DugFin
Joined 14 years ago
Karma
127
Submissions
42
Member since
Apr 6
Recent submissions
Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
The idea is that the sound of an impact drill adds to the noise pollution of a supposedly "natural" area, and that they're "too easy" so they result in a proliferation of bolts in the rock. There's a lot of argument back and forth on the subject in places like Yosemite, where it sees so much traffic that it could hardly be called natural anymore. Personally, I'd rather hear 12 seconds of a Li-ion rotohammer than 30 minutes of some dude whacking a hand drill with a hammer, and since they make better holes, a rotohammer drills more symmetrical holes and is going to let the bolt seat better and it won't result in a proliferation of cratered out rock where old bolts pull out and have to be replaced by drilling new holes next to it. It's a touchy subject for a lot of folks. Some don't like "permanent" protection at all, but in places they don't allow bolts you end up with "temporary permanent" nylon slings tied around rocks all over the place. Doesn't really seem better.
Comment · 9 years ago
>The US doctrine have always been fleet warfare with large formations of US ships sailing alone on the open sea or in some water they have complete dominance over
One of the problems with the US Navy over the last 70+ years has been a tendency act as if they're still fighting WW2. It shows up in a lot of places in interesting ways. Another example is the USMC's fixation with hot beach amphibious assault, a tactic which is completely outdated with the advent of modern air power, and which hasn't actually been utilized since the Incheon landing in 1950.
Comment · 9 years ago
>I wonder why signatures replaced signet rings?
As the need for legal documentation spread downward from the upper classes, they needed an identification method that anyone could use, and wasn't limited to people who could afford to have a unique piece of jewelry crafted.
Comment · 9 years ago
The problem is that a lot of people aren't capable of working remotely and/or treat work from home as a day off.
Well, that's half the problem. The other half is the tendency of many managers to view all requests to work from home as a request to stay home and goof off on the clock. I've worked places where the apparent measure of productivity is how many aggregate ass-in-seat hours the department put in.
Comment · 9 years ago
>closing the fuel cycle loop in a way that is proliferation resistant
Isn't simply using a non-PUREX reprocessing method sufficient? Realistically, a "nuclear club" nation like the US/France/GB only needs to ensure that the reprocessed fuel contains enough non-Pu239 isotopes that any attempt at a bomb with stolen Pu would necessarily fizzle. The fact that the nation itself could (theoretically) produce Pu239 via the process and cause "proliferation" seems far fetched in the absence of the Cold War level rivalry that was the original proliferation impetus. Warheads are expensive. Nobody who already has a bunch of them already is really interested in making more.
Comment · 9 years ago
>Turns out the answer was _always_ "No."
My experience has been the opposite. I bought a Pebble so I could know whether I had to put down my tools, pull out my phone, and answer a call from my boss; or if I could just ignore yet another call from an idiot coworker.
>When Pebble sold out to Garmin
I wish. Garmin might have done something with it. They sold out to FitBit, whose major motivation was the elimination of a competitor.
Comment · 9 years ago
no, it just prolongs the inevitable. The first player to gain an edge on the others still eventually wins, it's just that it takes hours instead of minutes.
Comment · 9 years ago
That's not the reason. Benadryl being in blister packs long predates its use in meth cooking, like by 30 years. The real reason is more likely marketing. If they sold them in a bottle, the amount they charge for those few tiny pills would seem outrageous. A blister pack gives the packaging more volume.
Comment · 9 years ago
>But reading McMH does not compete with browsing those real estate listings. So it's probably fair use.
No facet of the fair use defense is based on the fact that one is exploiting a market for the work that the rightsholder currently isn't. On the contrary, the fact that one is exploiting any market at all with the work is a strike against any fair use defense.
Comment · 9 years ago
>due to flaws in their reasoning or refusal to consistently apply their own reasoning for personal reasons
That's not the entirety of it. The problem is that these ethical problems exist within a certain societal framework, and that framework is made of multiple overlapping assumptions, habits, traditions, and expectations, some of them contradictory. Two people's axioms might be identical, but they may come to two opposite conclusions over whether these identical axioms apply to a given situation based on how they each subjectively weight the assorted related circumstances. They'll BOTH claim that the other's bad conclusion is due to "flaws in their reasoning", and can still both have perfect internally consistent reasoning for their own conclusion. Ethics isn't physics. There often ISN'T a right or wrong answer, only a variation in assumptions.
Comment · 9 years ago
Yep. Though as with most things, it's not so much about changing people's minds as it is waiting for the old folks to die:
>Approval of black-white marriage is higher among younger Americans, and lowest among those 65 and older
Comment · 9 years ago
The physical vinyl won't outlast your digital, it'll just fail more gracefully, slowly losing fidelity every time you scrape it with a needle. You're just replacing a small chance of catastrophic failure with a guaranteed gradual failure.
Comment · 9 years ago
Thing is, it arrest actually IS a problem. It's often said that any decent prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. Throw in a dash of racism or classism, and you've got a recipe for sending lots of people to jail who didn't commit the crime. Every step of the way needs to responsible and honest in order to mitigate this problem as much as possible. Can't just let cops do whatever they please under the premise that the prosecutor's office will figure out the truth.
Comment · 10 years ago
The way I see it, they probably did it somewhat incrementally. To some degree, they've ALWAYS programmed the ECUs "to the test", because isn't that basically what the authorities want? A system that meets standards X, Y, and Z, as verified by a test of X, Y, and Z? What got them into trouble was the fact that ECUs became more and more sophisticated, allowing them to gradually isolate X, Y, and Z into ever-shrinking "islands" of compliance. It was tolerated for so long that both engineering and management probably became accustomed to cheating the test to some degree, so when the standards became even more stringent, they basically saw nothing wrong with creating a special "clean" ECU profile narrowly tailored to the specific parameters of the test procedure. Granted, they knew they were cheating, but I think when you're inside the corporate bubble and everyone's operating on the premise that cheating has always been tolerated on the test, it becomes harder to be the guy that says "this is too much".
No, it's legal because of the Federal Arbitration Act passing in 1925. Prior to that, waiving of such rights "in advance by agreement" was explicitly disallowed, as SCOTUS determined in Insurance Company v. Morse (1874).