Well, someone might say that we (the U.S.) are NOT europe, we do not share a common history, we do not share economic status, we do not share wealth, we do not share many, many laws, we do not share a class system... We are our own nation and we have our own strengths and weaknesses. We do things our way in a way that is different from european countries.
Or as my grandma said, "wherever you go, there you are."
Funny thing is, most gun deaths in the US are suicides. I personally support the right of a person to suicide. Whoa, check this out! The US is number 30 on the list of male suicides per capita listed by countries! That means... Hmm I don't know what that means wrt gun deaths, but wow- Sweden, new zealand, australia, canada, germany, demark, heck, most of europe has higher suicide rates than the US. I'm not going to extrapolate what those numbers might mean to either side of the gun debate, but boy is that interesting. I guess you can draw your own conclusions.
This isn't just about hardware; this has a lot to do with socioeconomic factors here in the US. Most european nations have a higher standard of living and lower poverty rates than the US- that alone accounts for the great disparity of crimes rates. The US ought to get its act together and start helping the downtrodden, but until that happens crime is a still very real, and it has little to do with weapons.
>>One wild round or accidental discharge and you may have killed an innocent bystander.
The same thing is true about automobiles (in a roundabout way) and that hasn't slowed down hundreds of thousands of people from killing each other in collisions.
It's time that the US got their priorities straight. You decide what that means.
There is a bumper sticker that is pretty common around here (northern MN):
"Kids who hunt, fish, and trap don't rob little old ladies"
While it can be taken seriously or tongue-in-cheek, I have to admit that it makes a little bit of sense. I'd need to see the numbers before I decided one way or another.
Of course this then brings up the real issue, which is that many (most?) 'enthusiastic' gun rights advocates are really just scared of inner-city, mostly minority youth, who really can't go out hunting and fishing in the first place. It makes me sad to say this, but I live in a city of 86,000 that is a cross section (racially) of the country and I have never seen a minority citizen buying a game or fishing license or buying a gun, and I do those things often. It is even more disappointing to know that starting an organization that encouraged responsible gun use and game conservation among inner city youth would be met by the public like a new kitten poison.
>>The vast majority of legal gun owners (proper license, clean background, etc) in the US commits a disproportionally lower percentage of the violent crime.
Just throwing a thought out there-
$150- cost of concealed carry permit (also good for handgun purchases) here in MN $200+- base cost for reliable handgun; most cost much more $20-50- box of decent self-defense ammo, though I suppose FMJ could work in a pinch if you were desperate $50-100- decent concealed holster or pouch $100-500- enough ammo to get OK practice with handgun; pie-plate accuracy if you keep it up
So we have ~$520 for a half-way decent handgun, ammo, practice, and permit. What the hell kind of criminal would pay that? OF COURSE legal gun owners will ALWAYS commit proportionately less crime. They have at least $500 of "disposable" income to spend on decent hardware and keeping legit. Poverty being one of the prime motivators for crime, the legal gun owners will always come out looking good because they obviously lack the motivation to go around committing violent crime (poverty).
>>The only thing I really get with a bigger house is bragging rights and a whole lot more maintenance.
Not quite true. In a condo or apartment, the money you pay goes to the landlord. After 30 years, you are that much poorer. When you buy a house, you are building equity and at the end of 30 years (or sooner), you own a house that is worth roughly what you put into it. The more you invest in the down payment, the more this is true.
I lived in an apartment for the last 7-8 years and that money is gone forever. I just bought a house, and while it is a pain in the ass initially (gutting and remodelling it), I will make back more than the money I invested in it.
You also get a place to call your own- a place you can decorate the way you want, where you make the rules, where you have the freedom to do almost whatever you want. THAT I think is the true american dream, or at the very least it's the best part of being an adult: Freedom is earned, one way or another, and buying a house is one way that we do that. There is no freedom living in a rental. You may not have any responsibilies, either, but you live at the whim of your landlord and your asshole neighbors.
>>Then again, it is mostly accepted these days that being overweight is bad for you, in all kind of different ways, so maybe a tax on fat is not such a bad idea, especially if human fat is recycled into bio-fuel.
