I drive a lot every week. 40 minutes at 70mph one way, each work day. I do not like driving. If I could use significantly less fuel while driving, I would jump on it.
Even at "oil crisis" prices in the bush years, the costs of fuel were still significantly less than the offset costs of living closer to town, and my standard of living is far higher. I am NOT wealthy. I own a 25k house, and make about 35k a year. The house I own would cost 2 to 3 times that much in the city, due to marketing forces of supply and demand, even now with housing crash prices. A sleezy, roach infested duplex rental in a gang violence riddled slum costs significantly more than my current house payment per month, for a significantly poorer living arrangement, with considerably greater risks of buglary and physical violence.
After adding all the bills together, I came to the conclusion that it was actually cheaper (including increased fuel costs, vehicular maintenance costs, and additional tax costs) to live outside the city than it is to live inside it.
This is because of several factors, the most poigniant of which is the cost of living differences caused by everyone else in the city trying to get a slice of everyone else's pie. (Eg, every store keeper wants to turn the highest profit that the local market can bear. This is basic economics. When people in the city get paid very well, people have more money to blow, and the costs of items increase to match the disparity. This is why the cost of living in high wage areas is so significantly higher than in low wage areas. ) I ran the numbers and found that living a certain distance from the high wage center, you get the option of earning the better pay, while livng in the reduced price area.
This is exactly what created the concept of suburbia. (Note, I do not live in suburbia. I live in hickville farmer community.) Suburbia could easily be serviced by light commuter rail, if the following conditions were met. (At least for most circumstances anyway...)
1) the train center needs free all-day parking. People still need cars. We just want them to drive them significantly less. The train does not go everywhere they need to go, such as to the dentist, or on a romantic drive into the countryside. The biggest consumer of fuel miles in consumer vehicles is the work commute. Free parking with reasonable lot security allows the suburbanites to drive 5 minutes to the train station, then take the light commuter rail to the various districts of the local big civic center, go to work, come back, and drive another 5 minutes to get home. We radically reduce the number of hours they drive, the number of miles they drive, and the city jurisdictions over which they drive, by enabling the free parking lot. People won't use the rail station if they get charged to ride, and charged by the hour to park. Subsidize the costs of the parking structure into the yearly rider's pass prices. Problem solved. One off riders only pay the one off ticket price, and get the free parking.
2) don't penalize people for living outside the city. People chosing to live outside the city forces prices for city residents down, because demand for services and properties diminish. People using the light rail to get to work reduces the nightmares of intracity traffic and parking (fewer people are driving), reducing the rate of roadway deterioration, and everyone is better off for it.
3) the light rail needs to be accessible, affordable, and offer a free or at least flat rate shuttle bussing service with dedicated commuter bus routes to all major centers and districts of town, and the surrounding suburbs. If it is a major city industry or service, it needs to be easily and safely serviced by the public transit option.
4) the actual day to day operations of terminal stations in the public transit network can be franchise run, but a minimum QoS for cleanliness, access, safety, and ease of use needs to be enforced somehow. Franchises work great here, b
The ion gun cited charges one way, then the other to neutralize the surface. Ionic charge only persists a second or two.
Eg, it fires negative ions as the trigger is pulled, then releases positive ions as the trigger is released.
Persistent charge on an LP also promotes rapid resoiling, which is why commerical cleaning guns like this neutralize the charge after blowing the dust off.
One would think it would be like removing the extremely fine dust from an LP.
Back in the day, there was this thing called an "Ion Gun". (Example product)
It basically compresses and slightly ionizes atmospheric gas, then directs it at the surface to be cleaned. The electrical charge in the gas causes the dust to be electrostatically repelled from the surface, and the forced air blows it off.
Surely such a toy could be attached to one of the arms of future solar powered rovers for periodic cleaning purposes, and even possibly for electrochemical experiments?
Yes, but it will not accept the cd key printed inside the box this way. The installer will say that the entered license key is only for upgrades, and not clean installs. Sure, it runs first stage install just fine, but bones you on the key. Been there, done that. Just over christmas I might add.
A clever trick that I heard of, but am not sure if it (still) works, is to install a copy of reactos first, then "upgrade" it. Reactos is foss, and doesn't do license keys, and last I heard, fakes out the upgrade process into setting the magic bit high.
The installer presumably treats an ROS install like it was an XP install, and let's you blow it away while keeping the upgrade flag set. Handy if you fuxxored the prior upgrade run by not having sata drivers, etc on hand, or need to reinstall an already upgraded machine.
It has been my unfortunate experience that most primary school instructors overly fixate on maintaining their visage of authority, and insist upon the "I tell you how it is, you don't question the validity of the information" approach to instruction.
This usually compounds into other aspects of the teacher/student interaction, such as "$foo is broken, $student must have broken it", or as my nephew once told me "I am right even when I am obviously and completely wrong, don't dare question my pronouncements. If you do, you will get in even deeper trouble." (He got in trouble for "playing video games" in class, because his teacher saw him running the disk defragmenter on his workstation. He said he ran it because the school system had neglected the windows box to such a degree that the volume was 99% fragmented, and was thrashing worse than an epilleptic with parkinsons at a rave party. Apparently she couldn't tell the difference between a video game and a gui system utility with a colored sector map.)
A teacher of the species you cite would have asked what he was doing, and gotten an accurate answer, and would not have acted like an officious ass that can do no wrong.
I really do wish that educators outside of institutions of higher learning would conduct themselves and their lessons in such a dynamic and competent fashion, but the grim reality is that a dynamic education does not lend itself well to standardized curricula, and standardized testing metics. Officious pronouncements and wrote memory, however do. Nevermind that you end up with a student that is full of sterile sound bytes without the rationality and skills to apply them effectively and intelligently.
