The military has a program that will put you through whatever college you can get into in exchange for 4 years in the armed service afterwards. NSA (National Security Agency) used to have a similar program if you were good in math but I don't know if they still do.
The military also has their respective academys, i.e., West Point, Anapolis and Colorado Springs. The men I've met who went to West Point spoke very highly of it in terms of the education they received.
There's a big advantage to black and white - you get BOTH resolution and color. The initial shots are in black and white because they're checking out the camera and other parts.
Later on, they'll calibrate the camera using the color wheel on the sundial (yep another old technology that works ) and you'll get full color images that are very crisp. The color images will be composite images that are built from 3 separate shots of the same scene looking through different colored lenses.
Had they chosen instead to send a ccd that was wired like a digital camera, the images would have had 1/3rd the resolution they'll get this way.
Click on the little red boxes where they magnify the image to full resolution. I think the most impressive shot is the cable hook which is on the far back wall inside the lab. The nominal shot shows some sort of shadow, the blowup shows the hook and the cable strands.
Details on the panoramic camera are available from Cornell. Check out the popup test image links which show the test shots they shot in the lab and at Cape Canaveral. They're pretty spectacular.
"Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants"
in the December 8, 1978, issue of Science magazine.
If you want a popular source, read John McPhee's Rising From The Plains, a book about Wyoming and John Love, a USGS geologist. As McPhee and Love were touring parts of Wyoming, Love pointed out areas of discolored coal and identified them as uranium concentrations. As dry as the topic sounds, McPhee does an excellent job of making it an engrossing read.
November 14 is when Apple started their more realistic battery replacement program. Yet the iPod had been on the market for 22 months at that point. For the math deficient, that's 10 months beyond the 12 month warranty period. That means that the poor suckers whose iPods were dying on the wrong side of the Bell Curve were SOL.
The video campaign may not have influenced Apple to lower their outrageous $255 fee to $100 (plus shipping) but I'll bet a lot of irate customers swearing at hapless Apple tech support reps did. I'll bet the calls got even hotter when the reps suggested just buying a new iPod instead of forking over the $255.
Not only does coal release gobs of CO2, it releases more radioactivity than a nuclear power plant. Coal is a magnet for uranium so when you burn a lump of coal, some uranium goes up the flue along with the CO2.
Try Firebird. The only website I visit that it can't deal with is microsoft.com. Firebird has several advantages over IE but the one I like most is scripts run in a sandbox which means I don't worry about yet another IE security exploit munging my computer. Given the repetitive security exploits attributable to some flaw in IE, I figure anyone who is running IE is just asking for trouble.
Funny, I deployed Open Office across my business. It did what I needed and was free. Figured it was better than paying $400/seat every few years.
Apache serves my web pages for the same reason - does what we need and it's way cheaper than IIS. IExplorer is so prone to attack that we use Firebird instead. Firebird also has a few features like pop-up blocking and tabbed windows that I wonder why anyone sticks with Explorer.
Re-reading your post gave me a distinct sense of Deja-Vu. Back in the late 70's, early 80's, IBM was pretty dismissive when it came to the Apple II. IBM just couldn't imagine that these desktop computers would amount to much. What IBM, and apparently you, failed to realize is that most businesses have pretty simple needs that can be met dozens of ways. When that's the case, price becomes an important factor.
For me personally, I use my desktop for lots, and lots of compiling. I'd like my desktop to be more responsive under heavy I/O load. I'd like it to do more things in the background.
Compiling will certainly soak your I/O channels which is why ramdisks are so useful. The downside to using a ramdisk to eliminate i/o as a bottleneck is it puts the cpu front and center as your bottleneck.
Seems to me that this is a technology that not only doesn't fill a need, it complicates the problem it's allegedly solving. I'll bet Diebold is behind it!
To get a degree, local (Central California Coast) high school students have to do some sort of volunteer work. It can be pretty much anything so one student I know has organized a computer drive. He accepts anything computer related and when he has enough parts, puts together a working computer which he then donates to families who can use them which he finds through the local food bank.
Another organization I know of is Oakland Tech, a public high school in Oakland California. They run a training program that teaches students how to repair broken computers. Once the machines are working, they're given away to students who can't afford to buy their own.
Notice that the copy even suggests why you would want replaceable batteries as a standard feature - road trips. Also notice that they aren't dinging you for $100, plus shipping, to replace a battery.
Don't be surprised when Apple finally caves and makes iPod batteries easily replaceable. They'll claim it's a great new feature.
i didn't think so either. Yep, I agree. You didn't think.
