Just out of curiosity, what does a "nuclear engineer" do, exactly?
I'm in EE and I could start working on power plant design project tomorrow. There are some redudancy issues I'd need an extra course or two in.. However, once someone does know how to build a fission reactor, the rest becomes details.. Great many details.
Interesting. Yes, a mission/base to mars looks much more likely this way. What I don't get, is why they're not similarly committed to having a moonbase. Moon has ice reserves as well and it's a little bit closer. Most importantly, it's way cheaper to build spacecraft/satellites/orbital nukes in moon. It'd be hands down the most expensive manufacturing plant in the known space to run. But getting stuff into orbit would be relatively dirt cheap.
Logistics of setting up a lunar steel mill would be interesting.. How much is it to get a kilo into orbit again? 20000$?
It's such an obvious idea to use these things for surveillance, I have to wonder why were they ever phased out? Especially for civilian use? One of those thigs would be really great for ATC uses or maritime surveillance, no?
The other thing I see talked about is to use zeppelins as cargo transport. Much, much faster than a ship but waaaay cheaper than a jet plane. Especially for heavy loads. One has to wonder how well a zeppelin loaded with a few hundred tonnes of cargo will turn anyways.
Come on. Chip inductors are hardly a rocket science. You can buy 0402 sized inductors off-the-shelf. They might not be as ubiquitous as resistors, but not exotic either. I think the size designation refers to thousanth of a furlough. It's so small you need microscope, fine tweezers, steady hands and lots of patience to work with those suckers.
What strikes me as funny about all this is that it would be more efficient to run a tiny engine instead of using a battery. Engines have to deal with friction, which leads to waste heat. Batteries do generate a little heat, but that's it. In other words, it's not that the micro-engines are so great, it's that the batteries are so bad. Lithium-ion batteries are more user-friendly and a little bit more efficient than nickel-cadmium-batteries, but not by that much. Zinc-oxygen batteries are a real innovation, if only due to the fact that air's free. I'm not complaining, my hearing aid runs more than twice as long as with conventional batteries, but the Zinc-air battery prices are highway robbery.
Until we learn to store electricity in a reasonable manner, wacky ideas like microengines will probably stay around. I didn't see much mention in the article about how to deal with the heat and friction of higher-rpm-than-conventional-gas-turbine, so we can safely assume this stuff is not going to appear next year in circuit city.
This is just great. And I thought our cable service was overloaded as it was. Never to worry, thought, they do send cease&desist nastygrams to everyone who exceeds an arbitary download quota as it is. In any case, you'd think it'd not be that difficult to monitor the bandwith usage per node and..
Actually this reminds me of the a**wipes who used to download pr0n with threaded ftp clients from within the student network. We had a shared 512kbit line and you can see where this is leading to. Ditto for download managers with "segment" support. I fully realize I'm using making the download even slower for everyone else by using Getright to have 4 independent connections.. Some people are just more equal than others, dammit!
2400 bauds actually. Okay, more like 2550-2650 bauds, but I digress. That just means you can change frequency component of the signal x times a second, which requires, yup, one Hz of bandwith a pop. You can also use amplitude modulation, which got you the original 9600bps modems. (2400Hz * 4 amplitude levels) and so on.
56k modem is, AFAIK, sort of one-directional ISDN.
Try reading some nice "mainstream" books once in a while. I don't mean bestseller/landfill category, but a genuinely good book. The thing you probably will notice that the characters have, well, character.
When you compare this to the usual cut&paste stats in a genre book.. Ouch. Sometimes even genre/mainstream titles by the same writer show that. Try "The Crow road" by Iain M. Banks, you'd hardly believe it was written by the same person as those Culture books. I suppose you have to write a story around your people if you don't have utopia/dystopia/whatever to distract the reader.
There are some very nice SF titles I have read. Usually, but not always, the story could be rewritten in contemporary setting without too much difficulty. Okay, so the 7 samurais was a samurai movie which was inspired by westerns.. And the few good men (or something like that!) was inspired by the 7 samurais.. So you can take the story and stick it into another setting, nothing new in that!
In my opinion, SF setting is more likely to hurt a book rather than help it.
Here in the socialist europe, mass transit is heavily subsidized and motorists are taxed until they squeak. Personally I ride a bike to work every day and take a bus during winter months. I moved into an apartment reasonably close to where I work.
