Interesting point, but you should try posting it in French. Starting in September all Slashdot postings must be in French. European harmonization, you know.
Just to let you know, I am familiar with all this and support it wholeheartedly. If I ever have a son, no painful unnecessary surgery for him. One of my friends has 3 sons and didn't do that to any of them, so the trend is apparently reversing.
Now, given that I can't go back in time and undo my trendy body modification (just mention to conservative middle Americans that they are involunatarily doing to their children what they criticize urban punks for doing to themselves; see how they react) I might as well joke about it.
Re:Let the time/distance conversions...BEGIN!
on
X43-A on to Mach 10
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· Score: 1
I hope you allowed for acceleration and deceleration in that estimate. If you didn't, you'll just transport a human slurpy accross the country and squirt it all over LA. That's not much better than a typical day on the LA freeway.
I didn't mean to imply that I was shutting off the engine. I did do that once in the Blue Ridge mountains on a gravel back road--must have coasted 5 miles. It was quite a harry experience when I hit a curve with no power steering or brakes though.
Of course if you don't shut off the engine it still burns gas. I get much more pleasure out of not using the brake; because it's like you've given up on the energy having any useful purpose.
Not far from my house there's a fairly long stretch of road where you can drive with just two "burns" of the engine (yes, I'm fantasizing about being in space when I drive it) and no brakes.
You have to allow the car to go 10-15 mph over the speed limit (downhill) for a stretch to get enough momentum to crest the first hill though.
Some things never change. *NIX people talking about Windows uptime is like Win* people talking about *NIX GUIs.
At least the *NIX snobs don't automaticly assume we are talking about NT server or some other Win* server OS when we say that Win* is better for some things... at least not quite as much.
I mean, 3 years ago I would defend Windows as a desktop OS where uptime was not the primary consideration, and people would automaticly jump on me for touting NT server which I totally wasn't doing. I would never do that.
Where can I get white doohickies? I'm a EE and this is a new one on me. What is the V-I characteristic of the doohicky? Is it a linear device? Please, someone who knows, tell me more.
...how is JIF pronounced? What is the benefit to overloading "JIF" to mean "GIF" also? It sound like peanut butter when you say it like that.
I don't care how the designer pronounces it. I don't care what some people think is "correct". I care more about what's right. I say it with a hard G because the other way is intrinsicly stupid, and if I ever meet the designer I won't hesitate to tell him that.
When I was in customer service, I experienced a handfull of customers I dubbed "the insatiables". Managers reviewed their service call logs, determined that they were costing the company 2 or 3 times what they brought in as revenue, and cancelled their service. Their demands were usually totally irrational (e.g., 100% uptime for every web site they wanted to visit).
This was rare, but it happened. Usually a company will carry customers at a loss rather than have bad PR of "firing" a customer.
I'm as much against government regulation as anybody, but when a private organization proves to be a public menace, then it's time to do something about it.
Why am I coming down on the Weather Channel?
Well, a couple years ago I was watching some thunderstorms build to the south of us. I turned on the weather channel and they were running some stupid "show". The local cable operator was still running radar feeds back then, but it was a Sunday so guess what? They were showing a baseball game on that channel. In Spanish.
I had to turn to my humble local ABC affiliate to get the real skinny: a tornado was approaching.
That's right. A relic of the "3 major networks only" days was more informative than the cable system.
The thunderstorms veered east and struck La Plata, Maryland. Yes--this was the F-4 tornado that wiped much of La Plata off the map. If you live in the DC area, you certainly heard of it.
If the storm had continued on track and hit Fairfax County, you might not have heard about it if you were relying on the Weather Channel. TWC is worse than useless--they are a public menace, and will kill people by strangling vital public information if we let them.
Keep the weather info free. REQUIRE the cable company to restore the radar feed. And *fund* it. I won't mind paying $1 extra in federal taxes per year for this.
Get an advanced degree in mathematics or physics, and you will come up with the idea to put "St. Pauli Exclusion Principle" on a six-pack of beer in a cartoon, and only a few geeks who like to stay up and watch Adult Swim last night will get the joke.
Don't worry. It shouldn't take the Catholic church too much longer to arrive at a sensible position on contraception than it took them to apologize to Galileo.
Sounds like we need another tractorcade to knock some sense into the politicians. Anyone remember the tractorcade in Washington in the 1970s? Tractors on the Beltway and stuff. It was pretty wild. That'd get their attention.
Yeah, and how can you steal a kiss? Oh, wait... this is Slashdot. Nobody can steal a kiss anyway.
