Tell that to the families of people killed when a large airplane crashes because some idiot flew his drone in the flight path. It's only a matter of time. I'm sure it will comfort them when the idiot is arrested, if they can find out who was piloting it. While there are plenty of responsible people flying drones, there are also plenty of idiots who ignore the existing laws.
I ran into a similar issue. I work on bootloaders for my company's 64-bit MIPS processors and due to size constraints disabled the normally enabled exception code (my bootloader has an exception handler). Anyway, it is usually easy to find the fault since the result is -1. It took me a while to figure that one out. If it were zero I probably never would have found the problem.
My lawn is turning brown. A lot of grass is grown for the beef industry which is one of the biggest wastes of water in the state. It takes something like 6,000 gallons of water for each pound of beef. Almonds don't really grow anywhere else in the country and California produces a majority of the world's supply and 99% of the almonds grown in the US. Almonds are native to the Mediterranean climate of the Middle East. The funny thing is that wild almonds are highly toxic and contain an enzyme which creates cyanide. Each wild almond can contain 4-9mg of cyanide. Sweet almonds contain a small fraction of that since they lack the enzyme. Almonds are considered a cash crop due to the high prices they demand. With the drought, though, a lot of farmers are cutting back on their water usage, though last weekend when I drove along highway 120 I saw at least one orchard running their sprinklers in the middle of the day with pools of water around the trees.
99% of the walnuts grown in the US are grown in California. The Persian and English walnuts are the most common for eating and like almonds like a Mediterranean climate. The black walnut is much less popular and there are varieties native to both the eastern North America and California and some other places.
Before the major drought, growing these was not a major issue in California. Unlike other crops, though, it takes years until a tree can produce and they don't do well in other areas of the country.
Hops, barley, wheat, etc. needed for beer can be grown just about anywhere and don't necessarily have to be grown in the state for the brewers.
Except that Apple tends to do even that in a non-standard way. In Apple's design, for example, they swap ground and the mic hookup compared to everyone else. Also, at least one set of Apple headphones would refuse to work unless they were given a 30v pulse to enable them according to someone I know who designed some non-Apple hardware and had to reverse engineer why the Apple headphones wouldn't work with it.
More and more of the treated wastewater is being reused now though only a few places recycle it back into the main drinking water supply. Most ends up for agricultural use and for things like golf courses, parks, etc.
Actually, residential usage has remained flat even though the population has doubled. Residential usage per-person has dropped significantly, otherwise the percentage used by the cities would have gone up and agriculture would have gone down. 80% of the water is used by agriculture and the most profitable crops tend to be water intensive, i.e. almonds. California grows most of the almonds in the world and 99% of the almonds in the US due to the climate. They don't grow well elsewhere. Most of the fresh fruit in the country is grown in California. We should just stop exporting to the rest of the country. Agriculture is only a small fraction of the state's GDP and are overly represented in the state government and tend to be very conservative (i.e. republican).
There's very little fracking occurring in California. From what I understand, the geology doesn't work well for it since much of the geology is already rather fractured unlike the geology of where fracking is common.
Agriculture, despite being so big in California is only around 6% of the domestic product since the state's economy is so diversified.
California uses very little coal. Most power is generated by natural gas, renewable sources (hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal, biomass) with very little coal power generation in the state. Electricity in California is also about the most expensive electricity in the country, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me other than the fact that the California Public Utilities Commission is corrupt and gives utilities cart blanche to raise rates whenever they want.
The problem is that 3 tons of water per minute is only a drop in the bucket compared to what's needed. People don't realize just how much agriculture there is in California, no other state comes anywhere close.
Hey, I hang out with a lot of creative people. Not Elon Musk, but Steve Jobs for more than a decade, and lots of people at least as smart that you don't know. They can be really brilliant, and successful, and they can still make really stupid mistakes and sell them to the rest of us pretty well because they believe in themselves completely and they have a track record. I've done that too.
That's the hyperloop. Something Elon never meant to stand behind (and still really isn't), just put out there to torpedo a worthy project that he didn't believe in.
Anyone who looks at the hyperloop design can see it's not a no-brainer. It has safety issues up the wazoo
Meanwhile, little Switzerland can have incredible trains everywhere and the United States can't get it together, and unlike with rockets and cars Elon's not helping this time. And I am not sure that the "lease" part of his solar business is a great thing for the world either.
Although the hyperloop is possible and might even be practical someday, let's please be honest about the reason it was created. Elon Musk just wanted to kill the California high-speed rail.
That might have been OK if there was a hope that we could actually replace it practically with a hyperloop. But given the history of bleeding-edge rail - ride any maglevs lately? We haven't even had much success with monorails outside of theme parks and Las Vegas - we don't really have any working system to replace high-speed rail. Hyperloop should really be called "Pipes that carry People" and we need decades of work on it before considering intercity lines.
My only PC that always boots Windows 7 is my home theater PC since I use the Windows Media Center to record broadcasts and use it as a DVR. As far as I know, Linux is not a solution because some of the channels I record are set not to copy and MythTV will not support that. I also have a Ceton Echo which lets me view the content in my bedroom. This also only works with Windows 7. None of the other packages I see out there can handle the protected content.
Actually that's false. Most compressors are AC motors though some applications are moving towards DC. Brushless AC motors are fairly easy to make and don't require any electronics to control them, though high power ones will use a capacitor since 3-phase power is not generally available for residential use in the US. Most fans, blowers and compressors are AC motors. Some higher-end blowers use DC when full variable speed motors are needed.
DC actually works quite well over long hauls. One nice thing about using HVDC instead of AC is that you can carry more current over the same wire since you no longer have to deal with the skin effect. It also makes it easier when it comes to synchronization. With HVDC they still have to periodically switch the direction of the DC current throught he lines.
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
