Birds would likely still live within the dome, and they would be able to perch ANYWHERE, so you wouldn't just be able to avoid parking under trees or lights.
Yes yes, that and the "interstate commerce clause"... Let's forget about all the reasons the constitution was created, and write off anything the government can concoct to a few words taken out of context.
The constitution exists for one reason. To keep the federal government from becoming too powerful and overtaxing it's citizens. This was the reason we left Britain in the first place. Dammit, now my America is striving to become more like Britain. If you like someone else's government... MOVE THERE. Don't force their socialist ideals on me, because I want to live in a free America like the one developed by those who wrote the constitution. So let's look at what it says:
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
So how is universal healthcare necessary or proper to execute the powers of government? Umm, it's not, the government can continue to function even if people have to pay for their own medical care. You forget that when this country was founded, people not only paid for their own healthcare, but they were lucky if any healthcare was available. Most people just DIED. You should be grateful you can run over to the nearest drug store and purchase any multitude of products to cure your ailments. Which by the way, isn't legislated, it's provided by the free market.
Actually the founding fathers were quite clever, they made not one, but two amendments to the constitution that they thought would stop idiots like you from bending the constitution to whatever you want:
Amendment 9 The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 10 The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Umm, I'm a libertarian, and that's exactly what I want to see. Maybe not private roads (maybe private highways like existing toll roads), but hell yes private schools. I went to private schools my whole life, and I can tell you that not many of my peers from the public education system even compare with my education. Why should my parents have had to pay TWICE for my education? My belief is that the government is there to prevent people from violating my rights (my actual rights, those set out in the constitution, not those invented afterward). I suppose you might be able to argue that healthcare is a right to life, but it doesn't say you have a right to live by stealing your neighbor's income (yes, taxes is stealing if it's not voluntary).
Don't believe everything you see in the movies (I'm looking at you Casino Royale). This would only be necessary in the case of trucks, vans, and SUVs as most cars won't flip by turning alone. Their center of gravity is low enough that street tires will skid on the pavement before there will be enough moment to rotate the vehicle.
My brother accidentally performed an experiment that proved on a Chevy Malibu that the front tire will physically break free from its mounts and the car will not flip. He did this by failing to complete a donut in the snow and sliding sideways over a curb. The back tire survived the bump over the curb.
Seeing a target isn't so much of an issue if you have sensors that detect outside of the visible spectrum. However, the bigger concern is heat dissipation, which can be a large problem in space, and making a black exterior only exacerbates the problem if you are close to a big light emission source such as a star.
Yes, but they take place over the internet... Hamachi/skype can make a pretty good LAN party equivalent for older games that don't have internet play anymore (command and conquer and such).
The "super string" was recently discovered to be a series of menus placed horizontally across the screen that then clicked, would decent with a series of logical commands organized such that the user would know where to find certain actions.
Actually, on a modern car, with the exception of park and lower gears (which most people STILL don't understand), on an automatic transmission, they don't have control over the shifting anyway. He would probably appreciate the power steering and brakes as well. The driving interface is quite possibly the best user interface I know of, because the basic design hasn't changed since the days of the horseless carriage.
To continue with your car analogy, the switch to the ribbon is like switching a car to a joystick... It might be more intuitive for younger people (who play too much Xbox), but it isn't necessarily the best tool for the job.
Actually, I'm thinking that the Half Life series has a lot of that going on. I would think that the source engine would be a good base to create a Star Trek game around. Great physics, great graphics, and a lot of potential to interact with the environment.
How much of that cost is taxes? Here in the US taxes can amount to about a quarter of the cost of the gas. People complain about profits that oil companies make on gasoline, but the reality is the government takes many times more money on every gallon (or liter/litre) than oil companies do.
Idiots yelling at idiots maybe. I don't know if the GP is an idiot, but making an uninformed comment like that just shows you are just as big if not a bigger idiot.
First of all, a personal attack on the GP about being a redneck. Nice argument there. FYI I doubt you've ever been to Alaska, but I didn't see any trailer parks there.
