I am also a strong supporter of the EU. But I can't help my North London and Oxbridge upbringing, and the accompanying "sense of humour" which consists of taking the piss with as straight a face as possible. So merci pour votre comprehension, mon brave.
No conrflakes required. I'm afraid that's an example of the English sense of humour, which doesn't travel well and is why we need to spend so much on our Armed Forces.
If you care to investigate you will find that (according to Merriam-Webster among others) soluble has both meanings. If you knew any Latin - and you obviously don't, despite referring to nitric acid as aqua fortis - you would know that u and v in Latin are interchangeable, and that soluble and solvable are from exactly the same root. While I'm exposing your linguistic inadequacies, I should perhaps explain further that the Latin root means to "loosen", and so is applicable both to loosening the bonds of a solid in a liquid, and loosening a "knotty" problem.
The sun is effectively at infinity, so the reflection from the parabolic mirror will come to a focus at some distance from the mirror and thereafter diverge. This won't work. You would need, in fact, a large array of flat mirrors which were steerable so they all converged on the target, and continued to do so as it rose. This could be technically very difficult indeed. It makes a lot more sense to use electricity to power one laser which then only requires steering. You can generate the electricity with solar panels if you like.
(A C Clarke had a story in which large numbers of flat mirrors were used to vaporise a football referee. Obviously, everybody holding a mirror had to steer it. In reality, the target would have been so bright they would probably not have been able to aim effectively.)
The key word that's part of ICBM is "ballistic", from the Greek ballein, I throw. It's travelling through extremely thin gas, and its trajectory is therefore practically simple Newtonian dynamics. Its position from moment to moment should be extremely predictable. Now consider an object attached to a rope in the atmosphere. It's subject to constantly changing wind forces in three dimensions. Even when it's out of the atmosphere, the beam is subject to deviation caused by atmospheric effects, which is why stars twinkle and big telescopes need clever adaptive control systems. Its path is many times less predictable. In a nutshell, it's the difference between catching a lofted cricket ball or baseball, and catching a fly. It is not an object with a "known/desired" trajectory.
The problem is, I'm sure, soluble, but the technical difficulty should not be underestimated.
Instead of warlords fighting for turf, you have civil servants fighting for budget. Progress. You also have the advantage that, unlike the US and the UK, you already have an overbearing, censorship-obsessed, fascist* slave state, so you don't have the civil servants fighting to get the budget to create one.
* anyone who thinks China is Communist doesn't understand either (a) the meaning of communism or (b) history.
I confess. I took the 12-step plan to recovery and although I will always be a connectoholic, I'm all right so long as you don't get me started on the subject.
The best system in the world, for real, is a combination of the Europlug and the Schuko plug. Proper Europlugs and Schuko plugs have bodies which fit partly into the wall so the load is not taken by the pins. The Europlug pins are partly insulated so if you can see metal, it's safe. You can fit lots of them onto a power strip, so a strip for electronics can have many connectors in a small space while a power extender can give you 16A in a small footprint.
The reason the UK still has the BS1363 plug is because it has square pins, and the manufacturers thought the Chinese would not want to invest in special tooling to make them when they had the world of round pins or cheap strip pins (as in US) to go after. Then Mrs. Thatcher came along and they decided to let the Chinese make them anyway.
Every time you buy a computer in the UK you get a BS 1363 to IEC lead and a Schuko to IEC lead. That's how cheap they are: manufacturers throw them away rather than be bothered to have two different SKUs.
Fascinating to watch art critics trying to claim that Gill was excused from civilised behaviour because he was a "genius". (Hint, guys - he isn't.) There was a good cartoon in the Guardian last Saturday - a day in the life of Eric Gill. Like the Monty Python Australian University rules where every second one was "no poofters", every second frame of the Gill cartoon is labelled "Censored".
Are you familiar with the idea of a time series graph? Which can be used to extrapolate?
You know, as in the dry season is approaching and the soil moisture level is heading below safe values, therefore there is very likely to be a drought, therefore we need to do something now?
When did Slashdot become so popular that it started to attract people who don't understand how prediction and modelling works?
Live in areas with a metre of rainfall per year, like to have somewhere to go outside in summer, have children and grandchildren, and are aware of the problems of runoff from concrete surfaces, decks and so on. Our lawn requires no fertilizer, no watering, and by next year the robot mower will be recharged from a solar panel. And it provides foot access to the vegetable garden and the fruit trees.
