He said there is a potential for violation if DOT and the public were misled by "engineering-quality work"- even if the authors did not claim to be engineers.
I simply do not believe the second half. There was clearly no attempt to mislead or misrepresent. If the DOT read the paper and failed to find errors, either that's a reflection on their own professional competence or they were not misled in any way. This is purely an attempt to stop citizen activism from members of a group - civil engineers - that particularly dislike any challenge from anyone outside their profession,
Presumably you live somewhere very flat. Railways can manage only very gentle gradients, and the cost of tunnelling and bridges is enormous. In the early days of rail they experimented with rope haulage on steep gradients to get the trains up. It didn't work for the obvious reason - a train is a lumped load, whereas rope haulage works best for distributed loads.
don't go up and down hills very well. On the other hand, using overhead conveyors to transport bulk loads to ports can be very efficient. Most of the posts on this thread seem to be of the "why would anyone want a bicycle, it's slower than a Porsche" variety - i.e. spectacularly missing the point.
To develop this as a proper standard, the "aliens" also need to be on the standards committee. So first of all we need a pre-protocol to identify aliens suitably qualified to participate in the standards process.
Also, should this start off as an IEEE exercise, or should it go straight to ISO? If the latter, we'll have to rename it the "Interplanetary Standards Organisation". And then we might find that one already exists and it will be us asking if we can send delegates.
Ten year old figures are almost as bad as the guy quoting a 15 year old graph above. I'm quite prepared to believe that US cars in 2000 had terrible idling performance and economy at low speeds because, to be frank, their power plants and transmissions were way obsolete. Diesels hardly suffer from the idle problem at all, and modern European cars would be expected to do much better because they have much more advanced fuel injection systems with features like cutoff on overrun. Plus most US cars are vastly over-engined for highway speeds; as an acquaintance remarked years ago when pulled over for doing 135 by men with guns, "Why do you build your cars so fast if the limit is 55?"
Another "urban myth". For gasoline engines, efficiency is lower at low specific output because the gas isn't compressed enough. Diesels are not affected by this and their efficiency curve is pretty flat from minimum to maximum power.
However, even for gasoline engines, the power required at low speeds drops more rapidly than the fall off in engine efficiency, for any sane value of engine size. Briefly, if your fuel consumption worsens at speeds below about 40mph, you are probably driving an old US V8 with a squirt-and-hope carburetor. People with sensible vehicles will not have this problem.
An engineering lecturer at Cambridge was proposing something like this in the early 1970s, but with vehicles having a mechanical connection - inherently safer because sudden braking would merely load up a damper, not cause an impact.
The problem where the UK is concerned is that motorways are actually our safest roads - it's people like the idiot woman this morning in the Range Rover who think that size overrides the Highway Code that present the problem, and this doesn't address it.
Once again, climate != weather
on
Bastardi's Wager
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As Dr. Pope of the UK Met Office pointed out years ago, events on the timescale of 10 years are "weather"-order fluctuations, not climate. Anybody who (cough) actually bothers to read the literature knows that the annual variation and the 10-year variation are much bigger than the averaged 100 year variation and so frequently go contrary to trend.
So this is a meteorologist who studies short-term phenomena claiming to be better at short-term prediction than people who study long-term phenomena. Wowee, zip de-doo. If a climatologist accepts his bet and loses, what does it prove? That a climatologist isn't a meteorologist, and I think we knew that already.
The method of storage in the Baby - a static charge used to represent 1 or 0 - proved to be the most effective form of storage for RAM (as static and dynamic CMOS) and is becoming more and more of a competitor for hard drives. Though CRT memory was short lived, in the long run Williams proved to be right. The Baby was prescient.
Mercury in a sealed tube is only as safe as the tube and the seal. There have to be arrangements to fill and empty the tube, and to allow for expansion. These are all potential weak points. I once had to condemn a piece of equipment built by an "electrician" which used 24 large mercury glass relays operated by rotary solenoids, in an open wooden box. The glass elements were rigidly attached and each time they switched the point of contact with the frame came under considerable pressure. One broken switch element and an entire factory would have had to be evacuated.
(The whole abortion was replaced with a small PCB containing mercury-wetted relays, which contain only tiny amounts of mercury - the electrician who built the panel didn't know the difference when he resd the spec.)
