1) Evacuation - people are on average much further from the edge of the plane. This probably isn't too big an issue - people already often have to go quite a way along the airplane to get to the closest exit.
2) Cargo - the constant cross-section of cylindrical planes means you can have standard size cargo pallets that fit anywhere in the plane. This plane has a much less regular shape. Perhaps they have sufficient volume they can afford to waste some.
3) Engine maintenance. The engines on this plane are very high and hard to access from the ground. This is already the case for the number 2 engines of DC-10, MD-11 and L1011's, so there is prior experience in handling this, but it will add to maintenence cost.
4) Manufacturing cost. In a constant cross-section fusilage, many panels, ribs etc. can be used many times over.
5) Difficulty in adjusting size. You can stretch or (rarely) shrink the length of a cylindrical fusilage fairly easily.
Of course, you can accept quite a few negatives in return for a 30% gain in economy.
Finally, there is the risk of the unexpected - revolutionary designs frequently stumble over unexpected problems that take a while to iron out - e.g. Comet (metal fatigue in presurized airframe), high tail planes like the DC 9 ('deep stall'), A320 (human/computer interface problems).
The second is part of the metric system - you can't change how long it is (or replace it with another time unit) without changing most of the rest of the metric system too (such as units of energy, voltage*, power, torque, pressure, force...) If you stay with the second, you are stuck with the fact that the apparent motion of the Big Light has a period of 86400 seconds, which is not a power of 10. Any time system that does not sync well with the Big Light will not be popular so long as we stay on Earth.
* Technically I should use something like 'electric potential difference' here, but then hardly anyone would know what I meant. Analogously, some people use the terms 'wattage' when they should say 'power' and 'amperage' when they should say 'electric current', but that is just rank ignorance. It is in no way comparable to my use of the term 'voltage'. Nope, not at all.
Any time you pay for a yes/no decision, all you've paid goes for a single bit. E.g. the millions spent on prosecution and defense of the over-hyped OJ Simpson trial all paid for the bit '0'. Similarly if you spend millions of dollars to business consultants to answer a question like 'should HP and Compaq merge?'
It is debatable whether these really are paying for just one bit - the OJ trial produced lots of public information, and the yes/no business descisions undoubtedly come with heafty reports explaining how the result was arrived at.
A test is to imagine an oracle that will (with known 100% accuracy) answer a question like 'If OJ goes to trial for murder, will he be found guilty?' If this result would be considered a sufficient substitute for actually holding the trial, then all those millions were indeed spent on one bit.
Imagine setting it to show you more pornographic pictures the more relaxed you got. Possibility 1: * You relax * You get exciting pictures * You get excited * Pictures get boring * Cycle repeats until * You get so frustrated you get nothing but pictures of fluffy kittens.
Possibility 2: * You learn to relax to get the hard core images * You get habituated, so sex sends you to sleep.
Good question on the efficiency. I'd guess '20% efficient' (or 40% for this new process) means either: * You can extract 20% as much energy from the produced hydrogen as you expended to extract it from the sewage. * You can extract 20% as much energy from the produced hydrogen, after deducting the cost of extraction, compared to the theoretical energy you could extract from the sewage by fully oxidizing it.
I disagree with the dangerous part, however. Hydrogen is safer than petrol/gasoline: * Lower energy density * Disperses *very* quickly, so it is hard to accumulate enough around a leak site to make a decent explosion.
Once dispersed, the hydrogen is harmless. Uranium is chemically extremely toxic. Both the chemical and radioactivity toxicity are not rendered harmless by dispersal - you just do less poisoning to more area. I would guess that for nearly pure uranium, the chemical toxicity is worse than the radioactivity. Once used in a reactor, however, the result is highly radioactive and will remain dangerous for thousands of years.
Re:Why does /. have to concentrate on this film?
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
·
· Score: 1
I used to have in my sig something like "I always mod down posts that refer to their own moderation", but I gave it up partly because I never have time to moderate anyhow.
I think you have misunderstood. Once you have given a legitimate, non-expired key the software will work forever. The only time you need to go back to Ambrosia is if you bought the key and didn't get around to applying it before it expired, or (I expect) if you reinstall. The reinstall is a problem, but not as bad as your scenario. (More like spare parts becoming unavailable when GM goes out of business.)
The article's closing sentence is: Perhaps if campaign finance reform succeeds in helping good arguments compete against ready cash, copyright will right itself.
The fight against DCMA, copyright extension, UCITA (or whatever it was - the law being peddled to states to give click-through licenses teeth etc.) are all worthwhile, but they are attacking the symptoms. The influence of money over politics is the cause.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen or resident, so arguably this really isn't my business.)