Re:Why were MP ever such a big deal?
on
Beyond Megapixels
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· Score: 1
The camera, which came with 2 batteries, and a roll of Kodak 400 speed color film sold for $17.53 (including tax) at the local Wallmart. For this type of photography I don't know of a digital camera which can come close to it for the money.
Until you try to shoot a couple 100 pictures and throw away the ones you don't like. That's what sold me on digital a long time ago, even when the camera cost $500 and took 640*480 images.
Nothing up to that could beat the freedom of shooting dozens of pictures a day, taking them home, manipulating them on the PC, and chucking what I didn't like. I think my Mavica FD6 paid for itself in a few weeks. Plus, it opened up a whole new world and way of taking pictures. Before digital, I had to carefully choose what I wanted to shoot, and I had to *wait* a long time only to be disappointed more often than not. I can count on one hand the pictures that came out really, really, well just like I wanted.
With digital, I shot 10 times more at least, and the good/trash ratio was about the same. So I got a lot more good pix.
Film is beyond dead to me. Now, if I ever got to be a really serious "art photographer" I'd probably still want to shoot film. I see it becoming that kind of niche market now.
Of course you have to add in the cost of the PC for digital, but most people already have a PC anyway. Besides, the real cost of film isn't the camera--it's the cumulative cost of the film, and all the ways that it confines you.
Maybe it just happens to be an object that doesn't rotate that fast. What am I missing here? If you throw a whole bunch of balls randomly into space, some will rotate fast and some won't, right? So they just happened to find one that doesn't rotate that fast. What is the *theoretical* argument that says such objects ought to rotate faster? Isn't the rotation just based simply on the sum of the angular forces imparted on the object?
It seems to me that we should expect there to be a wide distribution of rotations, and that we should be surprised *not* to find the occasional object with a slower than average rotation.
I would expect the rotation speeds to range all the way from zero to whatever speed they can handle before flying apart into smaller pieces.
...couldn't we just live in small, dense cities connected by public transportation? Not only would it solve many of the problems of the elderly living at home, it would also cut pollution, reduce dependance on foreign oil, and save farm/timber land.
Of course, what do I know? I'm just a guy who has spent the better part of my 36 years in the suburbs, feeling quite powerless to change the poor design around me...
And yes, I know this is pie-in-the-sky stuff that would be hard to make happen without wrecking the free market and possibly doing more harm than good.
I also know every other obvious point with which you are about to rebut, so when you write your rebuttle, please don't imply I'm not aware of something bloody obvious just because I didn't say it.
Then you missed your opportunity. When I was unemployed I wrote a whole bunch of widgets and started projects that I thought were cool. Some of that code actually helped me on my next job, and best of all it was all "mine" and I submitted a disclosure CD-ROM before hire so the company and I both are in agreement that said widgets and projects are mine, up to the disclosure date.
I could cut that commute by 34 minutes and 54 seconds
If you accelerated to 5000 mph in 3 seconds and then decelerated back to zero in the same ammount of time, you'd cut a lot of other things too... like internal organs and appendages.
To "antiglide" (my word, not theirs, at least I didn't see it when I skimmed the article) wouldn't you have to turn the wing upside down?
A traditional glider takes the force of gravity and re-directs it sideways. It does this via the Bernoulli (sp?) effect making the air go faster over the top side of the wing.
If gravity pulled up, the glider would naturally want to flip upside down.
A traditonal balloon has nothing to pull you sideways, except air currents.
A traditonal glider runs out of power when you hit the ground, and you have to tow it back up. A tradional balloon can only rise so high before it's impractical for buoyancy to overcome gravity--100,000 ft for high performance balloons.
Now, the idea is intriguing, but to antiglide in a manner comparable to a glider, they need to have enough upward force to impart something comparable to 1g on the craft for a significant part of the vertical range. Ever see a blimp take off? It certainly doesn't look like it's under the influence of 1g. No, far from it. The other challenge is to do this with a craft with surface area small enough so that the airfoil effect isn't overcome by air currents.
IANA Aeronautical Engineer, but I think they would have to build it out of unobtanium or something. Kevlar? That strong? I don't think so. I'd like to see some calculations. The fact that they are calling it "fuelless" certainly arouses suspicions. Even a sub needs fuel to blow that ballast. That's essentially what they are proposing--repeatedly cycling the ballast.
For the sake of argument, let's assume it works. Imagine traveling accross the country in a plane where the pilot goes up to 20,000 ft, then glides down to 1000 then goes back up to 20,000... etc. Can you say "barf bag"?
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting point, but you should try posting it in French. Starting in September all Slashdot postings must be in French. European harmonization, you know.
