I figure a better way to store hydrogen would be with around a chain of carbon atoms;). There's a lot of hydrogen you can store that way.
Either we burn the result, or we figure out how to build filters, fuel cells and catalysts that can handle the result in an environmentally friendly way.
A big benefit of having an electric subsystem is for the regenerative braking.
The benefit of sticking to hydrocarbons would be backward compatibility.
One of the problems is if we use rare catalysts - there might not be enough to go around to put in every vehicle (assuming a believable catalyst recycle rate when the vehicle is scrapped).
I'm in a celsius standard place, and sometimes I do use Fahrenheit.
Many airconditioning controls here only have 2 digits for temp, and it seems they do support precision to degree Fahrenheit, so you lose precision if you use Celsius. Most don't bother supporting decimal points;).
One degree Celsius is quite a big difference in temperature to people. For example, 24 could be too warm, and 23 too cold. Switching to Fahrenheit allows you to specify in between temperatures. Many airconditioning controls do allow you to switch to F (cheaper to produce the same one for all markets).
Still, from one of the links 'In his congratulatory letter to those working in the space industry, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia was the first nation "to open the way to the stars to humanity."'
I'm sure space tourism will count almost as much as "first person in space" in the history books.
Now what someone should organize is a "vote off the planet" "reality show". Then we could vote people off the planet (return trip or one-way;) ). Now that would be what I call progress:).
Even if "winners" politely decline their one-way trip to space, I think many voters would still feel the cost of casting their votes more than worth it, especially if the "decline interview" is televised on the show.
"space tourism" was the most important experiment the ISS was ever involved in.
To have your space program sustainable due to willing customers rather than solely dependent on government enforced taxes is what I call making progress[1]. One of the milestones in aerospace and the Russians were pioneers.
It is a step backwards if they discontinue space tourism (and do not move it to some other agency/organization).
[1] When people stop clapping hands and cheering every time after space vehicles somehow manage to lift off without blowing up, that's even more progress;).
I'm starting to think that they should make it illegal for people to put such terms in contracts.
Employment contracts have started getting more and more unreasonable and crap in the past few decades.
A sufficiently high level of unreasonableness and crapness is indistinguishable from evil.
They often say "Oh it's nothing, the company will never do that", "Oh that's just our standard contract", or bullshit like that.
Slavery was abolished years ago, but they're now reintroducing it in employment contracts everywhere. Go read some of those contracts, which boil down to "If you sign this you are now my Slave^H^H^H^H^HEmployee, I'm the Master^H^H^H^H^H^HEmployer so bow down, worship and serve me, bwahaha, and lastly, fuck you".
Meme or no meme, if they can't find jobs in countries where most companies are afraid that "controversy may translate into some kind of litigation down the road", then they may have to move elsewhere if they have no other means of supporting themselves.
Depends on which company they are applying to and probably what else they have online ( OSS projects with great code etc those are all also part of the "plumage").
While it means that those people have a higher chance of not being hired by "holier than thou" companies, they probably won't be a good fit in those companies anyway - might not have as much fun in those companies too;).
A fun company to join wouldn't care if prospective employees have photos of themself drunk wearing a silly party hat scattered amongst the social networks.
Nude beer bongs, smoking grass? I'm sure there are many bosses who have done that stuff before, and didn't think it was that bad. People hire people who are like them.
I've never done all of that, but I don't see that stuff as a huge problem, unless that person comes in smelling of grass/alcohol and looking doped/drunk then that's a very bad sign (you can always call up a bit earlier and say you can't make it for the appointment;) ).
It will hurt them if the job market is really tight, but otherwise, I don't think it's as bad as people think. Furthermore when these younger generation become CEOs and HR people, a fair number of them are probably going to think it's normal to have such pics, and might even view negatively/with suspicion people who don't let it all hang out;).
Now if there's evidence of them doing something vicious or malicious, in a manner where the context is hard to deny, then I think companies should think twice (esp if the culprit is the one posting it on his/her own page, unless maybe it's as an apology or something, but still...). It's kind of scary to have someone who might "snap" and bash colleagues/employees/staff, or do that just for amusement, and those traits will probably show up in other areas of their worklife.
I personally don't care if people link my posts with me. Ever since I've post stuff on the internet (more then a decade ago), I have assumed what I post can and will be linked to me. Google has thousands of hits of my posts etc.
Wouldn't you like to work with someone who was smart, not too lazy, competent AND _fun_? Maybe you can't have too many clowns around, but heck even a staid but wise HR dept might hire a "company clown" or two to brighten things up.