Personally, I feel that this is the halmark of overbearing control from government legislators, who think that more administration and tighter control over education will make everything better. The tinfoil hat voice in the back of my head says that they like the implicit life lessons that such educational experiences impart to children, as children trained to never question groww up to be voters that never question, but I do not think this was done intentionally as a conspiracy. Mostly, I think it stems from this simple formula:
Performance of public schools drops compared to other industrial nations.
Parents cry for something to be done.
The difficulties of administering an ad-hoc, and dynamic lecture and curriculum based on logic, rhetoric, and investigation in a consistent manner (each crop of kids in disparate schools ask different questions, leading to a fundementally heterogenous learning environment that lacks recurring consistency) prompt legislators to "do something" by mandating what material is to be taught, and how that is to be accomplished.
Setting the goal at "excellence" for a grading requirement places many demographics into a disadvantaged position. Parents complain.
Legislators "do something" by lowering standards of the curriculum so that disadvantaged students appear to be excellent, because the homogenous teaching method employed cannot easily adapt to such special needs students without labeling them with stigmatizing terms, such as defining them as being 'retarded', when they might just be malnourished, or have a homelife unconducive to completing homework. (Abusive parents, have to care for younger siblings while parents work, etc.)
1) personally i'd use a crippled kiosk system. If the kids steal it, guess what? It doesn't work outside of the school's network infrastructure. Remove incentive to steal, stuff isn't stolen. Vandalism is another matter though...
2) apple and intel, as per the arrangement.
3)netbooted kiosk image from read only share, on a different architecture from the kiosks. Virus? Power it off, then back on again. Good as new. Even a techtarded teacher (not all teachers are, mind) can handle "viruses" this way. Also helps ensure kiosks are clean prior to tests, lessons, etc.
It was really overkill to spring for the i7 as my new system build, but I like that I can churn out 3 completed folding@home sets in 8hrs on the SMP build on a single system. (I let it run while I am at work. Utility costs be damned.)
When I actually use the thing, I do video re-encodes, and like having 64bit registers, and multiple cores to crunch with.
I am not a typical user.
In addition to video processing, I also play with a pirated copy of the CAD software I use legitimately at work. I don't confuse the two and bring work home; they don't pay me enough for that. I just use the software as an artistic program when in my off time. It makes use of all 8 cores.
Windows xp does not and cannot satisfy my computing needs, so I don't run it. I do however, have to support it when my family calls for tech support. You know the drill.:)
Ok, here's the rundown as I have managed to wring out of friends and family that cling to XP.
1) it came on the computer they currently have, and works fine on that hardware.
2) they are familiar with it, and it does what they expect it to.
3) they don't want to buy new hardware when the hardware they have suits their needs already, (when running xp)
4) microsoft has switched around how the user interface works, so that now it treats you like you don't own the box. This causes issues for users who just want to make the printer they got for christmas work. Clicking OK on 3 or more scary "let this program make administrative changes?" Dialogs and other "scary" popups are not enjoyable to users, who really don't understand the significance of what the windows really mean, and who don't have an alternative to the "untrusted" 3rd party driver CD that came with the printer anyway. Windows 7 does this "less" than windows vista, which complained when you wanted to run solitare, but this is simply users chosing the lesser of two evils. They prefer the simplicity and nonverbose output of xp.
5) fewer and fewer people buy computers to play video games these days, given the rise of modern console games with online multiplayer, and the reduced hassles of competing against people with better rigs. There is much less incentive to continue driving the forced upgrade cycle, so users try to get more equity out of already owned assets, like older hardware. Let's face it, unless you turn on 3d return of clippy or some other horseshit, you don't need an i7 to print resumes or make greeting cards. You don't need gobs of resources to play mp3s while you clean your house, facebook and farmville don't need epic leetness, etc. An old windows xp era rig can do all those things just fine, and users know this. Thus, windows xp satisfies most of their needs for a general purpose computing environment.
The few issues that crop up appear to be (and are) totally contrived to continue monetizing the computing market. Driver support for devices, for instance. Unless it is some radical new slot architecture or something, there is little to make xp insufficient for a driver, especially when you are pushing a crapware consumer peripheral device like a printer or scanner, which usually use unidrv.dll for 99% of the functionality anyway. Other than drivers, you have security fixes, updates, and browsers. Browser makers don't like to support "legacy" OSes because they usually represent the dreaded "low end hardware", which forces them to make efficient code instead of quickly produced code; the impetus of which is purely due to makerting forces in the vast majority of cases. Feature creep causes a software product to require more and more resources to satisfy more and more edge case uses, which would be better satisfied with optional plugins run in sandboxed processes. Remember: "newer isn't always better." when users feel financially pinched, they stop chasing the shiny.
Speaking as someone who goes through regular cycles of caffine addiction, I can attest to the OP.
In the winter months I abuse caffine, due to my working second shift, and having low exposure to natural light. (This causes all kinds of sleep related trouble for me, so I abuse coffee to keep from becoming narcoleptic:).)
During the summer, I lay off the stuff completely. I have gone through the addiction cycle numberous times, and can speak from personal experience that I too have noticed that coffee doesn't make me more alert, it just keeps me from sleeping, especially after the first few weeks of routine use. In truth, it makes me feel lethargic and bitter when I don't get it, which are classic signs of addiction. I find myself much better after quitting when my sleep cycles start to level out as the winter months pass. It's fantastic to wake up and be actually alert, rather than a drag-assed zombie until I prop up my nervous system on drugs.