I used to own a car as well as a motorcycle. Then, one day, I woke up and realized I'm shelling some 50% of my income-after-taxes into car tax, gas tax and insurance vat. So, out goes the car. I ain't buying one unless there's a major overhaul of the income tax structure, which won't happen. I was already trying to find a work in UK where the car tax is more reasonable but this spring was not a good time to look for work abroads.
I've been using public transport for about six years now and I can say it still does suck. The only nice exception is rail transport. Local rails, trams, metro.. The schedules gives you maximum wait time of about 10 minutes and the train is usually there when it was supposed to be.
One remarkable development in this area is the web transport guide (http://pathfinder3.meridian.fi/ytv/eng/).. This one actually does work. You give it where you're starting from and where you're going to and when you're supposed to be there or when you're going to leave. It spits out three or four possible routes to your destination complete with any/all switches and lead times invoved. Brilliant. e-application that's actually very useful?
..From the usual "windmill" claptrap you get from people who don't like nuclear power.
Seriously, thought. It's a cool idea, but you'd really need a way to build the panels from local materials. When our lunar power corp was up and churning out solar panels, the situation would just *beg* for a bald guy with a cat blackmailing major cities. Bad fry-day?
To me, the real merit of the idea is to estabilish lunar industrial base which would make getting stuff into orbit a relative bargain. Anyone know if there are actually useful metal deposits et cetera in the moon?
For the DIY-crowd, ad-aware will clean up the mess Kazaa leaves behind without too much hassle. Grab it here. It's quite nice package, too. I have it running at every startup and it's not that rare to get a "visitor" regularly. In fact, it's so nice I've been thinking of investing the $15 for the plus-version.
I thought I read that you can't dump a product on market in EU. That is, they can't sell it for less than the manufacturing costs. Apparently Xbox had at least an extra 100 on the price. For the new cost (299) it'd be almost worth it just for a DVD player.
I do believe capping cable modems is more because you have quite limited bandwith beyond the cable company's local net. Yes, it's sweet to be able to download at 400kB/s, but providing that sort of service costs arm + leg.
Information may want to be free, bandwith doesn't. Now, I have no problem seeing cablecos offering TV broadcasts via cable modems in future. With multicasting, you end up *saving* cable bandwith. Only, again, the problem isn't the cable bandwith, it's the cost of the bandwith for *you* to download britney spears nekkid pics..
This sort of reminds me of creationist mindset. Microsoft has Windows CE, which was supposed to be a "consumer level realtime operating system". Which doesn't mean it has anything to do with an RTS. You can have those things running in 2kB of ram with interrupt support and everything.
That's just marketoidspeak for stripped down version you can stick into an ATM or something. At the same time, stripping down XP middleware will cripple windows. Okay, removing all that middleware would create _business opportunities_ to 3rd parties. Which might indeed cripple windows as we know it.
Ohh, And here I thought we have a RC1 available for download. Dang. Never mind, I didn't realize Mozilla is such big news that/. publishes even plans to have a beta build:-)
I've been using Mozilla starting around.92 and moved toward the point I'm at right now, which is about 95% mozilla and rest for IE. Usually the culprit is some kind of fancy menu-system or dysfunctional scripting gimmick. The important thing is, however, that for majority of the sites Mozilla works just great!
I'm just feeling a little odd about thinking it'd be a good thing to have AOL use Gecko so that we'd get standards-compliant web sites. Who'd have thought of it, AOL as a force for the white hats?
Sign of times, surely. Old Office suites are into nth generation and they've accumulated so much excess baggage that something written from scratch can actually compete.
From the article, it seems that this particular one is not quite ready for prime time yet. It's ok if the feature count doesn't include the kitchen sink, but what there is has to work. Especially if anyone would consider using it for work.
I suppose there will be the open-office people coming out of woodwork again. As if $50 would be excessive cost for a word processor, spreadsheet and an app to make simple slides. It is excessive if the apps do not quite work, like it says in the article.
The ASRAAM for Eurofighter was supposed to be transatlantic project, but US decided to go with new generation of sidewinder instead. So now it's ready. Like everyone has already said, this really isn't anything truly new. USAAF is simply deploying tried & tested technology that's proven to work for everybody else. I don't doubt the Raytheon's system will prove to be the most user-friendly and effective as they can utilize the lessons from other manufacturers' platforms.
