One of the biggest engineering problems is getting people to do adequate risk assessments. Most of the population of the developed world hasn't got a clue about it - but they are allowed to make decisions on engineering projects.
Here in the UK we have a joint assessment of the risks of new nuclear plant, with public involvement. People don't participate, even "environmental activists". But, at the end , they will announce their own opinions in a fact-free way. Stupidity - the inability to see the connections or lack thereof between the real world and your opinion - truly is a social engineering problem of vast proportions that will probably be the thing that wipes us out as a species.
When I was teaching physics, years ago, I used to take classes to a cliff where fulmars (a small albatross) used to fly. They would fly along the cliff edge into a side wind so slowly that you could stand there and watch them maybe three metres away, and examine the wing beat very closely. It's astonishing how slowly the wings seem to move. (I made some super-8 film of them, but the classroom experience didn't generate anything like the interest of the real-world experience.)
The energy density of fat is close to that of Diesel fuel. Tank weight for battery weight, a Diesel car has more than 6 times the range of a battery powered car. (Nissan Leaf 100 miles, equivalent Nissan European Diesel approx. 600 miles.)
In fact, our brains do more than that. We can consciously learn to do things, then pass to a stage of being aware of what we are doing, then do something without conscious thought. Sometimes I drive to work with hardly a conscious thought about the process, sometimes in hazardous conditions (ice, school moms) I'm conscious of what I'm doing all the time. Anyone who has watched young birds learning to fly knows that they go through this process. I've watched a young jackdaw practice, over and over, flying from one branch to another till it could do it and hit the second branch with hardly a wing flap. That implies goal-directed learning.
As for "inherent stability" - a bird is far more unstable in flight than the most exotic aircraft. The Festo design doesn't flap its wings very far. Many birds can flap their wings so that the tips meet underneath them. Watch a fair sized slow flying bird like a heron, and the wing geometry change during a single flap is very large.
Very, very slowly indeed, and we are going to need an extremely long tape for it to operate on.
Forgetting Turing-complete machines for a moment, years ago I was asked to look at a circuit for controlling a stepper motor. It was overheating despite using CMOS logic. The designer was a mad genius; that is, he had implemented a gate-level-coded simple microprocessor with 16 instructions, and a hard-coded memory so that the 4 basic ops (up,down,left,right) each caused the thing to cycle through a set of those instructions at a maximum of 200 ips. But he hadn't understood what happened when you left gates floating in CMOS, so all the unused gates were floating and drawing a lot of current.
We replaced this amazing bit of design with a small PIC, in case you hadn't guessed.
You're a developer and you find registering for a web site too complicated and boring? And you create css stylesheets? You then propose that the OS should create boilerplate and provide auto logins?
Who was it said that UI interface designers mostly wouldn't recognise security if it stood in front of them with its name in big red letters an a T-shirt and hit them with a clue bat till they got the point? Probably me.
What matters is the G-force on impact. Concrete is very hard, so in the worst case if your phone hits edge-on it will stop in a millimetre or so. That can easily exceed 1000g, which will break a lot of things. On the bike, your phone probably fell about the same distance but made a glancing impact. It may well have spun, when the kinetic energy downwards was transformed into rotational energy, or it might have landed flat and been cushioned by the air trapped underneath at speed.
You would need to perform controlled tests under identical conditions to decide which is the more durable in reality. Please post the results on YouTube.
Sorry, but law and business analysis are not worthless, though there are many people who are bad at them. There are bad engineers, doctors and scientists too who somehow do well professionally.
Without law, you have Mafia economics, settling conflict with guns. Without investment advice, how do you get money for your good idea?
Meego development continues, and I'm waiting to see whether I want to replace mine or whether the production Meego will meet my needs. But if I do replace it, it will probably be with the new WebOs phone/tablet ecosystem.
Then I suggest that you consider that this is Slashdot, not the Journal of Applied Physics or whatever you usually read, and I'm using exaggeration to make a point, in a popular blog. If you consider that to be "troll" or "flamebait", I think you are truly being over-sensitive (but then I check your posting history and realise that it's probably due to your Japanese connections.)
The truth is, in fact, that compared to the intelligence level to be a fully functioning member of our society - politically active, socially responsible, and able to deal with bureaucracy and machinery - the majority of people are insufficiently intelligent. That's not their fault, agreed. We have created a technocratic society and devil take the hindmost. But we let these people play with computers - and they promptly look at gambling sites and pornography and get their computers infected, which costs the rest of us money.
It was under 90 years ago, and in any case the point there was that corporations were part of the State. In this case, the corporation applied to the Government for authorisation and the police supervised it. Under Fascism, the Government would have instructed Microsoft to carry out the raid. See the difference?
Perhaps you should upgrade your nick to a more modern CPU.