Just to let you know, I am familiar with all this and support it wholeheartedly. If I ever have a son, no painful unnecessary surgery for him. One of my friends has 3 sons and didn't do that to any of them, so the trend is apparently reversing.
Now, given that I can't go back in time and undo my trendy body modification (just mention to conservative middle Americans that they are involunatarily doing to their children what they criticize urban punks for doing to themselves; see how they react) I might as well joke about it.
Most of us were snipped shortly after birth.
I hope you allowed for acceleration and deceleration in that estimate. If you didn't, you'll just transport a human slurpy accross the country and squirt it all over LA. That's not much better than a typical day on the LA freeway.
We are conducting this research so that we can drop a bomb on any location on Earth in under an hour
Why not just distribute the bombs to local Dominoe's Pizza franchises?
I didn't mean to imply that I was shutting off the engine. I did do that once in the Blue Ridge mountains on a gravel back road--must have coasted 5 miles. It was quite a harry experience when I hit a curve with no power steering or brakes though.
Of course if you don't shut off the engine it still burns gas. I get much more pleasure out of not using the brake; because it's like you've given up on the energy having any useful purpose.
Not far from my house there's a fairly long stretch of road where you can drive with just two "burns" of the engine (yes, I'm fantasizing about being in space when I drive it) and no brakes.
You have to allow the car to go 10-15 mph over the speed limit (downhill) for a stretch to get enough momentum to crest the first hill though.
Short and sweet, immediately leaps to mind if you're a math geek.
Some things never change. *NIX people talking about Windows uptime is like Win* people talking about *NIX GUIs.
At least the *NIX snobs don't automaticly assume we are talking about NT server or some other Win* server OS when we say that Win* is better for some things... at least not quite as much.
I mean, 3 years ago I would defend Windows as a desktop OS where uptime was not the primary consideration, and people would automaticly jump on me for touting NT server which I totally wasn't doing. I would never do that.
Where can I get white doohickies? I'm a EE and this is a new one on me. What is the V-I characteristic of the doohicky? Is it a linear device? Please, someone who knows, tell me more.
...how is JIF pronounced? What is the benefit to overloading "JIF" to mean "GIF" also? It sound like peanut butter when you say it like that.
I don't care how the designer pronounces it. I don't care what some people think is "correct". I care more about what's right. I say it with a hard G because the other way is intrinsicly stupid, and if I ever meet the designer I won't hesitate to tell him that.
When I was in customer service, I experienced a handfull of customers I dubbed "the insatiables". Managers reviewed their service call logs, determined that they were costing the company 2 or 3 times what they brought in as revenue, and cancelled their service. Their demands were usually totally irrational (e.g., 100% uptime for every web site they wanted to visit).
This was rare, but it happened. Usually a company will carry customers at a loss rather than have bad PR of "firing" a customer.
Oh, and sausage
Hovercraft!
I'm as much against government regulation as anybody, but when a private organization proves to be a public menace, then it's time to do something about it.
Why am I coming down on the Weather Channel?
Well, a couple years ago I was watching some thunderstorms build to the south of us. I turned on the weather channel and they were running some stupid "show". The local cable operator was still running radar feeds back then, but it was a Sunday so guess what? They were showing a baseball game on that channel. In Spanish.
I had to turn to my humble local ABC affiliate to get the real skinny: a tornado was approaching.
That's right. A relic of the "3 major networks only" days was more informative than the cable system.
The thunderstorms veered east and struck La Plata, Maryland. Yes--this was the F-4 tornado that wiped much of La Plata off the map. If you live in the DC area, you certainly heard of it.
If the storm had continued on track and hit Fairfax County, you might not have heard about it if you were relying on the Weather Channel. TWC is worse than useless--they are a public menace, and will kill people by strangling vital public information if we let them.
Keep the weather info free. REQUIRE the cable company to restore the radar feed. And *fund* it. I won't mind paying $1 extra in federal taxes per year for this.
"A lot" is two words. You wouldn't say "alittle", would you?
Only sometimes.
Get an advanced degree in mathematics or physics, and you will come up with the idea to put "St. Pauli Exclusion Principle" on a six-pack of beer in a cartoon, and only a few geeks who like to stay up and watch Adult Swim last night will get the joke.
Don't worry. It shouldn't take the Catholic church too much longer to arrive at a sensible position on contraception than it took them to apologize to Galileo.
Sounds like we need another tractorcade to knock some sense into the politicians. Anyone remember the tractorcade in Washington in the 1970s? Tractors on the Beltway and stuff. It was pretty wild. That'd get their attention.