Second of all, caribou actually do love pipelines. When pipelines break, yes there is a risk to wildlife, but the plants love it. You have to remember that one life form's poison is another's food. Crude just so happens to be decayed plant matter (READ: fertilizer). Also one of the biggest risk of pipelines leaking here in the lower 48 is crude getting into the water supply, which isn't the biggest risk in the tundra where the soil is frozen year round.
Why do you insist on attacking the 1% of religious nut jobs that happen to be on the right to discredit the whole idea of being conservative? Why is it that you believe the government (which is known to be corrupt regardless of political affiliation) has the infinite wisdom to not only control the climate, but to control health care, the economy, and even world peace too. I'm glad that the politicians in Washington ignore the tenets that this nation was founded upon (i.e. the Constitution) in order to inflict the "greater good" upon the people.
Lets face it, it's embarrassing to be aligned with either democrats or republicans as they have both done absurdly disgusting acts and said absurd things in public. One more reason I align libertarian, because I don't believe that any politician regardless of beliefs should be bringing more government into my life.
I second that comment. I went about a month ago because I remembered it being fun when I was a kid. Let's just say their main exhibit was about Harry Potter (not really science or industry). Oh and did I mention that the Harry Potter exhibit costs extra? Oh and the sub costs extra too, and if you want to interact with the cyberspace exhibit, that costs, and if you want to build a top, that costs. So what exactly do you get for the admission price? The aging farm, petroleum, coal, and plumbing exhibits that are probably the same ones that were there 10 years ago.
But by all means, do the field museum, shedd aquarium, and adler planetarium... Those were awesome, but save yourself the crap of the science and industry museum.
And to go back up like 10 levels, I agree with the above comment about the childrens museum in Indy. I haven't been there in ages, but I remember it being awesome. Second only to the old COSI in Columbus. Why did museums switch from hands on learning to touchscreen learning?
At refineries, working on reactions, yes... Chemistry tends to be a mostly SI field. I agree that metric units aid in reaction calcs, but I work on the products after they leave the refineries, and all pipe sizes, pressures, pump capacities, storage volumes, etc are all english units, and probably are in many places in the world.
If you have a small child running around with scissors, you've got bigger issues than your cables being cluttered. Hell a kid would probably cut the cable before a zip tie.
"Mr. Fusion powers the time circuits and the flux capacitor, but the internal combustion engine runs on ordinary gasoline. It always has. There's not gonna be a gas station around here until sometime in the next century. Without gasoline, we can't get the DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour." -Doc Brown
Maybe he would have been better off with the MIT version...
It depends on your market... I work in the oil industry and we do business in barrels. Last time I checked that wasn't an SI unit. Also, the MIT team is likely using metric because they are in science. Had they been in engineering, they'd have used english units. (Disclaimer: I didn't RTFA, so they may have been engineering students after all, in which case MIT is vastly different than my engineering education)
Wow, someone needs a reality check. Diesel in most places is comparable to gasoline and has a higher energy density than gasoline. Add in the extra fuel efficiency and the cost in cents per mile for diesel whips the pants off gasoline. The smoke you refer to was from high sulfur diesel which is no longer sold in the United States. Diesel has been shown to release less emissions than gasoline, and in fact VW is trying to reverse myths that you have with ad campaigns like this http://tdi.vw.com/a-coffee-filter-shows-how-clean-tdi-clean-diesel-is/.
And the new Turbodiesels get much better mileage than their equivalent gasoline counterparts. For example the Jetta gasoline vs diesel goes from 20 to 29 city and 29 to 40 highway (45% city, 38% highway). For comparison, the Honda Civic gasoline vs hybrid goes from 25 to 40 city and 36 to 45 highway (60% city, but 25% highway). Also note that the VW Jetta TDI won the 2009 Green Car of the Year award.
And there is no way in hell a hybrid beats a diesel in performance. The Civic Hybrid has 110 HP/123 ft-lb of torque. The Jetta TDI? 140 HP/236 ft-lb of torque. There is a reason diesels have been winning the Le Mans.
