds in aircraft drag FORCE scales as V^2, so drag power goes as V^3 - so its even worse.

The whole discussion is a bit incorrect though since it depends on altitude. Designing for high speed at high altitude is quite different from low altitude high speed capability). In a non-turbocharged plane, you are generally fastest at low altitude because the engine produces more power there. With a turbocharged plane the engine output is usually constant up to some max altitude (which can be quite high - 25,000'), so to go fast you climb high were the air is thin (less drag), but the engine is still able to produce max power .

We don't see jetpacks or flying cars for the very same physics reason. In order to hover against gravity you need to produce thrust > weight. Since thrust is proportional to (mass/second) X velocity, and power is proportional to (mass/second) X velocity^2, an efficient source of thrust you want to move a lot of material slowly (assuming you have unlimited reaction mass -> the atmosphere).

So, things that hover need to move lots of air, and have great big propellers. That is why helicopters work, and jet-reaction cars are too inefficient to be practical. It is why airplanes have big wings, not stubby lifting bodies. There may be a few spacial cases where you are willing to tolerate inefficiency, but they are rare.

Planes look like planes for a reason. Helicopters look like helicopters for a reason.

Been using it so long that its hardwired into my brain. Productivity drops at least 2X with any other tool (even after months of using Python).