It's a political statement. Omitting the u in labour is intended to show that they are just like the US versons of such groups. They represent labor (working hard), but they don't include "u".
Agreed. However, getting such a reactor design through the nonproliferation hurdles would be quite a feat, let alone the "nuclear is teh evil!" Crowd.
Fast breeder reactors that can convert high level reactor waste into catalyst for thorium and other plentiful potential fuels can easily be outfitted for neutron capture in non fuel materials, such as low grade uranium to produce weapons grade.
It would be fantastic if we lived in a world where people with big egos and tiny penises didn't have to "make up" for it with collosal explosions (and the threat of them), but sadly we do. People like the late kim jong il, and armadinajad (however you spell his name) pretty much ruin it for everyone.
An rtg on the other hand, would take millions of years to passively radiate an enclosure made of low grade uranium sufficiently for such a purpose. Even then the idea of even trying that itself is asinine. I agree that far more useful quantities of power could be harvested with a fast breeder reprocessing reactor/ordinary reactor pair for the same fuel costs. It is just the dipshit world leaders stroking their e-peens that are the problem.
What I always wondered is why "spent" fuel (really an exotic blend of lighter, but still strongly radioactive materials that cannot sustain catalyzed fission) is glass cast, then buried.
The stuff has a half like of 10 million years? Sounds like a fantastic core for an RTG to me.
Make the glass cast waste able to be extracted from the RTG enclosure by making it modular, so that the core can be retained while the shell is disposed of/replaced when it wears out. The shell would be radically less raiological, and useful energy could be passively extracted from the spent waste, potentially for centuries.
But that would make sense. A large battery of rtgs in a warehouse could power a small city for pennies.
No. Instead we spend billions on fossil fuel instead.
Velocity does not imply accelleration. Accelleration does imply velocity.
Example: you are sitting in your chair. You are not experiencing accelleration. You are however, traveling at very high velocity. The earth is rotating, is orbiting the sun, and the sun is in turn orbiting galactic center. You are moving at fantastic velocities. You do not percieve any G-forces, because you are not experiencing delta-v.
This is why the above post is modded informative.
Delta-v is a function which measures CHANGE of velocity. Continual application of very tiny delta-v (as long as you aren't fighting a gravity well) over sufficient time will result in very very high linear velocities, with minimal g-force cost.
The problem is leaving the earth-s gravity well. You have to overcome the effective pull of gravity. This means at least 2G inertial force on the occupants of the vessel, using a rocket. In addition, you have to deal with atmospheric drag and other factors. This bumps things up to 3 or 4Gs.
As I pointed out in another post, "breathing" is not a problem unless you are obeise. The problem is anoxia from poor blood flow, because the blood in your arteries becomes 4X heavier. Your blood pressure spikes, and if you have heart trouble or hypertension, you can have a heart attack, an embolism, or a stroke. I have a mitral valve prolapse.
Essentially, when my blood pressure rises, the mitral valve in my heart malfunctions, causing arythmia and a loss of positive blood flow, which causes dizziness and fainting. As a result I cannot be an astronaut.
It might be possible to overcome if I use a pressurized G-suit. However, unless I was super splendiferously important to the mission, this solution would not be explored due to increased launch weight, and only limited effectiveness.
Most people don't have congenital heart defects like mine though.
I suggested using frosted/etched glass to eliminate glare. This would simultaneously solve the "ooh! There's a dog outside!" Type distractions. Kids can't see much more than a colored smudge through the frosted glass, and that is only for things really close to the glass, like plants.
Stuffiness is a serious issue. A high ceiling helps to deal with that by giving more dead air space for hot air to rise into. Coupled with good ventilation in the room, this deals with most instances of stuffiness.
Assuming said "joe ordinary" janitor does not weigh 250lbs, and does not have high bloodpressure, he would not "die on takeoff".
As for the deterioration, I think you could benefit from re-reading my post, and doing some research. I specifically said long term habitation. A long term habitat would actively take measures to prevent such deterioration. Recent studies in anamal models shows that microtrauma to skeletal and muscle tissues are what stave off atrophy. See for instance, this study from 07.
A properly constructed habitat that simulates 1G effective resistance would stave off all musle and bone deterioration that was not caused by increased ambient radiation. Any long term habitat would have to take this radiation exosure into consideration as well, and would have to actively shield against it to maintain acceptable dosage levels.
Most of the issues with deterioration could be addressed with current space habitats with an inflatable pressure suit with a built in vibrator.
Space is not some magical lifeforce depleting environment. The current problems with deteriorating astronaut health comes from designing habitats for short term occupation, due to budget issues. Not because space is just so wicked on humans.
I specifically mentioned through a hose. As in, unpressurized.
A padi certified diver at 5atm uses compressed trimix. His lungs would never be able to exert sufficient pull to draw breath through an unpressurised hose at that depth. It would require strength to displace several hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. The human body is physically incapable of that. Deep water divers don't have that problem, because they use compressed gas.
The astronaut at 5Gs total effective body mass would be around 850lbs, yes. His chest would only be about 200lbs. To effectively simulate, stack 4 50lb dogfood bags on your chest while laying down. I can do that easily. The real problem with high delta-v is that your blood pressure has to increase 5x what it is at rest to avoid anoxia. If you have heart trouble of any kind, that is what kills you.
You mean high delta-v travel. Not high velocity travel. When not accellerating or decellerating, there would be no noteworthy g-stresses on the body.