No need to take it out, the human body comes complete with bio-fuel->useful movemenet synthesizers commonly referred to as muscles.
The energy released via x-rays and hawking radiation would, unless I am off by several orders of magnitude, not nearly be as efficient as you say.
Black holes have gravity because of the mass they absorbed. If they converted mass into energy in these vast percentages, they would never become as massive as you usually find them to be (big enough to be detectable, that is). A black hole that would emit enough energy to pay for itself would require the mass of the entire solar system at least, and I think that mass could serve better uses, seeing as how we'd never get it back again.
I am also not a physicist, and I have a question that's been bothering me for a while.
I understand the concept of black holes, how they work wrt mass and gravity. However, I was under the impression that
-all matter exerts gravitational force -gravity follows the inverse cube or square rule that light follows (can't remember which one) -the existing sun's diameter is greater than 0
So in my mind, the mass at the surface and middle of the sun exert tremendous gravitational pull on us almost as much as the center of the sun, accounting for density. In my mind what would happen is that the 2/3 of the sun's mass that was affecting us would now be millions of miles farther away. Would that not affect our orbit?
Wait. It just occurred to me that the mass on the OTHER side of the sun would also become CLOSER to us, maybe cancelling out the afore-mentioned affects. Crap. Did I just answer my own question?
-New FISA Bill Would Grant Telcoms Immunity; Vote Is Tomorrow
-McCain Backs Nuclear Power
- Netflix To Eliminate Profiles Feature
If our friendly polish, french, swedish, brazilian, et al readers cannot be bothered to know at least roughly what the difference between F and C is, then why on earth would they bother to come to this website in the first place when 1/3 of the content is completely US-centric and another 1/3 is based on US companies?
I don't think you're giving people enough credit. Kind of reminds me of those people who say things like, "well, it doesn't offend ME, but maybe you should take that down just to be safe."
Let the nerds who can't figure out Fahrenheit speak for themselves.
>>It could be argued that the no child left behind act is largely responsible for our corrupt, money hungry, and materialistic society today.
The NCLB Act of 2001? The one that was passed into law in 2002? It is remarkable that we went from a pure, altruistic, ascetic society into the dystopia you describe in merely 6 years...
I'm not a supporter of the Act by any means or in any way, but your argument is weakened by your ignorance or exaggeration of the import of removing ethics classes within the last ~6 years.
The use of 'kill switch' in the headline really bugged me, but for different reasons. A kill switch is a very common thing; My grass trimmer has one (shorts out the spark plug wire, killing the engine), a lot of diesel equipment at work has them, I know that a lot of big iron servers use them (the emergency power shutoff 'big red button'), gas stations have the same thing, etc.
What I'm trying to say is that kill switches, like dead-man switches, are very common things but their unfortunate names lead to easy media sensationalizing. A 'kill-switch' would be used on the ground before takeoff. If an airplane needed to be taken down while in flight, it would likely be done with an AIM 120 missile or a suitable substitute (manpads are not suitable subs).
I see you got modded +5, and all the more power to you, but your comment may as well have said, "I'll never get on anything with a SPDT switch!" Aircraft already have a variety of 'kill switches' that you just don't know about.
You're right- popularity has nothing to do with being 'right'. I just think that there is enough evidence for Jesus being a real person with an effect on historical society.
Oh for a time machine. My kingdom for a time machine! Society would, of course, fall apart.
I think that it is enough to say that Jesus/the apostles/christian theologians have had a profound effect on western society throughout the ages without saying that they were 'right' one way or another. His coming/passing signaled a sea change in western philosophy that rivals the industrial revolution in its range throughout people's lives. I would say the same thing about muhummad but not Joseph Smith (not yet at least). I mean, we're talking about a religion/cult that had a huge effect on the Roman Empire, even if its decline wasn't directly related to christianity. I think that Jesus's life and his influence throughout the roman empire coincide closely enough to call him an early joseph smith-style prophet who gained traction based on his ideas, which were kind of revolutionary at the time. Joe Smith's influence is limited partly (imo) because he said nothing new really except for his historical revisionism and the claim that god spoke to him. Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum!