You insensitive clod!
Having said which, you are totally right. Lawns belong in places where the climate is suitable and they are a cheap, low-maintenance,environmentally friendly surface cover. But most places in the world are not Southern England.
I keep seeing these ideas for low cost conversions using lead acid batteries. Every time they come from people who may be good engineers but don't understand lead acid technology. Repeat after me, there are no good, cheap lead acid traction batteries. Standard lead acid is simply not a good technology for any mobile application other than starting and low draw domestic power. This is because lead acid batteries deteriorate rapidly at high current draw and discharge above 40%. That's why all the research into lithium and nickel hydride batteries; they are simply many times better for traction applications.
The result is that to get acceptable power and life from a lead acid power pack, the weight becomes such as to be potentially dangerous in a car chassis not designed from scratch to take it. Cars are engineering structures designed to take just so much load in just such places. Sticking a load of heavy lead acid batteries in a car chassis risks catastrophic failure under the wrong conditions - and re-engineering the chassis to fit this would not be cheap to say the least. You would do better to put the batteries in the bed of a pickup, provided you designed a suitable carrier that could resist the side forces and contain the acid in a spill - but then your vehicle will still be a less environmentally friendly commuter than a modern small car, and most of the carrying capacity is now battery
Has it occurred to people like these carnegie-Mellon guys that there are people out there who have dedicated their careers to electric vehicles, that many of them are brilliant engineers, and that if they think the future is lithium - to the extent that Mitsubishi and Nissan are building battery factories - perhaps they know more about it than someone who thinks he can build a racing milk float cheap using a bit of regenerative braking?
Have you noticed the new Acer netbook - the Ferrari One? It comes with Windows 7 64 bit running on an AMD dual core, with 2G RAM and 320G hard drive, and a 5 hour battery life. And it is a netbook, ffs, with an 11.6 inch screen. I'm probably going to buy myself one for Christmas and put Ubuntu on it in dual boot, but compared to a Macbook Air it's almost free. The prospect of actually being able to do work on 64 bit system coding while flying economy should appeal to more than one developer.
I won't go over CaptainofSpray's ground again except to commend his post. But they have plenty of opportunity to make their case. The local weekly magazine (Fosseway) is now very right wing Conservative and would give them plenty of space to publish rebuttals. The blogger is, basically, alleging that they have made planning decisions which benefit the council leader and not the public. If this is true, how are they going to respond? If not, why hasn't their response been published at length in a magazine which often reports contentious council business at vast length?
Only 1 of the 12 had actually been elected. The blogger was drawing attention to what he saw as a democratic deficit in Somerton. Locals started to believe him and started to turn up to Council meetings to see what went on. It looks as if this sudden public attention may have caused the councillors to decide that they didn't want to be councillors any more. On the other hand, on our side of the constituency where just about every council seat is contested and where the local paper is full of arguments about what is going on, hardly anybody bothers to turn up to see what happens at Council meetings = councillors complain that there is not enough public involvement.
BTW who told you his allegations were unfounded? As for why he doesn't stand for election himself, it's because a campaign of intimidation has been aged against him - it's documented on his blog and believe me, anyone who lives in this part of the world knows this kind of thing goes on and can well believe it. I suggest that, just as British posters do tend not to pontificate about US politics, you keep your US=centric views out of this case. Because you do not understand UK local government at all.
Phone calls at all hours would result in the attention of PC Plod. It's illegal in this country. And townhall meetings are a US phenomenon with no UK equivalent.
Disclaimer: I live in the Somerton and Frome constituency. The East side (where I live) is part of the 21st century, The politics is mainly Lib Dem (the only mainstream UK progressive party- and no, I am not a member.) The south-west side is deeply conservative and rural, and the local grandees have a huge sense of entitlement. They think that they have a right to run things and nobody should be allowed to criticise them. (They are also the area's Nimbys - they try to block industry or anything that will modernise the area and provide well-paid jobs for non-landowners.)
Now someone thinks they have the right to comment on Council decisions - and the toys get thrown out of the pram.
This is not about bloggers. It's about rural Conservatives finding their views called into question. It would be exactly the same if it was a campaigning newspaper, or if the people in subsidised housing started a resident's group and sent someone to see what happened in Council meetings.