This is actually part of the problem with bone and muscle deterioration. Freefall induced microgravity actually *reduces* riggors on the body which promote healthy muscle and bone tissue. It is actually the pressure against bones and muscles caused by exerting them in a gravity well which keeps bones dense. A few studies with genetically bone atrophied mice showed that increasing ambient stresses against their bones rebuilt bone mass. (They used a vibrating plate to introduce additional skeletal shock forces.) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2929696/
Most of these degeneration effects could be effectively eliminated with proper habitat construction. This means that they are much less of an issue if properly addressed.
No, I label people stupid when they repeatedly do the same stupid things, and actively refuse education and correction.
People who revel in their ignorance, refuse to better themselves when given every possible opportunity, and fail at basic logic and show no inclination to improve themselves are people I consider stupid.
As such your assumption is wrong. Everyone does make mistakes, and I am no exception. Refusal to grow, improve, and learn on the other hand, is the hallmark of being stupid.
The implication was not that 250lb tubs of lard should be accepted. The implication was that you don't have to be a 170lb addonas with washboard abs, and a pretty smile.
There are people with a "heavy" build that are perfectly healthy and fit. The physical characterisitics sheet disqualifies such people. (My dad had such an endomorphic build. The police dept he worked for introduced rules to combat police obesity, which enforced BMI requirements. Ended up lethargic and emaciated bones to reach the required BMI for his height because he really does have heavy musculature and bones. Ended up getting a medical exemption with a doctor's order. His "healthy and fit" weight was right at 200lbs for a 5'6" man. He would never meet russian body requirements, even in tiptop shape. I understand the "million dollars per kilogram" fuel requirement. I also realize that those requirements coincide nicely with "idealized" perceptions of attractiveness. I have yet to see a truly butt ugly astronaut.)
Then you have the eyesight requirement. Many astronauts in current service have nowhere near 20/20. Unless you are myopic as hell, or have insane astigmatism like I do, the 20/20 req is madness, since you won't keep that if you stay in space anyway. Most astronauts forgo eyetests after missions for this very reason, yet they still seem able to do their jobs just fine.
Simply use frosted glass on the windows to diffuse the hard light, and monitor glare vanishes unless the monitors directly face the window. (Bad idea. It causes eyestrain from the contrast.)
The rows should ideally form "[" shaped units that face outward, with the teacher's station near the center of the floorspace. This way the teacher can easily see what all the students are doing. Eye-contact with the lecture is overrated in my opinion, but swivel chairs would accomplish that too if the teacher insists on it. 2 of the walls should ideally be frosted glass, with droppable curtains to occult the light when using a digital projector. The projector shines on the wall behind the teacher's desk. In addition to the projector, student's screens should be swappable to the projector feed, in case students would rather see it that way. (This also keeps kids from fucking off on the computer during lecture material.)
Some plants, a higher ceiling with recessed lights (cloudy days, winter classes, etc) to prevent hard light and to keep the room from feeling confined and stuffy are great ideas.
Try not to jam workstations in like sardines. Each student needs at least a 3 square foot work envelope that is strictly thiers. 5ft is better. This minimizes cheating, since their neighbor's computer is too far away to be easily seen, and minimizes horseplay in the lab.
The ability to turn on the radio over the presentation system is a nice perk, as is the ability to slave the overhead digital projector from a student's workstation for student presentations, such as software development projects. Both need to be easilly controlled from the teacher's workspace.
Hardware wise, I would suggest creatively crippling the systems, and using a linux like environment. Wine can do anything MS office wants, so that isn't an issue. The added security features and increased difficulty of students secretly smuggling unapproved software onto the workstations is put to good use this way. I would suggest using diskless workstations with a local fileserver to further combat inappropriate use.
But I know flat out that I would never make the cut.
Over the past year, I have grown sideways considerably. I also have rather pronounced astigmatism, and a mitralvalve prolapse, on top of carpel tunnel and occult gangaleon cysts in my wrists.
I would NEVER get passed the physical.
That said, I would have no trouble with the psychological aspects. I actually *like* confined spaces, as long as the airflow is good. Working with others could be a problem, but the hiring reqs would ensure that stupid people are disqualified, so that would be ok. If I have to explain what the words "heuristic" and "obfuscate" mean, I won't be able to work effectively with the team. Effective communication is essential for that. If they are competent, have more than a 500 word vocabulary, and are professional it is all good.
Eventually though, NASA and ESA are going to have to send ordinary people up, if they ever intend to do any kind of space based manufacturing, or permanent space based habitats. People aren't going to like jumping through insane hurdles, just to be a space janitor. Best just to hire a regular janitor that meets some core competencies so he doesn't blow himself out an airlock or get water into an instrument panel.
While being fit is important for space vocations, I suspect most of the fitness requirements center around looking sexy for TV. The hiring guidelines for astronauts in the US and Russia were created during the biggest PR penis waving contest of the last century, and being sexy for cameras was very important for political reasons. I suspect there is a very large amount of beaurocratic inertia on those guidelines, and that many of the physical fitness reqs are not actually necessary for the job, but have been retained because being too picky is less troublesome than getting new guidelines through regulatory approval.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me preface this carefully.
I drive a lot every week. 40 minutes at 70mph one way, each work day. I do not like driving. If I could use significantly less fuel while driving, I would jump on it.
Even at "oil crisis" prices in the bush years, the costs of fuel were still significantly less than the offset costs of living closer to town, and my standard of living is far higher. I am NOT wealthy. I own a 25k house, and make about 35k a year. The house I own would cost 2 to 3 times that much in the city, due to marketing forces of supply and demand, even now with housing crash prices. A sleezy, roach infested duplex rental in a gang violence riddled slum costs significantly more than my current house payment per month, for a significantly poorer living arrangement, with considerably greater risks of buglary and physical violence.