It's all just speculation, of course, without that damned time machine. If we were ever on the verge of creating working time travel technology, I wonder which religions would sponsor it and which would suppress it.
It's a good off-the-shelf solution for knowing where your rolling stock is. Train schedules are incredibly complex and are laid out to the second, so having a high degree of accuracy of the locations of your locomotives with no initial R&D investment is a hell of a deal.
I mean, you could say the same thing about cars- they mostly just stay on the road, right?
Well, the thing about Jesus is that although he probably traveled a lot and carried few possessions (meaning little physical evidence), he had a profound impact on the people around him. This effect CAN in fact be researched; there are in fact many accounts from different sources that describe the early christian movement. A particularly good source were descriptions of early christian rebellion in the Roman Empire; the movement started out very small but devoted, and their remarkable acts of faith caught the attention of the highest rulers to the commoners.
I would not even care to say one way or another if Jesus as a real person had some kind of divinity or appearance of divinity- I myself am as much an atheist as a person can be- but he wrought some pretty important changes in society at the time that are easy to trace. It's like finding black holes by looking at the ways they affect the space around them instead of finding the actual singularity.
>>Tensile strength is how well a material can resist pulling, not bending or compression.
Bending IS tensile stress (unless you are working with a compressible material). If you bend a beam, you are stretching the side that is becoming convex and attempting to compress the concave side. I suspect you will have a difficult time showing that tensile stress is unrelated to 'bending stress'. Hardness and toughness are also different measures of material strength. They all vary relative to each other depending on material. And, as i've pointed out elsewhere, tensile and shear strengths do not scale equally nor are they related or identical, even in the same material. Read the modulus tables for Fe vs Al alloys sometime- fascinating.
>>Not a lot of our building techniques rely primarily on tensile strength, most rely on spanning gaps with weight bearing members.
Erm... what kind of stress do you think 'spanning gaps' will produce? Tensile strength is very important in the middle 2/3 of a horizontal structural member like a floor joist. You have some shear stress at the ends, but that pales in comparison to the tensile forces placed on the joist in the middle. There is no such thing as 'bending' strength. Bending is a compound stress that includes compressive and tensile stresses. If you load a horizontal beam, the top of the beam will try to compress, and the bottom of the beam will try to stretch. In wood and most materials, the compressive and shear strength is orders of magnitude greater than the tensile strength, which is why it is so important. I can virtually guarantee that you will not find cases of structural failure in wood-frame buildings due to shear stress before tensile stress causes damage.
Be careful with you stresses- many of them are compound stresses that reuse the basic ones. Torsion, for example, is simply shear stress perpendicular to the axis of rotation. And so on.
On the other hand, aluminum foil is basically pure aluminum, while aluminum alloys contain up to around 10% of either copper, zinc, tin, etc. Some special 7000-series alloys have tensile strengths surpassing some of the softer steels; they are however shockingly expensive and brittle (and they ring like glass when struck).
The aluminum found in aluminum foil would never be used in aircraft construction or anything else requiring strength. While I love materials science, TFA or the researchers (whoever chose this comparison w/ cast iron) are way off base here. Anyone who has worked with thin materials including cast iron knows that tensile and shear strengths do not scale and are not compatible among different metals (example: you can't replace thick aluminum with thinner steel because although the tensile strength may be higher, the shear strength will be lower. This is important in aircraft repair, as some members endure one or both stresses).
Also, tearing a sheet of foil constitutes shear stress, not tensile. A sheet of aluminum foil perfectly supported somehow on both ends so that the force was equal along its length would be stronger than you might imagine. Think of it this way:
12 inch sheet X.005 inch thick=.060" total cross-sectional area
That gives you a wire with diameter of.276". That's a pretty beefy wire even for a soft metal.
>>Fussing that RepRap is not 'perfectly self-replicating' yet is an extremely common criticism. >>This pedantic but factually true statement glosses over the fact that it's a machine that cheaply >>and easily makes its own parts*, using inexpensive feedstock. And it can make other useful things. >>That's the important stuff, which your criticism fails to address.