Fusion proponents carefully don't mention the effects of the fusion by-products on the reactor itself. It's the same with conventional thermal plants: the radioactive waste from the fuel rods isn't so bad, but the radiation converts some of the steel in the containment to radioactives (including the steel rods in the reinforced concrete.)
The solution of the Sun and other stars - spray the crap all over the Universe - is perhaps not the most environmentally friendly, but it's why we're here at all. We're basically standing (or sitting) on nuclear waste from a star that went bang.
The holy grail of portable devices is long battery life. Other things being equal, the system that uses the least memory will use less power and have a longer battery life. It will also be more reliable, because the probability of memory errors is proportional to the number of bits. And if you can use fully static RAM, the power goes down and the speed goes up because you do not need to refresh the memory cells.
Currently it doesn't matter too much because the main power consumption is in the display. But new display technology will change this.
Canonical's big opportunity is in mobile devices and in the Third World where power is expensive. Xubuntu is already a much nicer system than earlier versions of Windows.
Slightly OT, but the car industry has already bought into the logic. The new VW engine that replaces the 3 litre V6 is a 2-litre inline 4 that generates more power, is lighter and has 20% better fuel consumption. Nobody is saying "but my last Golf had a 3-litre V6, this is crap". Companies that focus on doing more with less are future proofing themselves.
Einstein wouldn't have known that. He was a mathematical theoretical physicist, not an engineer. But you are wrong for another reason. Most low end PCBs are actually printed on a polymer-loaded paper substrate not that far from cardboard. Most modern paper burns very badly because a major component is clay - it's extremely hard to burn a magazine as they tend to have very highly loaded paper to allow full color printing. A modern mechanically polished paper substrate printed with a thin layer of UV cured polymer - which is basically what a full gloss brochure typically is made from - would be a "good enough" substrate for short life printable electronics.
I waited to see if anybody would take my (off-topic) point. I think that "Photography", literally drawing with light, does properly apply to the silver process. The digital process is quite different and has a different mindset. I'm a former RPS member who used to do landscape and portraits in medium format. I had to plan carefully, expose carefully and process carefully so as not to waste film. Nowadays, people just seem to point and click endlessly hoping that one of the results will be good, then fix stuff in Photoshop. I call it digital imaging because it is a different trade with different skills, just as I don't call helming a powerboat "sailing". (And my attempts with digital cameras are still nowhere near as good as my old MF photos - just knowing you can point and click seems to do something to my skill level.)
Until the end of the 20th century, a major market for silver was photography. The digital camera and the inkjet printer have slowly destroyed that market and replaced it with digital imaging. Now there's a new use for the silver which, presumably, had digital imaging not come along would have been much more expensive. (Although color photography ends up more or less silver free and there was considerable recycling, there was still a steady consumption of silver, and as the photography market democratised, the amount of silver in use at a given time was steadily increasing.)
But really what will kill it is more "innovative" UIs for lower-end laptops don't look like "real" computers in the eyes of the consumer.
No, they look like smartphones on steroids. And as these lower-end units will basically be just that - with 3 and 3.5G, phone connectivity, GPS, Bluetooth and wireless, and connecting seamlessly to the back at the ranch desktop - they will be seen as a step up from phones, not down from laptops.
It's possible that the desktop dominance of Windows will keep Arm out of the small computer market. But a lot will depend on developments with Oleds and e-ink. Currently the display is the power hog of all-in-one computers, which means that changing the cpu energy consumption makes relatively little difference. But once Oled and e-ink displays reduce the power consumption needed for the display, the cpu becomes more significant. As screen sizes on convergent devices fall - I personally suspect that the 5.5 to 7 inch diagonal screen will come to dominate in truly portable devices - the resulting limit on battery size will be the difference between an all-day device and one that cannot get through a working day. This is where the new generation of Linux distributions like Maemo and Android running on Arm will deliver a visible benefit, and the end user - who doesn't really care whether he has to run "word" or "floop" so long as the document opens correctly and edits - will be more interested in whether he can go from 7 a.m. to 7p.m without a charge.
I'm writing this on a netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 and it just works (TM). It would work just as well on an Arm processor.