Actually it's worse than that. They will scare everyone and say: Oh noes we in Country A can't catch the evil hackers/paedophiles/spammers/etc in Country B, we need to cooperate and have our laws "harmonized".
Some countries will balk or there will still be some differences. Then they'll go: We can't have that, we need a Global Authority with more power to "fix that".
Once all that and more is done, the Throne is ready, then I guess it won't be long before The Beast (Mr 666 from Revelations) sits in it, and says to everyone "Bow down before me, or your cert doesn't get renewed".
Naturally that sort of thing is pretty handy for making life hard for crooks - no cert = no buy, no sell, no travel.
But sure would suck to be you, if you're "innocent". But nobody's innocent right?
"The lesson is that code cannot save one from a wrong design"
Which is why I prefer using languages which are faster and easier to code in, so that I can spend more time in design (or slashdot;) ).
Most programming is actually design, coding is closer to the act of drawing the blueprint[1].
So I prefer using something which allows me to "draw faster". If the drawing is wrong at the start, I can throw it away and start again.
If the drawing tool has decent defaults/templates and syntactic sugar which make drawing faster, then all the better.
[1] Whereas building the executable (compiling etc) is analogous to the actual construction of what's in the blueprint. Which is why Software Engineering is so different from Civil Engineering.
It is actually quite fun. 3 channel infra-red control (throttle, forward/back, turn left/right), and remarkably stable and controllable for something that size and price. I've tried a few other mini helis before and those were a lot less controllable.
Note that it's really light so just a bit of air movement can affect it a lot.
In still air with no draughts (don't even think about flying it in a breeze or wind!) it can hover better than my "3 times the price and 15 times the weight" esky lama v3 heli (which I'm too lazy to figure out how to trim properly:) ).
I bought it at Graffiti Toys, Berjaya Times Square, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
You can see something similar in the following url:
http://www.abc-intl.net/detail.php?model=ABC010
Thing is, mine has an all yellow body and yellow cockpit and none of the 2 other possible variations in the shop look like the one in the above url in terms of colour markings, but the design appears identical. So I'm not sure if they are really made by the same company/factory or if someone did some copying/counterfeiting - hard to tell nowadays as per article;).
The design is pretty decent - unlike with many other mini helis the blades are flexible plastic and are actually hinged so if they hit something they can move away which reduces the odds of damage, and it can survive 8 foot drops to carpet easily. But it's still just 15g of mostly plastic so if someone/something squishes it...
You can see the alleged wholesale price (USD11.2-11.8) if you create a throwaway login - a working email isn't necessary. I actually don't recommend using a real login or email.
Heh, nowadays even the Japanese get the Chinese to produce stuff for them. You can get the full range of quality from china - from great to crap to "might kill you".
So the chinese producers will probably form a "normal" bell curve in terms of quality rather than form a "biased towards quality" curve.
But as tech improves in some fields the average quality will end up being good enough for most. I don't really care if my USD22 remote control heli stops working after a month or two (I've already had plenty of fun with it). The last I checked apparently wholesale price was USD11.40/pc if you buy a full container of 6050 pcs;).
China will take longer as long as they don't take TQM seriously.
Anyway I think many Japanese companies have stopped taking quality seriously either - they just outsource the actual production to China and then they (and their customers) get "burnt" - e.g. laptop batteries.
Haven't you heard? There's this new fangled advanced "CRT" tech that's available in some places already:
24 bit colour Good colour gamut Extremely good black levels Good contrast ratios. Really fast grey to grey transition times Extremely low input lag (some say zero, but there's no such thing right?) Cheaper than LCD at the lower resolutions (imagine that!).
Cons: Higher power consumption. Heavy.
But hey I'm, sure they'll fix the cons real soon now right? They've already solved the burn-in problems in the earlier models.;)
Given thimerosal gets converted to ethyl mercury I'd actually be more surprised if there were no problems.
I'm sure _most_ people have no problems (scientific proof and all that yadda yadda), but when you make it compulsory for _everyone_ it sure sounds like a stupid idea.
Imagine injecting everyone with vaccines preserved with some peanut extract. Sure most people have no problems. But guess what, some people _will_ swell up and die.
The safety standards for compulsory drugs/treatment has to be a lot higher than for elective drugs/treatment.
It is not fair to compare software engineering with civil engineering, because most people don't know the real difference especially the bosses and project managers.
The real differences between software engineering and civil engineering:
With Civil Engineering:
The design phase of the project involves X people, X machines, X materials, X dollars and X time.
The build phase of the project involves 100X people, 100X machines, >1000X materials, >=10X dollars and > 2X time (go fill in more accurate figures yourself).
The plastic models cost <10% of the real thing to make, and the customer won't be satisfied with them.