Before you bother to produce anything, try your game out on friends and friends of friends. If it falls flat there, you're not out anything. What will more likely happen is, by watching carefully and just listening, you can see things that don't quite work the way you thought they would. So you revise and try again. Keep doing it until you hear people telling you they played the game even when you weren't around to watch them play.
At that point, it's time to consider whether you want to self-publish or sell to a publisher. If you decide to self-publish, with a good game in hand, you're about 1/5 of the way to making money. Then you worry about production issues like you are now. Producing parts isn't tough unless you have to build molds in which case it can get expensive pretty quick. Boards, manuals, cards, boxes are all cheap to produce. Once you have physical product, you're about 1/3 of the way there. You still have to sell the game to resellers and to do that, you have to convince them that the game will move off their shelves better than what they're currently carrying. That's a tough road and requires a lot of patience and persistence to see it through. To get a feeling for the problem you have to overcome, put yourself in a game store and you see a new game on the shelf. Would you buy it if you know nothing about it? That's what a reseller is going to wonder and it's a fear you'll have to overcome.
So you finally land your first sale. Except you're not there yet. Somebody like Walmart or Target is going to want to know that you'll take the game back if it dies on the shelf. That means you won't see money from them until the product shows that it's moving and they're ready to reorder. It's when the second and third re-orders start coming in that you know you've got a product that'll sell. Self-publishing is a rush but most of the time you're worrying about keeping product moving more than you're worrying about developing a great game. Been there, done that.
The analysts would identify themselves as "Jim" and "Bob". Just this is insulting - as if we can't learn how to pronounce or recognize the name of someone from a different culture than ours? It's just a sign of not understanding the needs and/or culture of the clients.
You missed the point as to why they introduce themselves as "Jim" and "Bob." It's not because you can't learn to pronounce Sushruth or Ramu, it's because the gold collars back here don't want their customers to know that they've outsourced jobs. They fear a backlash from consumers when it becomes widely known that SBC Global, a public utility, outsourced its help desk.
Next time, try asking "Bob" where he's from or where he's located. Used to be you'd get answers like Lincoln, Nebraska. Now you get, "We're not allowed to tell you where we are."
The LA Times ran a series on Walmart which corroborates most of the original poster's comments.
In the series, Walmart admits that they don't pay their workers enough to support a family on. They also admit that most of their employees can't afford the Walmart health care plan which means those employees end up in the county hospital at taxpayer's expense. It's one thing to cut operating costs to remain competitive, it's quite another to cut costs so much that your employees end up having to rely on charity to make ends meet.
I don't think water was the crucial moderator in the African event. I believe it was the hydrogen in the water that served as the moderator, not the oxygen. Presumably, the hydrogen attached to uranium hydride would suffice as a moderator.
If I recall correctly, u235 is more radioactive because it fissions in the presence of both fast and slow neutrons whereas u238 only fissions in the presence of slow neutrons. As I understand it, and I may be wrong, when u238 is hit by a slow neutron it can take one of three paths - it can shrug the neutron off, it can, as you say, "gobble" the neutron and begin transmuting to plutonium or it can fission. Two of the three events lead to heat. Fission generates immediate heat and plutonium generates heat sometime within its relatively short half life.
Although u238 has a long half life, it is still a source of neutrons so you wouldn't need u235 to keep the reactor going. The reason is that you have a reactor that dwarfs any we've made so when a u238 atom fissions, two things are likely to happen - the 2 neutrons will eventually collide with enough hydrogen atoms supplied by the hydride to slow them down and they'll impact another u238 nucleus. In a man-made reactor, a u238 atom fissions and the neutrons have another option - they can escape the reactor before they slow down. Because our reactors have a relatively large surface area to volume ratio, you need u235 to improve the fissioning odds and supply more neutrons. In a reactor a mile in diameter, u238 would supply more than enough neutrons because the surface area/volume ratio is considerably smaller so the neutrons from the u238 can't as readily escape before they encounter another u238 atom.
I'm not saying the core is all uranium - iron is 30,000 times more abundant than uranium is. However, uranium, while scarce in meteorites, is not uncommon on earth. Even at a 30,000 to 1 ratio, earth has more than enough uranium for some of it to have trickled down to the the center, even accounting for the various losses to oxidation and the silicates. Uranium oxide, a common compound of uranium, is lighter than molten iron as are the uranium bearing silicates. On the other hand, some forms, such as uranium hydride is considerably heavier than iron and could find its way to the center of an iron core. That would be especially true while the earth was accreting.
