Do you not mean re-education centre?

If it takes your HR 15 minutes to get back to normal you really MUST start doing a lot more exercise...

My sums : Assuming you're doing "moderate" exercise at 150 bpm and your resting HR is not brilliant at 80bpm, thats a recovery rate of about 5bpm per minute. If it doesn't drop more than 12bpm per minute after ceasing exercise that puts you at an increased risk of death :
      http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199910283411804

Intervals are an excellent way to improve this...

Your insurance that you have by law though only needs to cover third parties, and hence has no reliance on the area you live in at all

Ok, so what's your relative risk of damaging a third party (person, vehicle or property) if you live in central london vs the highlands of scotland? You think the two are equivalent?!

I can poke a few holes in your argument there... :

Those models would most likely become obsolete without ever being used.

1) The nuclear power plants designs don't change significantly over their decades long lifespans. The robot is a tool. If it's designed to do the job in the first place, it's ability to do so does not become obsolete any more than the power plant itself does (or other proper tech such as the space shuttle or 747's over their lifespans). Newer tech may become available that improves on the old but if it can do the job, it can do the job. Don't think with a (modern) consumer electronics mindset!.

With nuclear accidents being extremely rare there is no point in designing robots specifically for them

2) Just because a situation is extremely rare doesn't mean you shouldn't plan to handle it. Consider : Flight control systems, vaccines, stock market crashes. You need to plan because the consequences of not planning are severe. Risk Assessment Fundamentals : Risk = Severity x Exposure x Probability.

3) Do you really want to be at the wrong end of the "exceedingly rare" incidence of these failing? If you were there you'd damn well want a robot. Read any first person accounts from people involved in the Chernobyl cleanup and then state in honesty that there's "no point".

In some countries (including the USA) it's an offence to mail a counterfeit item back to the seller. See :
        http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/04/paypal_destroys_violin/

~Pev

Nice idea, but seriously, don't take any tech of value to a festival it'll only get nicked... On the other hand build yourself a proper van [travelvans.co.uk] with solar charging facilities and go to festies in it instead!

Well, not sure from TFA :

Wallace said he sold close to 24,000 bottles in his last few months of business at $6.50 a pop.

At its height, Polar Pure was bringing in about $100,000 a year,

So...? With my basic maths that makes a turnover of $156,000 in a "few months". If we take that to be four months - that's $468,000. I tried to work out what materials costs would be - iodine crystal is $8 per ounce (http://www.justice.gov/ndic/pubs1/1467/index.htm) but couldnt find out how much is in the bottle... making max 20% turnover as profit seems a bit tight (we're assuming this is less than 100K this year). Most people operate on significantly higher margins.

On another note, 100K US = around 65K UK - I don't think that many people I know would bitch about this as a yearly income and don't earn close to that! Certainly wouldn't class it as "hard up" or struggling as in TFA. Of course they said it's less now though...

In the UK, if you're a driver, you're compelled to have third party insurance in case you cause damage. If you're a professional you generally want to have professional indemnity for similar reasons. Shouldn't companies engaging in risky practices such as these be forced to have appropriate cover in case they cause a massive earthquake as a pre-requisite for doing so?

The main reason OSX 'just works' as they like to say is that the hardware spec is tightly controlled and the OS drivers are written and tested specifically for that hardware. Unless there's a linux vendor who's maintaining a distribution tailored for the hardware, Linux won't give you that level of smoothness. Sadly I don't think that will ever happen as the idea of tightly-coupling a distribution to particular hardware is naturally contrary to the nature of most Linux users so we have a deadlock.

Personally I love the integration of Mac hardware OSX and it's a premium I am happy to pay for myself. I write code personally and professionally much of my waking life. I love figuring out and optimising systems but when I get home and want to chill I appreciate not having to do maintenance on my own machine! I run Linux (and that other OS) in VMWare Fusion and it works perfectly plus lets me hotswitch and easily archive virtual machines and I find the performance hit isn't a big deal for my needs. It might not be for everyone but for me it lets me spend time focussing on what I want to achieve and not waste my valuable spare time ****ing about in stuff I already know about and don't need to deal with over and over again like a high-tech factory worker...

Data isn't protected unless it has some merit of it's own

Erm, doesn't all stored data inherently have merit? If it didn't, no-one would store it?!