mrbabbage

10 ms·

61.
by mrbabbage 10y ago
> Do trucks and SUVs in the US even have emissions standards? I know they're exempt from emissions tests in many states which is part of the reason for their popularity. In 1999, California enacted its LEV (low emissions vehicle) II
62.
by mrbabbage 10y ago
> I don't know the exact details of her situation, but it seems like perhaps the correct decision would have been to sell the house and move to a smaller, more efficient house if the current house is too expensive to maintain given
63.
by mrbabbage 10y ago
What about the fuel tanks that would be required for a hypothetical hydrogen aircraft? Unlike kerosene, hydrogen is very light, but the high-pressure tank to contain the hydrogen is quite heavy. Plus, given hydrogen's very low volume
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by mrbabbage 10y ago
here's the original YouTube footage of the Third Street red light violation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CdJ4oae8f4
65.
by mrbabbage 10y ago
related reading: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/quic... there's a lot of linked reading on airport connectors' rather bizarre propensity to attract huge amounts of capital s
66.
by mrbabbage 11y ago
I highly recommend that you check out the book Mass transit and the politics of technology: a study of BART and the San Francisco Bay Area. It's a different, if similarly unflattering, take on the forces that shaped BART's eventu
67.
by mrbabbage 11y ago
For lots of people, "marriage" is extremely intertwined with religious practice, and some religious traditions don't recognize same-sex marriages. It's not a matter of a specific desire to discriminate; for these people
68.
by mrbabbage 11y ago
There's a world of difference between opposing gay marriage and supporting a white supremacist terrorist organization. They're not even remotely comparable. Specifically, it's entirely possible to oppose gay marriage on a nu
69.
by mrbabbage 11y ago
The presence of overhead equipment for electrification is orthogonal; the real issue is loading gauge, a cross-section profile that defines the minimum car size that the most restrictive segment of a line must support. Usually, tunnels end
70.
by mrbabbage 11y ago
Make sure you qualify what "most expensive" means. Here in California, we have some of the highest electric rates in the United States but also some of the lowest electric bills [1]. Saying we have "expensive" energy r
71.
by mrbabbage 11y ago
> nuclear backup That wouldn't work with current nuclear reactors, whose startup / shutdown sequences take hours. Typically, the grid operator runs nuclear plants at nearly 100% 24/7 (so called "baseload") due t
72.
by mrbabbage 11y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs How would training followed by a bonding period be considered differently than other mechanisms inducing employees to stay? Could these other mechanisms also be legally
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by mrbabbage 11y ago
My general impression: every country engaged in the TPP is making embarrassing concessions in the negotiations; if such an embarrassing concession came out into public early in the negotiation process, it could politically wreck that countr
74.
by mrbabbage 11y ago
Two main thoughts: > Hailed as a victory for consumer privacy and security, the development dismayed law enforcement officials, who said it threatens what they describe as a centuries-old social compact in which the government, with
75.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
Further reading for the interested: - "All studies indicated that current corn ethanol technologies are much less petroleum-intensive than gasoline but have greenhouse gas emissions similar to those of gasoline. However, many important
76.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
Have you tried Dolphin on Linux? It's absolutely the best graphical file shell I've ever used: - integrated command line whose PWD matches the directory shown in the graphic view. This is killer. - automatic numbering if you ren
77.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
In general, you'd be right; in parent's hypothetical scheme, the trust model is different because your systems exist on both sides of the exchange (in normal Web communication, this obviously isn't the case). You simply conf
78.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
There are some very important uses of such institutional eavesdropping, such as running an intrusion detection system on a corporate network; I'd argue that this is a worthy tradeoff between employee privacy and good information securi
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by mrbabbage 12y ago
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, available at ( http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1232g )
80.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
Your point about housing is spot-on. I'm not sure I understand how an unconditional payment achieves any more desirable objectives than an EITC-style negative income tax. Under a negative income tax, a marginal increase in income stil
81.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
This doesn't answer your question about residential solar, but it's a useful primer on economic analysis for utility-scale operations. http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm The inte
82.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
Describing hydrogen as "dense" is a bit fraught. It is very dense on a joules per kilogram basis, but it is sparse on a kilograms per liter or joules per liter basis. And the design constraint in cars is the volume of the tank,
83.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
This is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I believe this is a good illustration of how most net neutrality advocacy is misguided. The (very real) problem net neutrality advocates are trying to solve isn't paid prioritization; ra
84.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
> It's not just water. Look at HVAC. In the US, natural gas is billed in therms, and electricity is billed in kilowatt-hours. In metric countries, both electricity and natural gas are specified in kilowatt-hours. It's funny you
85.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
A search warrant isn't a license for law enforcement to break the law; it's a license to lawfully conduct a search and seizure based on probable cause of the commission of a crime. Warrants exist because of the Fourth Amendment,
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Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater(nytimes.com)
41 points by mrbabbage 12y ago|11 comments
87.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
Here's something that's even more "out there": an experimental OS and programming environment where all protection is done statically, at compile time. You can do things as crazy as run all "user" processes an
88.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
Yeah, it's a huge difference, and all you need is high school chemistry: - gas is CH4 (four hydrogens for every carbon). Oil is approximately CH2 (in reality, it's slightly higher than two). Coal is approximately CH. - a CH bond h
89.
by mrbabbage 12y ago
> Is there any data that our lungs are seriously hurt by these particulates right now? There's a lot. From a health perspective, PM is way worse for human health than carbon dioxide. Here's two EPA fact sheets and a well-c
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by mrbabbage 12y ago
That's probably the day the article will appear in the print. It's very common practice among websites of print publications, so that there's no discrepancy in dates between the online and print editions.

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