The other thing is you don't need an awful lot of it to form a critical mass. If just 1/10% of the earth's uranium made its way to the core, you'd have around 2 cubic miles of uranium. That's a sphere with a 1 mile diameter - pretty hard to pick out tomographically.
With regard to the magnetic field, the iron core is still there. The uranium would only occupy a small fraction of the core. The interesting thing is that if the very nucleus of the earth turned out to be uranium and it did undergo periodic poisoning or fuel starvation and shut down, that may be a mechanism that drives the pole reversals. The idea would be that the field is driven by the charge flux associated with fission. The surrounding iron not only emphasizes the field but provides a positive feedback mechanism that drives the orientation of the flux. When the center shut down due to poisoning or a temporary insufficiency in uranium, the source of the charge flux goes away with it. The poisoning decay products get cleared out via convection or more uranium trickles in and the reactor starts back up. But by this time, the magnetic field is provided by the sun as the earth's field has dissipated. So whichever way the sun's field happens to be at the moment, that's the way the reactor fires up. As long as the reactor keeps operating, future solar field reversals are insufficient to overcome the field provided by the uranium/iron core.
If this were true, wouldn't volcanos be far more radioactive than they are today?
Not necessarily. I can think of two ways the radioactivity wouldn't be expressed.
If a uranium core is small, then a few miles of surrounding material would serve to contain the radioactivity. The heat, however, would conduct outwards and drive the lighter basalts upward.
The other possibility is that the transit time from the core to the surface is sufficiently long that the fission debris have completely decayed.
Lord Kelvin's estimate of the age of the earth was 100 million years based on his understanding of heat radiation and conduction. He started with a molten sphere at 7000 Kelvin and figured out how long it would take to cool to what we see today. His math was right but his estimate was wrong by a factor 45 because he didn't know about radioactive heat sources. Point being that radioactivity is already implicated in explaining why the earth is as hot as it is. The question is are the fissionable elements concentrated at the center or dispersed throughout the mantle or both? The best argument that they're dispersed is that uranium is chemically reactive and readily forms oxides which are lighter than iron. On the other hand, there isn't a lot of lab chemistry being done at the intense pressures and heat found just a few miles below our feet, let alone several thousand miles down so we don't really know how uranium chemically behaves under those conditions.
As to your refraction question - it goes back to the resolution of the tool being used and the size of a uranium core as to whether it would show up or not.
What would it take to port this guy's dataset to Quake so you could view the data from any perspective you wanted? I think it would be cool to see the continents rendered on the sphere's surface and be able to spin the sphere, dive in and look around at the plume structures.
To assert categorically that the core is iron strikes me as foolish. It's hard for me to believe that the density of Uranium wouldn't almost guarantee that it forms the central core of the earth. At 19,000 kg/m^3, it's almost 3 times as dense as iron. Although iron is around 30,000 times as abundant as uranium on the surface and assuming the abundance ratio didn't change much as you went down towards the core, you're still talking about a fair amount of Uranium.
It wouldn't take a lot of uranium settling to the core to form a natural nuclear reactor. I can imagine the reactor pulsing as it heats up, poisoning itself like Hanford did when they first fired it up, shutting down and cooling which allows it to shrink. Since the core is molten, the lighter fission products would convect away allowing pure uranium to accrete once again and repeating the cycle.
At the imaging resolution we're currently getting from seismographs, it's not clear to me the reactor would show up in these images. It wouldn't take a lot of "contaminates" to form a small nugget of uranium at the center of the putative iron core.
Slashdot Mirror
The military also has their respective academys, i.e., West Point, Anapolis and Colorado Springs. The men I've met who went to West Point spoke very highly of it in terms of the education they received.
Later on, they'll calibrate the camera using the color wheel on the sundial (yep another old technology that works ) and you'll get full color images that are very crisp. The color images will be composite images that are built from 3 separate shots of the same scene looking through different colored lenses.
Had they chosen instead to send a ccd that was wired like a digital camera, the images would have had 1/3rd the resolution they'll get this way.
Click on the little red boxes where they magnify the image to full resolution. I think the most impressive shot is the cable hook which is on the far back wall inside the lab. The nominal shot shows some sort of shadow, the blowup shows the hook and the cable strands.
Details on the panoramic camera are available from Cornell. Check out the popup test image links which show the test shots they shot in the lab and at Cape Canaveral. They're pretty spectacular.