Probably one big motivation for this comes way back in -89 when Germany was re-unified. Luftwaffe suddenly had a bunch of Mig-29s in working condition and the logistics to support them. Turns out that Mig definitely had an edge over F-16 as the Vympel thrust-vectored missile could be shot "across the gap". Germans did decide to keep those Migs around..
Ivan's out of the game now, so US is the bully in the playground. EU would have the technology and the economic power.. I can just imagine what would happen to a motion to increase military spending of each member country to, say, 8% of annual budget. The national armies would have to be unified as well. Not going to happen in a hurry. That sort of leaves China. And they're way behind the technology curve.
Actually, the region coding is much more powerful than the copy protection. Gives you some ideas about priorities of Sony on this. So, if I'd just want to play from "backups", I could get an el-cheapo module. But because I'd like to play US imports, I gotta get the fancy (and expensive) one.
PS2 protection is, in any case, much more robust than PSX. You have to do quite a bit of wiring to get completely protection-free box.
Media Industry really seems enamored by the pay-per-view ideology. Instead of hearing songs from radio for the cost of being assaulted by ads, we get pay-per-songs in web radio? Wonderful.
The real pay-per-view experience of renting a movie is fundamentally different experience from listening to a CD. How many times have you listened to your favorite CD? How many times have you seen your favorite movie?
If the former does not exceed the latter by an order of magnitude, you're probably one of those Rocky Horror Show freaks..
I have to wonder how much of the new revenue from digital media will end up fueling lobbying to outlaw DRM-free hard disk drives etc.
The spam-filtered email I'm using is http://spamcop.net.. They started the email service a few months ago so it's still a little rough around the edges and you need to use your local SMTP server. Other than that, it works pretty much as advertised.
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Just out of curiosity, what does a "nuclear engineer" do, exactly?
I'm in EE and I could start working on power plant design project tomorrow. There are some redudancy issues I'd need an extra course or two in.. However, once someone does know how to build a fission reactor, the rest becomes details.. Great many details.
Interesting. Yes, a mission/base to mars looks much more likely this way. What I don't get, is why they're not similarly committed to having a moonbase. Moon has ice reserves as well and it's a little bit closer. Most importantly, it's way cheaper to build spacecraft/satellites/orbital nukes in moon. It'd be hands down the most expensive manufacturing plant in the known space to run. But getting stuff into orbit would be relatively dirt cheap.
Logistics of setting up a lunar steel mill would be interesting.. How much is it to get a kilo into orbit again? 20000$?
I don't have to say I'm using Netscape 6.2 anymore, while bitching about site XXX HTML not working in Mozilla? More power to these guys.
It's such an obvious idea to use these things for surveillance, I have to wonder why were they ever phased out? Especially for civilian use? One of those thigs would be really great for ATC uses or maritime surveillance, no?
The other thing I see talked about is to use zeppelins as cargo transport. Much, much faster than a ship but waaaay cheaper than a jet plane. Especially for heavy loads. One has to wonder how well a zeppelin loaded with a few hundred tonnes of cargo will turn anyways.
Come on. Chip inductors are hardly a rocket science. You can buy 0402 sized inductors off-the-shelf. They might not be as ubiquitous as resistors, but not exotic either. I think the size designation refers to thousanth of a furlough. It's so small you need microscope, fine tweezers, steady hands and lots of patience to work with those suckers.
What strikes me as funny about all this is that it would be more efficient to run a tiny engine instead of using a battery. Engines have to deal with friction, which leads to waste heat. Batteries do generate a little heat, but that's it. In other words, it's not that the micro-engines are so great, it's that the batteries are so bad. Lithium-ion batteries are more user-friendly and a little bit more efficient than nickel-cadmium-batteries, but not by that much. Zinc-oxygen batteries are a real innovation, if only due to the fact that air's free. I'm not complaining, my hearing aid runs more than twice as long as with conventional batteries, but the Zinc-air battery prices are highway robbery.
Until we learn to store electricity in a reasonable manner, wacky ideas like microengines will probably stay around. I didn't see much mention in the article about how to deal with the heat and friction of higher-rpm-than-conventional-gas-turbine, so we can safely assume this stuff is not going to appear next year in circuit city.