Then why is is that all I ever hear about are 'self-replicating' machines only to find out that you have to buy/make all the metal/electronics/etc? I work in a machine shop- every tool there is a self-replicating tool according to you definition. The lathes would of course require you to operate them, but the CNC mills are literally capable of building (non-cnc versions of) themselves.
I find it disingenuous to call anything self-replicating or to say that it makes its own parts unless there is something an order of magnitude easier or cheaper about it then a cheapo Grizzly vertical mill.
>>And in reality, if you want the best indicator that people are going to vote a Democrat president in, look at the Republican house and senate seats that have been lost already to Democrats this year.
On the other hand, the election might come a day after americans realize that the new Democratic congress hasn't done a damned thing. I think that the democrats are really shooting themselves in the foot here- they claim a mandate by saying that they have the voting majority, but in reality they don't (due to illnesses, etc), and they come off looking either useless or toothless. Whether the reason for that is numerical weakness or actual willingness to bend to the administration matters little for their public image. When the election comes around, the D's had better improve their image as capable, powerful, and benevolent instead of coming off like a bunch of milquetoasts.
I'm not trying to be nitpicky here- if anyone knows the answer, please chime in- but shouldn't the offense here be slander instead of libel? Or are they close enough that the courts just use libel in all cases?
>>It's not an embarrassment for the DoE, it's an embarrassment for the Bush Administration and the Republican party in general-
I disagree. It is not an embarrassment- not by a long shot: It is a vindication of the long-held conservative opinion that science and art shouldn't be publicly funded. This basically proves: "If private individuals want science and art bad enough, they will fund it themselves once the gov't checks stop."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, someone might say that we (the U.S.) are NOT europe, we do not share a common history, we do not share economic status, we do not share wealth, we do not share many, many laws, we do not share a class system... We are our own nation and we have our own strengths and weaknesses. We do things our way in a way that is different from european countries.
Or as my grandma said, "wherever you go, there you are."
Funny thing is, most gun deaths in the US are suicides. I personally support the right of a person to suicide. Whoa, check this out! The US is number 30 on the list of male suicides per capita listed by countries! That means... Hmm I don't know what that means wrt gun deaths, but wow- Sweden, new zealand, australia, canada, germany, demark, heck, most of europe has higher suicide rates than the US. I'm not going to extrapolate what those numbers might mean to either side of the gun debate, but boy is that interesting. I guess you can draw your own conclusions.
-b
This isn't just about hardware; this has a lot to do with socioeconomic factors here in the US. Most european nations have a higher standard of living and lower poverty rates than the US- that alone accounts for the great disparity of crimes rates. The US ought to get its act together and start helping the downtrodden, but until that happens crime is a still very real, and it has little to do with weapons.
-b
>>One wild round or accidental discharge and you may have killed an innocent bystander.
The same thing is true about automobiles (in a roundabout way) and that hasn't slowed down hundreds of thousands of people from killing each other in collisions.
It's time that the US got their priorities straight. You decide what that means.
-b
There is a bumper sticker that is pretty common around here (northern MN):
"Kids who hunt, fish, and trap don't rob little old ladies"
While it can be taken seriously or tongue-in-cheek, I have to admit that it makes a little bit of sense. I'd need to see the numbers before I decided one way or another.
Of course this then brings up the real issue, which is that many (most?) 'enthusiastic' gun rights advocates are really just scared of inner-city, mostly minority youth, who really can't go out hunting and fishing in the first place. It makes me sad to say this, but I live in a city of 86,000 that is a cross section (racially) of the country and I have never seen a minority citizen buying a game or fishing license or buying a gun, and I do those things often. It is even more disappointing to know that starting an organization that encouraged responsible gun use and game conservation among inner city youth would be met by the public like a new kitten poison.
America, please get your shit together.
-b
>>The vast majority of legal gun owners (proper license, clean background, etc) in the US commits a disproportionally lower percentage of the violent crime.