With Software Engineering:
The design phase of the project involves X people, X machines, X materials and X dollars.
The build phase of the project involves the programmers typing "make all" and going for coffee.
The plastic models or blueprints _each_ cost as much as the "real thing" to make, and they often seem to work a bit like the real thing to customers. Thus they are often sold to customers as version 1.0 or 2.0 by management;).
If during the design phase, a software engineer asks management for 50% more money or time to "get it right" this would imply increasing the entire project cost by 50% more money or time.
If during the design phase a civil engineer or architect asks for 50% more money or time to get it right, it would affect the cost of the entire project a lot less.
Lastly, if programmers write bug free code they usually don't get rewarded for it because most of their bosses reward hard work, not low defect/quality. Most bosses can't tell the difference between good or great (and many can't even tell the difference between good or bad).
If coders post on slashdot/surf the internet because their stuff has nothing to fix, they might either: 1) End up being given everyone else's work to do 2) End up being reprimanded or sacked for being a slacker.
Or be required to make a player a coach in order to pay him more.
Or be required to pay coaches more than players even if the coach is crap.
Good coaches should be paid highly (they are worth it). But it should all be a matter of supply and demand.
And I can tell you in the corporate world there seem to be lots of bad coaches who are paid more than good players. I can't see a _good_ reason why, given the supply and demand curves.
Slashdot Mirror
I figure a better way to store hydrogen would be with around a chain of carbon atoms ;). There's a lot of hydrogen you can store that way.
Either we burn the result, or we figure out how to build filters, fuel cells and catalysts that can handle the result in an environmentally friendly way.
A big benefit of having an electric subsystem is for the regenerative braking.
The benefit of sticking to hydrocarbons would be backward compatibility.
One of the problems is if we use rare catalysts - there might not be enough to go around to put in every vehicle (assuming a believable catalyst recycle rate when the vehicle is scrapped).
As they get older most start realizing that just having huge numbers in their bank account isn't that "satisfying".
;).
Most want to live on somehow. Having lots of money alone doesn't cut it.
So some start aiming for power, and some for philantrophy. A rare few find God.
Most of these billionaires aren't stupid and barring "sudden death" it's pretty silly to be holding on to tons of money when you're dead.
e.g. "Being of sound mind and body, I spent it all"
Some kid (minor) or someone else could have installed it for you (whether you noticed it or not).
Contracts are not binding on minors.
The grey hairs are because even your very DNA is being subverted and counterfeited.
That's what you get with cheap clones.
Just wait till Monsanto and friends catch up with you. Unauthorized reproduction and all that.
Which is why these competitions have about as much relation to "security for real world systems" as F1 racing has to real life goods delivery.
I'm in a celsius standard place, and sometimes I do use Fahrenheit.
;).
Many airconditioning controls here only have 2 digits for temp, and it seems they do support precision to degree Fahrenheit, so you lose precision if you use Celsius. Most don't bother supporting decimal points
One degree Celsius is quite a big difference in temperature to people. For example, 24 could be too warm, and 23 too cold. Switching to Fahrenheit allows you to specify in between temperatures. Many airconditioning controls do allow you to switch to F (cheaper to produce the same one for all markets).
After all so many years, drives are still so slow.
7.6ms random access write. 119MB/sec transfer - that's less that 1Gbps.
So still have to stick lots and lots of drives together.
How about like the HHGTG: Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
:)
Instead of artificial meat, you breed a cow that _wants_ to be eaten, and will indicate so.
I agree with you too.
;) ). Now that would be what I call progress :).
Still, from one of the links 'In his congratulatory letter to those working in the space industry, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia was the first nation "to open the way to the stars to humanity."'
I'm sure space tourism will count almost as much as "first person in space" in the history books.
Now what someone should organize is a "vote off the planet" "reality show". Then we could vote people off the planet (return trip or one-way
Even if "winners" politely decline their one-way trip to space, I think many voters would still feel the cost of casting their votes more than worth it, especially if the "decline interview" is televised on the show.
Pride? Begging?
;).
"space tourism" was the most important experiment the ISS was ever involved in.
To have your space program sustainable due to willing customers rather than solely dependent on government enforced taxes is what I call making progress[1]. One of the milestones in aerospace and the Russians were pioneers.
It is a step backwards if they discontinue space tourism (and do not move it to some other agency/organization).
[1] When people stop clapping hands and cheering every time after space vehicles somehow manage to lift off without blowing up, that's even more progress
I'm starting to think that they should make it illegal for people to put such terms in contracts.
Employment contracts have started getting more and more unreasonable and crap in the past few decades.
A sufficiently high level of unreasonableness and crapness is indistinguishable from evil.
