Comment Re:Uh, sure.. (Score 1) 359
Yup. A giant PITA. Why don't they fix this?
Yup. A giant PITA. Why don't they fix this?
... Anyone who needs software can stand up a software team just about anywhere anytime.
Sure, but is the business able to utilize that team "anywhere" with the same degree of success?
Many, many businesses have learned the hard way that core software development needs to be in close (as in immediate, face-to-face) contact with the business side to translate requirements (often inchoate in the minds of the execs and product managers) into concrete requirements and actual software quickly in a very competitive market place.
It varies greatly by industry, company size, and business objective of course - but often the financial and opportunity cost of trying to get the work done with remote teams, even in the U.S., much less overseas - can be unsustainable.
I have seen many businesses/business units waste months or years trying to compete using remote teams of various compositions, before finally pulling some or all of the development back to a central location, even at higher nominal cost. Witness what Marissa Mayer (not a person I would usually use as a model) did with Yahoo. What she did, she did with some very good reasons.
Arguing that all businesses should be able to use remote teams with equal success is a silly game. Woulda, shoulda, coulda - the fact is many businesses try and fail at this, and cannot afford to keep trying to make reality match theory.
There is a lot of bickering on the this page about what Libertarianism does or does not believe, or the sins of government and/or corporations, but let's cut to the chase: Is there anybody here who thinks this scheme is a good idea?. As far as I can tell in the few hundred comments posted thus far, the answer is a resounding "No!"
looks foolish. News at 11.
Bingo!
Among the many problems with this proposal -h is notion of the wall's construction is preposterous. This is very similar to the world's highest concrete arch dams - which require solid rock foundations. A 2000 km structure 300 meters high would have to be built as an earth dam. One plus of this is that don't need billions of tons of concrete, just lots and lots of dirt and rocks, a minus is that the base is ~4 times the width of height so this structure is a kilometer plus thick. The proposal then is essentially to build a continent spanning mountain range.
Using the Tehri Dam in India as a model (260 m tall, 575 m long, cost $1 billion) the cost per kilometer would be on the order of $3 billion per kilometer, or $6 trillion dollars total. The total number of people in the tornado belt is about 70 million, so the cost is roughly $100,000 per person in round numbers. Meanwhile an F5 tornado shelter can be bought for $3000. So at a small fraction of this cost (and environmental impact) every building in the tornado belt could have a shelter able to withstand even the most intense tornados.
The original paper also asserts that this would save money over time by reducing property damage. Annual tornado damage runs $400 million, so it would take 15,000 years for this "savings" to occur, assuming the interest on the investment is zero.
Calavar crushed your case like a bug. Nice to see you are as graceless a loser as your close-minded, and logic-challenged.
Hmmm. The Director of the NSA might encounter all sorts of information about the Big Money Boys that they would rather not be known generally. Would that information necessarily be classified? But whether or not it is, being paid NOT to disclose it would surely not be a violation of security. Wall Streeters might regard a million a month mighty cheap insurance...
...In the mid 70's? someone defected in Japan with a Mig-25, almost crashing into a commercial jet at the Tokyo airport.
Viktor Belenko and it was Hakodate Airport in northern Japan. He overshot the runway, damaging the landng gear, but he was almost out of fuerl and couldn't go around (plus, he didn't want to get shot at).
Well of course the USAF pretty much went over it with a fine tooth comb before returning it. They found out the environmental system sucked,
The pressurized flight suit worked fine, I've never read that it didn't (athough the current F-35 program seems to be having problems). Possibly you are referring to the sophisticated environmental system for electronics that the Mig-25 did not have because its vacuum tube electronics did not need them? The vacuum tube radar was far more powerful than any on any U.S. aircraft, 600 KW continuous, with tremendous ECM burn-through power (the F-4 had a 30 kw radar).
the build quality suffered greatly
Probably you are referring to the fact that the Soviets did not use blind rivets everywhere, as in a US aircraft, but only where they were needed? Or the fact that titanium was only used where its high temperature properties were needed?
and the engines were prone to needing replacement after a few missions.
Not when flown according to guidelines (they did have a shorter life than U.S. engines though, true).
In other words, other than speed, it kind of sucked.
How about extremely high operating altitude, out of the range of most other combat aircraft?
It has a very creditable (though limited) combat record. But 75% of all Mig-25s were recon versions, and there their performance and record is outstanding, remaining in service in India until recently. It remains one of the most successful combat reconnaissance planes of all time.
For reference, a standard round from an M4 rifle has about 1.5-1.65kW of kinetic energy upon leaving the barrel.
