It's perfectly understandable. While I don't want the Higgs to exist, not because I'm unpatriotic, but out of sheer perversity. I really don't like the way physics is going, with all this speculation about tiny dimensions, strings and multiple universes, and I would really like us to find out that Nature (anthropomorphic personification, I know, I know) is indeed fundamentally simple.
There used to a bottled propane called Bottogas which was sold in the UK. A friend (who admittedly lived in a rural area...) was persuaded when small by his older brother that it was so called because the bottles were filled with the gas from cows' bottoms. You may find this improbable, but buildings have caught fire and burnt down through people carelessly igniting cow fart.
How many other people who were involved in the first deployment of lithium batteries in portable electronics remember how dangerous they could be? I remember two instances; once when an engineer was talking to a technician and, without thinking, the technician picked up a lithium AA cell and a set of metal calipers and was about to measure the length. The engineer warned him not to do that - from under the desk. The second was a discussion, post-Falklands, about the possibility of keeping stocks of lithium cells for use with tactical radio telephones in case the battery charger was damaged. A technical sergeant remarked "All we need is a little gadget that shorts them after a few seconds and they can double as (censored) hand grenades." The problem was that fusing them meant a minor overcurrent draw by the electronics (e.g. from being on the fringes of an EMP burst) would blow the fuse making the cell useless, whereas thermal trips might take too long to operate.
These cells will need remarkably good protection against internal and external shorts. They have the stored energy density of dynamite, but they don't have the long development of reduced sensitivity characteristics that make dynamite safe.
Someone whose child was murdered is understandably wound up about it and does not come to a rational solution. What has this got to do with guns? Are you telling me there are no parents in the US who have had their child murdered? If so, that's balls. And do some of them want to take extreme measures to reduce child murders? Unsurprising.
Does NRA membership cause low IQs, or is there merely a correlation?
Last I heard, you can still compose your own music and perform it without going near those agencies.
In fact, you can produce your own version of anything that is out of copyright and do exactly what you want with it. Anything you created, you can assign the copyright to anyone you like. You can play it on local radio, post it to YouTube, sell your own CDs, and you can tell the PRS to go reproduce itself off. So how does this inhibit creativity?
I can assure you that the Danes do have a record of invading their Southern near neighbours, and I believe the governments of the time were pretty totalitarian. If the Danes had that rocket capability in the 10th century AD, nobody would have heard of King Alfred. And we'd be making the Lego for them.
Yes, he was a nasty manipulative self centred Trotskyite then, but no more of a nutjob than the other Trots we were saddled with in our student union. Their view can be summarised thus: one of them said to me "you can't just allow anyone to vote in a democracy because they might vote the wrong way". And now they run the country.
However, to be fair to Straw (through gritted teeth) I-like-fucking-rich-Yanks Blunkett, I-just-like-fucking-rich-people Mandelson, the utterly appalling John Reid (who now works lobbying for private prisons, no less), Jacqui claims-for-her-sister's-house Smith, Harriet Harman, Tessa "what bribe from Berlusconi?" Jowell, Tony "bomber" Blair and "Buff" Hoon are all even worse.
As Dr. Pope of the UK Met Office pointed out, people are very confused between climate (long term variation) and weather (relatively short term variation, which can still extend over periods of maybe 30 years.) Measuring climate change takes a long time and needs standards of reference that go a long way back - which is why things like dendrochronology (dating from tree rings and noting how they vary from year to year) is so valuable, or taking ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. On another note, that's why we have to persist with an Arctic ice tracking technology that has flaws - because even with the flaws it should be internally consistent over time. Changing the methodology makes the history useless.
So when this network of sensors is connected up, how long will it be before they actually provide any useful information about climate change as distinct from weather variation?
Which is not to knock the idea. Someone has to do it. It used to be the mark of a really advanced society that it planned for the long term - like British aristocrats planting trees to be felled by their great-grandchildren.
This is a good suggestion. Wind up dynamos are now available that provide 5.5V at up to 0.5A, and it is difficult to get this out of a small solar panel if you cannot mount it easily at the right angle. It should certainly be considered as a backup. Of course the other gadgets need to be chosen to be compatible.
Owing to paranoid customers that won't even let you read your own log files, our application has to send us emails so we can tell them what they are going wrong. The worry comes when we get ones saying "help I am trapped in a VMWare instance, please get me out of here".
