Be careful with those adjectives there - they have the potential to completely altering the meaning of the noun they're applied to. From the wikipedia article: Civil libertarianism is not a complete ideology; rather, it is a collection of views on the specific issues of civil liberties and civil rights. Because of this, a civil libertarian outlook is compatible with many other political philosophies, and civil libertarianism is found on both the right and left of modern politics, although it is often associated with social liberals in the United States.
Example: I consider myself a social democrat and always get irritated by the idiocies hardcore Libertarians spread on Slashdot. I'd feel insulted to be classified a Libertarian - I'm pretty much the opposite. Yet I fully support most of EFF's causes.
It will always be a trade-off between efficiency and polarization of power. Just like in politics. Decision-making is extremely efficient in an absolute dictatorship, but people have to rely on the dictator being benevolent, staying benevolent, staying healthy (I've seen people's character completely change because of illness), and having benevolent successors (this almost never happens in real-life politics). On the other side of the spectrum, you have democracies with a proper implementation of Montesqieu's separation of powers, which in some instances get plagued by indecisiveness, gridlock, and half-assed compromises that really are not helpful for anyone. (*) You'll find the same principles apply to system administration, or anything that involves power.
(*)<opinion>Obamacare is a perfect example: started off as a radical reform that would allow America to take back its place amongst civilized nations, was watered down to a legislative abomination. Note that I'm not implying that the president has too little power - this is merely an example of one of the side-effects of the democratic system America is using. I can give some examples of presidential abuse of power as well.</opinion>
I fear you might be on to something. Friends in different places in the world are complaining that politics (and more importantly, public opinion) in the countries they're living in is creeping steadily to the right. Same in my home country and in the country I'm currently living in. Wonder where this will end...
I'd like to add that the chemical structure looks more like a potential high-explosive than a potential rocket fuel (but then again, these things are difficult to predict). Moreover, high explosives for specialized purposes do not need to be available/affordable in such high amounts as rocket fuels (but they generally do require a better shelf life, which might be an issue).
As much as GP's desires are grossly unrealistic and would lead to a Libertarian dystopia, he or she has a point that the whole "land of the free" rhetoric is hollowed out and stinks of hypocrisy. I cannot imagine the "socialist" western European country I'm coming from to treat the pilot like this, or Private Manning, or to have something equivalent to Guantanamo, the Patriot act, the DMCA, the which hunt against wikileaks, or (to throw in a few smaller thing) millimeter scanners, pat-downs and absurd liquor laws. I hate to break it to you, but I felt much more free living in Europe than in the US.
Over the decades, chemists have come up with dozens of molecular structures that would make "the perfect rocket fuel" or "the perfect explosive" (both qualities are closely related). If only they would be stable enough to prevent accidental explosions ("It remains to be seen how stable the molecule is in a solid form"). And be possible to produce in hundreds of tons ("The scientists have also managed to produce enough of the compound in a test tube for it to be detectable.") And most important of all, cheap enough to compete with existing propellants.
Until these problems can be addressed, this "breakthrough" is just another octanitrocubane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octanitrocubane It's a chemical tour-de-force to synthesize difficult structures like this in the first place, and in that sense, the researchers may have made a valuable contribution to the field of synthetic chemistry, but if you expect rockets with quadruple payloads based on this molecule to be lifting of by 2015, well, don't hold your breath.
What makes you think that 6.3 g is too much? Sustaining 6.3 g for 1.75 seconds along the vertical axis is well within the capabilities expected from a fighter pilot. Moreover, the acceleration when catapult-launching a plane is along the horizontal axis which is much better tolerated. Untrained humans are able to tolerate 17 g eyeballs-in for several minutes without loss of consciousness or apparent long-term harm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-G_training
That said, you are right about the 240mph actually being 240km/h. From the pdf file: "The complete EMALS system will use a 300-ft long LIM to accelerate a 100,000-lb (45,000-kg) aircraft to more than 130 knots (67m/sec) and lighter aircraft to 200 knots (100m/sec)". 130 knots is almost exactly 140km/h. However, 45 metric tons is about twice the weight of a typical fighter plane, and I believe the stall speed of jet fighters is significantly higher than 240km/h, especially when loaded. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that the 200knots (130mpg or 370km/h) is for fighter planes, which would correspond to an acceleration of roughly 6 g.