They often say "Oh it's nothing, the company will never do that", "Oh that's just our standard contract", or bullshit like that.
Slavery was abolished years ago, but they're now reintroducing it in employment contracts everywhere. Go read some of those contracts, which boil down to "If you sign this you are now my Slave^H^H^H^H^HEmployee, I'm the Master^H^H^H^H^H^HEmployer so bow down, worship and serve me, bwahaha, and lastly, fuck you".
Because he would still rather work at that place - just like that "disloyal" friend would too.
:).
And given "our current economic situation" maybe even if that place is filled with disloyal friends and crappy bosses.
Go figure
Meme or no meme, if they can't find jobs in countries where most companies are afraid that "controversy may translate into some kind of litigation down the road", then they may have to move elsewhere if they have no other means of supporting themselves.
"controversy may translate into some kind of litigation down the road"
Maybe the myspace partying bunch will have to move to other countries, where this isn't such a big issue.
Which would be a win-win- the US will have a higher proportion of people suited to "holier than thou" companies, just the way they like it.
"who do you think will get the job"
;).
;) ).
;).
Depends on which company they are applying to and probably what else they have online ( OSS projects with great code etc those are all also part of the "plumage").
While it means that those people have a higher chance of not being hired by "holier than thou" companies, they probably won't be a good fit in those companies anyway - might not have as much fun in those companies too
A fun company to join wouldn't care if prospective employees have photos of themself drunk wearing a silly party hat scattered amongst the social networks.
Nude beer bongs, smoking grass? I'm sure there are many bosses who have done that stuff before, and didn't think it was that bad. People hire people who are like them.
I've never done all of that, but I don't see that stuff as a huge problem, unless that person comes in smelling of grass/alcohol and looking doped/drunk then that's a very bad sign (you can always call up a bit earlier and say you can't make it for the appointment
It will hurt them if the job market is really tight, but otherwise, I don't think it's as bad as people think. Furthermore when these younger generation become CEOs and HR people, a fair number of them are probably going to think it's normal to have such pics, and might even view negatively/with suspicion people who don't let it all hang out
Now if there's evidence of them doing something vicious or malicious, in a manner where the context is hard to deny, then I think companies should think twice (esp if the culprit is the one posting it on his/her own page, unless maybe it's as an apology or something, but still...). It's kind of scary to have someone who might "snap" and bash colleagues/employees/staff, or do that just for amusement, and those traits will probably show up in other areas of their worklife.
I personally don't care if people link my posts with me. Ever since I've post stuff on the internet (more then a decade ago), I have assumed what I post can and will be linked to me. Google has thousands of hits of my posts etc.
Wouldn't you like to work with someone who was smart, not too lazy, competent AND _fun_? Maybe you can't have too many clowns around, but heck even a staid but wise HR dept might hire a "company clown" or two to brighten things up.
Actually it's worse than that. They will scare everyone and say: Oh noes we in Country A can't catch the evil hackers/paedophiles/spammers/etc in Country B, we need to cooperate and have our laws "harmonized".
Some countries will balk or there will still be some differences. Then they'll go: We can't have that, we need a Global Authority with more power to "fix that".
Once all that and more is done, the Throne is ready, then I guess it won't be long before The Beast (Mr 666 from Revelations) sits in it, and says to everyone "Bow down before me, or your cert doesn't get renewed".
Naturally that sort of thing is pretty handy for making life hard for crooks - no cert = no buy, no sell, no travel.
But sure would suck to be you, if you're "innocent". But nobody's innocent right?
"The lesson is that code cannot save one from a wrong design"
;) ).
Which is why I prefer using languages which are faster and easier to code in, so that I can spend more time in design (or slashdot
Most programming is actually design, coding is closer to the act of drawing the blueprint[1].
So I prefer using something which allows me to "draw faster". If the drawing is wrong at the start, I can throw it away and start again.
If the drawing tool has decent defaults/templates and syntactic sugar which make drawing faster, then all the better.
[1] Whereas building the executable (compiling etc) is analogous to the actual construction of what's in the blueprint. Which is why Software Engineering is so different from Civil Engineering.
Fill in the blanks yourself, it's not that hard.
The hard part is the "right" amount of backward compatibility you want to keep (which is why I think Apple has a good chance of doing it).
It is actually quite fun. 3 channel infra-red control (throttle, forward/back, turn left/right), and remarkably stable and controllable for something that size and price. I've tried a few other mini helis before and those were a lot less controllable.
:) ).
;).
:).
Note that it's really light so just a bit of air movement can affect it a lot.