In fact Alan Turing himself pointed out that a mixture of alcohol and water would do the job as well as mercury (he wanted to use gin.) Perhaps "Mercury delay line" just sounded more techie to the Civil Service.
Any massmarket device needs to be usable with one finger. Multitouch needs an alternative and accessible one-finger backup operation. What happened to accessibility?
A "get me somewhere familiar" button should almost be mandatory on anything without a keyboard.
Why are all the posters bitching about the PDFs ACs?
I ask simply because I have viewed them today on the latest Chrome on Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7, and I cannot reproduce the problem, even on a crappy 4 year old laptop.
He does these really interesting data visualisations and publishes them for free - and what do people do?
"Was this "anonymous reader" the guy who owns the blog?"
"his files are hosted in *.pdf files. tried looking at them in a windows 7 and an ubuntu machine, both have the text with unreadable lines through them. why would you host graphics as pdf?" - mine don't.
I am slowly recovering from flu. What's the justification for all you miserable bastards out there? This is genuinely interesting stuff presented in an accessible way, and is the sort of thing/. should be about (checks karma and mod points - yup, probably allowed to say that.)
Ayn Rand was an intelligent fruitcake, not a philosopher or a scientist. The basis of her ideas can be found in the sources quoted in Umberto Eco's The search for the perfect language, which is quite hard going but I think worth the effort.
Ayn Rand's concept of the arbitrary has its origins in the medieval ideas of substance and accident - the properties that define what something is versus things that don't (you wouldn't separate men into those with, and those without, spots on their bum and expect to deduce any real insights.)
So: sounds like rehashed old stuff from the mob who want to argue that there is no "physical reality".
finally, how modern physics has gone down the wrong path due to the lack of a proper theory of induction.
I await a better one with interest; the present one has been under investigation for hundreds of years, and the root problem remains the initially unprovable hypothesis (which will eventually be found to be . It doesn't go away with hand waving.
Incidentally, the Whipple Museum at Cambridge is stuffed with unreadable and largely unread books on induction in the philosophy of science. It tends to be a career graveyard subject: scientists are too busy to care, philosophers of science just categorise them by principal fallacies.
Actually they will want to find out if your ancestors include English convicts. But don't worry, the Government will make it illegal to discriminate against you if you can't produce any.
I am entitled to write this because my cousin is an Ocker.
Have you ever considered the difficulty of using, say, an Armalite on the bridge of a cargo ship? Last time I checked, snipers did not use moving platforms, or aim at rapidly moving targets . Therefore, range would be greatly reduced.
It could be several seconds, or even tens of seconds, between clear shots. So: you wound one pirate. The others start firing RPGs and AK-47s. These do not need to be accurate.
If pirates assume armed response, they will start shooting the moment they come within range. Therefore, casualties will mount.
Bottom line: I suggest before coming up with idiotic suggestions, you actually google a bit of naval history. (And yes, I did do a feasibility study on missile attack defenses based on cannon, not rifles, and even they are not a very good defense.)
Slashdot Mirror
Bosun's chair and a block or two, medieval technology and cheap.
I simply do not believe the second half. There was clearly no attempt to mislead or misrepresent. If the DOT read the paper and failed to find errors, either that's a reflection on their own professional competence or they were not misled in any way. This is purely an attempt to stop citizen activism from members of a group - civil engineers - that particularly dislike any challenge from anyone outside their profession,
Presumably you live somewhere very flat. Railways can manage only very gentle gradients, and the cost of tunnelling and bridges is enormous. In the early days of rail they experimented with rope haulage on steep gradients to get the trains up. It didn't work for the obvious reason - a train is a lumped load, whereas rope haulage works best for distributed loads.
don't go up and down hills very well. On the other hand, using overhead conveyors to transport bulk loads to ports can be very efficient. Most of the posts on this thread seem to be of the "why would anyone want a bicycle, it's slower than a Porsche" variety - i.e. spectacularly missing the point.
Also, should this start off as an IEEE exercise, or should it go straight to ISO? If the latter, we'll have to rename it the "Interplanetary Standards Organisation". And then we might find that one already exists and it will be us asking if we can send delegates.
Truly this is a can of worms.