That is kJ, not kW.
Cosmic inflation has always puzzled me - so the distance between particles of matter is slowly widening, without the particles themselves actually moving, why can't we observe this at the molecular level? Or do we? Even if its only a miniscule expansion at the smallest scales it must surely show some sign, and wouldn't it have some effect on say chemical interactions?
There are three different expansive phenomenon in modern cosmology - the initial inflation of the original symmetry breaking event, the subsequent vastly longer and slower expansion (measured by the Hubble Constant) that followed where the Universe coasted under influence of gravity alone, and then the recently discovered (and cosmically more recent) cosmic acceleration.that is now offsetting gravity.
The first event lasting a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second did indeed push all the particles then existing apart very fast, while creating lots of new particles.
The second phase of coasting, and the modern phase when cosmic acceleration kicked in, is currently pushing things apart on a cosmic scale, but not gravitationally bound structures, much less the far more strongly bound electromagnetically bound ones (atoms and molecules, and molecular agglomerations) or nuclear force bound structures.
Eventually, under current models, cosmic acceleration will strengthen to the point where it will start ripping apart these galaxy clusters. then galaxies, then star systems, then stars and bulk matter, then molecules and atoms, then nuclei,and finally composite subatomic particles themselves.
There is tones of evidence against the Big Bang also.
It is one of MANY theories, they group it under the STANDARD THEORY, because that is politically they want to push as fact, when in fact, it is not fact, and they do not teach other theories that are equally as valid. THAT is the problem with academia.
The "tones" - frequencies and modulations in the cosmic medium - support the Big Bang model quite strongly.
The signal-to-noise ratio demonstrating the reality of the Big Bang in scientific data collected over decades is enormously higher than that of the posts appearing here today where numerous ACs spout contentless skepticism and derision, and to the extent they reference facts at all, they get them hilariously wrong.
Any AC who claims lots of evidence against a well-established scientific model, but it unable to cite a single scrap of same it simply polluting Slashdot and wasting everyone's time (including his/her own).
The coal plants can still be "plugged in" and operated during times of peak load (weekday summer afternoons and winter mornings); what they can't do is operate much the rest of the time.
The problem with this is that coal plants can't operate this way. A typical coal plant takes 4-8 hours to reach full power from a warm start and can take 24 hours to cold start. This is why we currently use them for baseload power and use other sources (mostly natural gas and hydro) for load following.
Stormv's argument was flawed, but it was unnecessary also. Coal has never been able to do load following, so other technologies were always required. Mothballed coal plants CAN be used as spare capacity when other generators are taken for maintenance or due to accident, with the same argument - they aren't operating all the time. This still reduces infrastructure, and thus overall, cost since otherwise spare (but unused) capacity must be built.
Where does this 'unsubsidized market' in PV and wind exist?
I mean, be real. Where??
If meant to be some sort of refutation, this is a non-sequitur. The unsubsized cost of renewables is easily calculated by simply removing the subsidy from the calculation, just as the cost for nuclear must be based on calculations of planned plant costs. When you do these calculations new nuclear is the most expensive form of energy due to its inherent high capital cost.
The facts that dywolf linked to showing that the overall program made money, not even counting the revenue the government will continue to collect in taxes from the economical activity generated.
You haven't shown that it lost any money.
Please provide concrete evidence, you know, actual facts with numbers, that are checkable (citations optional if Googling will bring them up) to support your arguments as others repeatedly requested instead of continually "arguing from your personal hatred of government" which, in your mind, excuses you from having to support your case.
Remarks to which "khallow" was responding:
The program that the Solyndra loan was a part of was budgeted for a 10 or 11% loss rate and even with Solyndra it still had less than 5% losses..
The government has been running different programs like that for a long time (more than 50 years) to help encourage new technologies to get off the ground. They always write in a 10 or 15% loss rate into them and the programs seldom reach that rate
So the US has been using similar failed approaches for half a century? I'm supposed to be impressed by this why?
In fact the boost to the economy for the ones that do succeed probably far outweigh any losses in the programs.
What boost? Perhaps we could discuss some of these examples and see if they really live up to your claims.
The loss rate for venture capital is 33-50%. Typical loss rate for "safe" conventional commercial investment strategies are 15% for leveraged buy-outs, and 13% for growth equity. A 10-15% loss rate for government is similar, or better than, commercial investment strategies. The stated 10-11% target indicates a very conservative approach, and an actual 5% loss rate is exceptionally conservative.
But is, as it seems, your operating principle is "what ever the government does is bad (perhaps outright evil)" then none of this will matter to you.
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