I remember the disaster when two engineers had to take an FEA program and data to the mainframe half way across the country. On the way someone came out in front of them at a T-junction and the driver had to brake really hard. They just missed the idiot and carried on to Rugby. When they opened the boot they found it full of random oriented punch cards, the cardboard box having been flung about. There was no option but to return, re-sort all the cards, and book another trip.
Youth of today, what do they know? I was the first person in the company to have a mag tape to mag tape assembler, but I had to write my own FP library because the supplier failed to deliver in time.
Your understanding of both pigment and the mechanism of vision are flawed. Human vision has only a 3-color system, and therefore cannot distinguish many mixes of colors. (Birds have a 4-color system, the last I heard; mammals lost theirs when they became nocturnal, and we have not fully recovered ours because, basically, primate evolution has not had long enough for it to reappear- perhaps the selection pressure is not that great.) What's more, there is no such thing as a pure green pigment. This is because the very concept of "green" covers a range of frequencies, and any "green" light produced by a black body radiator and produced by filtration will have a peak somewhere in the region we call "green", and considerable outliers. It is possible to produce objects that look the same color under one source and different colors under another, but that applies equally between mean sunlight and incandescent bulbs as between bulbs and CFLs.This is because the energy spectrum of an incandescent lamp is nothing like mean sunlight. The fact that we are not usually consciously aware of this shows how adaptable the eye is to different light sources.
As a final note, it is possible to produce fluorescents that give a rendering much closer to mean sunlight than do incandescent bulbs, whereas the only way to get the effect with incandescents is to use filters which stop most of the visible radiation from them, meaning that a very high wattage is needed. In the good old days we needed 1000W Photofloods with special film for color indoor photography, which you can do just fine nowadays with standard discharge flashlamps that are built into cameras.
You are totally wrong. You have to use an incident light meter, it's no good pointing a camera type light meter at the bulb because incandescents all have a bright spot while fluorescents spread the emission over a bigger area.
My own experiments, years ago, showed that in real world use CFLs are equivalent to about four times the wattage of standard 1000 hour incandescents, whereas full size fluorescents produce maybe 5 times the output of the same wattage incandescent. Linear 8W CFLs as used on boats and caravans give about the same actual illumination as a 20W tungsten-halogen bulb, because their light output is much less directional, but then they are much better at illuminating dark corners.
Case in point: when we moved to our present house, the kitchen used 3 100W bulbs. These have been satisfactorily replaced with 3 20W CFLs for the last 20 years. As different types of CFL have evolved, there has been no deterioration in light output, though it is important to buy good quality - GE or Philips - bulbs.
I note that the cost of LEDS is now becoming comparable in lifetime cost with CFLs. The main issue is that LED drivers are relatively inefficient because most of them waste a lot of power in series resistors. What is needed is a really efficient current driver IC for LEDs. This would drive up the efficiency of conversion and make them even more useful in the Third World.
Is there some convention that all planets are female? I had it that on the present system Venus, the Earth (Gaia) and the Moon are female, and the rest very definitely male. Moons of Jupiter are named for his - ahem - lady friends.
The British crisis started when it emerged that the Northern Rock mortgage lender had in fact hidden 60 billion of assets off balance sheet in an offshore fund called "Granite". Just as thieves would find life a lot harder if there were no fences, corporate criminals would find life a lot harder if there were no tax havens to conceal their activities. However, my point was a little different. When a corporation vests itself in eitgher a tax haven or a US State with low standards of corporate governance (Delaware), you can safely assume that they are not doing this from ethical motives.
Whenever I read that, in this case for Capitol Records, why do I just assume they will rely on dubious tactics?
The world would be a significantly better place if the US Government were to send out the cruise missiles to every building listed as a corporate HQ in Delaware, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos, Bermuda, Jersey, Guernsey, Monaco, Lichtenstein, Zug...when you start in business with an intention to defraud, the omens are not good.
You forget that the rest of the world does not share the US attitude, rightly or wrongly, and that there are a lot more of them. And you don't know the principle of ethics that says, in effect, "the right of your fist stops at my nose". Why should I have to defend myself against lies? There has to be a remedy for them. Your argument can ultimately be extended to "anybody should be allowed to fire a gun at me anonymously, it's my responsibility to protect myself." At what point on the spectrum between anonymous hate speech and anonymous attempts at murder should the state step in?