After adding all the bills together, I came to the conclusion that it was actually cheaper (including increased fuel costs, vehicular maintenance costs, and additional tax costs) to live outside the city than it is to live inside it.
This is because of several factors, the most poigniant of which is the cost of living differences caused by everyone else in the city trying to get a slice of everyone else's pie. (Eg, every store keeper wants to turn the highest profit that the local market can bear. This is basic economics. When people in the city get paid very well, people have more money to blow, and the costs of items increase to match the disparity. This is why the cost of living in high wage areas is so significantly higher than in low wage areas. ) I ran the numbers and found that living a certain distance from the high wage center, you get the option of earning the better pay, while livng in the reduced price area.
This is exactly what created the concept of suburbia. (Note, I do not live in suburbia. I live in hickville farmer community.) Suburbia could easily be serviced by light commuter rail, if the following conditions were met. (At least for most circumstances anyway...)
1) the train center needs free all-day parking. People still need cars. We just want them to drive them significantly less. The train does not go everywhere they need to go, such as to the dentist, or on a romantic drive into the countryside. The biggest consumer of fuel miles in consumer vehicles is the work commute. Free parking with reasonable lot security allows the suburbanites to drive 5 minutes to the train station, then take the light commuter rail to the various districts of the local big civic center, go to work, come back, and drive another 5 minutes to get home. We radically reduce the number of hours they drive, the number of miles they drive, and the city jurisdictions over which they drive, by enabling the free parking lot. People won't use the rail station if they get charged to ride, and charged by the hour to park. Subsidize the costs of the parking structure into the yearly rider's pass prices. Problem solved. One off riders only pay the one off ticket price, and get the free parking.
2) don't penalize people for living outside the city. People chosing to live outside the city forces prices for city residents down, because demand for services and properties diminish. People using the light rail to get to work reduces the nightmares of intracity traffic and parking (fewer people are driving), reducing the rate of roadway deterioration, and everyone is better off for it.
3) the light rail needs to be accessible, affordable, and offer a free or at least flat rate shuttle bussing service with dedicated commuter bus routes to all major centers and districts of town, and the surrounding suburbs. If it is a major city industry or service, it needs to be easily and safely serviced by the public transit option.
4) the actual day to day operations of terminal stations in the public transit network can be franchise run, but a minimum QoS for cleanliness, access, safety, and ease of use needs to be enforced somehow. Franchises work great here, b
The ion gun cited charges one way, then the other to neutralize the surface. Ionic charge only persists a second or two.
Eg, it fires negative ions as the trigger is pulled, then releases positive ions as the trigger is released.
Persistent charge on an LP also promotes rapid resoiling, which is why commerical cleaning guns like this neutralize the charge after blowing the dust off.
One would think it would be like removing the extremely fine dust from an LP.
Back in the day, there was this thing called an "Ion Gun".
(Example product)
It basically compresses and slightly ionizes atmospheric gas, then directs it at the surface to be cleaned. The electrical charge in the gas causes the dust to be electrostatically repelled from the surface, and the forced air blows it off.
Surely such a toy could be attached to one of the arms of future solar powered rovers for periodic cleaning purposes, and even possibly for electrochemical experiments?
Yes, but it will not accept the cd key printed inside the box this way. The installer will say that the entered license key is only for upgrades, and not clean installs. Sure, it runs first stage install just fine, but bones you on the key. Been there, done that. Just over christmas I might add.
A clever trick that I heard of, but am not sure if it (still) works, is to install a copy of reactos first, then "upgrade" it. Reactos is foss, and doesn't do license keys, and last I heard, fakes out the upgrade process into setting the magic bit high.
The installer presumably treats an ROS install like it was an XP install, and let's you blow it away while keeping the upgrade flag set. Handy if you fuxxored the prior upgrade run by not having sata drivers, etc on hand, or need to reinstall an already upgraded machine.
It has been my unfortunate experience that most primary school instructors overly fixate on maintaining their visage of authority, and insist upon the "I tell you how it is, you don't question the validity of the information" approach to instruction.
This usually compounds into other aspects of the teacher/student interaction, such as "$foo is broken, $student must have broken it", or as my nephew once told me "I am right even when I am obviously and completely wrong, don't dare question my pronouncements. If you do, you will get in even deeper trouble." (He got in trouble for "playing video games" in class, because his teacher saw him running the disk defragmenter on his workstation. He said he ran it because the school system had neglected the windows box to such a degree that the volume was 99% fragmented, and was thrashing worse than an epilleptic with parkinsons at a rave party. Apparently she couldn't tell the difference between a video game and a gui system utility with a colored sector map.)
A teacher of the species you cite would have asked what he was doing, and gotten an accurate answer, and would not have acted like an officious ass that can do no wrong.
I really do wish that educators outside of institutions of higher learning would conduct themselves and their lessons in such a dynamic and competent fashion, but the grim reality is that a dynamic education does not lend itself well to standardized curricula, and standardized testing metics. Officious pronouncements and wrote memory, however do. Nevermind that you end up with a student that is full of sterile sound bytes without the rationality and skills to apply them effectively and intelligently.
Personally, I feel that this is the halmark of overbearing control from government legislators, who think that more administration and tighter control over education will make everything better. The tinfoil hat voice in the back of my head says that they like the implicit life lessons that such educational experiences impart to children, as children trained to never question groww up to be voters that never question, but I do not think this was done intentionally as a conspiracy. Mostly, I think it stems from this simple formula:
Performance of public schools drops compared to other industrial nations.