Anybody want to get some easy karma by posting links to campaign finance reform organizations?
0.7% of mass is converted to energy burning ordinary hydrogen to helium, so your 4 million tonnes/s mass -> energy implies about 600 million tonnes/s of hydrogen used up.*
It is slow in that a hydrogen atom (actually a proton, as it will be ionized) in the core of the sun has only a very low probability per second of being 'consumed', or equivalently it has a lifetime/halflife** of billions of years.
Only a fraction of the hydrogen in the sun will actually get burned before the sun 'burns out' - the rest will be expelled in a stellar wind during the red giant phase. The fraction is on the order of one half.
* Mdot = 6x10^11 kg/s. M = 2x10^30 => T = 3x10^18 s = 10^11 years. This is high by a factor of 10, but doesn't account for not all the hydrogen being burned, or the much higher luminosity during red giant phase of evolution.
** These are not quite synonymous, differing by a constant factor (ln 2).
The surface of the sun is at about 5700K, far below that required for fusion. I thought this meant the science was totally implausible, but it turns out to be an error in the Slashdot summary. The article claims "simulations also indicate that temperatures inside the collapsing bubbles may reach up to 10 million degrees Kelvin, as hot as the center of the sun." and "Temperatures inside these bubbles can be as high as 5000-7000 degrees Kelvin, about as hot as the sun?s surface. But, recent experiments by a number of researchers suggest that bubble temperatures can reach even higher temperatures--closer to the heat needed for nuclear fusion...".
Deuterium 'burns' at much lower temperatures than the ordinary hydrogen burning that powers our sun (where reaction rates are so slow it will take billions of years to use up the fuel supply.)
I'm a bit worried about how well this will differentiate colours - the colour filtering is pretty crude - i.e. how far the penetrates the silicon. Almost certainly this will be a mean-free-path like dependency - the amount of light penetrating to a given depth will drop exponentially with depth, but with a different characteristic length. (Substitute time for depth and you have the radioactive decay half-life situation.)
The situation is likely to be something like this: Each layer absorbs (and therefore counts) 80% of the blue light, 50% of the green light and 20% of the red light*. So if the incoming intensities are R, G and B then:
1st layer counts.8B +.5G +.2R
2nd layer counts.16B +.25G +.16R
3rd layer counts.032B +.125G +.128R
So to disentagle the actual R, G, B values, it will be necessary to solve a set if simultaneous equations. This process will introduce substantial extra noise into the colour values.
(Another way of saying this is that the colour/response curves for each layer is quite broad.)
*This example is simpler than the real situation is likely to be, e.g. we can improve things if we make the 2nd layer twice as thick and the 3rd layer 'infinitely' thick, then we get:
Layer 1:.800B.500G.200R
Layer 2:.192B.375G.288R
Layer 3:.008B.125G.512R
which gives better colour differentiation, but no matter what we do, it will always be a mixture in each layer.
"In most jurisdictions, any illegal clause throws out the entire contract unless specifically excluded by the judge."
So if the McAfee contract clause is illegal everyone using their software (within the juristiction of the court) is no longer legally entitled to use it, and McAfee owes them all their money back?
In my employment example, my employment contract is totally negated, and I can legally distribute my employer's trade secrets but have to give them all my salary back?
I guess these are examples where the Judge would use their discretion to impose a modified replacement contract.
If the clause is found to be illegal, is it simply deemed not to exist, or can McAfee try to find a legal replacement for it?
It is hard to see what would be a legal replacement for this particular clause (if the original one is illegal), so imagine an alternative scenario.
Say my employment contract had a confidentiality clause that was so restrictive it was overturned in court as illegal. Could my employer replace it with a less restrictive clause, or would I become free to distribute their trade secrets because the only thing that had been preventing me was the voided clause?
I don't remember the details, but a non-eliptical shape implies you are looking at non-ellipsoidal thing - which in the case of a galactic bulge, pretty much means a bar.
I think our bar was first detected by stellar dynamics - looking at star velocities and locations and seeing asymmetry.
From memory, I think we are about SBab (i.e. about midway between an a and a b). It is a bit difficult to tell from inside, and so far as I know it is a subjective scale rather than quantitative. Basically it measures the ratio between bulge and disk size. Larger galaxies tend towards the 'a' end. We are in a quite large spiral galaxy.
I should have read more carefully - the BBC article *does* incorrectly claim this as a first: "Evident in the map, and seen directly for the first time, is the cigar-shaped bar..."
My apologies to the submitter of this story.