In still air with no draughts (don't even think about flying it in a breeze or wind!) it can hover better than my "3 times the price and 15 times the weight" esky lama v3 heli (which I'm too lazy to figure out how to trim properly
I bought it at Graffiti Toys, Berjaya Times Square, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
You can see something similar in the following url:
http://www.abc-intl.net/detail.php?model=ABC010
Thing is, mine has an all yellow body and yellow cockpit and none of the 2 other possible variations in the shop look like the one in the above url in terms of colour markings, but the design appears identical. So I'm not sure if they are really made by the same company/factory or if someone did some copying/counterfeiting - hard to tell nowadays as per article
The design is pretty decent - unlike with many other mini helis the blades are flexible plastic and are actually hinged so if they hit something they can move away which reduces the odds of damage, and it can survive 8 foot drops to carpet easily. But it's still just 15g of mostly plastic so if someone/something squishes it...
You can see the alleged wholesale price (USD11.2-11.8) if you create a throwaway login - a working email isn't necessary. I actually don't recommend using a real login or email.
I'm happy with what I paid for it
Heh, nowadays even the Japanese get the Chinese to produce stuff for them. You can get the full range of quality from china - from great to crap to "might kill you".
;).
So the chinese producers will probably form a "normal" bell curve in terms of quality rather than form a "biased towards quality" curve.
But as tech improves in some fields the average quality will end up being good enough for most. I don't really care if my USD22 remote control heli stops working after a month or two (I've already had plenty of fun with it). The last I checked apparently wholesale price was USD11.40/pc if you buy a full container of 6050 pcs
China will take longer as long as they don't take TQM seriously.
Anyway I think many Japanese companies have stopped taking quality seriously either - they just outsource the actual production to China and then they (and their customers) get "burnt" - e.g. laptop batteries.
Haven't you heard? There's this new fangled advanced "CRT" tech that's available in some places already:
;)
24 bit colour
Good colour gamut
Extremely good black levels
Good contrast ratios.
Really fast grey to grey transition times
Extremely low input lag (some say zero, but there's no such thing right?)
Cheaper than LCD at the lower resolutions (imagine that!).
Cons:
Higher power consumption.
Heavy.
But hey I'm, sure they'll fix the cons real soon now right? They've already solved the burn-in problems in the earlier models.
Given thimerosal gets converted to ethyl mercury I'd actually be more surprised if there were no problems.
I'm sure _most_ people have no problems (scientific proof and all that yadda yadda), but when you make it compulsory for _everyone_ it sure sounds like a stupid idea.
Imagine injecting everyone with vaccines preserved with some peanut extract. Sure most people have no problems. But guess what, some people _will_ swell up and die.
The safety standards for compulsory drugs/treatment has to be a lot higher than for elective drugs/treatment.
It is not fair to compare software engineering with civil engineering, because most people don't know the real difference especially the bosses and project managers.
;).
:).
The real differences between software engineering and civil engineering:
With Civil Engineering:
The design phase of the project involves X people, X machines, X materials, X dollars and X time.
The build phase of the project involves 100X people, 100X machines, >1000X materials, >=10X dollars and > 2X time (go fill in more accurate figures yourself).
The plastic models cost <10% of the real thing to make, and the customer won't be satisfied with them.
With Software Engineering:
The design phase of the project involves X people, X machines, X materials and X dollars.
The build phase of the project involves the programmers typing "make all" and going for coffee.
The plastic models or blueprints _each_ cost as much as the "real thing" to make, and they often seem to work a bit like the real thing to customers. Thus they are often sold to customers as version 1.0 or 2.0 by management
If during the design phase, a software engineer asks management for 50% more money or time to "get it right" this would imply increasing the entire project cost by 50% more money or time.
If during the design phase a civil engineer or architect asks for 50% more money or time to get it right, it would affect the cost of the entire project a lot less.
Lastly, if programmers write bug free code they usually don't get rewarded for it because most of their bosses reward hard work, not low defect/quality. Most bosses can't tell the difference between good or great (and many can't even tell the difference between good or bad).
If coders post on slashdot/surf the internet because their stuff has nothing to fix, they might either:
1) End up being given everyone else's work to do
2) End up being reprimanded or sacked for being a slacker.
And this is why things are the way they are
See: http://www.insidehoops.com/nbasalaries.shtml
It's pretty stupid to make a top player a coach.
Or be required to make a player a coach in order to pay him more.
Or be required to pay coaches more than players even if the coach is crap.
Good coaches should be paid highly (they are worth it). But it should all be a matter of supply and demand.
And I can tell you in the corporate world there seem to be lots of bad coaches who are paid more than good players. I can't see a _good_ reason why, given the supply and demand curves.