Just throwing a thought out there-
$150- cost of concealed carry permit (also good for handgun purchases) here in MN
$200+- base cost for reliable handgun; most cost much more
$20-50- box of decent self-defense ammo, though I suppose FMJ could work in a pinch if you were desperate
$50-100- decent concealed holster or pouch
$100-500- enough ammo to get OK practice with handgun; pie-plate accuracy if you keep it up
So we have ~$520 for a half-way decent handgun, ammo, practice, and permit. What the hell kind of criminal would pay that? OF COURSE legal gun owners will ALWAYS commit proportionately less crime. They have at least $500 of "disposable" income to spend on decent hardware and keeping legit. Poverty being one of the prime motivators for crime, the legal gun owners will always come out looking good because they obviously lack the motivation to go around committing violent crime (poverty).
Just the two cents of a legal handgun owner.
-b
President Arnold Schwarzenegger: "I was elected to LEAD, not to READ [emails]."
-b
>>The only thing I really get with a bigger house is bragging rights and a whole lot more maintenance.
Not quite true. In a condo or apartment, the money you pay goes to the landlord. After 30 years, you are that much poorer. When you buy a house, you are building equity and at the end of 30 years (or sooner), you own a house that is worth roughly what you put into it. The more you invest in the down payment, the more this is true.
I lived in an apartment for the last 7-8 years and that money is gone forever. I just bought a house, and while it is a pain in the ass initially (gutting and remodelling it), I will make back more than the money I invested in it.
You also get a place to call your own- a place you can decorate the way you want, where you make the rules, where you have the freedom to do almost whatever you want. THAT I think is the true american dream, or at the very least it's the best part of being an adult: Freedom is earned, one way or another, and buying a house is one way that we do that. There is no freedom living in a rental. You may not have any responsibilies, either, but you live at the whim of your landlord and your asshole neighbors.
-b
>>Then again, it is mostly accepted these days that being overweight is bad for you, in all kind of different ways, so maybe a tax on fat is not such a bad idea, especially if human fat is recycled into bio-fuel.
No need to take it out, the human body comes complete with bio-fuel->useful movemenet synthesizers commonly referred to as muscles.
-b
>>It is not the size that matters. Forcibly taking away someone's productivity (in the form of money) is no different from theft.
Using public and/or common services and resources without paying for them is also theft. Your argument presents a false dilemma.
-b
Where would the mass come from?
The energy released via x-rays and hawking radiation would, unless I am off by several orders of magnitude, not nearly be as efficient as you say.
Black holes have gravity because of the mass they absorbed. If they converted mass into energy in these vast percentages, they would never become as massive as you usually find them to be (big enough to be detectable, that is). A black hole that would emit enough energy to pay for itself would require the mass of the entire solar system at least, and I think that mass could serve better uses, seeing as how we'd never get it back again.
-b
I am also not a physicist, and I have a question that's been bothering me for a while.
I understand the concept of black holes, how they work wrt mass and gravity. However, I was under the impression that
-all matter exerts gravitational force
-gravity follows the inverse cube or square rule that light follows (can't remember which one)
-the existing sun's diameter is greater than 0
So in my mind, the mass at the surface and middle of the sun exert tremendous gravitational pull on us almost as much as the center of the sun, accounting for density. In my mind what would happen is that the 2/3 of the sun's mass that was affecting us would now be millions of miles farther away. Would that not affect our orbit?
Wait. It just occurred to me that the mass on the OTHER side of the sun would also become CLOSER to us, maybe cancelling out the afore-mentioned affects. Crap. Did I just answer my own question?
-b
Headlines from the main page:
-New FISA Bill Would Grant Telcoms Immunity; Vote Is Tomorrow
-McCain Backs Nuclear Power
- Netflix To Eliminate Profiles Feature
If our friendly polish, french, swedish, brazilian, et al readers cannot be bothered to know at least roughly what the difference between F and C is, then why on earth would they bother to come to this website in the first place when 1/3 of the content is completely US-centric and another 1/3 is based on US companies?
I don't think you're giving people enough credit. Kind of reminds me of those people who say things like, "well, it doesn't offend ME, but maybe you should take that down just to be safe."
Let the nerds who can't figure out Fahrenheit speak for themselves.