If you want a popular source, read John McPhee's Rising From The Plains, a book about Wyoming and John Love, a USGS geologist. As McPhee and Love were touring parts of Wyoming, Love pointed out areas of discolored coal and identified them as uranium concentrations. As dry as the topic sounds, McPhee does an excellent job of making it an engrossing read.
The video campaign may not have influenced Apple to lower their outrageous $255 fee to $100 (plus shipping) but I'll bet a lot of irate customers swearing at hapless Apple tech support reps did. I'll bet the calls got even hotter when the reps suggested just buying a new iPod instead of forking over the $255.
What Apple has done for those early customers?
Not only does coal release gobs of CO2, it releases more radioactivity than a nuclear power plant. Coal is a magnet for uranium so when you burn a lump of coal, some uranium goes up the flue along with the CO2.
Try Firebird. The only website I visit that it can't deal with is microsoft.com. Firebird has several advantages over IE but the one I like most is scripts run in a sandbox which means I don't worry about yet another IE security exploit munging my computer. Given the repetitive security exploits attributable to some flaw in IE, I figure anyone who is running IE is just asking for trouble.
Apache serves my web pages for the same reason - does what we need and it's way cheaper than IIS. IExplorer is so prone to attack that we use Firebird instead. Firebird also has a few features like pop-up blocking and tabbed windows that I wonder why anyone sticks with Explorer.
Re-reading your post gave me a distinct sense of Deja-Vu. Back in the late 70's, early 80's, IBM was pretty dismissive when it came to the Apple II. IBM just couldn't imagine that these desktop computers would amount to much. What IBM, and apparently you, failed to realize is that most businesses have pretty simple needs that can be met dozens of ways. When that's the case, price becomes an important factor.
Compiling will certainly soak your I/O channels which is why ramdisks are so useful. The downside to using a ramdisk to eliminate i/o as a bottleneck is it puts the cpu front and center as your bottleneck.
Seems to me that this is a technology that not only doesn't fill a need, it complicates the problem it's allegedly solving. I'll bet Diebold is behind it!
Another organization I know of is Oakland Tech, a public high school in Oakland California. They run a training program that teaches students how to repair broken computers. Once the machines are working, they're given away to students who can't afford to buy their own.
It may not be beer but it's still pretty tasty.
Notice that the copy even suggests why you would want replaceable batteries as a standard feature - road trips. Also notice that they aren't dinging you for $100, plus shipping, to replace a battery.
Don't be surprised when Apple finally caves and makes iPod batteries easily replaceable. They'll claim it's a great new feature.
i didn't think so either.
Yep, I agree. You didn't think.
At that point, it's time to consider whether you want to self-publish or sell to a publisher. If you decide to self-publish, with a good game in hand, you're about 1/5 of the way to making money. Then you worry about production issues like you are now. Producing parts isn't tough unless you have to build molds in which case it can get expensive pretty quick. Boards, manuals, cards, boxes are all cheap to produce. Once you have physical product, you're about 1/3 of the way there. You still have to sell the game to resellers and to do that, you have to convince them that the game will move off their shelves better than what they're currently carrying. That's a tough road and requires a lot of patience and persistence to see it through. To get a feeling for the problem you have to overcome, put yourself in a game store and you see a new game on the shelf. Would you buy it if you know nothing about it? That's what a reseller is going to wonder and it's a fear you'll have to overcome.
So you finally land your first sale. Except you're not there yet. Somebody like Walmart or Target is going to want to know that you'll take the game back if it dies on the shelf. That means you won't see money from them until the product shows that it's moving and they're ready to reorder. It's when the second and third re-orders start coming in that you know you've got a product that'll sell. Self-publishing is a rush but most of the time you're worrying about keeping product moving more than you're worrying about developing a great game. Been there, done that.
You missed the point as to why they introduce themselves as "Jim" and "Bob." It's not because you can't learn to pronounce Sushruth or Ramu, it's because the gold collars back here don't want their customers to know that they've outsourced jobs. They fear a backlash from consumers when it becomes widely known that SBC Global, a public utility, outsourced its help desk.
Next time, try asking "Bob" where he's from or where he's located. Used to be you'd get answers like Lincoln, Nebraska. Now you get, "We're not allowed to tell you where we are."
In the series, Walmart admits that they don't pay their workers enough to support a family on. They also admit that most of their employees can't afford the Walmart health care plan which means those employees end up in the county hospital at taxpayer's expense. It's one thing to cut operating costs to remain competitive, it's quite another to cut costs so much that your employees end up having to rely on charity to make ends meet.
I know! Teach it to dance the Hokey Pokey!