I don't think you'll lose any karma, this is a good discussion... Hence why I am continuing it.
The corrosion issue is real. I work for an oil company, and I can tell you as far as corrosion goes, diesel is least corrosive, then gasoline, ethanol, and finally crude has the highest corrosivity (probably not a real word). This isn't coming from a manufacturer, this is coming from first hand experience seeing the steel storage tanks for these products.
Your suggestion of "lay pipes" is a good starting point, and we have miles and miles of pipeline in this country and around the world. But ethanol doesn't flow through any of it. There is no way to keep water out of a pipeline due to condensation mostly, and as water ruins ethanol, it can't be shipped via pipeline. All ethanol in this country is shipped by barge, rail, or truck... All three of which run on diesel or worse. Another few problems with ethanol that I didn't mention before are that it burns invisibly to the naked eye, which is a huge safety hazard, and that leak detection is much harder since it's not as toxic to the environment. You may see that as a plus, but product and crude pipelines are quickly repaired and remediated when they leak, and ethanol might continue to leak for a long time before it was discovered and can end up damaging the environment more.
The reason I don't like ethanol is because it offers no real-world benefit over gasoline. Especially if it comes from corn. Taking food resources and then distilling them into a motor fuel raises prices for food, and even then it's only economical to sell as a fuel when gasoline is expensive and the government is giving subsidies. Yes, ethanol can be used in higher compression engines, but not many of those exist. Ethanol is used in racing fuel, where engines are designed for it, but those engines don't last hundreds of thousands of miles like consumer vehicles.
The reason I call diesel a better technology is because it has a better Carnot efficiency due to the higher compression ratios possible with the diesel cycle. Thus the ability of diesel to be more efficient is only limited by the amount of compression you can achieve, as octane doesn't matter. Diesel engines are also more flexible about fuel options. Gasoline engines are very picky about what they can run on, but Diesel engines can run on pretty much anything that burns and can be vaporized... Pretty much everything from flammable gasses and liquids, to even sawdust.
And to finally continue burning the fire, it doesn't matter what gasoline was originally used for... Many things were originally waste products. Gasoline and internal combustion engines aren't perfect, but they do give reliable and inexpensive operation for many vehicles. They would never have succeeded as much as they did in the marketplace if they weren't. Wankels may be more efficient, but the cost and complexity doesn't justify it. Maybe in the future, a better process will change that, but today most research has gone into internal combustion and diesel technology, and of the two diesel has upper hand on efficiency and torque.
I'm going to combine some replies here, so I apologize. First of all, ethanol doesn't grow mold inside the fuel, but the vapors support mold to grow on any surface not submerged in the fuel. Next time you pass a tank farm, the tank with black crap at the top near the vents is the ethanol tank.
Ok, I used imprecise language, but ethanol is more corrosive than gasoline. And stainless steel is much more expensive than regular steel, and isn't nearly as durable in the long run.
Petrol (gasoline) doesn't give two shits about water. Gasoline doesn't form a solution with water. Water simply sits at the bottom of your gas tank and the gasoline continues to power your car. Water does form a solution with ethanol and ruins the fuel potential of the mix.
The lower energy density creates a larger cost of shipment as the same energy requires more volume (hence you need more truck trips to get the same energy to the service station).
Ethanol does have a higher octane rating, which is why it makes a good gasoline additive. Sure beats lead or MTBE anyway. But as a straight fuel, it doesn't make sense.
And finally, I have to disagree with you about diesel (I realize I misspelled it, but I am too quick to hit post rather than preview). It's the better technology, more torque, greater durability, and better efficiency. Diesel cars have shown that they can match gasohol fuels for racing (see the LeMans) and can match hybrids in efficiency (see Jetta TDI).
Slashdot Mirror
I think Microsoft should send them a cake to celebrate.
Birds would likely still live within the dome, and they would be able to perch ANYWHERE, so you wouldn't just be able to avoid parking under trees or lights.