I can confirm this. I was living in a western-european country (no, not France) when it happened, and our media (who aren't puppets of the military-industrial establishment) reported things a whole lot different. Everyone in my country knew that Iraq had no WMDs left by 2003, because of the combined effort of the Clinton administration and the UN. And we knew that the Iraqi Ba'ath regimen never had any links to Al Quaeda, they even brutally repressed them. We watched with astonishment how the American media - completely critique-less of the Bush presidency since 9/11 - brainwashed the American public into believing it was a good idea to abandon the search for Bin Laden, abandon the fragile recovery process in Afghanistan, and start an baseless war in Iraq. Our government opposed the "eighteenth resolution", a standpoint backed by an overwhelming majority of our population, only to see Bush form a "coalition of the delusional". We saw it all coming, from start to finish. Analysts in our media warned us that taking Iraq would be the easy part, but that it would sink into chaos and become a true breeding ground for terrorists. That a very strong commitment was needed to make Afghanistan stable and secure, and that a second war would be detrimental. We all saw it coming years ahead. We were very upset about the things "America" was doing, and how "America" wouldn't listen to the voice of the international community; I can imagine that American tourists would probably have received a slightly less warm welcome than in other periods of history.
Now the thing you should know is I'm not talking about France - in fact my story would apply to any country in Western Europe except the UK, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria and (depending on which criterion you're using) Poland and the Czech republic. And the rest of the world was similarly mostly opposed to going to war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_and_the_Iraq_War
Which brings us to the following piece of advice for GP: if you ever want any hope of making a true statement about "the world", the first thing you should do is radically stop viewing any American media - most of them are rotten to the core. Start with the BBC website as a primary news source. Or, just for the sake of experiment, try that other "biased" outlet, Al-Jazeera. You'll be surprised how little bias they have compared to, say, Fox News.
OK, I'll bite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K6
"The AMD K6 is based on the Nx686 microprocessor that NexGen was designing when it was acquired by AMD. Despite the name implying a design evolving from the K5, it is in fact a totally different design that was created by the NexGen team"
Also, it was more than competitive with the Intel processors of its time. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel,22-10.html
The K6 was a turning point in the x86 wars, after which AMD slowly started taking the performance lead away from Intel with the Athlon, Athlon XP and Athlon 64, the latter having total dominance over Intel's competing Pentium 4.
For the record (and to avoid starting a flame war), the Core2 was the turning point where Intel started coming back, and Intel is currently firmly holding the performance lead with the Core i7.
Uh... in what way is parent a troll? Is Flash held in such high respect that one cannot poke fun at its slowness? Or is someone simply not getting the "lines" joke?
The problem with the firehose is its absurdly high noise level. The only way to get through a significant number of submissions is by only reading the title and then voting the submission up or down as quickly as your mouse can move; thinking is absolutely out of the question. This indeed reduces otherwise sensible people to idiots when it comes to rating submissions. That's known and to be expected, and is probably the reason why there are editors filtering through the highest-rated submissions. The system breaks down if this last filter "fails open" as well, which seems to be the case for kdawson. That or the man simply has no clue about science. Either way,/. would be better off if he'd refrain from posting science-related stories.
Say what you want, but the fact remains that Apple's stock is at an all-time high, and that it tripled in value since January 2009, vastly outperforming the stock indices. Someone must be doing something right. Jobs may know little about computers, but so do a majority of Apple's customers (yes I know a lot of geeks own macs but they're still a minority in Apple's clientele). What Jobs does know is what his customers want. It's probably extremely challenging for a more technically inclined person to work for someone who knows little about the technical side and keeps on asking for cool-sounding features ("no Steve, that's not possible with today's technology", "no Steve, that would be prohibitively expensive"), but a challenge is not always a bad thing. Apple's technology may not always be game-changing, but the tension between geeks and shininess/usability freaks does result in game-changing products.
