Posts by Don Jefe 5059 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Nov 2011
I can see someone following a brand for coupons/freebies. I wouldn't do it, but I can understand why someone might.
The weirdest thing I've seen people follow though is their insurance company. Why in gods name would you want to follow them? There's nothing to be gained and, going solely by my experiences, insurance types tend to be insufferably boring and/or inane.
Your concerns about the battery location are not really very practical. Sure, you could hit an extraordinarily deep hole just right and damage something, but the actual ground clearance on the Tesla S is higher than many 'normal' rear wheel drive vehicles and is certainly greater than more traditional performance vehicles.
The exhaust system on my fun car is several inches lower than a Tesla S and is fine to drive everywhere it is designed to go: Improved roads. You have to be aware of your surroundings, but that's not exclusive to the Tesla cars. If you want something to take on unimproved roads or drive in the snow, a Tesla would be a pretty awful option, regardless of where they put the batteries.
The S kind of qualifies as an entry level performance car and any car of that type requires a little more awareness anyway. This is a strange accident and it could have just as easily destroyed the fuel lines in an internal combustion vehicle and resulted in just as much of fire.
I wouldn't think the hazards are anywhere near as bad in an automotive scenario, for a variety of reasons.
I'm not sure what the electrical system parameters are on a Tesla S but, in the event of a fire, the chances of the entire battery circuit remaining closed during the time it takes for fire safety personnel to arrive would be astronomically low.
There are certainly theoretical fringe cases one could construct, but overall it would be safer. The really great thing about a car fire is that if everyone is clear of the vehicle you don't have to put it out.
If there were serious safety concerns about electrical or chemical hazards you could concentrate on keeping other things from catching fire and just let the car burn. No modern car is salvageable, economically, after a serious fire and you can't move a burned out car for hours anyway. Just watch it burn. Maybe pose for some hilarious pictures and be chuffed nobody is inside.
Tesla probably won't sue, but the owner of the car likely will. He'll likely win as well. Failure to maintain a hazard free road that results in damage to the vehicle almost always wins in court and the city/owner of the road has to pay. That was a big deal in the 90's when the 'cool kids' were putting those huge ugly wheels on their cars and the matter has been settled in many, many courts.
If you insert a metal object into any battery it will arc and could catch fire. That has always been the case.
The Chevrolet Corvette used to have serious battery fire problems due to the cars fiberglass construction and the location of the battery just behind the front wheel next to the fender (a super common spot to be hit in an accident). The big metal bumpers of old would punch right through the fender and into the battery and inevitably caught fire.
They solved this in later models by putting a steel plate inside the battery area to prevent puncture. As an aside, that steel plate became a very popular aftermarket add-on as car thieves were drilling through the fender and into the battery. Draining the battery, thus disabling the factory anti-theft system. I don't know how many cars were stolen that way (or who would want to steal one) but I know the car stereo shop where I worked in high school sure did put a lot of those plates in those cars.
Not absolutely correct. As with many fires, the cause of the fire, and not just its fuel must be addressed to safely extinguish the flames. Choosing incorrectly can lead to much larger problems.
In the event of a lithium battery fire caused by thermal runaway in the cells, water is the first choice suppressant. It is the best suited to draining away the heat. Other suppressants may temporarily extinguish the flames through oxygen deprivation, but unless the heat component from the runaway is solved first the fire will resume in very, very short order. After the thermal runaway and initial flames have been suppressed with water other chemical suppressants may be safely used.
This case appears to be just a good old fashioned electrical fire so water was not the correct choice. However, the Dreamliner situation and in other known industrial accidents caused by lithium thermal runaway water is the best initial choice. This is even more critical in an aircraft or vessel in which escape is not safe and the fire must stay suppressed.
The biggest real risk with using water in a thermal runaway fire is that of hot metal slag being ejected from the water pressure and the busy chemical reaction taking place. This would obviously suck, but if it is happening in a place you can't escape from it is an acceptable risk.
As larger lithium batteries enter the consumer product stream safety and awareness will increase. In this case a well educated fire team would have had to make a judgement call as to the actual source if the fire. Even if this was done the water must be applied directly to the batteries to inhibit the runaway. Possibly this is what they were trying but misjudged the cause of the fire?
The upshot of this event is good. It provides for greater education opportunities for fire safety professionals. No one was hurt and now everyone can be better prepared.
That was a complete bullshit thing to even say. Our legal system doesn't work that way. Something is a crime or it isn't. It isn't part of the judges or prosecutors job to prove something was almost a crime. Hell, our entire culture functions because we are really good (if that's the appropriate term) at pushing things as close to criminal as they can get, without crossing that line.
What really sucks though, is his shutting down the service is the type of action the NSA uses to justify grabbing and keeping everything. You can hear the gears turning at Ft, Meade 35 miles away as they work Lavabit as a case study into their next FISA court report. Jackasses.