Also, I have checked and found it was COBE (cosmic background explorer) not IRAS that made my poster. Here it is. Notice how this too reveals the squarish, thicker towards the edges shape of the bulge indicating a bar seen obliquely.
As is so often the case in journalism, this claim is wildly overselling things (and is not made in the BBC article.) I was using IRAS (infrared astronomy satellite) and various earthbound surveys (including the much earlier TMSS two micron all sky survey) around 1990, and have an IRAS poster from that era at home showing our galaxy (including the core.) Similarly, we have known for over a decade that our galaxy is a barred spiral.
Is this a case of the more overblown your submission, the more likely slashdot is to carry the story?
I'm not knocking the 2MASS survey - high quality all sky surveys like this lead to huge amounts of high quality science.
I remember an article in New Scientist from years ago about a company that was the first to succesfully genetically engineer cotton claiming a patent on all genetically engineered cotton - just the sort of excess you complain about.
I've said this before: patents should distinguish between means and ends, and one may be patentable when the other is not.
Examples:
Self developing film: obvious end, inobvious means.
Hula hoop: obvious means, inobvious end (so the developers could prevent loops of hose being sold as a toy for swinging around one's body, but not loops of hose being used for other means.)
Rubic's cube: inobvious means, inobvious end.
One-click shopping using cookies: obvious means, obvious end.
I had a physics lecturer like that once - describing how in a semiconductor the lonely holes and electrons would meet and annihilate each other in a burst of passion. A great teacher is a joy to behold.
I enjoy teaching when I get the chance, but I know I'm way short of these heights. I've volunteered to do some mathematics and astronomy teaching for the local 'gifted kids' program to keep my hand in. Teaching *and* perl programming - the ideal job:-).
Ah well, time to stop wasting my employer's time by posting to slashdot and instead to continue wasting it by writing Perl programs to generate random sentences in English and Latin.
The free money thinks about ancient gates.
Pecunia libera portis antiquis cogitat.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Evacuation - people are on average much further from the edge of the plane. This probably isn't too big an issue - people already often have to go quite a way along the airplane to get to the closest exit.
2) Cargo - the constant cross-section of cylindrical planes means you can have standard size cargo pallets that fit anywhere in the plane. This plane has a much less regular shape. Perhaps they have sufficient volume they can afford to waste some.
3) Engine maintenance. The engines on this plane are very high and hard to access from the ground. This is already the case for the number 2 engines of DC-10, MD-11 and L1011's, so there is prior experience in handling this, but it will add to maintenence cost.
4) Manufacturing cost. In a constant cross-section fusilage, many panels, ribs etc. can be used many times over.
5) Difficulty in adjusting size. You can stretch or (rarely) shrink the length of a cylindrical fusilage fairly easily.
Of course, you can accept quite a few negatives in return for a 30% gain in economy.
Finally, there is the risk of the unexpected - revolutionary designs frequently stumble over unexpected problems that take a while to iron out - e.g. Comet (metal fatigue in presurized airframe), high tail planes like the DC 9 ('deep stall'), A320 (human/computer interface problems).
Four things in this world are sacred: books, children, freedom and generosity.
with fewer* than one byte per year of Knuth's life:
perl -e '@a=1..pop;sub a{@a?map@a=(a(@_,pop@a),@a),@a:print"@_\n";pop}a' 4
* I'm just counting the perl code, not the 'perl -e' and quotes for the shell.
Once we went on holiday and asked the little old lady next door to feed our normal weight cat.
We returned to a black furry blimp. I had not realized it was possible to increase weight by 50% in 2 weeks.
The second is part of the metric system - you can't change how long it is (or replace it with another time unit) without changing most of the rest of the metric system too (such as units of energy, voltage*, power, torque, pressure, force ...) If you stay with the second, you are stuck with the fact that the apparent motion of the Big Light has a period of 86400 seconds, which is not a power of 10. Any time system that does not sync well with the Big Light will not be popular so long as we stay on Earth.
* Technically I should use something like 'electric potential difference' here, but then hardly anyone would know what I meant. Analogously, some people use the terms 'wattage' when they should say 'power' and 'amperage' when they should say 'electric current', but that is just rank ignorance. It is in no way comparable to my use of the term 'voltage'. Nope, not at all.
Any time you pay for a yes/no decision, all you've paid goes for a single bit. E.g. the millions spent on prosecution and defense of the over-hyped OJ Simpson trial all paid for the bit '0'. Similarly if you spend millions of dollars to business consultants to answer a question like 'should HP and Compaq merge?'
It is debatable whether these really are paying for just one bit - the OJ trial produced lots of public information, and the yes/no business descisions undoubtedly come with heafty reports explaining how the result was arrived at.