It is also a prime in base 3 (ie. if you interpret it as a base 3 number that just happens to not contain any 2s) In decimal that would be 2497252857355093
I'm feeling very tempted to go on the forum of some expensive proprietary software that uses Adobe FlexNet DRM and go 'hey guys, listen up: there's this neat operating system "Debian/Ubuntu Linux", and after installing it, I could re-install after the trial period expired and keep on using it.'
Texas school boards defend teaching alternative meaning of equals sign
'The students have the right to hear both sides in this debate. What is currently taught - that the equals sign means that both sides are equal and cannot mean "evaluate the left-hand side" - is biased under the influence of powerful left-leaning groups, calling themselves "scientists" and "engineers". These are the same atheists that say that creationism, as dictated by the bible, is not a valid alternative for their pet theory of evolution. Their "algebra" is purely based on politically and religiously biased axioms. Their definition of "equals" confuses students trying to understand things such as pocket calculators and the concepts of "gender equality" and "racial equality" in society.'
While I always enjoy a good round of DMCA-abuse-bashing, it seems like parent is spot on, and that in this particular case, NAMCO is not overstepping the boundaries of decency. In other words, move on people, nothing to see here.
Slashdot Mirror
Be careful with those adjectives there - they have the potential to completely altering the meaning of the noun they're applied to. From the wikipedia article: Civil libertarianism is not a complete ideology; rather, it is a collection of views on the specific issues of civil liberties and civil rights. Because of this, a civil libertarian outlook is compatible with many other political philosophies, and civil libertarianism is found on both the right and left of modern politics, although it is often associated with social liberals in the United States.
Example: I consider myself a social democrat and always get irritated by the idiocies hardcore Libertarians spread on Slashdot. I'd feel insulted to be classified a Libertarian - I'm pretty much the opposite. Yet I fully support most of EFF's causes.
It will always be a trade-off between efficiency and polarization of power. Just like in politics. Decision-making is extremely efficient in an absolute dictatorship, but people have to rely on the dictator being benevolent, staying benevolent, staying healthy (I've seen people's character completely change because of illness), and having benevolent successors (this almost never happens in real-life politics). On the other side of the spectrum, you have democracies with a proper implementation of Montesqieu's separation of powers, which in some instances get plagued by indecisiveness, gridlock, and half-assed compromises that really are not helpful for anyone. (*) You'll find the same principles apply to system administration, or anything that involves power.
(*)<opinion>Obamacare is a perfect example: started off as a radical reform that would allow America to take back its place amongst civilized nations, was watered down to a legislative abomination. Note that I'm not implying that the president has too little power - this is merely an example of one of the side-effects of the democratic system America is using. I can give some examples of presidential abuse of power as well.</opinion>
Guess the OP suffers from lysdexia...
I fear you might be on to something. Friends in different places in the world are complaining that politics (and more importantly, public opinion) in the countries they're living in is creeping steadily to the right. Same in my home country and in the country I'm currently living in. Wonder where this will end...
I'd like to add that the chemical structure looks more like a potential high-explosive than a potential rocket fuel (but then again, these things are difficult to predict). Moreover, high explosives for specialized purposes do not need to be available/affordable in such high amounts as rocket fuels (but they generally do require a better shelf life, which might be an issue).
As much as GP's desires are grossly unrealistic and would lead to a Libertarian dystopia, he or she has a point that the whole "land of the free" rhetoric is hollowed out and stinks of hypocrisy. I cannot imagine the "socialist" western European country I'm coming from to treat the pilot like this, or Private Manning, or to have something equivalent to Guantanamo, the Patriot act, the DMCA, the which hunt against wikileaks, or (to throw in a few smaller thing) millimeter scanners, pat-downs and absurd liquor laws. I hate to break it to you, but I felt much more free living in Europe than in the US.