The default response of all politicians and administrations since about the end of Bush MkI has been to only hand over hard copy when/if they are investigated by law enforcement, regulators or Congress. Hundreds of thousands, or more, of randomly ordered pages.
The Palin Gubernatorial administration alone turned over more than 500,000 pages of unsorted email correspondence for just one account. The Clinton Presidential administration presented so much paper during his impeachment hearing that the investigators declared that the amount of information was so overwhelming they couldn't use it and agreed to only reference it if the Clinton defense did so first. Bush MkII and Cheney just said fuck it and deleted everything before it even got printed.
I don't see how what this guy did is any different than what our 'leaders' do.
In defense of Republicans. There are a lot of moderate, intelligent and caring people in that party. They just aren't the ones that get on TV. They're like the bulk of 'Americans', just normal people who want to go about their business.
The Republicans everybody hears and sees are like the fools on that Big Brother or Jersey Shore show. Just like some of their constituents; they are loud, aggressive and not very bright. Judging the entire party by their headline grabbers isn't representative of the whole.
*I am not a Republican
That's what's so funny to me about the music business: Their shift from music to marketing. They strangled their own golden goose.
Even as recently as the early 90's the big names carried the smaller acts. The business approved and even supported that. The 'big names' always got their inspiration from artists the general public has never heard of. If the record companies didn't support those small acts then there would be little inspiration for future acts. They were afraid music would be 'stuck' for long periods of time like it had in the past if new and exciting artists didn't get to record and be heard. The music business was investing in its own future. And they stopped in exchange for a quick buck (I guess that's normal these days though).
Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin covered the costs of musicians like Bonnie Raitt, Waylon Jennings and other acts that were the inspiration for acts like U2 and Metallica. It was a good investment. Where is the next batch of inspiration going to come from? Just recycle what's already been done and add some nice tits and ass? I'm a fan of tits and ass, but they don't make good music. It seems like the music business has done to itself what it always feared would happen if they didn't invest in small acts.
The music asshats should look at Hollywood. I realize the movies aren't the greatest, but they've really, really improved over the last few years.
Yes, yes, I know it is mostly recycling good stories with glitzy special effects, but they are at least somewhat entertaining and the resurgence of the industry proves it. If you make things people like they will pay for those things. If you aren't willing to cater to your customers you don't deserve to make scads of money.
I was always taught the customer is always wrong, but they have the money. If you want it, you better do what they want.
The NSA doesn't really have a budget. They have a line item on the big report but the rest of their funds are disbursed without much oversight or any public record keeping. They, like the CIA, never run short of money.
Besides, James Clapper strikes me as a Lex Luthor kind of guy. It wouldn't surprise me if they were siphoning off rounding errors from every electronic transaction on the planet. (The last line is a joke).
Covering costs to satisfy government demands is such a loaded statement. You aren't allowed to gouge the Feds on price, but you don't have to. You just assign 15 engineers, a project manager, a compliance officer and somebody from legal to handle the request that could be handled by one or two people. It is done everyday.
The government can only demand that the billable time for your staff not be above and beyond what you change a private entity. They can't tell you how to manage internal operations. If you say it takes 10 people, then it takes 10 people.
This is a positive sign that US/Iranian relations are improving. Since the US has used up all its friends and is now making nice with Tehran this is just an overture of friendship and proof that the US is serious about making this work. We only interfere in the internal affairs of our real friends.
Having lost faith in mainstream analysts and tired of paying for their lunches we developed and deployed our own internal system based on the same sorcery used by Gartner. We call it 'The Magic Ovoid'.
The Magic Ovoid works as follows. We put the names of all the vendors who call on us each week onto their own small sheet of paper. The papers are placed into The Magic Ovoid and the employee who won the 'Most Impossible to Answer Vendor Question Award' that week defecates into The Magic Ovoid. Our patented random hydraulic mixing technology sorts the papers and magic ingredients and automatically disposes of those which are unsuitable. The winning name (or names) that remain in The Magic Ovoid are then used as the targets for the following weeks 'Most Impossible to Answer Vendor Question' contest.
All in all we have found that just adding some shit to random marketing gibberish provides results at least as accurate as those of analysts. Our methods are significantly cheaper and easily replicated by any interested parties using only equipment and supplies found in every office.
Drug dealers who have enough scale to make real money get caught (or dead). That's a nearly universal truth. I don't think anyone will be screaming injustice.
What does suck, is now that Bitcoin has been proven as a way to finance large scale drug transactions governments everywhere will squash it. I think the whole concept of Bitcoin is kind of dumb, but a lot of people are into it. Not all if those people are into drugs but they'll be 'associated' with narcotics financing now, and that does kind of suck for them.