A test is to imagine an oracle that will (with known 100% accuracy) answer a question like 'If OJ goes to trial for murder, will he be found guilty?' If this result would be considered a sufficient substitute for actually holding the trial, then all those millions were indeed spent on one bit.
Imagine setting it to show you more pornographic pictures the more relaxed you got.
Possibility 1:
* You relax
* You get exciting pictures
* You get excited
* Pictures get boring
* Cycle repeats until
* You get so frustrated you get nothing but pictures of fluffy kittens.
Possibility 2:
* You learn to relax to get the hard core images
* You get habituated, so sex sends you to sleep.
proving that not everything goes around the earth.
Good question on the efficiency. I'd guess '20% efficient' (or 40% for this new process) means either:
* You can extract 20% as much energy from the produced hydrogen as you expended to extract it from the sewage.
* You can extract 20% as much energy from the produced hydrogen, after deducting the cost of extraction, compared to the theoretical energy you could extract from the sewage by fully oxidizing it.
I disagree with the dangerous part, however. Hydrogen is safer than petrol/gasoline:
* Lower energy density
* Disperses *very* quickly, so it is hard to accumulate enough around a leak site to make a decent explosion.
Once dispersed, the hydrogen is harmless. Uranium is chemically extremely toxic. Both the chemical and radioactivity toxicity are not rendered harmless by dispersal - you just do less poisoning to more area. I would guess that for nearly pure uranium, the chemical toxicity is worse than the radioactivity. Once used in a reactor, however, the result is highly radioactive and will remain dangerous for thousands of years.
I used to have in my sig something like "I always mod down posts that refer to their own moderation", but I gave it up partly because I never have time to moderate anyhow.
I think you have misunderstood. Once you have given a legitimate, non-expired key the software will work forever. The only time you need to go back to Ambrosia is if you bought the key and didn't get around to applying it before it expired, or (I expect) if you reinstall. The reinstall is a problem, but not as bad as your scenario. (More like spare parts becoming unavailable when GM goes out of business.)
The article's closing sentence is: Perhaps if campaign finance reform succeeds in helping good arguments compete against ready cash, copyright will right itself.
The fight against DCMA, copyright extension, UCITA (or whatever it was - the law being peddled to states to give click-through licenses teeth etc.) are all worthwhile, but they are attacking the symptoms. The influence of money over politics is the cause.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen or resident, so arguably this really isn't my business.)
Anybody want to get some easy karma by posting links to campaign finance reform organizations?
0.7% of mass is converted to energy burning ordinary hydrogen to helium, so your 4 million tonnes/s mass -> energy implies about 600 million tonnes/s of hydrogen used up.*
It is slow in that a hydrogen atom (actually a proton, as it will be ionized) in the core of the sun has only a very low probability per second of being 'consumed', or equivalently it has a lifetime/halflife** of billions of years.
Only a fraction of the hydrogen in the sun will actually get burned before the sun 'burns out' - the rest will be expelled in a stellar wind during the red giant phase. The fraction is on the order of one half.
* Mdot = 6x10^11 kg/s. M = 2x10^30 => T = 3x10^18 s = 10^11 years. This is high by a factor of 10, but doesn't account for not all the hydrogen being burned, or the much higher luminosity during red giant phase of evolution.
** These are not quite synonymous, differing by a constant factor (ln 2).
The surface of the sun is at about 5700K, far below that required for fusion. I thought this meant the science was totally implausible, but it turns out to be an error in the Slashdot summary. ...".
The article claims "simulations also indicate that temperatures inside the collapsing bubbles may reach up to 10 million degrees Kelvin, as hot as the center of the sun." and "Temperatures inside these bubbles can be as high as 5000-7000 degrees Kelvin, about as hot as the sun?s surface. But, recent experiments by a number of researchers suggest that bubble temperatures can reach even higher temperatures--closer to the heat needed for nuclear fusion
Deuterium 'burns' at much lower temperatures than the ordinary hydrogen burning that powers our sun (where reaction rates are so slow it will take billions of years to use up the fuel supply.)
I'm a bit worried about how well this will differentiate colours - the colour filtering is pretty crude - i.e. how far the penetrates the silicon. Almost certainly this will be a mean-free-path like dependency - the amount of light penetrating to a given depth will drop exponentially with depth, but with a different characteristic length. (Substitute time for depth and you have the radioactive decay half-life situation.)