In the real world, if I were to post anonymously that Zero_DGZ is a pedophile who visits Thailand to frequent child brothels, there are other anonymous idiots who would read this and post it as news. Once a few hundred people posted this juicy bit of information, people would cease to note it was anonymous and think "Google says lots of people think that...", and before long you would get a visit from the FBI.
It may be that anonymous statements of opinion, as in "I think ZeroDgZ is sociopathic", should be protected, but statements presented as facts that are actually lies should not. Using anonymity to protect against suit for libel should also not be protected (it is illegal in many countries as regards print media at least).
I'm only a peacetime sailor myself - but I learned a lot from my father who commanded a ship during and after WW2, as well as the retired naval officers and engineers who infest our marina. I was in fact alluding to many Slashdot posters who feel able to comment on waterborne matters while clearly having no idea (e.g. my son-in-law who cannot understand why I don't fit a couple of 500HP Diesels to my displacement hull to "get more speed", but is easily capable of understanding the propellor law if he ever put his mind to it).
You can see the same thing on a thread above where I commented, very briefly and intended humorously, on the point that to win a battle in the days of sail the British tactic involved very close bombardment indeed, perferably between wind and water at a range of a few feet. Moderated down. Moderated up were posts by people who obviously thought that Nelson, Drake and co. would have stood off a good long way and fired their guns using fire control computers. They and the moderators clearly haven't even been round a wooden warship, let alone been on one when the wind is blowing and the sea is up.
No mod points, but this is a high quality post that people should take note of. (Incidentally it is not only military craft where the paint locker is important. My flammables are kept in a steel structure with low level vents and with an expanse of deck between it and the cabin; not only can fumes not build up but an actual fire should not result in any serious damage. Fire is in fact a much bigger hazard on boats than sinking.)
Your comment on ASW radar is spot on, but in fact it's even worse than that - readily available low-tech radar can pick up the wake from an aircraft. Unfortunately, too many people think they are smarter than the people in navies, whereas the truth is that navies tend to attract some extremely bright and forward thinking people.
Ireland is a small country that has been riddled with political corruption for a long time. It has few natural resources (and as Brian O'Nolan once observed, the only words of Irish you really need to have a conversation on the West Coast are those for downpour, eternity, whiskey and potatoes. And he was Irish...)
So Irish governments have had the idea of making Ireland a tax haven for "creatives" - writers, musicians and artists. Given the current financial doo-doos, caused in part by the diversion of so much of the EU infrastructure budget to other purposes, they will naturally turn to trying to keep the recording industry onside. And with Dell going, and Apple deeper in bed with the recording industry, they have no incentive to support anybody else's business model.
Still, I expect the Irish communities around the world, full of people with enough go in them to want to escape, will welcome the influx of young well-educated people.
This is dependent on unobstructed sunlight and a properly aligned receptor. Which means tracking systems, which add cost. Perhaps at some point thin film PV will simply become cheaper than the lens system, because although a bigger total area will be needed, tracking will be a lot simpler or unnecessary.
Unfortunately the UK has a long history of underfunded research and development projects that fizzle - Blue Streak, anyone? Significantly, the most successful British rocket project of recent years was the car that broke the sound barrier, and Richard Noble and Andy Green are now trying to build one to exceed 1000mph. Significantly, because when Noble was trying to get funding, BAe actually sent a memo around its engineers telling them not to co-operate as the inevitable failure would bring them into disrepute.
Give the money to Noble. He'll use it to train the next generation of advanced engineers on a fun project that will actually go somewhere. Looking at the history to date of US efforts to develop scramjets (and this thing is basically an extended scramjet and therefore even more complex and expensive) a million Euros won't even pay for the project manager's office.