-b
>>It could be argued that the no child left behind act is largely responsible for our corrupt, money hungry, and materialistic society today.
The NCLB Act of 2001? The one that was passed into law in 2002? It is remarkable that we went from a pure, altruistic, ascetic society into the dystopia you describe in merely 6 years...
I'm not a supporter of the Act by any means or in any way, but your argument is weakened by your ignorance or exaggeration of the import of removing ethics classes within the last ~6 years.
-b
The use of 'kill switch' in the headline really bugged me, but for different reasons. A kill switch is a very common thing; My grass trimmer has one (shorts out the spark plug wire, killing the engine), a lot of diesel equipment at work has them, I know that a lot of big iron servers use them (the emergency power shutoff 'big red button'), gas stations have the same thing, etc.
What I'm trying to say is that kill switches, like dead-man switches, are very common things but their unfortunate names lead to easy media sensationalizing. A 'kill-switch' would be used on the ground before takeoff. If an airplane needed to be taken down while in flight, it would likely be done with an AIM 120 missile or a suitable substitute (manpads are not suitable subs).
I see you got modded +5, and all the more power to you, but your comment may as well have said, "I'll never get on anything with a SPDT switch!" Aircraft already have a variety of 'kill switches' that you just don't know about.
-b
You're right- popularity has nothing to do with being 'right'. I just think that there is enough evidence for Jesus being a real person with an effect on historical society.
Oh for a time machine. My kingdom for a time machine! Society would, of course, fall apart.
I think that it is enough to say that Jesus/the apostles/christian theologians have had a profound effect on western society throughout the ages without saying that they were 'right' one way or another. His coming/passing signaled a sea change in western philosophy that rivals the industrial revolution in its range throughout people's lives. I would say the same thing about muhummad but not Joseph Smith (not yet at least). I mean, we're talking about a religion/cult that had a huge effect on the Roman Empire, even if its decline wasn't directly related to christianity. I think that Jesus's life and his influence throughout the roman empire coincide closely enough to call him an early joseph smith-style prophet who gained traction based on his ideas, which were kind of revolutionary at the time. Joe Smith's influence is limited partly (imo) because he said nothing new really except for his historical revisionism and the claim that god spoke to him. Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum!
It's all just speculation, of course, without that damned time machine. If we were ever on the verge of creating working time travel technology, I wonder which religions would sponsor it and which would suppress it.
-b
It's a good off-the-shelf solution for knowing where your rolling stock is. Train schedules are incredibly complex and are laid out to the second, so having a high degree of accuracy of the locations of your locomotives with no initial R&D investment is a hell of a deal.
I mean, you could say the same thing about cars- they mostly just stay on the road, right?
-b
Dammit! You got me all excited about a smart comedian and it turns out his work is in GERMAN! Ich bin piste und weining!
-b
Well, the thing about Jesus is that although he probably traveled a lot and carried few possessions (meaning little physical evidence), he had a profound impact on the people around him. This effect CAN in fact be researched; there are in fact many accounts from different sources that describe the early christian movement. A particularly good source were descriptions of early christian rebellion in the Roman Empire; the movement started out very small but devoted, and their remarkable acts of faith caught the attention of the highest rulers to the commoners.
I would not even care to say one way or another if Jesus as a real person had some kind of divinity or appearance of divinity- I myself am as much an atheist as a person can be- but he wrought some pretty important changes in society at the time that are easy to trace. It's like finding black holes by looking at the ways they affect the space around them instead of finding the actual singularity.
-b
>>Tensile strength is how well a material can resist pulling, not bending or compression.
Bending IS tensile stress (unless you are working with a compressible material). If you bend a beam, you are stretching the side that is becoming convex and attempting to compress the concave side. I suspect you will have a difficult time showing that tensile stress is unrelated to 'bending stress'. Hardness and toughness are also different measures of material strength. They all vary relative to each other depending on material. And, as i've pointed out elsewhere, tensile and shear strengths do not scale equally nor are they related or identical, even in the same material. Read the modulus tables for Fe vs Al alloys sometime- fascinating.