I completely agree. For the great majority of users, computers have become just too complicated and confusing to operate, and the great majority of users are also stupid. Microsoft is part of the problem because, in its effort to gain consumer market share, it has just allowed those users to do far too much, in ignorance.
The same thing happened with cars; when they were rare and and expensive, the people who bought them either employed someone to drive them or were sufficiently interested to learn to do it properly themselves. When the mass market really took off, driving licences followed, along with compulsory insurance. But, at the same time, the "user interface" got simplified and standardised.
The iPad, or a laptop equivalent, is what most people actually want. But Microsoft's entire consumer business model is currently based around not giving it to them. It looks as if we are going to have to rely (currently) on Apple, HP and perhaps Motorola to come up with a reasonably secure solution to letting the monkeys into the banana plantation, since most of us are never going to be in a position to force them to use Windows 7 with a non-Administrator account.
Plato was an aristocrat, as was Socrates. He thought that the State should be run, not by the mob or a single tyrant, but by - you know, our kind of people, educated, superior, know what's best for everybody else.
But as the standards he was comparing to were either ad hoc rule by all citizens (a minority) with no checks or balances on the one hand, and arbitrary rule by a king on the other, and we have a subsequent 2400 years of political history to draw on, his views on the matter are pretty much worthless.
The Brazil site works in IE, however you have to test that whole Google Chrome Frame plug in out with every site required for business
No, you don't, because it is only used if the site notifies the browser that it is opted in to Google Chrome Frame - i.e. the designers have stated that it is compatible.. Google employs some pretty good programmers, and they tend to think of things like that. What you are describing is ignorant and underskilled IT departments - a universal problem, but one that has to be addressed or there will be no progress.
Check out the iFixit breakdown of the Xoom. It's already been done.
Also, you and your GP are doing the traditional US-centric thing of thinking that the US model of highly Taylorised corporates applies everywhere in the world. In the UK (and Europe) there are many SMEs (i.e. up to around $500 million turnover) that do not fit the US model, and the company I referenced is one of these. My company works (among others) with outsourcers and with break/fix companies that supply services to these SMEs, and I can assure you that maintainability is important to them. Traditionally in costing laptops and similar equipment they factor in an oversupply to deal with EOL maintenance and field failures once the manufacturer warranty expires. Maintainable equipment equates to a lower oversupply.
But shoot, what do I know? I've only been in the business eleven years...whereas I guess that someone who has to SHOUT a lot to try to make their point is probably under 25.
I've already told one potential tablet adopter to wait for the Xoom, because it's already known that it is very serviceable. This means that in-house IT will be able to cannibalise machines for spares after a year or two, and replace the batteries, without having to send things off for increasingly expensive repairs. The Xoom seems to be designed much more with corporate IT in mind. I know that the iPad 2 is thin and light, must have gadget and the rest of it, but corporate users have other priorities.
Part of the problem seems to be that when the reactors were planned, Japan was in a seismic lull. Since then, activity has been increasing, and this put into doubt some of the safety features of the reactors, but nothing was done.
This is an argument, not against nuclear power, but in favour of transparency in the design, planning, build and monitoring processes. That, however, would demand equally grown up behaviour from the antis. I do feel that part of the problem with nuclear power has been the culture of secrecy fed by, to be frank, the scientific and engineering ignorance, emotionalism and sometimes near-hysteria of the antis.
In the early days of railways and canals there was similar "anti" hysteria - clergymen claiming that canals would be destroyed because it was blasphemy for men to ape their Creator by making rivers, idiots claiming that travelling at speed would prevent people from breathing - but the benefits were so enormous that people largely ignored them. The problem with nuclear power is that most people are not equipped to understand the potential benefits, so all they hear about is the potential downsides.
The standalone version is free. There is a supported commercial version that looks interesting. This is Dassault; if you look at what they do you will see why they might want to have a CAD system that they own. Pendant plusieurs d'années, la France ne voudrait pas etre membre d'OTAN: faut pas chercher pour comprendre.
1MW for 100ns = 0.1J, roughly equivalent to dropping 100g a distance of 10cm. 1kW for 100ns = 0.1mJ, equivalent to dropping a 1 gramme mass approx. 1mm. I believe the latter could pop a balloon, but it doesn't seem enough to punch through a razor blade. My memory may be faulty, but I seem to recall it takes of the order of magnitude of 10^10 W/sq cm to do that. Focussing the beam to 10^-7 sq. cm would be quite an achievement.
Perhaps either the original estimate is correct or the pulse duration is much longer, of the order of 100 microseconds.
It should be obvious, and a visit to the ruins in the Middle East will tell you the story. As fuel prices rise, cities like Atlanta will become uneconomic. Business will relocate elsewhere or go under, houses and industrial estates on the outskirts will be abandoned. If fuel prices rise quickly, the change will also happen relatively fast.