I posted up this thread commenting that the extent of the error had been misrepresented, and deliberately being sharply critical of AGW deniers and Nigel Calder in particular. During the period when it's mainly Europeans who post, this got moderated up to +3. Then the US started to come on line and it's now down to -1 troll. I don't know whether this is a more coordinated campaign by US lobbyists, now they've lost the election, or whether it's something in the US Zeitgeist at the moment, but at least on Slashdot my suspicion is that Europe is diverging from the US. It's really odd, when you consider that it means that some US Slashdot posters now prefer the views of largely unqualified journalists to mostly American scientists. Odd and depressing, given that other threads seem to have people with limitless belief in the capabilities of those scientists and engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's perfectly understandable. While I don't want the Higgs to exist, not because I'm unpatriotic, but out of sheer perversity. I really don't like the way physics is going, with all this speculation about tiny dimensions, strings and multiple universes, and I would really like us to find out that Nature (anthropomorphic personification, I know, I know) is indeed fundamentally simple.
There used to a bottled propane called Bottogas which was sold in the UK. A friend (who admittedly lived in a rural area...) was persuaded when small by his older brother that it was so called because the bottles were filled with the gas from cows' bottoms. You may find this improbable, but buildings have caught fire and burnt down through people carelessly igniting cow fart.
Since France is about to join NATO (which of course they call OTAN) this could lead to serious diplomatic incidents.
"You, Sir, are a dirty liar! The machine says so!"
"Sale espece de cochon, I have simply had snails in garlic with a bottle of Burgundy for lunch."
These cells will need remarkably good protection against internal and external shorts. They have the stored energy density of dynamite, but they don't have the long development of reduced sensitivity characteristics that make dynamite safe.
Does NRA membership cause low IQs, or is there merely a correlation?
In fact, you can produce your own version of anything that is out of copyright and do exactly what you want with it. Anything you created, you can assign the copyright to anyone you like. You can play it on local radio, post it to YouTube, sell your own CDs, and you can tell the PRS to go reproduce itself off. So how does this inhibit creativity?
I can assure you that the Danes do have a record of invading their Southern near neighbours, and I believe the governments of the time were pretty totalitarian. If the Danes had that rocket capability in the 10th century AD, nobody would have heard of King Alfred. And we'd be making the Lego for them.
However, to be fair to Straw (through gritted teeth) I-like-fucking-rich-Yanks Blunkett, I-just-like-fucking-rich-people Mandelson, the utterly appalling John Reid (who now works lobbying for private prisons, no less), Jacqui claims-for-her-sister's-house Smith, Harriet Harman, Tessa "what bribe from Berlusconi?" Jowell, Tony "bomber" Blair and "Buff" Hoon are all even worse.
OK, rant for the day over.
So when this network of sensors is connected up, how long will it be before they actually provide any useful information about climate change as distinct from weather variation?
Which is not to knock the idea. Someone has to do it. It used to be the mark of a really advanced society that it planned for the long term - like British aristocrats planting trees to be felled by their great-grandchildren.
This is a good suggestion. Wind up dynamos are now available that provide 5.5V at up to 0.5A, and it is difficult to get this out of a small solar panel if you cannot mount it easily at the right angle. It should certainly be considered as a backup. Of course the other gadgets need to be chosen to be compatible.
Owing to paranoid customers that won't even let you read your own log files, our application has to send us emails so we can tell them what they are going wrong. The worry comes when we get ones saying "help I am trapped in a VMWare instance, please get me out of here".
Youth of today, what do they know? I was the first person in the company to have a mag tape to mag tape assembler, but I had to write my own FP library because the supplier failed to deliver in time.
As a final note, it is possible to produce fluorescents that give a rendering much closer to mean sunlight than do incandescent bulbs, whereas the only way to get the effect with incandescents is to use filters which stop most of the visible radiation from them, meaning that a very high wattage is needed. In the good old days we needed 1000W Photofloods with special film for color indoor photography, which you can do just fine nowadays with standard discharge flashlamps that are built into cameras.
My own experiments, years ago, showed that in real world use CFLs are equivalent to about four times the wattage of standard 1000 hour incandescents, whereas full size fluorescents produce maybe 5 times the output of the same wattage incandescent. Linear 8W CFLs as used on boats and caravans give about the same actual illumination as a 20W tungsten-halogen bulb, because their light output is much less directional, but then they are much better at illuminating dark corners.
Case in point: when we moved to our present house, the kitchen used 3 100W bulbs. These have been satisfactorily replaced with 3 20W CFLs for the last 20 years. As different types of CFL have evolved, there has been no deterioration in light output, though it is important to buy good quality - GE or Philips - bulbs.