Parents cry for something to be done.
The difficulties of administering an ad-hoc, and dynamic lecture and curriculum based on logic, rhetoric, and investigation in a consistent manner (each crop of kids in disparate schools ask different questions, leading to a fundementally heterogenous learning environment that lacks recurring consistency) prompt legislators to "do something" by mandating what material is to be taught, and how that is to be accomplished.
Setting the goal at "excellence" for a grading requirement places many demographics into a disadvantaged position. Parents complain.
Legislators "do something" by lowering standards of the curriculum so that disadvantaged students appear to be excellent, because the homogenous teaching method employed cannot easily adapt to such special needs students without labeling them with stigmatizing terms, such as defining them as being 'retarded', when they might just be malnourished, or have a homelife unconducive to completing homework. (Abusive parents, have to care for younger siblings while parents work, etc.)
1) personally i'd use a crippled kiosk system. If the kids steal it, guess what? It doesn't work outside of the school's network infrastructure. Remove incentive to steal, stuff isn't stolen. Vandalism is another matter though...
2) apple and intel, as per the arrangement.
3)netbooted kiosk image from read only share, on a different architecture from the kiosks. Virus? Power it off, then back on again. Good as new. Even a techtarded teacher (not all teachers are, mind) can handle "viruses" this way. Also helps ensure kiosks are clean prior to tests, lessons, etc.
4) not sure.
Actually, I have an i7 running lucid.
It was really overkill to spring for the i7 as my new system build, but I like that I can churn out 3 completed folding@home sets in 8hrs on the SMP build on a single system. (I let it run while I am at work. Utility costs be damned.)
When I actually use the thing, I do video re-encodes, and like having 64bit registers, and multiple cores to crunch with.
I am not a typical user.
In addition to video processing, I also play with a pirated copy of the CAD software I use legitimately at work. I don't confuse the two and bring work home; they don't pay me enough for that. I just use the software as an artistic program when in my off time. It makes use of all 8 cores.
Windows xp does not and cannot satisfy my computing needs, so I don't run it. I do however, have to support it when my family calls for tech support. You know the drill. :)
Ok, here's the rundown as I have managed to wring out of friends and family that cling to XP.
1) it came on the computer they currently have, and works fine on that hardware.
2) they are familiar with it, and it does what they expect it to.
3) they don't want to buy new hardware when the hardware they have suits their needs already, (when running xp)
4) microsoft has switched around how the user interface works, so that now it treats you like you don't own the box. This causes issues for users who just want to make the printer they got for christmas work. Clicking OK on 3 or more scary "let this program make administrative changes?" Dialogs and other "scary" popups are not enjoyable to users, who really don't understand the significance of what the windows really mean, and who don't have an alternative to the "untrusted" 3rd party driver CD that came with the printer anyway. Windows 7 does this "less" than windows vista, which complained when you wanted to run solitare, but this is simply users chosing the lesser of two evils. They prefer the simplicity and nonverbose output of xp.
5) fewer and fewer people buy computers to play video games these days, given the rise of modern console games with online multiplayer, and the reduced hassles of competing against people with better rigs. There is much less incentive to continue driving the forced upgrade cycle, so users try to get more equity out of already owned assets, like older hardware. Let's face it, unless you turn on 3d return of clippy or some other horseshit, you don't need an i7 to print resumes or make greeting cards. You don't need gobs of resources to play mp3s while you clean your house, facebook and farmville don't need epic leetness, etc. An old windows xp era rig can do all those things just fine, and users know this. Thus, windows xp satisfies most of their needs for a general purpose computing environment.
The few issues that crop up appear to be (and are) totally contrived to continue monetizing the computing market. Driver support for devices, for instance. Unless it is some radical new slot architecture or something, there is little to make xp insufficient for a driver, especially when you are pushing a crapware consumer peripheral device like a printer or scanner, which usually use unidrv.dll for 99% of the functionality anyway. Other than drivers, you have security fixes, updates, and browsers. Browser makers don't like to support "legacy" OSes because they usually represent the dreaded "low end hardware", which forces them to make efficient code instead of quickly produced code; the impetus of which is purely due to makerting forces in the vast majority of cases. Feature creep causes a software product to require more and more resources to satisfy more and more edge case uses, which would be better satisfied with optional plugins run in sandboxed processes. Remember: "newer isn't always better." when users feel financially pinched, they stop chasing the shiny.
While rate of production has net decreased, rate of energy consumption per person has radically increased.
The west has traded one evil for another.
Speaking as someone who goes through regular cycles of caffine addiction, I can attest to the OP.
In the winter months I abuse caffine, due to my working second shift, and having low exposure to natural light. (This causes all kinds of sleep related trouble for me, so I abuse coffee to keep from becoming narcoleptic :).)
During the summer, I lay off the stuff completely. I have gone through the addiction cycle numberous times, and can speak from personal experience that I too have noticed that coffee doesn't make me more alert, it just keeps me from sleeping, especially after the first few weeks of routine use. In truth, it makes me feel lethargic and bitter when I don't get it, which are classic signs of addiction. I find myself much better after quitting when my sleep cycles start to level out as the winter months pass. It's fantastic to wake up and be actually alert, rather than a drag-assed zombie until I prop up my nervous system on drugs.
It's a political statement. Omitting the u in labour is intended to show that they are just like the US versons of such groups. They represent labor (working hard), but they don't include "u".