In the real world, I'm sure that Microsoft will be able to roll out Windows Mobile on Arm one microsecond after Dell tell them that their new 7 inch communications centre and ebook reader will have to run an OS supplied by Canonical.
Slashdot Mirror
I am also a strong supporter of the EU. But I can't help my North London and Oxbridge upbringing, and the accompanying "sense of humour" which consists of taking the piss with as straight a face as possible. So merci pour votre comprehension, mon brave.
No conrflakes required. I'm afraid that's an example of the English sense of humour, which doesn't travel well and is why we need to spend so much on our Armed Forces.
If you care to investigate you will find that (according to Merriam-Webster among others) soluble has both meanings. If you knew any Latin - and you obviously don't, despite referring to nitric acid as aqua fortis - you would know that u and v in Latin are interchangeable, and that soluble and solvable are from exactly the same root. While I'm exposing your linguistic inadequacies, I should perhaps explain further that the Latin root means to "loosen", and so is applicable both to loosening the bonds of a solid in a liquid, and loosening a "knotty" problem.
(A C Clarke had a story in which large numbers of flat mirrors were used to vaporise a football referee. Obviously, everybody holding a mirror had to steer it. In reality, the target would have been so bright they would probably not have been able to aim effectively.)
The problem is, I'm sure, soluble, but the technical difficulty should not be underestimated.
* anyone who thinks China is Communist doesn't understand either (a) the meaning of communism or (b) history.
The best system in the world, for real, is a combination of the Europlug and the Schuko plug. Proper Europlugs and Schuko plugs have bodies which fit partly into the wall so the load is not taken by the pins. The Europlug pins are partly insulated so if you can see metal, it's safe. You can fit lots of them onto a power strip, so a strip for electronics can have many connectors in a small space while a power extender can give you 16A in a small footprint.
The reason the UK still has the BS1363 plug is because it has square pins, and the manufacturers thought the Chinese would not want to invest in special tooling to make them when they had the world of round pins or cheap strip pins (as in US) to go after. Then Mrs. Thatcher came along and they decided to let the Chinese make them anyway.
Every time you buy a computer in the UK you get a BS 1363 to IEC lead and a Schuko to IEC lead. That's how cheap they are: manufacturers throw them away rather than be bothered to have two different SKUs.
Fascinating to watch art critics trying to claim that Gill was excused from civilised behaviour because he was a "genius". (Hint, guys - he isn't.) There was a good cartoon in the Guardian last Saturday - a day in the life of Eric Gill. Like the Monty Python Australian University rules where every second one was "no poofters", every second frame of the Gill cartoon is labelled "Censored".
You know, as in the dry season is approaching and the soil moisture level is heading below safe values, therefore there is very likely to be a drought, therefore we need to do something now?
When did Slashdot become so popular that it started to attract people who don't understand how prediction and modelling works?
You are right, but as a good HHGG follower, I don't use swear words on Slashdot.
You insensitive clod!
Having said which, you are totally right. Lawns belong in places where the climate is suitable and they are a cheap, low-maintenance,environmentally friendly surface cover. But most places in the world are not Southern England.
The result is that to get acceptable power and life from a lead acid power pack, the weight becomes such as to be potentially dangerous in a car chassis not designed from scratch to take it. Cars are engineering structures designed to take just so much load in just such places. Sticking a load of heavy lead acid batteries in a car chassis risks catastrophic failure under the wrong conditions - and re-engineering the chassis to fit this would not be cheap to say the least. You would do better to put the batteries in the bed of a pickup, provided you designed a suitable carrier that could resist the side forces and contain the acid in a spill - but then your vehicle will still be a less environmentally friendly commuter than a modern small car, and most of the carrying capacity is now battery
Has it occurred to people like these carnegie-Mellon guys that there are people out there who have dedicated their careers to electric vehicles, that many of them are brilliant engineers, and that if they think the future is lithium - to the extent that Mitsubishi and Nissan are building battery factories - perhaps they know more about it than someone who thinks he can build a racing milk float cheap using a bit of regenerative braking?
Have you noticed the new Acer netbook - the Ferrari One? It comes with Windows 7 64 bit running on an AMD dual core, with 2G RAM and 320G hard drive, and a 5 hour battery life. And it is a netbook, ffs, with an 11.6 inch screen. I'm probably going to buy myself one for Christmas and put Ubuntu on it in dual boot, but compared to a Macbook Air it's almost free. The prospect of actually being able to do work on 64 bit system coding while flying economy should appeal to more than one developer.