<---this table won't display in any browser not updated to marshmallow level-->
No, it won't be as hard as that, it'll all happen in the css.
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about html, but you noticed that already.
Ten year old figures are almost as bad as the guy quoting a 15 year old graph above. I'm quite prepared to believe that US cars in 2000 had terrible idling performance and economy at low speeds because, to be frank, their power plants and transmissions were way obsolete. Diesels hardly suffer from the idle problem at all, and modern European cars would be expected to do much better because they have much more advanced fuel injection systems with features like cutoff on overrun. Plus most US cars are vastly over-engined for highway speeds; as an acquaintance remarked years ago when pulled over for doing 135 by men with guns, "Why do you build your cars so fast if the limit is 55?"
Speeds by satnav.
Your "explanation", by the way, has nothing to do with anything (it has no numbers), but in any case suggests the exact opposite of what you propose.
However, even for gasoline engines, the power required at low speeds drops more rapidly than the fall off in engine efficiency, for any sane value of engine size. Briefly, if your fuel consumption worsens at speeds below about 40mph, you are probably driving an old US V8 with a squirt-and-hope carburetor. People with sensible vehicles will not have this problem.
The problem where the UK is concerned is that motorways are actually our safest roads - it's people like the idiot woman this morning in the Range Rover who think that size overrides the Highway Code that present the problem, and this doesn't address it.
Happy now?
So this is a meteorologist who studies short-term phenomena claiming to be better at short-term prediction than people who study long-term phenomena. Wowee, zip de-doo. If a climatologist accepts his bet and loses, what does it prove? That a climatologist isn't a meteorologist, and I think we knew that already.
The method of storage in the Baby - a static charge used to represent 1 or 0 - proved to be the most effective form of storage for RAM (as static and dynamic CMOS) and is becoming more and more of a competitor for hard drives. Though CRT memory was short lived, in the long run Williams proved to be right. The Baby was prescient.
(The whole abortion was replaced with a small PCB containing mercury-wetted relays, which contain only tiny amounts of mercury - the electrician who built the panel didn't know the difference when he resd the spec.)
In fact Alan Turing himself pointed out that a mixture of alcohol and water would do the job as well as mercury (he wanted to use gin.) Perhaps "Mercury delay line" just sounded more techie to the Civil Service.
They pollute the environment with lots of nasty stuff, which will always restrict their use (in any sane society).
A "get me somewhere familiar" button should almost be mandatory on anything without a keyboard.
I ask simply because I have viewed them today on the latest Chrome on Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7, and I cannot reproduce the problem, even on a crappy 4 year old laptop.
They are going to have a field day (more likely, a lot of field days.)
"Was this "anonymous reader" the guy who owns the blog?"
"his files are hosted in *.pdf files. tried looking at them in a windows 7 and an ubuntu machine, both have the text with unreadable lines through them. why would you host graphics as pdf?" - mine don't.
I am slowly recovering from flu. What's the justification for all you miserable bastards out there? This is genuinely interesting stuff presented in an accessible way, and is the sort of thing /. should be about (checks karma and mod points - yup, probably allowed to say that.)
"the initially unprovable hypothesis (which will eventually be found to be insufficient and be replaced with a refinement)"
Ayn Rand's concept of the arbitrary has its origins in the medieval ideas of substance and accident - the properties that define what something is versus things that don't (you wouldn't separate men into those with, and those without, spots on their bum and expect to deduce any real insights.)
So: sounds like rehashed old stuff from the mob who want to argue that there is no "physical reality".
I await a better one with interest; the present one has been under investigation for hundreds of years, and the root problem remains the initially unprovable hypothesis (which will eventually be found to be . It doesn't go away with hand waving.
Incidentally, the Whipple Museum at Cambridge is stuffed with unreadable and largely unread books on induction in the philosophy of science. It tends to be a career graveyard subject: scientists are too busy to care, philosophers of science just categorise them by principal fallacies.
I'm pretty sure the guy whose name I inherit was an illegal immigrant in 1066.
I am entitled to write this because my cousin is an Ocker.
Bottom line: I suggest before coming up with idiotic suggestions, you actually google a bit of naval history. (And yes, I did do a feasibility study on missile attack defenses based on cannon, not rifles, and even they are not a very good defense.)