No matter how much is spent on cities, if they become uneconomic they will eventually be abandoned.
Sorry, recombination happens all the time in bacteria. It's hardly news. At least, they were teaching us about it in introductory cell biology at Cambridge in 1969, and the textbook was already years old.
As an agnostic Zen Buddhist who sometimes attends Quaker meetings, Jesus of Nazareth is only of interest to me insofar as his teachings were a step towards the modern era. I am interested in the period, but I'm also interested in the evolution of Zen in Japan, and of Protestantism in the UK.
I do know what Kelber's schtick is, thank you very much. However, the oral historians have a particular axe to grind. I think you've read a bit to confirm your prejudices, and your knowledge of the NT era is derived from a bit of reading, but you don't understand the background in any depth. (Apart from anything else, even 1.5% literacy is easily enough for a bright kid from an artisanal background to become literate. There was social mobility then - or how did Jews become Roman citizens?) I'm not wasting any more time on you, because you have very fixed ideas and an abusive turn of phrase. I just wanted to let you know your assumptions are incorrect.
Heston Blumenthal has been doing this for years. His restaurant (The Fat Duck) at Bray (West of London - hint, not cheap and a long, long wait) is world famous. Not so well known is that he also has a first class gastro-pub at Bray, and that the Little Chef first on the left on the Westbound A303 has a Blumenthal menu available - it fills up very early at weekends.
So, you're saying that the Scribes and the Pharisees didn't exist? And that the Dead Sea Scrolls are fake?
Why is the concept of a "middle class" laughable? Are you saying that Israel didn't have shopkeepers, artisans and the like who maybe employed a few people, engaged in business, and the richer sort of which aspired to buy Roman citizenship? Saul was reported to be a Roman citizen of the artisanal class - he was trained as a tent-maker.
I think you need to cite some serious research here. On the other side, I'm afraid it's down to citing whole sections of libraries.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the UK we have a joint assessment of the risks of new nuclear plant, with public involvement. People don't participate, even "environmental activists". But, at the end , they will announce their own opinions in a fact-free way. Stupidity - the inability to see the connections or lack thereof between the real world and your opinion - truly is a social engineering problem of vast proportions that will probably be the thing that wipes us out as a species.
When I was teaching physics, years ago, I used to take classes to a cliff where fulmars (a small albatross) used to fly. They would fly along the cliff edge into a side wind so slowly that you could stand there and watch them maybe three metres away, and examine the wing beat very closely. It's astonishing how slowly the wings seem to move. (I made some super-8 film of them, but the classroom experience didn't generate anything like the interest of the real-world experience.)
The energy density of fat is close to that of Diesel fuel. Tank weight for battery weight, a Diesel car has more than 6 times the range of a battery powered car. (Nissan Leaf 100 miles, equivalent Nissan European Diesel approx. 600 miles.)
As for "inherent stability" - a bird is far more unstable in flight than the most exotic aircraft. The Festo design doesn't flap its wings very far. Many birds can flap their wings so that the tips meet underneath them. Watch a fair sized slow flying bird like a heron, and the wing geometry change during a single flap is very large.
Forgetting Turing-complete machines for a moment, years ago I was asked to look at a circuit for controlling a stepper motor. It was overheating despite using CMOS logic. The designer was a mad genius; that is, he had implemented a gate-level-coded simple microprocessor with 16 instructions, and a hard-coded memory so that the 4 basic ops (up,down,left,right) each caused the thing to cycle through a set of those instructions at a maximum of 200 ips. But he hadn't understood what happened when you left gates floating in CMOS, so all the unused gates were floating and drawing a lot of current.
We replaced this amazing bit of design with a small PIC, in case you hadn't guessed.
Who was it said that UI interface designers mostly wouldn't recognise security if it stood in front of them with its name in big red letters an a T-shirt and hit them with a clue bat till they got the point? Probably me.
"We have a Pope" - sorry, couldn't resist.
You would need to perform controlled tests under identical conditions to decide which is the more durable in reality. Please post the results on YouTube.
Without law, you have Mafia economics, settling conflict with guns. Without investment advice, how do you get money for your good idea?
Meego development continues, and I'm waiting to see whether I want to replace mine or whether the production Meego will meet my needs. But if I do replace it, it will probably be with the new WebOs phone/tablet ecosystem.
The truth is, in fact, that compared to the intelligence level to be a fully functioning member of our society - politically active, socially responsible, and able to deal with bureaucracy and machinery - the majority of people are insufficiently intelligent. That's not their fault, agreed. We have created a technocratic society and devil take the hindmost. But we let these people play with computers - and they promptly look at gambling sites and pornography and get their computers infected, which costs the rest of us money.
Perhaps you should upgrade your nick to a more modern CPU.