I won't go over CaptainofSpray's ground again except to commend his post. But they have plenty of opportunity to make their case. The local weekly magazine (Fosseway) is now very right wing Conservative and would give them plenty of space to publish rebuttals. The blogger is, basically, alleging that they have made planning decisions which benefit the council leader and not the public. If this is true, how are they going to respond? If not, why hasn't their response been published at length in a magazine which often reports contentious council business at vast length?
BTW who told you his allegations were unfounded? As for why he doesn't stand for election himself, it's because a campaign of intimidation has been aged against him - it's documented on his blog and believe me, anyone who lives in this part of the world knows this kind of thing goes on and can well believe it. I suggest that, just as British posters do tend not to pontificate about US politics, you keep your US=centric views out of this case. Because you do not understand UK local government at all.
Phone calls at all hours would result in the attention of PC Plod. It's illegal in this country. And townhall meetings are a US phenomenon with no UK equivalent.
Now someone thinks they have the right to comment on Council decisions - and the toys get thrown out of the pram.
This is not about bloggers. It's about rural Conservatives finding their views called into question. It would be exactly the same if it was a campaigning newspaper, or if the people in subsidised housing started a resident's group and sent someone to see what happened in Council meetings.
The solution of the Sun and other stars - spray the crap all over the Universe - is perhaps not the most environmentally friendly, but it's why we're here at all. We're basically standing (or sitting) on nuclear waste from a star that went bang.
Currently it doesn't matter too much because the main power consumption is in the display. But new display technology will change this.
Canonical's big opportunity is in mobile devices and in the Third World where power is expensive. Xubuntu is already a much nicer system than earlier versions of Windows.
Slightly OT, but the car industry has already bought into the logic. The new VW engine that replaces the 3 litre V6 is a 2-litre inline 4 that generates more power, is lighter and has 20% better fuel consumption. Nobody is saying "but my last Golf had a 3-litre V6, this is crap". Companies that focus on doing more with less are future proofing themselves.
Einstein wouldn't have known that. He was a mathematical theoretical physicist, not an engineer. But you are wrong for another reason. Most low end PCBs are actually printed on a polymer-loaded paper substrate not that far from cardboard. Most modern paper burns very badly because a major component is clay - it's extremely hard to burn a magazine as they tend to have very highly loaded paper to allow full color printing. A modern mechanically polished paper substrate printed with a thin layer of UV cured polymer - which is basically what a full gloss brochure typically is made from - would be a "good enough" substrate for short life printable electronics.
I waited to see if anybody would take my (off-topic) point. I think that "Photography", literally drawing with light, does properly apply to the silver process. The digital process is quite different and has a different mindset. I'm a former RPS member who used to do landscape and portraits in medium format. I had to plan carefully, expose carefully and process carefully so as not to waste film. Nowadays, people just seem to point and click endlessly hoping that one of the results will be good, then fix stuff in Photoshop. I call it digital imaging because it is a different trade with different skills, just as I don't call helming a powerboat "sailing". (And my attempts with digital cameras are still nowhere near as good as my old MF photos - just knowing you can point and click seems to do something to my skill level.)
Until the end of the 20th century, a major market for silver was photography. The digital camera and the inkjet printer have slowly destroyed that market and replaced it with digital imaging. Now there's a new use for the silver which, presumably, had digital imaging not come along would have been much more expensive. (Although color photography ends up more or less silver free and there was considerable recycling, there was still a steady consumption of silver, and as the photography market democratised, the amount of silver in use at a given time was steadily increasing.)
I meant "roll out the latest Windows Mobile on Arm..."
No, they look like smartphones on steroids. And as these lower-end units will basically be just that - with 3 and 3.5G, phone connectivity, GPS, Bluetooth and wireless, and connecting seamlessly to the back at the ranch desktop - they will be seen as a step up from phones, not down from laptops.
I'm writing this on a netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 and it just works (TM). It would work just as well on an Arm processor.
In the real world, I'm sure that Microsoft will be able to roll out Windows Mobile on Arm one microsecond after Dell tell them that their new 7 inch communications centre and ebook reader will have to run an OS supplied by Canonical.