Over the decades, chemists have come up with dozens of molecular structures that would make "the perfect rocket fuel" or "the perfect explosive" (both qualities are closely related). If only they would be stable enough to prevent accidental explosions ("It remains to be seen how stable the molecule is in a solid form"). And be possible to produce in hundreds of tons ("The scientists have also managed to produce enough of the compound in a test tube for it to be detectable.") And most important of all, cheap enough to compete with existing propellants.
Until these problems can be addressed, this "breakthrough" is just another octanitrocubane
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octanitrocubane
It's a chemical tour-de-force to synthesize difficult structures like this in the first place, and in that sense, the researchers may have made a valuable contribution to the field of synthetic chemistry, but if you expect rockets with quadruple payloads based on this molecule to be lifting of by 2015, well, don't hold your breath.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4,6-Tris(trinitromethyl)-1,3,5-triazine
Actually, I submitted the wrong wikipedia link there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_force#Horizontal_axis_g-force
Again, 6g along the horizontal axis is not a problem for the pilot. Don't know about the equipment...
And I also made a typo in the speeds: 130 knots is almost exactly 240km/h.
What makes you think that 6.3 g is too much? Sustaining 6.3 g for 1.75 seconds along the vertical axis is well within the capabilities expected from a fighter pilot. Moreover, the acceleration when catapult-launching a plane is along the horizontal axis which is much better tolerated. Untrained humans are able to tolerate 17 g eyeballs-in for several minutes without loss of consciousness or apparent long-term harm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-G_training
That said, you are right about the 240mph actually being 240km/h. From the pdf file: "The complete EMALS system will use a 300-ft long LIM to accelerate a 100,000-lb (45,000-kg) aircraft to more than 130 knots (67m/sec) and lighter aircraft to 200 knots (100m/sec)". 130 knots is almost exactly 140km/h. However, 45 metric tons is about twice the weight of a typical fighter plane, and I believe the stall speed of jet fighters is significantly higher than 240km/h, especially when loaded. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that the 200knots (130mpg or 370km/h) is for fighter planes, which would correspond to an acceleration of roughly 6 g.
I can confirm this. I was living in a western-european country (no, not France) when it happened, and our media (who aren't puppets of the military-industrial establishment) reported things a whole lot different. Everyone in my country knew that Iraq had no WMDs left by 2003, because of the combined effort of the Clinton administration and the UN. And we knew that the Iraqi Ba'ath regimen never had any links to Al Quaeda, they even brutally repressed them. We watched with astonishment how the American media - completely critique-less of the Bush presidency since 9/11 - brainwashed the American public into believing it was a good idea to abandon the search for Bin Laden, abandon the fragile recovery process in Afghanistan, and start an baseless war in Iraq. Our government opposed the "eighteenth resolution", a standpoint backed by an overwhelming majority of our population, only to see Bush form a "coalition of the delusional". We saw it all coming, from start to finish. Analysts in our media warned us that taking Iraq would be the easy part, but that it would sink into chaos and become a true breeding ground for terrorists. That a very strong commitment was needed to make Afghanistan stable and secure, and that a second war would be detrimental. We all saw it coming years ahead. We were very upset about the things "America" was doing, and how "America" wouldn't listen to the voice of the international community; I can imagine that American tourists would probably have received a slightly less warm welcome than in other periods of history.
Now the thing you should know is I'm not talking about France - in fact my story would apply to any country in Western Europe except the UK, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria and (depending on which criterion you're using) Poland and the Czech republic. And the rest of the world was similarly mostly opposed to going to war:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_and_the_Iraq_War
Which brings us to the following piece of advice for GP: if you ever want any hope of making a true statement about "the world", the first thing you should do is radically stop viewing any American media - most of them are rotten to the core. Start with the BBC website as a primary news source. Or, just for the sake of experiment, try that other "biased" outlet, Al-Jazeera. You'll be surprised how little bias they have compared to, say, Fox News.