Yes yes, that and the "interstate commerce clause"... Let's forget about all the reasons the constitution was created, and write off anything the government can concoct to a few words taken out of context.
The constitution exists for one reason. To keep the federal government from becoming too powerful and overtaxing it's citizens. This was the reason we left Britain in the first place. Dammit, now my America is striving to become more like Britain. If you like someone else's government... MOVE THERE. Don't force their socialist ideals on me, because I want to live in a free America like the one developed by those who wrote the constitution. So let's look at what it says:
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into
Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this
Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or
Officer thereof.
So how is universal healthcare necessary or proper to execute the powers of government? Umm, it's not, the government can continue to function even if people have to pay for their own medical care. You forget that when this country was founded, people not only paid for their own healthcare, but they were lucky if any healthcare was available. Most people just DIED. You should be grateful you can run over to the nearest drug store and purchase any multitude of products to cure your ailments. Which by the way, isn't legislated, it's provided by the free market.
Actually the founding fathers were quite clever, they made not one, but two amendments to the constitution that they thought would stop idiots like you from bending the constitution to whatever you want:
Amendment 9
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed
to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to
the people.
Umm, I'm a libertarian, and that's exactly what I want to see. Maybe not private roads (maybe private highways like existing toll roads), but hell yes private schools. I went to private schools my whole life, and I can tell you that not many of my peers from the public education system even compare with my education. Why should my parents have had to pay TWICE for my education? My belief is that the government is there to prevent people from violating my rights (my actual rights, those set out in the constitution, not those invented afterward). I suppose you might be able to argue that healthcare is a right to life, but it doesn't say you have a right to live by stealing your neighbor's income (yes, taxes is stealing if it's not voluntary).
Don't believe everything you see in the movies (I'm looking at you Casino Royale). This would only be necessary in the case of trucks, vans, and SUVs as most cars won't flip by turning alone. Their center of gravity is low enough that street tires will skid on the pavement before there will be enough moment to rotate the vehicle.
My brother accidentally performed an experiment that proved on a Chevy Malibu that the front tire will physically break free from its mounts and the car will not flip. He did this by failing to complete a donut in the snow and sliding sideways over a curb. The back tire survived the bump over the curb.
Seeing a target isn't so much of an issue if you have sensors that detect outside of the visible spectrum. However, the bigger concern is heat dissipation, which can be a large problem in space, and making a black exterior only exacerbates the problem if you are close to a big light emission source such as a star.
Yes, but they take place over the internet... Hamachi/skype can make a pretty good LAN party equivalent for older games that don't have internet play anymore (command and conquer and such).
The "super string" was recently discovered to be a series of menus placed horizontally across the screen that then clicked, would decent with a series of logical commands organized such that the user would know where to find certain actions.
Actually, on a modern car, with the exception of park and lower gears (which most people STILL don't understand), on an automatic transmission, they don't have control over the shifting anyway. He would probably appreciate the power steering and brakes as well. The driving interface is quite possibly the best user interface I know of, because the basic design hasn't changed since the days of the horseless carriage.
To continue with your car analogy, the switch to the ribbon is like switching a car to a joystick... It might be more intuitive for younger people (who play too much Xbox), but it isn't necessarily the best tool for the job.
There actually is: http://www.askvg.com/insert-classic-menubar-and-toolbar-in-microsoft-office-2007/
Actually, I'm thinking that the Half Life series has a lot of that going on. I would think that the source engine would be a good base to create a Star Trek game around. Great physics, great graphics, and a lot of potential to interact with the environment.
It wouldn't prevent the collision, but it would prevent the catastrophe of eliminating all human life.
How much of that cost is taxes? Here in the US taxes can amount to about a quarter of the cost of the gas. People complain about profits that oil companies make on gasoline, but the reality is the government takes many times more money on every gallon (or liter/litre) than oil companies do.
Idiots yelling at idiots maybe. I don't know if the GP is an idiot, but making an uninformed comment like that just shows you are just as big if not a bigger idiot.