-b
>>Not a lot of our building techniques rely primarily on tensile strength, most rely on spanning gaps with weight bearing members.
Erm... what kind of stress do you think 'spanning gaps' will produce? Tensile strength is very important in the middle 2/3 of a horizontal structural member like a floor joist. You have some shear stress at the ends, but that pales in comparison to the tensile forces placed on the joist in the middle. There is no such thing as 'bending' strength. Bending is a compound stress that includes compressive and tensile stresses. If you load a horizontal beam, the top of the beam will try to compress, and the bottom of the beam will try to stretch. In wood and most materials, the compressive and shear strength is orders of magnitude greater than the tensile strength, which is why it is so important. I can virtually guarantee that you will not find cases of structural failure in wood-frame buildings due to shear stress before tensile stress causes damage.
Be careful with you stresses- many of them are compound stresses that reuse the basic ones. Torsion, for example, is simply shear stress perpendicular to the axis of rotation. And so on.
-b
On the other hand, aluminum foil is basically pure aluminum, while aluminum alloys contain up to around 10% of either copper, zinc, tin, etc. Some special 7000-series alloys have tensile strengths surpassing some of the softer steels; they are however shockingly expensive and brittle (and they ring like glass when struck).
.005 inch thick= .060" total cross-sectional area
.276". That's a pretty beefy wire even for a soft metal.
The aluminum found in aluminum foil would never be used in aircraft construction or anything else requiring strength. While I love materials science, TFA or the researchers (whoever chose this comparison w/ cast iron) are way off base here. Anyone who has worked with thin materials including cast iron knows that tensile and shear strengths do not scale and are not compatible among different metals (example: you can't replace thick aluminum with thinner steel because although the tensile strength may be higher, the shear strength will be lower. This is important in aircraft repair, as some members endure one or both stresses).
Also, tearing a sheet of foil constitutes shear stress, not tensile. A sheet of aluminum foil perfectly supported somehow on both ends so that the force was equal along its length would be stronger than you might imagine. Think of it this way:
12 inch sheet X
That gives you a wire with diameter of
-b
>>Fussing that RepRap is not 'perfectly self-replicating' yet is an extremely common criticism.
>>This pedantic but factually true statement glosses over the fact that it's a machine that cheaply
>>and easily makes its own parts*, using inexpensive feedstock. And it can make other useful things.
>>That's the important stuff, which your criticism fails to address.
Then why is is that all I ever hear about are 'self-replicating' machines only to find out that you have to buy/make all the metal/electronics/etc? I work in a machine shop- every tool there is a self-replicating tool according to you definition. The lathes would of course require you to operate them, but the CNC mills are literally capable of building (non-cnc versions of) themselves.
I find it disingenuous to call anything self-replicating or to say that it makes its own parts unless there is something an order of magnitude easier or cheaper about it then a cheapo Grizzly vertical mill.
-b
>>And in reality, if you want the best indicator that people are going to vote a Democrat president in, look at the Republican house and senate seats that have been lost already to Democrats this year.
On the other hand, the election might come a day after americans realize that the new Democratic congress hasn't done a damned thing. I think that the democrats are really shooting themselves in the foot here- they claim a mandate by saying that they have the voting majority, but in reality they don't (due to illnesses, etc), and they come off looking either useless or toothless. Whether the reason for that is numerical weakness or actual willingness to bend to the administration matters little for their public image. When the election comes around, the D's had better improve their image as capable, powerful, and benevolent instead of coming off like a bunch of milquetoasts.
My two cents.
>>liable for claims of libel
I'm not trying to be nitpicky here- if anyone knows the answer, please chime in- but shouldn't the offense here be slander instead of libel? Or are they close enough that the courts just use libel in all cases?
I'm just curious.
-b
>>It's not an embarrassment for the DoE, it's an embarrassment for the Bush Administration and the Republican party in general-
I disagree. It is not an embarrassment- not by a long shot: It is a vindication of the long-held conservative opinion that science and art shouldn't be publicly funded. This basically proves: "If private individuals want science and art bad enough, they will fund it themselves once the gov't checks stop."
-b