I note that the cost of LEDS is now becoming comparable in lifetime cost with CFLs. The main issue is that LED drivers are relatively inefficient because most of them waste a lot of power in series resistors. What is needed is a really efficient current driver IC for LEDs. This would drive up the efficiency of conversion and make them even more useful in the Third World.
Is there some convention that all planets are female? I had it that on the present system Venus, the Earth (Gaia) and the Moon are female, and the rest very definitely male. Moons of Jupiter are named for his - ahem - lady friends.
The British crisis started when it emerged that the Northern Rock mortgage lender had in fact hidden 60 billion of assets off balance sheet in an offshore fund called "Granite". Just as thieves would find life a lot harder if there were no fences, corporate criminals would find life a lot harder if there were no tax havens to conceal their activities. However, my point was a little different. When a corporation vests itself in eitgher a tax haven or a US State with low standards of corporate governance (Delaware), you can safely assume that they are not doing this from ethical motives.
The world would be a significantly better place if the US Government were to send out the cruise missiles to every building listed as a corporate HQ in Delaware, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos, Bermuda, Jersey, Guernsey, Monaco, Lichtenstein, Zug...when you start in business with an intention to defraud, the omens are not good.
In the real world, if I were to post anonymously that Zero_DGZ is a pedophile who visits Thailand to frequent child brothels, there are other anonymous idiots who would read this and post it as news. Once a few hundred people posted this juicy bit of information, people would cease to note it was anonymous and think "Google says lots of people think that...", and before long you would get a visit from the FBI.
It may be that anonymous statements of opinion, as in "I think ZeroDgZ is sociopathic", should be protected, but statements presented as facts that are actually lies should not. Using anonymity to protect against suit for libel should also not be protected (it is illegal in many countries as regards print media at least).
You can see the same thing on a thread above where I commented, very briefly and intended humorously, on the point that to win a battle in the days of sail the British tactic involved very close bombardment indeed, perferably between wind and water at a range of a few feet. Moderated down. Moderated up were posts by people who obviously thought that Nelson, Drake and co. would have stood off a good long way and fired their guns using fire control computers. They and the moderators clearly haven't even been round a wooden warship, let alone been on one when the wind is blowing and the sea is up.
Read up Nelson's tactics at Trafalgar. Basically, just ram and then blow them to bits at literally a few feet of range.
Your comment on ASW radar is spot on, but in fact it's even worse than that - readily available low-tech radar can pick up the wake from an aircraft. Unfortunately, too many people think they are smarter than the people in navies, whereas the truth is that navies tend to attract some extremely bright and forward thinking people.
So Irish governments have had the idea of making Ireland a tax haven for "creatives" - writers, musicians and artists. Given the current financial doo-doos, caused in part by the diversion of so much of the EU infrastructure budget to other purposes, they will naturally turn to trying to keep the recording industry onside. And with Dell going, and Apple deeper in bed with the recording industry, they have no incentive to support anybody else's business model.
Still, I expect the Irish communities around the world, full of people with enough go in them to want to escape, will welcome the influx of young well-educated people.
This is dependent on unobstructed sunlight and a properly aligned receptor. Which means tracking systems, which add cost. Perhaps at some point thin film PV will simply become cheaper than the lens system, because although a bigger total area will be needed, tracking will be a lot simpler or unnecessary.
Give the money to Noble. He'll use it to train the next generation of advanced engineers on a fun project that will actually go somewhere. Looking at the history to date of US efforts to develop scramjets (and this thing is basically an extended scramjet and therefore even more complex and expensive) a million Euros won't even pay for the project manager's office.
I posted up this thread commenting that the extent of the error had been misrepresented, and deliberately being sharply critical of AGW deniers and Nigel Calder in particular. During the period when it's mainly Europeans who post, this got moderated up to +3. Then the US started to come on line and it's now down to -1 troll. I don't know whether this is a more coordinated campaign by US lobbyists, now they've lost the election, or whether it's something in the US Zeitgeist at the moment, but at least on Slashdot my suspicion is that Europe is diverging from the US. It's really odd, when you consider that it means that some US Slashdot posters now prefer the views of largely unqualified journalists to mostly American scientists. Odd and depressing, given that other threads seem to have people with limitless belief in the capabilities of those scientists and engineers.