First of all, a personal attack on the GP about being a redneck. Nice argument there. FYI I doubt you've ever been to Alaska, but I didn't see any trailer parks there.
Second of all, caribou actually do love pipelines. When pipelines break, yes there is a risk to wildlife, but the plants love it. You have to remember that one life form's poison is another's food. Crude just so happens to be decayed plant matter (READ: fertilizer). Also one of the biggest risk of pipelines leaking here in the lower 48 is crude getting into the water supply, which isn't the biggest risk in the tundra where the soil is frozen year round.
A question for liberals out there:
Why do you insist on attacking the 1% of religious nut jobs that happen to be on the right to discredit the whole idea of being conservative? Why is it that you believe the government (which is known to be corrupt regardless of political affiliation) has the infinite wisdom to not only control the climate, but to control health care, the economy, and even world peace too. I'm glad that the politicians in Washington ignore the tenets that this nation was founded upon (i.e. the Constitution) in order to inflict the "greater good" upon the people.
Lets face it, it's embarrassing to be aligned with either democrats or republicans as they have both done absurdly disgusting acts and said absurd things in public. One more reason I align libertarian, because I don't believe that any politician regardless of beliefs should be bringing more government into my life.
I believe the most standard definition is the area of a circle with a radius of one.
I second that comment. I went about a month ago because I remembered it being fun when I was a kid. Let's just say their main exhibit was about Harry Potter (not really science or industry). Oh and did I mention that the Harry Potter exhibit costs extra? Oh and the sub costs extra too, and if you want to interact with the cyberspace exhibit, that costs, and if you want to build a top, that costs. So what exactly do you get for the admission price? The aging farm, petroleum, coal, and plumbing exhibits that are probably the same ones that were there 10 years ago.
But by all means, do the field museum, shedd aquarium, and adler planetarium... Those were awesome, but save yourself the crap of the science and industry museum.
And to go back up like 10 levels, I agree with the above comment about the childrens museum in Indy. I haven't been there in ages, but I remember it being awesome. Second only to the old COSI in Columbus. Why did museums switch from hands on learning to touchscreen learning?
Yes, but it's that darn library of congress numbering/lettering scheme that doesn't make any goddamn sense!
At refineries, working on reactions, yes... Chemistry tends to be a mostly SI field. I agree that metric units aid in reaction calcs, but I work on the products after they leave the refineries, and all pipe sizes, pressures, pump capacities, storage volumes, etc are all english units, and probably are in many places in the world.
If you have a small child running around with scissors, you've got bigger issues than your cables being cluttered. Hell a kid would probably cut the cable before a zip tie.
"Mr. Fusion powers the time circuits and the flux capacitor, but the internal combustion engine runs on ordinary gasoline. It always has. There's not gonna be a gas station around here until sometime in the next century. Without gasoline, we can't get the DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour." -Doc Brown
Maybe he would have been better off with the MIT version...
It depends on your market... I work in the oil industry and we do business in barrels. Last time I checked that wasn't an SI unit. Also, the MIT team is likely using metric because they are in science. Had they been in engineering, they'd have used english units. (Disclaimer: I didn't RTFA, so they may have been engineering students after all, in which case MIT is vastly different than my engineering education)
Wow, someone needs a reality check. Diesel in most places is comparable to gasoline and has a higher energy density than gasoline. Add in the extra fuel efficiency and the cost in cents per mile for diesel whips the pants off gasoline. The smoke you refer to was from high sulfur diesel which is no longer sold in the United States. Diesel has been shown to release less emissions than gasoline, and in fact VW is trying to reverse myths that you have with ad campaigns like this http://tdi.vw.com/a-coffee-filter-shows-how-clean-tdi-clean-diesel-is/.
And the new Turbodiesels get much better mileage than their equivalent gasoline counterparts. For example the Jetta gasoline vs diesel goes from 20 to 29 city and 29 to 40 highway (45% city, 38% highway). For comparison, the Honda Civic gasoline vs hybrid goes from 25 to 40 city and 36 to 45 highway (60% city, but 25% highway). Also note that the VW Jetta TDI won the 2009 Green Car of the Year award.