Agreed. However, getting such a reactor design through the nonproliferation hurdles would be quite a feat, let alone the "nuclear is teh evil!" Crowd.
Fast breeder reactors that can convert high level reactor waste into catalyst for thorium and other plentiful potential fuels can easily be outfitted for neutron capture in non fuel materials, such as low grade uranium to produce weapons grade.
It would be fantastic if we lived in a world where people with big egos and tiny penises didn't have to "make up" for it with collosal explosions (and the threat of them), but sadly we do. People like the late kim jong il, and armadinajad (however you spell his name) pretty much ruin it for everyone.
An rtg on the other hand, would take millions of years to passively radiate an enclosure made of low grade uranium sufficiently for such a purpose. Even then the idea of even trying that itself is asinine. I agree that far more useful quantities of power could be harvested with a fast breeder reprocessing reactor/ordinary reactor pair for the same fuel costs. It is just the dipshit world leaders stroking their e-peens that are the problem.
What I always wondered is why "spent" fuel (really an exotic blend of lighter, but still strongly radioactive materials that cannot sustain catalyzed fission) is glass cast, then buried.
The stuff has a half like of 10 million years? Sounds like a fantastic core for an RTG to me.
Make the glass cast waste able to be extracted from the RTG enclosure by making it modular, so that the core can be retained while the shell is disposed of/replaced when it wears out. The shell would be radically less raiological, and useful energy could be passively extracted from the spent waste, potentially for centuries.
But that would make sense. A large battery of rtgs in a warehouse could power a small city for pennies.
No. Instead we spend billions on fossil fuel instead.
Velocity does not imply accelleration. Accelleration does imply velocity.
Example: you are sitting in your chair. You are not experiencing accelleration. You are however, traveling at very high velocity. The earth is rotating, is orbiting the sun, and the sun is in turn orbiting galactic center. You are moving at fantastic velocities. You do not percieve any G-forces, because you are not experiencing delta-v.
This is why the above post is modded informative.
Delta-v is a function which measures CHANGE of velocity. Continual application of very tiny delta-v (as long as you aren't fighting a gravity well) over sufficient time will result in very very high linear velocities, with minimal g-force cost.
The problem is leaving the earth-s gravity well. You have to overcome the effective pull of gravity. This means at least 2G inertial force on the occupants of the vessel, using a rocket. In addition, you have to deal with atmospheric drag and other factors. This bumps things up to 3 or 4Gs.
As I pointed out in another post, "breathing" is not a problem unless you are obeise. The problem is anoxia from poor blood flow, because the blood in your arteries becomes 4X heavier. Your blood pressure spikes, and if you have heart trouble or hypertension, you can have a heart attack, an embolism, or a stroke. I have a mitral valve prolapse.
Essentially, when my blood pressure rises, the mitral valve in my heart malfunctions, causing arythmia and a loss of positive blood flow, which causes dizziness and fainting. As a result I cannot be an astronaut.
It might be possible to overcome if I use a pressurized G-suit. However, unless I was super splendiferously important to the mission, this solution would not be explored due to increased launch weight, and only limited effectiveness.
Most people don't have congenital heart defects like mine though.
We agree on a lot of issues.
I suggested using frosted/etched glass to eliminate glare. This would simultaneously solve the "ooh! There's a dog outside!" Type distractions. Kids can't see much more than a colored smudge through the frosted glass, and that is only for things really close to the glass, like plants.
Stuffiness is a serious issue. A high ceiling helps to deal with that by giving more dead air space for hot air to rise into. Coupled with good ventilation in the room, this deals with most instances of stuffiness.
Assuming said "joe ordinary" janitor does not weigh 250lbs, and does not have high bloodpressure, he would not "die on takeoff".
As for the deterioration, I think you could benefit from re-reading my post, and doing some research. I specifically said long term habitation. A long term habitat would actively take measures to prevent such deterioration. Recent studies in anamal models shows that microtrauma to skeletal and muscle tissues are what stave off atrophy. See for instance, this study from 07.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2929696/
A properly constructed habitat that simulates 1G effective resistance would stave off all musle and bone deterioration that was not caused by increased ambient radiation. Any long term habitat would have to take this radiation exosure into consideration as well, and would have to actively shield against it to maintain acceptable dosage levels.
Most of the issues with deterioration could be addressed with current space habitats with an inflatable pressure suit with a built in vibrator.
Space is not some magical lifeforce depleting environment. The current problems with deteriorating astronaut health comes from designing habitats for short term occupation, due to budget issues. Not because space is just so wicked on humans.
I specifically mentioned through a hose. As in, unpressurized.
A padi certified diver at 5atm uses compressed trimix. His lungs would never be able to exert sufficient pull to draw breath through an unpressurised hose at that depth. It would require strength to displace several hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. The human body is physically incapable of that. Deep water divers don't have that problem, because they use compressed gas.
The astronaut at 5Gs total effective body mass would be around 850lbs, yes. His chest would only be about 200lbs. To effectively simulate, stack 4 50lb dogfood bags on your chest while laying down. I can do that easily. The real problem with high delta-v is that your blood pressure has to increase 5x what it is at rest to avoid anoxia. If you have heart trouble of any kind, that is what kills you.
You mean high delta-v travel. Not high velocity travel. When not accellerating or decellerating, there would be no noteworthy g-stresses on the body.
This is actually part of the problem with bone and muscle deterioration. Freefall induced microgravity actually *reduces* riggors on the body which promote healthy muscle and bone tissue. It is actually the pressure against bones and muscles caused by exerting them in a gravity well which keeps bones dense. A few studies with genetically bone atrophied mice showed that increasing ambient stresses against their bones rebuilt bone mass. (They used a vibrating plate to introduce additional skeletal shock forces.)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2929696/
Most of these degeneration effects could be effectively eliminated with proper habitat construction. This means that they are much less of an issue if properly addressed.