I don't get it... When I was young and wanted to bang a casual friend I just rang her up and asked. Do kids not know how to ask for sex anymore? I bet if they put down their phones and learned to communicate they could get laid a lot more. Funny that the thing they're using to find sex also keeps them from getting sex. Dumb kids.
If you're a home brewer then you enjoy brewing. There are certainly plenty of decent options ready made if you just want to get to the drinking.
The brewing isn't the hard part anyway. It takes time, but it certainly isn't difficult. The hard part is the sterilization of the equipment. That's a bugger and there is no room for error. I don't see how this gadget is going to help with that. It might even exacerbate the issue.
There really isn't reliable data on the value of assets or cash held by sole proprietorships as a whole. Those companies aren't required to report anything except taxable sales and numbers for labor.
There are risks associated with being organized as a sole proprietorship, sure, but as long as you're using your money and/or traditional bank loans, and not funds from outside investors, you can pretty much do whatever you want. The vast majority of US business law people hear about is corporate law, it has no bearing on private organizations. From taxation to employment law and everything in between, sole proprietorships operate completely differently than public companies or NPO's.
The customers who put that $147B in Apple's hands didn't think they were overpriced...
I agree that their devices could be sold considerably cheaper, but what's the point? Increased volume is not, by itself, a good thing. It is insanely expensive to swim at the low end of the consumer market. If people are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at you, without having to deal with low end consumer complications, it would be the height of lunacy to do something differently.
What they're doing isn't allowed by a face value reading of the rules; but both parties exploit technicalities when they pull this stunt. Both parties have spent 150+ years twisting the definitions of words around that none of it makes any kind of reasonable sense.
The twisting of vocabulary is what led the two primary parties to completely swap places/platform since the a Civil War. They're still doing it and both will switch back. They have to. They paint themselves into a corner by twisting the language and it forces their platform to move as well. It is all really fucking stupid and more than anything highlights the weaknesses of our leaders.
I'm really glad Curiosity isn't scuttled because of this, but surely it doesn't require constant monitoring anyway. You'd think there were assumptions that communications/Human input might be cut off for a while, and Curiosity would be able to cope OK...
I know at least one huge science experiment underway that wasn't spared though. A very large disease challenge was underway at a USDA aquaculture research facility near my home and now everyone is locked out of the facility. Nobody is going to be there to collect the data or even make mortality counts. Months of research and a large amount of funding has been thrown away. The knock on effects will be enormous as this experiment was being highly watched by the global aquaculture industry who had a high degree of confidence the findings would be directly applicable in commercial applications.
I can only imagine how many times this is being repeated all over the country. It will be hundreds of millions of dollars wasted because a bunch of old men can't communicate with their colleagues.
You're right about the unpatched vulnerabilities, but even if one were found it is highly unlikely it would be fixed in a week or so anyway.
But the bandwidth costs thing doesn't work. The government pays an annual set fee for bandwidth. The providers have already been paid. This is more about making it visible the government has quit working. I work in DC and even there it is hard to tell the government does anything other than fill up the metro with staff and clog up the highways. They've got to so something extremely visible or nobody would notice they were gone.
The Republicans do not want to reign in spending. They want to reallocate spending. Read through their proposals. I challenge you to read through them and see for yourself. Don't take the pundits word for it or John Elop Boehner's word for it. Go back to 2001 or start with 2013. Overall spending remains level with a decrease in tax revenue in all their proposed and in their in place policies.
The GOP want to move the expenditures, basically to other departments, where the numbers look better. The Democrats just accept the numbers don't look good. Both parties proposed and actual policies increase the overall debt and neither really wants to do anything about it. They'll lose votes. That's the only thing they want are votes.
Instead of parroting what you've heard on TV or news sites spend the time to get to know proposed and actual legislation. It is plainly evident that reducing the debt is not a goal of either the Republican or Democratic parties.
Both parties are equally guilty of fucking the taxpayer. Neither party is going to help you, the average citizen. It is in their best interests if you choose sides and take at face value the things their 'platform represents'. A divided populace is good for them and they'll do everything they can to keep it that way. People should set an example for the lawmakers and stop choosing sides: That's extremism.
Maybe they should declare a 'War on Budgets'! Declaring war on something is a proven way to accomplish exactly the opposite its intended goals.
Declaring war also provides an easy out for all involves. You can change the goals as soon as you start losing, declare it all a smashing success and go home to decide what thing to declare war on next. It's a win-win for all, especially for anyone involved in the targeted thing!
Of course the ACA is a Republican wet dream. The overall plan was drawn up by the most conservative think tank in the nation. That plan was chosen as a way to get conservatives onboard. That predictably backfired because the GOP isn't after any sort of successful policy, they're after the Democrats Congressional seats.