And there is no way in hell a hybrid beats a diesel in performance. The Civic Hybrid has 110 HP/123 ft-lb of torque. The Jetta TDI? 140 HP/236 ft-lb of torque. There is a reason diesels have been winning the Le Mans.
I don't think you'll lose any karma, this is a good discussion... Hence why I am continuing it.
The corrosion issue is real. I work for an oil company, and I can tell you as far as corrosion goes, diesel is least corrosive, then gasoline, ethanol, and finally crude has the highest corrosivity (probably not a real word). This isn't coming from a manufacturer, this is coming from first hand experience seeing the steel storage tanks for these products.
Your suggestion of "lay pipes" is a good starting point, and we have miles and miles of pipeline in this country and around the world. But ethanol doesn't flow through any of it. There is no way to keep water out of a pipeline due to condensation mostly, and as water ruins ethanol, it can't be shipped via pipeline. All ethanol in this country is shipped by barge, rail, or truck... All three of which run on diesel or worse. Another few problems with ethanol that I didn't mention before are that it burns invisibly to the naked eye, which is a huge safety hazard, and that leak detection is much harder since it's not as toxic to the environment. You may see that as a plus, but product and crude pipelines are quickly repaired and remediated when they leak, and ethanol might continue to leak for a long time before it was discovered and can end up damaging the environment more.
The reason I don't like ethanol is because it offers no real-world benefit over gasoline. Especially if it comes from corn. Taking food resources and then distilling them into a motor fuel raises prices for food, and even then it's only economical to sell as a fuel when gasoline is expensive and the government is giving subsidies. Yes, ethanol can be used in higher compression engines, but not many of those exist. Ethanol is used in racing fuel, where engines are designed for it, but those engines don't last hundreds of thousands of miles like consumer vehicles.
The reason I call diesel a better technology is because it has a better Carnot efficiency due to the higher compression ratios possible with the diesel cycle. Thus the ability of diesel to be more efficient is only limited by the amount of compression you can achieve, as octane doesn't matter. Diesel engines are also more flexible about fuel options. Gasoline engines are very picky about what they can run on, but Diesel engines can run on pretty much anything that burns and can be vaporized... Pretty much everything from flammable gasses and liquids, to even sawdust.
And to finally continue burning the fire, it doesn't matter what gasoline was originally used for... Many things were originally waste products. Gasoline and internal combustion engines aren't perfect, but they do give reliable and inexpensive operation for many vehicles. They would never have succeeded as much as they did in the marketplace if they weren't. Wankels may be more efficient, but the cost and complexity doesn't justify it. Maybe in the future, a better process will change that, but today most research has gone into internal combustion and diesel technology, and of the two diesel has upper hand on efficiency and torque.
I'm going to combine some replies here, so I apologize. First of all, ethanol doesn't grow mold inside the fuel, but the vapors support mold to grow on any surface not submerged in the fuel. Next time you pass a tank farm, the tank with black crap at the top near the vents is the ethanol tank.
Ok, I used imprecise language, but ethanol is more corrosive than gasoline. And stainless steel is much more expensive than regular steel, and isn't nearly as durable in the long run.
Petrol (gasoline) doesn't give two shits about water. Gasoline doesn't form a solution with water. Water simply sits at the bottom of your gas tank and the gasoline continues to power your car. Water does form a solution with ethanol and ruins the fuel potential of the mix.
The lower energy density creates a larger cost of shipment as the same energy requires more volume (hence you need more truck trips to get the same energy to the service station).
Ethanol does have a higher octane rating, which is why it makes a good gasoline additive. Sure beats lead or MTBE anyway. But as a straight fuel, it doesn't make sense.
And finally, I have to disagree with you about diesel (I realize I misspelled it, but I am too quick to hit post rather than preview). It's the better technology, more torque, greater durability, and better efficiency. Diesel cars have shown that they can match gasohol fuels for racing (see the LeMans) and can match hybrids in efficiency (see Jetta TDI).