The same thing happened with cars; when they were rare and and expensive, the people who bought them either employed someone to drive them or were sufficiently interested to learn to do it properly themselves. When the mass market really took off, driving licences followed, along with compulsory insurance. But, at the same time, the "user interface" got simplified and standardised.
The iPad, or a laptop equivalent, is what most people actually want. But Microsoft's entire consumer business model is currently based around not giving it to them. It looks as if we are going to have to rely (currently) on Apple, HP and perhaps Motorola to come up with a reasonably secure solution to letting the monkeys into the banana plantation, since most of us are never going to be in a position to force them to use Windows 7 with a non-Administrator account.
But as the standards he was comparing to were either ad hoc rule by all citizens (a minority) with no checks or balances on the one hand, and arbitrary rule by a king on the other, and we have a subsequent 2400 years of political history to draw on, his views on the matter are pretty much worthless.
No, you don't, because it is only used if the site notifies the browser that it is opted in to Google Chrome Frame - i.e. the designers have stated that it is compatible.. Google employs some pretty good programmers, and they tend to think of things like that. What you are describing is ignorant and underskilled IT departments - a universal problem, but one that has to be addressed or there will be no progress.
Also, you and your GP are doing the traditional US-centric thing of thinking that the US model of highly Taylorised corporates applies everywhere in the world. In the UK (and Europe) there are many SMEs (i.e. up to around $500 million turnover) that do not fit the US model, and the company I referenced is one of these. My company works (among others) with outsourcers and with break/fix companies that supply services to these SMEs, and I can assure you that maintainability is important to them. Traditionally in costing laptops and similar equipment they factor in an oversupply to deal with EOL maintenance and field failures once the manufacturer warranty expires. Maintainable equipment equates to a lower oversupply.
But shoot, what do I know? I've only been in the business eleven years...whereas I guess that someone who has to SHOUT a lot to try to make their point is probably under 25.
I've already told one potential tablet adopter to wait for the Xoom, because it's already known that it is very serviceable. This means that in-house IT will be able to cannibalise machines for spares after a year or two, and replace the batteries, without having to send things off for increasingly expensive repairs. The Xoom seems to be designed much more with corporate IT in mind. I know that the iPad 2 is thin and light, must have gadget and the rest of it, but corporate users have other priorities.
This is an argument, not against nuclear power, but in favour of transparency in the design, planning, build and monitoring processes. That, however, would demand equally grown up behaviour from the antis. I do feel that part of the problem with nuclear power has been the culture of secrecy fed by, to be frank, the scientific and engineering ignorance, emotionalism and sometimes near-hysteria of the antis.
In the early days of railways and canals there was similar "anti" hysteria - clergymen claiming that canals would be destroyed because it was blasphemy for men to ape their Creator by making rivers, idiots claiming that travelling at speed would prevent people from breathing - but the benefits were so enormous that people largely ignored them. The problem with nuclear power is that most people are not equipped to understand the potential benefits, so all they hear about is the potential downsides.
The standalone version is free. There is a supported commercial version that looks interesting. This is Dassault; if you look at what they do you will see why they might want to have a CAD system that they own. Pendant plusieurs d'années, la France ne voudrait pas etre membre d'OTAN: faut pas chercher pour comprendre.
Perhaps either the original estimate is correct or the pulse duration is much longer, of the order of 100 microseconds.
No matter how much is spent on cities, if they become uneconomic they will eventually be abandoned.
Sorry, recombination happens all the time in bacteria. It's hardly news. At least, they were teaching us about it in introductory cell biology at Cambridge in 1969, and the textbook was already years old.
I do know what Kelber's schtick is, thank you very much. However, the oral historians have a particular axe to grind. I think you've read a bit to confirm your prejudices, and your knowledge of the NT era is derived from a bit of reading, but you don't understand the background in any depth. (Apart from anything else, even 1.5% literacy is easily enough for a bright kid from an artisanal background to become literate. There was social mobility then - or how did Jews become Roman citizens?) I'm not wasting any more time on you, because you have very fixed ideas and an abusive turn of phrase. I just wanted to let you know your assumptions are incorrect.
Heston Blumenthal has been doing this for years. His restaurant (The Fat Duck) at Bray (West of London - hint, not cheap and a long, long wait) is world famous. Not so well known is that he also has a first class gastro-pub at Bray, and that the Little Chef first on the left on the Westbound A303 has a Blumenthal menu available - it fills up very early at weekends.
Why is the concept of a "middle class" laughable? Are you saying that Israel didn't have shopkeepers, artisans and the like who maybe employed a few people, engaged in business, and the richer sort of which aspired to buy Roman citizenship? Saul was reported to be a Roman citizen of the artisanal class - he was trained as a tent-maker.
I think you need to cite some serious research here. On the other side, I'm afraid it's down to citing whole sections of libraries.