This is just great. And I thought our cable service was overloaded as it was. Never to worry, thought, they do send cease&desist nastygrams to everyone who exceeds an arbitary download quota as it is. In any case, you'd think it'd not be that difficult to monitor the bandwith usage per node and ..
Actually this reminds me of the a**wipes who used to download pr0n with threaded ftp clients from within the student network. We had a shared 512kbit line and you can see where this is leading to. Ditto for download managers with "segment" support. I fully realize I'm using making the download even slower for everyone else by using Getright to have 4 independent connections.. Some people are just more equal than others, dammit!
2400 bauds actually. Okay, more like 2550-2650 bauds, but I digress. That just means you can change frequency component of the signal x times a second, which requires, yup, one Hz of bandwith a pop. You can also use amplitude modulation, which got you the original 9600bps modems. (2400Hz * 4 amplitude levels) and so on.
56k modem is, AFAIK, sort of one-directional ISDN.
Try reading some nice "mainstream" books once in a while. I don't mean bestseller/landfill category, but a genuinely good book. The thing you probably will notice that the characters have, well, character.
When you compare this to the usual cut&paste stats in a genre book.. Ouch. Sometimes even genre/mainstream titles by the same writer show that. Try "The Crow road" by Iain M. Banks, you'd hardly believe it was written by the same person as those Culture books. I suppose you have to write a story around your people if you don't have utopia/dystopia/whatever to distract the reader.
There are some very nice SF titles I have read. Usually, but not always, the story could be rewritten in contemporary setting without too much difficulty. Okay, so the 7 samurais was a samurai movie which was inspired by westerns.. And the few good men (or something like that!) was inspired by the 7 samurais.. So you can take the story and stick it into another setting, nothing new in that!
In my opinion, SF setting is more likely to hurt a book rather than help it.
Well.
.. This one actually does work. You give it where you're starting from and where you're going to and when you're supposed to be there or when you're going to leave. It spits out three or four possible routes to your destination complete with any/all switches and lead times invoved. Brilliant. e-application that's actually very useful?
Here in the socialist europe, mass transit is heavily subsidized and motorists are taxed until they squeak. Personally I ride a bike to work every day and take a bus during winter months. I moved into an apartment reasonably close to where I work.
I used to own a car as well as a motorcycle. Then, one day, I woke up and realized I'm shelling some 50% of my income-after-taxes into car tax, gas tax and insurance vat. So, out goes the car. I ain't buying one unless there's a major overhaul of the income tax structure, which won't happen. I was already trying to find a work in UK where the car tax is more reasonable but this spring was not a good time to look for work abroads.
I've been using public transport for about six years now and I can say it still does suck. The only nice exception is rail transport. Local rails, trams, metro.. The schedules gives you maximum wait time of about 10 minutes and the train is usually there when it was supposed to be.
One remarkable development in this area is the web transport guide (http://pathfinder3.meridian.fi/ytv/eng/)
..From the usual "windmill" claptrap you get from people who don't like nuclear power.
Seriously, thought. It's a cool idea, but you'd really need a way to build the panels from local materials. When our lunar power corp was up and churning out solar panels, the situation would just *beg* for a bald guy with a cat blackmailing major cities. Bad fry-day?
To me, the real merit of the idea is to estabilish lunar industrial base which would make getting stuff into orbit a relative bargain. Anyone know if there are actually useful metal deposits et cetera in the moon?
For the DIY-crowd, ad-aware will clean up the mess Kazaa leaves behind without too much hassle. Grab it here. It's quite nice package, too. I have it running at every startup and it's not that rare to get a "visitor" regularly. In fact, it's so nice I've been thinking of investing the $15 for the plus-version.
I thought I read that you can't dump a product on market in EU. That is, they can't sell it for less than the manufacturing costs. Apparently Xbox had at least an extra 100 on the price. For the new cost (299) it'd be almost worth it just for a DVD player.
Didn't I read just now that US of A is about to build a new nuke plant?
I quess the powers-that-be finally got interested in Kioto treaty. And decided to create some high-tech jobs while they were at it.
I do believe capping cable modems is more because you have quite limited bandwith beyond the cable company's local net. Yes, it's sweet to be able to download at 400kB/s, but providing that sort of service costs arm + leg.