Instead of trying to include the GOP, the Obama administration should have rammed through real public health care and let the GOP negotiate down to an ACA plan. That would have let the GOP feel strong, and that's really what all this is about. The GOP are supposed to be the strong party, but in reality they can't cope when things aren't exactly to their liking. That's how the tea party got in, posing as 'strong'.
It is a law now. It stopped being a bill quite a few years ago.
The debate was had, had again and had some more. The matter is settled. That's how our political system works. Debate while the debate is on and deal with the outcome.
The refusal of all involved to follow the very rules they claim to be supporting is the highest of hypocrisies. Even worse it highlights the weaknesses of the GOP platform and its leadership. They cannot lead through this. They cannot deal with reality. They've been throughly trounced so many times over this that now they look like nothing more than spoiled brats who want to take their game home now that they're lost.
Everyday this drags on the GOP and tea party lose credibility and strength. They can act now to fix this and lose the nutter vote or act later and keep moving voters to the left. They've cut their own throats by acting like bullies in so very many other matters that the bulk of the public blames them for the shutdown. That's all that maters, voter perception. The GOP is going to have to get some leadership. Right now they've got the political equivalent of Stephen Elop in charge of the House.
The President used to be responsible for the annual Federal budget. It was his primary operational role. If he had time he'd make some speeches, maybe do a little warring, but the budget pretty well occupied his time.
Congress decided they didn't like that and took budgetary control away from the President. Now both sides can extort the country and milk it to further their own ends. They effectively made the office of President a Beeblebrox role with little real power. It completely broke the system of governance and we've been paying for it ever since. More resources have always been spent trying to undermine the 'other side' than on getting things done. No party is innocent in this. They are equally guilty for undermining their own country for greed and self interest.
They've tried to change it. The Republicans have had more preliminary vote counts and floor votes trying to change the ACA than any other bill in US history. Every single one failed. They couldn't even muster up enough support within their own party to change the law.
Every Congressperson is equally responsible for the shutdown. But only the GOP are responsible for completely wasting two years of legislative time focusing on the past instead of dealing with reality and moving forward. The GOP is broken and their leadership is weak. Like any weak entity, the first to strike are the extremists and that's exactly what happened to the GOP. The tea party nutters got in and have poisoned the party from the inside.
Eliminating funding is cowardly politics, a move played by cowards on both sides. The system wasn't designed to work that way. Budget concerns were to be addressed in the bills debate and once signed into law you dealt with the reality. If your side lost, you put on a bold face and made the best of it. You didn't cut off funding or shut down the government because you were too weak to cope with reality.
It'll be the same lizards, no matter which lizard gets in. The system is rigged from step #1 to keep 'alternative parties' out of Washington. Only the two main parties quality for State or Federal campaign funds and the radio and TV networks don't give them time because they don't have to. The system is so insanely rigged that occasionally big 'Brand Name' candidates can't get on the ballot in their own State.
The Republicans and Democrats both skew the system equally. They despise other parties so badly they'd rather elect their enemy than have someone else get in on the flag burning they get up to on Capitol Hill.
That's just it, regardless of your personal politics, this is 100% the fault of everyone in Congress. No finger pointing, no nothing, this is abject failure on the parts of Federal Legislators. Every single one of them is just as responsible as the next.
The only people this hurts are the Citizens. With no functional government they have broken the only thing they were supposed to be doing. Stopping government is not an optional move, you simply can't do tat and consider yourself as doing a good job.
They can horse trade and place blame all they like, but when they can't come to an agreement and keep the government working they are all to blame. Trying to decide which side is 'right' only hurts us more as Citizens. It is to their advantage, and our disadvantage: Like nearly everything they do. Fuck 'em all, each and every one.
It is very, very rare for any legislator to read the legislation they vote on, even sponsor. The laws have mostly been drafted by private groups for nearly 40 years now. It is really easy to tell if an actual Congressperson came up with a bill all by themselves. It is always really fucking stupid. Like declaring parts of the Moon a National Park and sovereign territory. If it actually sounds like legal policy then a 3rd party private entity wrote it. Every single time.
Bunch of children. The healthcare act has survived every legal challenge the system provides for. Instead of moving forward and dealing with reality, the Republicans have chosen to disenfranchise every US Citizen by taking away the cornerstone on which the country is founded.
The funniest thing in all this, to me, is that National Park Service Park Rangers (Law Enforcement) have been dispatched to stand guard at trailheads where the Appalachian National Scenic Trail (Appalachian Trail) crosses roads to prevent anyone from getting on the Trail. Normally there are a grand total of three NPS rangers for all ~2,100 miles of the Trail. They had to get extra Rangers from other, easier to close, parks to make this stupid gesture.
Devil take the lot of these cocksuckers. Every one on every side.
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