Forgive the one on the right - it reads too much Slashdot.
Oops! This isn't the vaporware thread. So sorry, mod me down.
If I recall correctly, u235 is more radioactive because it fissions in the presence of both fast and slow neutrons whereas u238 only fissions in the presence of slow neutrons. As I understand it, and I may be wrong, when u238 is hit by a slow neutron it can take one of three paths - it can shrug the neutron off, it can, as you say, "gobble" the neutron and begin transmuting to plutonium or it can fission. Two of the three events lead to heat. Fission generates immediate heat and plutonium generates heat sometime within its relatively short half life.
Although u238 has a long half life, it is still a source of neutrons so you wouldn't need u235 to keep the reactor going. The reason is that you have a reactor that dwarfs any we've made so when a u238 atom fissions, two things are likely to happen - the 2 neutrons will eventually collide with enough hydrogen atoms supplied by the hydride to slow them down and they'll impact another u238 nucleus. In a man-made reactor, a u238 atom fissions and the neutrons have another option - they can escape the reactor before they slow down. Because our reactors have a relatively large surface area to volume ratio, you need u235 to improve the fissioning odds and supply more neutrons. In a reactor a mile in diameter, u238 would supply more than enough neutrons because the surface area/volume ratio is considerably smaller so the neutrons from the u238 can't as readily escape before they encounter another u238 atom.
The other thing is you don't need an awful lot of it to form a critical mass. If just 1/10% of the earth's uranium made its way to the core, you'd have around 2 cubic miles of uranium. That's a sphere with a 1 mile diameter - pretty hard to pick out tomographically.
With regard to the magnetic field, the iron core is still there. The uranium would only occupy a small fraction of the core. The interesting thing is that if the very nucleus of the earth turned out to be uranium and it did undergo periodic poisoning or fuel starvation and shut down, that may be a mechanism that drives the pole reversals. The idea would be that the field is driven by the charge flux associated with fission. The surrounding iron not only emphasizes the field but provides a positive feedback mechanism that drives the orientation of the flux. When the center shut down due to poisoning or a temporary insufficiency in uranium, the source of the charge flux goes away with it. The poisoning decay products get cleared out via convection or more uranium trickles in and the reactor starts back up. But by this time, the magnetic field is provided by the sun as the earth's field has dissipated. So whichever way the sun's field happens to be at the moment, that's the way the reactor fires up. As long as the reactor keeps operating, future solar field reversals are insufficient to overcome the field provided by the uranium/iron core.
It'll not only form oxides which are lighter than iorn but it'll also form hydrides that are heavier and would therefore sink.
Not necessarily. I can think of two ways the radioactivity wouldn't be expressed.
- If a uranium core is small, then a few miles of surrounding material would serve to contain the radioactivity. The heat, however, would conduct outwards and drive the lighter basalts upward.
- The other possibility is that the transit time from the core to the surface is sufficiently long that the fission debris have completely decayed.
Lord Kelvin's estimate of the age of the earth was 100 million years based on his understanding of heat radiation and conduction. He started with a molten sphere at 7000 Kelvin and figured out how long it would take to cool to what we see today. His math was right but his estimate was wrong by a factor 45 because he didn't know about radioactive heat sources. Point being that radioactivity is already implicated in explaining why the earth is as hot as it is. The question is are the fissionable elements concentrated at the center or dispersed throughout the mantle or both? The best argument that they're dispersed is that uranium is chemically reactive and readily forms oxides which are lighter than iron. On the other hand, there isn't a lot of lab chemistry being done at the intense pressures and heat found just a few miles below our feet, let alone several thousand miles down so we don't really know how uranium chemically behaves under those conditions.As to your refraction question - it goes back to the resolution of the tool being used and the size of a uranium core as to whether it would show up or not.
What would it take to port this guy's dataset to Quake so you could view the data from any perspective you wanted? I think it would be cool to see the continents rendered on the sphere's surface and be able to spin the sphere, dive in and look around at the plume structures.
It wouldn't take a lot of uranium settling to the core to form a natural nuclear reactor. I can imagine the reactor pulsing as it heats up, poisoning itself like Hanford did when they first fired it up, shutting down and cooling which allows it to shrink. Since the core is molten, the lighter fission products would convect away allowing pure uranium to accrete once again and repeating the cycle.
At the imaging resolution we're currently getting from seismographs, it's not clear to me the reactor would show up in these images. It wouldn't take a lot of "contaminates" to form a small nugget of uranium at the center of the putative iron core.