Yeah, and how can you steal a kiss? Oh, wait... this is Slashdot. Nobody can steal a kiss anyway.
The camera, which came with 2 batteries, and a roll of Kodak 400 speed color film sold for $17.53 (including tax) at the local Wallmart. For this type of photography I don't know of a digital camera which can come close to it for the money.
Until you try to shoot a couple 100 pictures and throw away the ones you don't like. That's what sold me on digital a long time ago, even when the camera cost $500 and took 640*480 images.
Nothing up to that could beat the freedom of shooting dozens of pictures a day, taking them home, manipulating them on the PC, and chucking what I didn't like. I think my Mavica FD6 paid for itself in a few weeks. Plus, it opened up a whole new world and way of taking pictures. Before digital, I had to carefully choose what I wanted to shoot, and I had to *wait* a long time only to be disappointed more often than not. I can count on one hand the pictures that came out really, really, well just like I wanted.
With digital, I shot 10 times more at least, and the good/trash ratio was about the same. So I got a lot more good pix.
Film is beyond dead to me. Now, if I ever got to be a really serious "art photographer" I'd probably still want to shoot film. I see it becoming that kind of niche market now.
Of course you have to add in the cost of the PC for digital, but most people already have a PC anyway. Besides, the real cost of film isn't the camera--it's the cumulative cost of the film, and all the ways that it confines you.
Maybe it just happens to be an object that doesn't rotate that fast. What am I missing here? If you throw a whole bunch of balls randomly into space, some will rotate fast and some won't, right? So they just happened to find one that doesn't rotate that fast. What is the *theoretical* argument that says such objects ought to rotate faster? Isn't the rotation just based simply on the sum of the angular forces imparted on the object?
It seems to me that we should expect there to be a wide distribution of rotations, and that we should be surprised *not* to find the occasional object with a slower than average rotation.
I would expect the rotation speeds to range all the way from zero to whatever speed they can handle before flying apart into smaller pieces.
...couldn't we just live in small, dense cities connected by public transportation? Not only would it solve many of the problems of the elderly living at home, it would also cut pollution, reduce dependance on foreign oil, and save farm/timber land.
Of course, what do I know? I'm just a guy who has spent the better part of my 36 years in the suburbs, feeling quite powerless to change the poor design around me...
And yes, I know this is pie-in-the-sky stuff that would be hard to make happen without wrecking the free market and possibly doing more harm than good.
I also know every other obvious point with which you are about to rebut, so when you write your rebuttle, please don't imply I'm not aware of something bloody obvious just because I didn't say it.
That tactic just totally pisses me off.
Then you missed your opportunity. When I was unemployed I wrote a whole bunch of widgets and started projects that I thought were cool. Some of that code actually helped me on my next job, and best of all it was all "mine" and I submitted a disclosure CD-ROM before hire so the company and I both are in agreement that said widgets and projects are mine, up to the disclosure date.
I could cut that commute by 34 minutes and 54 seconds
If you accelerated to 5000 mph in 3 seconds and then decelerated back to zero in the same ammount of time, you'd cut a lot of other things too... like internal organs and appendages.
To "antiglide" (my word, not theirs, at least I didn't see it when I skimmed the article) wouldn't you have to turn the wing upside down?
A traditional glider takes the force of gravity and re-directs it sideways. It does this via the Bernoulli (sp?) effect making the air go faster over the top side of the wing.
If gravity pulled up, the glider would naturally want to flip upside down.
A traditonal balloon has nothing to pull you sideways, except air currents.
A traditonal glider runs out of power when you hit the ground, and you have to tow it back up. A tradional balloon can only rise so high before it's impractical for buoyancy to overcome gravity--100,000 ft for high performance balloons.
Now, the idea is intriguing, but to antiglide in a manner comparable to a glider, they need to have enough upward force to impart something comparable to 1g on the craft for a significant part of the vertical range. Ever see a blimp take off? It certainly doesn't look like it's under the influence of 1g. No, far from it. The other challenge is to do this with a craft with surface area small enough so that the airfoil effect isn't overcome by air currents.
IANA Aeronautical Engineer, but I think they would have to build it out of unobtanium or something. Kevlar? That strong? I don't think so. I'd like to see some calculations. The fact that they are calling it "fuelless" certainly arouses suspicions. Even a sub needs fuel to blow that ballast. That's essentially what they are proposing--repeatedly cycling the ballast.
For the sake of argument, let's assume it works. Imagine traveling accross the country in a plane where the pilot goes up to 20,000 ft, then glides down to 1000 then goes back up to 20,000... etc. Can you say "barf bag"?