According to the UN, the efforts governments are making to curb CO2 emissions are a far cry from what is needed to keep climate change within acceptable limits: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11813578
OK, I'll bite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K6
"The AMD K6 is based on the Nx686 microprocessor that NexGen was designing when it was acquired by AMD. Despite the name implying a design evolving from the K5, it is in fact a totally different design that was created by the NexGen team"
Also, it was more than competitive with the Intel processors of its time.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel,22-10.html
The K6 was a turning point in the x86 wars, after which AMD slowly started taking the performance lead away from Intel with the Athlon, Athlon XP and Athlon 64, the latter having total dominance over Intel's competing Pentium 4.
For the record (and to avoid starting a flame war), the Core2 was the turning point where Intel started coming back, and Intel is currently firmly holding the performance lead with the Core i7.
Uh... in what way is parent a troll? Is Flash held in such high respect that one cannot poke fun at its slowness? Or is someone simply not getting the "lines" joke?
The problem with the firehose is its absurdly high noise level. The only way to get through a significant number of submissions is by only reading the title and then voting the submission up or down as quickly as your mouse can move; thinking is absolutely out of the question. This indeed reduces otherwise sensible people to idiots when it comes to rating submissions. That's known and to be expected, and is probably the reason why there are editors filtering through the highest-rated submissions. The system breaks down if this last filter "fails open" as well, which seems to be the case for kdawson. That or the man simply has no clue about science. Either way, /. would be better off if he'd refrain from posting science-related stories.
So what? Every climber has to pause and catch its breath from time to time. The BBC article you're citing is does not disagree with what I'm saying:
The net income figure - announced after the close of trading in New York - was up 70% on a year earlier, and beat expectations of $3.8bn.
But the company's stock responded by falling sharply.
Apple's shares have hit historic highs lately, and the drop may be due to speculators selling to lock in profits.
Say what you want, but the fact remains that Apple's stock is at an all-time high, and that it tripled in value since January 2009, vastly outperforming the stock indices. Someone must be doing something right. Jobs may know little about computers, but so do a majority of Apple's customers (yes I know a lot of geeks own macs but they're still a minority in Apple's clientele). What Jobs does know is what his customers want. It's probably extremely challenging for a more technically inclined person to work for someone who knows little about the technical side and keeps on asking for cool-sounding features ("no Steve, that's not possible with today's technology", "no Steve, that would be prohibitively expensive"), but a challenge is not always a bad thing. Apple's technology may not always be game-changing, but the tension between geeks and shininess/usability freaks does result in game-changing products.
It is also a prime in base 3 (ie. if you interpret it as a base 3 number that just happens to not contain any 2s)
In decimal that would be 2497252857355093
That's disturbing.
OTOH, poor lass... must be really hard having to put up with a deranged idiot (or perhaps, an alcoholic?) for a husband.
Pray tell, in your libertarian utopia, who is going to pay the multi-billion dollar bill for developing an "Alzhiemer's" (sic) drug?
Buckyballs, meet Streisand
I'm feeling very tempted to go on the forum of some expensive proprietary software that uses Adobe FlexNet DRM and go 'hey guys, listen up: there's this neat operating system "Debian/Ubuntu Linux", and after installing it, I could re-install after the trial period expired and keep on using it.'
Texas school boards defend teaching alternative meaning of equals sign
'The students have the right to hear both sides in this debate. What is currently taught - that the equals sign means that both sides are equal and cannot mean "evaluate the left-hand side" - is biased under the influence of powerful left-leaning groups, calling themselves "scientists" and "engineers". These are the same atheists that say that creationism, as dictated by the bible, is not a valid alternative for their pet theory of evolution. Their "algebra" is purely based on politically and religiously biased axioms. Their definition of "equals" confuses students trying to understand things such as pocket calculators and the concepts of "gender equality" and "racial equality" in society.'
Citation please?
Oh wait, supersonic, that should be *BAAANG*
While I always enjoy a good round of DMCA-abuse-bashing, it seems like parent is spot on, and that in this particular case, NAMCO is not overstepping the boundaries of decency. In other words, move on people, nothing to see here.