Information may want to be free, bandwith doesn't. Now, I have no problem seeing cablecos offering TV broadcasts via cable modems in future. With multicasting, you end up *saving* cable bandwith. Only, again, the problem isn't the cable bandwith, it's the cost of the bandwith for *you* to download britney spears nekkid pics..
You mutilated your hand and still didn't take the lesson from the experience? Sometimes, it's worth the expense to pay an expert.
This sort of reminds me of creationist mindset. Microsoft has Windows CE, which was supposed to be a "consumer level realtime operating system". Which doesn't mean it has anything to do with an RTS. You can have those things running in 2kB of ram with interrupt support and everything.
That's just marketoidspeak for stripped down version you can stick into an ATM or something. At the same time, stripping down XP middleware will cripple windows. Okay, removing all that middleware would create _business opportunities_ to 3rd parties. Which might indeed cripple windows as we know it.
Ohh, And here I thought we have a RC1 available for download. Dang. Never mind, I didn't realize Mozilla is such big news that /. publishes even plans to have a beta build :-)
.92 and moved toward the point I'm at right now, which is about 95% mozilla and rest for IE. Usually the culprit is some kind of fancy menu-system or dysfunctional scripting gimmick. The important thing is, however, that for majority of the sites Mozilla works just great!
I've been using Mozilla starting around
I'm just feeling a little odd about thinking it'd be a good thing to have AOL use Gecko so that we'd get standards-compliant web sites. Who'd have thought of it, AOL as a force for the white hats?
You can honestly say Jpeg2000 will improve your sex life!
Sign of times, surely. Old Office suites are into nth generation and they've accumulated so much excess baggage that something written from scratch can actually compete.
From the article, it seems that this particular one is not quite ready for prime time yet. It's ok if the feature count doesn't include the kitchen sink, but what there is has to work. Especially if anyone would consider using it for work.
I suppose there will be the open-office people coming out of woodwork again. As if $50 would be excessive cost for a word processor, spreadsheet and an app to make simple slides. It is excessive if the apps do not quite work, like it says in the article.
They certainly did take their time.
The ASRAAM for Eurofighter was supposed to be transatlantic project, but US decided to go with new generation of sidewinder instead. So now it's ready. Like everyone has already said, this really isn't anything truly new. USAAF is simply deploying tried & tested technology that's proven to work for everybody else. I don't doubt the Raytheon's system will prove to be the most user-friendly and effective as they can utilize the lessons from other manufacturers' platforms.
Probably one big motivation for this comes way back in -89 when Germany was re-unified. Luftwaffe suddenly had a bunch of Mig-29s in working condition and the logistics to support them. Turns out that Mig definitely had an edge over F-16 as the Vympel thrust-vectored missile could be shot "across the gap". Germans did decide to keep those Migs around..
Ivan's out of the game now, so US is the bully in the playground. EU would have the technology and the economic power.. I can just imagine what would happen to a motion to increase military spending of each member country to, say, 8% of annual budget. The national armies would have to be unified as well. Not going to happen in a hurry. That sort of leaves China. And they're way behind the technology curve.
As far as I understand, EU regs say you cannot price dump units. So M$ cannot sell Xboxes under the manufacturing cost here.
Too bad for them.
Actually, the region coding is much more powerful than the copy protection. Gives you some ideas about priorities of Sony on this. So, if I'd just want to play from "backups", I could get an el-cheapo module. But because I'd like to play US imports, I gotta get the fancy (and expensive) one.
PS2 protection is, in any case, much more robust than PSX. You have to do quite a bit of wiring to get completely protection-free box.
Media Industry really seems enamored by the pay-per-view ideology. Instead of hearing songs from radio for the cost of being assaulted by ads, we get pay-per-songs in web radio? Wonderful.
The real pay-per-view experience of renting a movie is fundamentally different experience from listening to a CD. How many times have you listened to your favorite CD? How many times have you seen your favorite movie?
If the former does not exceed the latter by an order of magnitude, you're probably one of those Rocky Horror Show freaks..
I have to wonder how much of the new revenue from digital media will end up fueling lobbying to outlaw DRM-free hard disk drives etc.
The spam-filtered email I'm using is http://spamcop.net .. They started the email service a few months ago so it's still a little rough around the edges and you need to use your local SMTP server. Other than that, it works pretty much as advertised.