.8B + .5G + .2R
.16B + .25G + .16R
.032B + .125G + .128R
.800B .500G .200R
.192B .375G .288R
.008B .125G .512R
The situation is likely to be something like this: Each layer absorbs (and therefore counts) 80% of the blue light, 50% of the green light and 20% of the red light*. So if the incoming intensities are R, G and B then:
1st layer counts
2nd layer counts
3rd layer counts
So to disentagle the actual R, G, B values, it will be necessary to solve a set if simultaneous equations. This process will introduce substantial extra noise into the colour values.
(Another way of saying this is that the colour/response curves for each layer is quite broad.)
*This example is simpler than the real situation is likely to be, e.g. we can improve things if we make the 2nd layer twice as thick and the 3rd layer 'infinitely' thick, then we get:
Layer 1:
Layer 2:
Layer 3:
which gives better colour differentiation, but no matter what we do, it will always be a mixture in each layer.
"In most jurisdictions, any illegal clause throws out the entire contract unless specifically excluded by the judge."
So if the McAfee contract clause is illegal everyone using their software (within the juristiction of the court) is no longer legally entitled to use it, and McAfee owes them all their money back?
In my employment example, my employment contract is totally negated, and I can legally distribute my employer's trade secrets but have to give them all my salary back?
I guess these are examples where the Judge would use their discretion to impose a modified replacement contract.
If the clause is found to be illegal, is it simply deemed not to exist, or can McAfee try to find a legal replacement for it?
It is hard to see what would be a legal replacement for this particular clause (if the original one is illegal), so imagine an alternative scenario.
Say my employment contract had a confidentiality clause that was so restrictive it was overturned in court as illegal. Could my employer replace it with a less restrictive clause, or would I become free to distribute their trade secrets because the only thing that had been preventing me was the voided clause?
I don't remember the details, but a non-eliptical shape implies you are looking at non-ellipsoidal thing - which in the case of a galactic bulge, pretty much means a bar.
I think our bar was first detected by stellar dynamics - looking at star velocities and locations and seeing asymmetry.
From memory, I think we are about SBab (i.e. about midway between an a and a b). It is a bit difficult to tell from inside, and so far as I know it is a subjective scale rather than quantitative. Basically it measures the ratio between bulge and disk size. Larger galaxies tend towards the 'a' end. We are in a quite large spiral galaxy.
I should have read more carefully - the BBC article *does* incorrectly claim this as a first: "Evident in the map, and seen directly for the first time, is the cigar-shaped bar..."
My apologies to the submitter of this story.
Also, I have checked and found it was COBE (cosmic background explorer) not IRAS that made my poster. Here it is. Notice how this too reveals the squarish, thicker towards the edges shape of the bulge indicating a bar seen obliquely.
As is so often the case in journalism, this claim is wildly overselling things (and is not made in the BBC article.) I was using IRAS (infrared astronomy satellite) and various earthbound surveys (including the much earlier TMSS two micron all sky survey) around 1990, and have an IRAS poster from that era at home showing our galaxy (including the core.) Similarly, we have known for over a decade that our galaxy is a barred spiral.
Is this a case of the more overblown your submission, the more likely slashdot is to carry the story?
I'm not knocking the 2MASS survey - high quality all sky surveys like this lead to huge amounts of high quality science.
for those who enjoy simple cryptanalysis:
perl -0777pe'$a="a";s/[a-z]/$b{lc$&}||=$a++/gei' filename
I use paragraphs of Jane Austin from Project Guttenburg to feed the cypher generator.
I remember an article in New Scientist from years ago about a company that was the first to succesfully genetically engineer cotton claiming a patent on all genetically engineered cotton - just the sort of excess you complain about.
I've said this before: patents should distinguish between means and ends, and one may be patentable when the other is not.
Examples:
Self developing film: obvious end, inobvious means.
Hula hoop: obvious means, inobvious end (so the developers could prevent loops of hose being sold as a toy for swinging around one's body, but not loops of hose being used for other means.)
Rubic's cube: inobvious means, inobvious end.
One-click shopping using cookies: obvious means, obvious end.
Or until January 20 2038, whichever comes first.
I had a physics lecturer like that once - describing how in a semiconductor the lonely holes and electrons would meet and annihilate each other in a burst of passion. A great teacher is a joy to behold.
:-).
I enjoy teaching when I get the chance, but I know I'm way short of these heights. I've volunteered to do some mathematics and astronomy teaching for the local 'gifted kids' program to keep my hand in. Teaching *and* perl programming - the ideal job
Ah well, time to stop wasting my employer's time by posting to slashdot and instead to continue wasting it by writing Perl programs to generate random sentences in English and Latin.
The free money thinks about ancient gates.
Pecunia libera portis antiquis cogitat.