No, I label people stupid when they repeatedly do the same stupid things, and actively refuse education and correction.
People who revel in their ignorance, refuse to better themselves when given every possible opportunity, and fail at basic logic and show no inclination to improve themselves are people I consider stupid.
As such your assumption is wrong. Everyone does make mistakes, and I am no exception. Refusal to grow, improve, and learn on the other hand, is the hallmark of being stupid.
The implication was not that 250lb tubs of lard should be accepted. The implication was that you don't have to be a 170lb addonas with washboard abs, and a pretty smile.
There are people with a "heavy" build that are perfectly healthy and fit. The physical characterisitics sheet disqualifies such people. (My dad had such an endomorphic build. The police dept he worked for introduced rules to combat police obesity, which enforced BMI requirements. Ended up lethargic and emaciated bones to reach the required BMI for his height because he really does have heavy musculature and bones. Ended up getting a medical exemption with a doctor's order. His "healthy and fit" weight was right at 200lbs for a 5'6" man. He would never meet russian body requirements, even in tiptop shape. I understand the "million dollars per kilogram" fuel requirement. I also realize that those requirements coincide nicely with "idealized" perceptions of attractiveness. I have yet to see a truly butt ugly astronaut.)
Then you have the eyesight requirement. Many astronauts in current service have nowhere near 20/20. Unless you are myopic as hell, or have insane astigmatism like I do, the 20/20 req is madness, since you won't keep that if you stay in space anyway. Most astronauts forgo eyetests after missions for this very reason, yet they still seem able to do their jobs just fine.
If it is anything like breathing under 6ft of water through a hose, I can do it. *shrug*
Glare is caused by hard-incident light.
Simply use frosted glass on the windows to diffuse the hard light, and monitor glare vanishes unless the monitors directly face the window. (Bad idea. It causes eyestrain from the contrast.)
The rows should ideally form "[" shaped units that face outward, with the teacher's station near the center of the floorspace. This way the teacher can easily see what all the students are doing. Eye-contact with the lecture is overrated in my opinion, but swivel chairs would accomplish that too if the teacher insists on it. 2 of the walls should ideally be frosted glass, with droppable curtains to occult the light when using a digital projector. The projector shines on the wall behind the teacher's desk. In addition to the projector, student's screens should be swappable to the projector feed, in case students would rather see it that way. (This also keeps kids from fucking off on the computer during lecture material.)
Some plants, a higher ceiling with recessed lights (cloudy days, winter classes, etc) to prevent hard light and to keep the room from feeling confined and stuffy are great ideas.
Try not to jam workstations in like sardines. Each student needs at least a 3 square foot work envelope that is strictly thiers. 5ft is better. This minimizes cheating, since their neighbor's computer is too far away to be easily seen, and minimizes horseplay in the lab.
The ability to turn on the radio over the presentation system is a nice perk, as is the ability to slave the overhead digital projector from a student's workstation for student presentations, such as software development projects. Both need to be easilly controlled from the teacher's workspace.
Hardware wise, I would suggest creatively crippling the systems, and using a linux like environment. Wine can do anything MS office wants, so that isn't an issue. The added security features and increased difficulty of students secretly smuggling unapproved software onto the workstations is put to good use this way. I would suggest using diskless workstations with a local fileserver to further combat inappropriate use.
But I know flat out that I would never make the cut.
Over the past year, I have grown sideways considerably.
I also have rather pronounced astigmatism, and a mitralvalve prolapse, on top of carpel tunnel and occult gangaleon cysts in my wrists.
I would NEVER get passed the physical.
That said, I would have no trouble with the psychological aspects. I actually *like* confined spaces, as long as the airflow is good. Working with others could be a problem, but the hiring reqs would ensure that stupid people are disqualified, so that would be ok. If I have to explain what the words "heuristic" and "obfuscate" mean, I won't be able to work effectively with the team. Effective communication is essential for that. If they are competent, have more than a 500 word vocabulary, and are professional it is all good.
Eventually though, NASA and ESA are going to have to send ordinary people up, if they ever intend to do any kind of space based manufacturing, or permanent space based habitats. People aren't going to like jumping through insane hurdles, just to be a space janitor. Best just to hire a regular janitor that meets some core competencies so he doesn't blow himself out an airlock or get water into an instrument panel.
While being fit is important for space vocations, I suspect most of the fitness requirements center around looking sexy for TV. The hiring guidelines for astronauts in the US and Russia were created during the biggest PR penis waving contest of the last century, and being sexy for cameras was very important for political reasons. I suspect there is a very large amount of beaurocratic inertia on those guidelines, and that many of the physical fitness reqs are not actually necessary for the job, but have been retained because being too picky is less troublesome than getting new guidelines through regulatory approval.
Well, it's christmas, and china has to up the ante.
Everything old is just waiting to be new again.
I guess a mercury filled kinetic toy set is just waiting to happen.
*muses*
"Metal racers! Race your tiny liquid metal drops down spiral tracks! Place obstacles and traps, and watch your racers grow!"
(Think cross between a mercury droplet labyrinth, and a hotwheels playset, where the droplets pool together to escape traps and obstacles.)
Amusingly, it would probably be a very entertaining toy.
Slightly? This is cadnium we are talking about. Its a freaking heavy metal! (And not the rock and roll kind!)
What's next, mercury funtime playsets?